How to Rebrand Your Print Company

If you’re looking to find out How to Rebrand Your Company, then you are in good company. Over the past few years all the big print publications, print consultants and marketing experts have said that print companies should be rebranding themselves to better reflect the needs of the market. While this may not be the path that every print company takes, you’re here, so it’s clear that rebranding is something you are either interested in or are moving forward with now. The desire to rebrand is initiated for a number of reasons. Things like new ownership, merger / acquisitions, new marketing management, comments about the look & feel from customers or prospects, boredom, legal entity updates, messaging updates to match industry expectations & opportunities and on the negative side would be disassociating from scandals or other bad press. Rebranding a company has different degrees of execution as well. You may only be looking to update your visual identity, it may be your messaging, you may only want to update your iconography or typography, or you may be looking to update literally everything. The point is that there is no one way to think about branding or rebranding. One of the most popular reasons print companies are rebranding and increasingly marketing themselves is to change the way they are perceived in the marketplace. You may not want to be seen as ONLY a print service provider. Instead you may want to be looked at as a marketing solutions provider, a company who prints as well as solves complex problems and gets results for businesses. In this article we’ll cover a number of items that you can do to successfully rebrand your business.  

What is a Brand?

To be honest we think you probably know what this is. Many different sources will define this in their own words as well, but basically a brand is a collection of “things” that represents the company, its products, services and culture. While a brand is technically intangible many of a brands assets are very real such as awareness, recognition, feelings / emotions, associations and the legal aspect of a brands visual identity is abstractly tangible such as a logo, brand name or names, slogans, taglines, photography, etc.  

What is a Rebrand?

Of course this is reworking the existing brand. To be more official, Rebranding is the process of changing the existing brand to update the visual identity and or messaging of a company for strategic reasons. Some may refer to a rebrand as a Brand Refresh and to us they are close enough to be considered the same thing. You may want to call a brand refresh a tweak to the existing look, feel and messaging, which is fine, but again for our article we’re considering them to be the same. So the question still remains… “How do I rebrand my print business?”. Let’s dive in!  

5 Steps to Rebrand Your Company

So you are ready! It’s time to take your print company to the next phase of its life and prepare for growth. Here we will share with you the 5 steps needed to rebrand your print business. The steps that we’ll cover are

• Confirm Your Target Audience
• Establish Your Vision & Mission
• Create Your Messaging
• Develop Your Visual Identity
• Build a Content Strategy

And lastly of course you’ll launch your brand, but we didn’t want to consider that a step!   1. Confirm Your Target Audience You may already have a target audience you are going after which is fine, you don’t have to come up with new targets, but if you’ve been thinking about it then now is the time to do it. If you stay targeting the same audience then you are simply re-confirming who they are, what they value, what problems they experience that you solve and how you will connect with them. If you are coming up with an entirely new target audience you will identify all of those same attributes for the audience it just may take a little more time.  Many print companies that rebrand choose to update their messaging and strategy to focus on specific industries which requires them to really lock in on the unique attributes of not only the individuals but on the industry as a whole. Industry verticals like financial advisers, restaurants, ecommerce fashion retailers, home builders are all good audiences to consider targeting when establishing audiences during a rebrand. For example, Restaurants are focused on increasing revenue by filling seats or increasing ticket sizes. So your industry specific targeting may be focused on the marketing decision makers of larger restaurant chains, or the owners & operations managers of restaurants with fewer locations, the messaging may then speak to getting more people into the restaurant or getting the customer to buy more and how your restaurant marketing solutions accomplish those goals.

2. Establish Your Vision & Mission What is a vision statement? Essentially a vision statement is a description of what the company is planning to achieve in the future. Some print businesses choose to be very specific while others are more abstract in their vision statements. An example of a vision statement could be “To develop marketing solutions for companies that help them grow.” When rebranding consider these elements when developing your vision statement

• Make it future focused
• Keep it motivational & inspiring
• Ensure it embodies your culture & values

What is a mission statement? A mission statement is meant to explain why the company exists. What is your purpose? This can be a very simple statement that has embedded your values and can be motivational for employees as well as reassuring to customers. An example mission statement for a print company could be “Sustainable and Equitable Printing” or “Marketing Solutions for the Greater Good”.   Why even have them? Having a vision and mission statement can help guide the messaging for your print company. When rebranding these statements serve as the “gut check” for the approach to content in the future in deciding on whether or not it meets your brand standards or tone of voice.

3. Create Your Messaging This is where most print companies want to make big changes. They want to be seen as marketing solution providers and not just printers. New messaging is how you’ll be able to pull that off. An easy way to get started with new messaging is to come up with some general messages, slogans and taglines that can be universal or generic to print and marketing solutions. These can then be turned into unique messages for each of your target audience segments. Critical areas to include in you messaging framework are

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• and Challenges facing your target audience

By addressing these in your messaging it will make it stronger, more valuable and more effective overall.  You also need to embed your value proposition across all messages. Examples of general brand messages for a print company could be “Connect With Your Customers in the Real World” or “Experience the Power of Integrated Marketing Solutions”. But the reality is that you will have a messaging structure that feeds into your content strategy and works in tandem with your chosen audience. For example, let’s say you are focusing on financial advisors as a target audience. You could actually steal their own messaging and point it right back at them. Many advisors tell their clients that they are doing things like building wealth, paving the way for a comfortable future for themselves or their family, protecting against unforeseen negative events, etc. Your advisor messaging strategy could be to literally say those same things except twist it to tell the advisor you help set them up to do those things for more clients by utilizing your financial advisor based marketing solutions.

4. Develop Your Visual Identity This is the fun part. Everyone loves to dive in on creating a new look and feel. It’s creative, seemingly boundless and is something you can own and be proud of. But it’s also the most difficult to finish because it is so personal. Multiple stakeholders may have differences of opinion on the look and feel which can make it hard to get 100% buy in. While We could go really deep into all of the elements of visual identify related to rebranding, we figured you are already pretty familiar with & confident in your ability to make the decisions about what you like and don’t like. We do want to caution you though, that a rebrand is more for your customers and to capitalize on new opportunities. It’s not all about how much you “like the look”. Many print companies get hung up on this and can end up with a brand that doesn’t reflect the expectations from their target audience. Elements of a visual identity when rebranding

• Logo
• Color Palette
• Imager / Photography Style
• Printed Collateral
• Internal Environmental Graphics

And if we’re being honest the list could go on longer as well, but the bulleted items we listed out here pretty much cover the main items you will want to update. There are numerous resources on developing a new “brand identity” and we encourage you to check them out.   5. Build a Content Strategy With your new messaging in place and an updated visual identity you’ll then be able to create a content strategy that reinforces your new brand. If your messaging is focused on marketing solutions then your content will need to share ideas and examples of how businesses can better market themselves and drive results utilizing the solutions you can provide them. It’s likely that many of these solutions will include printed collateral or have heavy doses of direct mail which is great, it just needs to be positioned as a solution and not just an individual product. Content to Create During & After the Rebrand

• Social Media Posts
• Blog Posts
• Marketing Emails
• Customer Emails
• Google Ads
• Social Media Ads

A great way to develop ideas for your content we always recommend looking at what customers & prospects are searching for online and what questions are being asked / discussed on social media. *As an FYI, we provide thousands of pieces of ready to use content on Pryntbase to expedite getting your content out in front of new customers. It’s strategic and effective!

Launch Your New Brand! Again, while we don’t actually consider this a step it’s still something that MUST be done. Schedule your posts & emails, launch your ad campaigns and start growing your new brand.   At Pryntbase we unfortunately aren’t creating new brands for print companies, but we do make solutions based content that you can use to grow your visibility, traffic, leads and sales.

Are You Ready to get more Print Leads and Sales?