For any business, branding is key. While you may think it isn’t that important to sift through endless fonts and choose the perfect logo—especially when you’re just launching your business—it’s actually crucial to create a solid brand that perfectly encapsulates what your business is all about.
Crafting a solid brand is essential for a number of reasons, including recognizability, trustworthiness, loyalty, and a personality. It allows you to connect with your audience on a personal level, and creates a sense of consistency across platforms.
For a B2B SaaS company, you might not think your branding is that important—but you’d be wrong. Your brand conveys to audiences what your mission is, your company values, products and services, and is even part of your public image. If you feel like the messaging isn’t coming across well enough, a rebrand could be in order. Here, we’ll go through everything you need to consider when rebranding your business.
What is rebranding?
Rebranding is when you rethink the entire marketing strategy and public image of your brand. It can include creating a new name, logo, design style or tone of voice, and is all done with the intention of crafting an updated identity in the minds of your audience.
A full rebrand may also allow you to target a new audience. You may find that a new, emerging audience should be targeted, which could lead to a rebrand in order to successfully target a new generation of buyers.
There are a number of reasons behind rebranding—and there isn’t necessarily a right or a wrong time to rebrand. However, you should take your time with any rebrand and ensure you’re making the right decisions for the right reasons.
Rebrand or brand refresh?
Often confused, a rebrand and brand refresh are two different marketing activities. As mentioned above, a rebrand consists of rethinking your public image and how you present your business to your audience. Meanwhile, a brand refresh looks specifically at the existing branding and alters the strategy to fit into what’s already working well.
A brand refresh requires an audit of your marketing efforts. You should be looking closely at what’s not working well for your business and where you may be losing money. Refreshing your brand and strategy allows you to drop that aspect of your marketing activity, streamlining your efforts and boosting your return on investment (ROI) and, ultimately, your profits.
When to rebrand your B2B SaaS company
As previously mentioned, there isn’t necessarily a good or bad time to rebrand your SaaS company. However, there are some flags that may indicate a rebrand is the right move.
Improve brand experience
The brand experience is something that’s becoming increasingly important. In fact, 46% of customers expect more personalized communications in order to completely trust a brand, according to Hubspot. The same article highlighted that business leaders are also increasingly focused on building better alignment between the customer success teams and other departments within a business.
If you feel that your business isn’t currently speaking directly to your customers, you may consider a rebranding strategy to change how you communicate with your audience. Updating your tone of voice and marketing methods could be a part of your rebrand—this could include launching a newsletter to speak to specific customers or building a presence on social media to create and foster a sense of community within your audience.
Switching up how you communicate with your audience is all part of changing up the brand experience. Just be careful that any changes in tone of voice are reflected across all communications and marketing efforts—including your website content.
Sustainable market share growth
Rebranding can open up your business to a wider audience than you previously had. When conducting a rebranding campaign, it’s important to conduct market research—which can highlight that your customers aren’t exactly who you thought they were. It was recently reported that 80% of content marketing is targeted at the wrong audience, which can have devastating consequences to your profits.
If you do find that there’s an untapped market during your research, a rebrand to effectively target the correct audience might help you stand out from competitors. Targeting this new audience can then naturally lead to an increase in market share, in a more sustainable way than simply expanding on products and services. And who doesn’t want to grow sustainably?
Differentiate from competitors
The global B2B SaaS market is incredibly saturated. The industry is set to grow to $232 billion in 2024, up from $197 billion in 2023. Because of this, it’s important that you stand out from the crowd. Conducting a rebrand can help you differentiate yourself from competitors, ensuring you’re making the right kind of noise to attract your audience.
We recommend conducting thorough competitor research before embarking on your reband, so you know exactly what’s already being done and decide how you can break free of the mold. Take the time to research gaps in the market from a branding perspective—can you be louder and more disruptive with the way you portray yourself? Think carefully about what your competitors are doing and how you can do it differently.
Share updated business values and vision
Have you recently updated your mission statement? Do you have a new vision for your brand, along with a fresh 5-year industry plan? These are things that can help shape your rebranding strategy. You want to communicate your values to your audience, as this helps create brand authenticity which customers are increasingly becoming appreciative of. A massive 88% of consumers cite authenticity as a deciding factor when looking for brands to support, so being transparent can only work in your favor.
Decide what’s important to your brand and business, and allow this to shine through in your branding? If you’re committed to creating a more sustainable workforce or reducing your carbon footprint, let this message take the center stage in your branding efforts.
When not to rebrand your B2B SaaS business
We’ve spoken a lot about when to rebrand—but knowing when not to rebrand is just as important.
To keep up with competitors
“If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?” We know, it’s insanely hyperbolic to be told that when you’re young. But, it holds true. Just because your competitors are rebranding and changing up their strategies is not an indication that you need to follow suit. Instead, wait for the right time that makes sense for you and your brand.
When you’re still a new brand
It doesn’t make much sense to rebrand if you’re still relatively new on the scene. The purpose of rebranding is to switch up how audiences perceive your business, and this isn’t possible if you’re still a fledgling company—there just isn’t a large enough brand to rework.
The beauty of being a new brand is you get to experiment and find what works best for you without causing too much confusion amongst your customers.
Because you’re feeling stale
We get it—you’re feeling a little too used to your image and you want something to change, drastically. A rebrand is essentially the equivalent of getting bangs or dying your hair blue when you’re feeling a bit lost and looking for change. But this isn’t a good enough reason to debut a daring new look. Much like getting a dodgy haircut, a rebrand in this instance can wind up generating attention you didn’t necessarily want.
No one knows this better than Mastercard, who tried to add a third circle to the already distinct red and yellow duo. In 2006, Mastercard added a third circle and shade to its logo, at a cost of a cool $1.5 million. However, this rebrand left consumers confused, and ended up making the logo even less recognizable.
After public outcry, Mastercard reinstated the former logo, using the newer version for corporate, internal communications. And the entire rebrand (fail) only cost them $10 million. Yikes.
How to rebrand your B2B SaaS company
There are a few things to keep in mind when going through a rebranding process.
Develop a brand strategy
This should go without saying, but having a clear strategy and plan before you start implementing any changes. Think about what message you want to convey and, most importantly, how you want this to come across.
Think carefully about how you’ll be adapting your existing processes—both internally and externally—in order to stick to your new plan. This could be product labels, website copy and design, and social assets, to name a few.
Bear in mind that this can take some time to implement. A recent study by Bynder found that a typical rebrand involves updating 215 assets over the course of seven months, on average.
Re-establish your target audience and market
Conducting thorough market research should be a crucial part of your rebrand. For any B2B customer, you may uncover an entirely new market and audience that you could be targeting. Rather than focusing on business owners, you may want to start marketing towards finance teams, HR teams, or even executive assistants, so they can pitch your business to the stakeholders.
Take the time to think about how you want to communicate to your new (and existing) audience. What content will they respond well to, and how do you want to speak to them? These questions will all help you decide on your new branding.
Redefine your brand vision and mission statement
If you’re considering a rebrand, take the opportunity to think about what your business stands for and what you want to achieve and how you’re going to sing this to your audience.
The most famous example in recent years is Facebook’s rebrand into Meta, to encompass Zuckerberg’s vision to create a virtual world—the metaverse—which would encompass all the Facebook-owned brands, like Instagram and WhatsApp. This rebrand looked at the future of the company long-term, and how AI and VR will play into the digital world.
Reimagine your visual identity
A huge part of branding is the visual identity. Strategic branding involves crafting visual stories that speak 1000 words, letting the audience know exactly who you are and what you do. Our design and branding team are experts in crafting these stories, turning your business into an aesthetically stunning brand.
Rebranding with B2B SaaS experts
At Literal Humans, we know how difficult it can be to work on a rebranding project—especially if you’re busy focusing on the ins and outs of running your business. That’s why we’re here to help. Our team will work with you to learn exactly what you do and who your audience is, and we’ll take it from there. But don’t just take our word for it—learn how we helped CORE Learning revamp their entire brand.
We can help tell your story and create messaging that your target market will resonate with. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help with your rebrand, get in touch. We’re more than happy to help.
