From your logo to the icons used on your website, these elements (among many others) serve as part of your brand identity. Each piece exposes the business to new audiences while at the same time building goodwill and loyalty toward it.

When it’s time to rebrand, part of the goal is to reimagine the brand’s identity and preserve its essence. The other part revolves around ensuring the new identity serves your business objectives.

It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of what the new brand should look like versus ensuring the final result represents what a business stands for.

However, having an objective voice in the room gives you the creative guidance needed to steer the redesign in the right direction. And partnering with a design agency delivers that voice.

Here are a few other advantages this collaboration gives you during a brand redesign.

Design agencies deep dive into brand perceptions

Brand redesigns build off of what you have now, and working with an agency provides both creative chops and strategy so you can continue staying true to your audience.

The creative team makes decisions throughout the design process based on a brief that contains information about your business and its goals. But it doesn’t stop there.

The designers have to understand what people think about your business and its identity before being able to produce a new brand for it. As part of the process, they’ll continue to add to this by conducting more in-depth research into your current brand, which can include:

• Evaluating your brand’s assets
• Looking into how people talk about your brand online
• Checking out the creative other businesses in related industries

Armed with this knowledge, the creative team has another set of tools available to create an engaging brand identity with the power to attract more customers and form the connections that lead to sales.

Designers help you overtake your competition

Your brand identity separates your business from competitors who may want to move in on your customer base. With a distinctive brand, you can outshine them and be the company to think of first when they need it.

Understanding how your competitors operate in visual spaces gives you a clear path to establishing your brand as one people should pay attention to.

When partnering with a branding or graphic design agency, the team looks into your direct and indirect competitors to see how they:

• Use graphics online and offline
• Maintain brand consistency across platforms (if they do it at all)
• Design their branded campaigns and the strengths and weaknesses of them

After performing this competitive audit, the designers fully understand what other businesses are doing and how your current brand compares. They then use this information during the rebrand to differentiate your business so it stands out in a memorable way.

Agencies create brand elements for memorability

Design agencies approach brand redesigns strategically. Yes, part of their job is to produce a beautiful design, but it also has to serve a functional role. Every part of the new identity is designed to work both within and outside the brand system as a standalone element.

Studies show that people remember brand logos more than brand names. This means there’s an opportunity to capitalize on what people naturally do—process visuals more readily and quickly than text. Whether it’s the symbolism in a logo, the hues in a color palette, or the fonts chosen for the brand’s headlines and body copy, a lot of thought goes into how each component works together.

When working through the brand redesign, you’ll work closely with the design agency to ensure each piece represents your business and lends itself to be remembered.

Measuring ROI after a brand redesign

Brand redesigns should produce tangible results. But how can you measure whether your rebrand was a success? Here are a few metrics that will help you determine the rebrand’s impact on your business.

Brand awareness: After the brand’s relaunch, website traffic, social media followers, and search volume are numbers to review since they provide information about how many eyes are on the new look and feel.

Customer engagement: Not every like leads to a sale, but it does help you to see how many people interact with the new brand. Paying attention to how people engage with your marketing can give insight into their response.

Brand perception: When in doubt, ask. Reviews, surveys, and other sentiment analyses can give you an idea of what people think about the new brand and if it resonates with them.

Financial performance: If you want to measure how well a rebrand has gone, you’ll need to look at your revenue and cost per acquisition (CPA). After the rebrand, if your revenue increases while your CPA decreases, it’s a good indicator that the rebrand was one of its driving forces.

When you can link your rebranding efforts with quantifiable results, it becomes easier to demonstrate their impact on your business.

Strategic partnerships lead to better brand redesigns

Brand redesigns don’t happen in a vacuum. They require the collaboration of decision-makers and designers to create a stronger brand. These projects involve many moving parts and personalities, each competing to make their input heard and incorporated into the new identity.

Working with an agency whose expertise lies in brand design helps position your business to maintain a competitive edge and engage with customers more effectively.

Other companies that don’t take a strategic approach to brand redesign won’t have this advantage, allowing you to get more market share with a distinctive brand.