The Business Case to Elevate Your Brand and Company Website

Brand elevation vs. brand revamp or rebranding

At Timelapse, we often recommend elevating a brand vs. undertaking a full rebrand. Instead of building a new brand from the ground up, we take a more constructive approach and elevate an existing brand.

This means we will identify and keep key elements from the existing brand in order to protect the brand equity and operate a smooth transition to your future brand. Continuity helps preserve a sense of stability and long-term business continuity. It also communicates an intrinsic sense of confidence in the direction the company and the brand have been taking in previous years. In other cases, a full rebrand is necessary to give a new direction to the company or reposition it more decisively.

But oftentimes, if your company and brand have been on the market for years, and there is a tangible and measurable brand recognition and credibility attached to that. Instead of reinventing the brand, you might think about modernizing and elevating it to positively impact the business.

With a similar philosophy, we also suggest optimizing a website in order to apply the revised brand, and messaging, and increase the inbound traffic and user experience to ultimately deliver more leads to sales.

This type of project often boils down to time, money, and the expected return on investment. Here are considerations and examples to form a business case for brand elevation and website optimization

Is this the right time to elevate your brand?

The first strategic question is is this the right time to elevate your brand?

The underlying question is: Could your current brand be better at moving your business forward, outperform competitors more effectively, and attract and retain more talent?

Does your brand messaging effectively connect your customer’s pain points that you’ve come to appreciate over the years, with the solutions you’re putting forward?

Elevating your brand as a differentiating factor

Having a more visually appealing and professionally designed brand is an excellent way to differentiate from competitors. It creates a more established image that communicates credibility.

For example, we rebranded the accounting and financial firm RoseRyan in 2016, with a new logo, visual identity, a new brand messaging, and a website revamp. As a result, the company appeared significantly more established than other companies of the same size (around 100 employees). You can read the full case study here and read a testimonial from their VP of Marketing.

Elevating your brand will send a strong, positive signal

Elevating your brand will act as a strong, positive signal to your customers, competitors, and stakeholders, that you’re investing in your image and company thoughtfully and are building up the momentum to drive the growth of your company forward. It also sends a signal to your employees that your company is positioning itself for growth.

For example, we gradually improved the visual identity of the company PRC Clinical over several years, which contributed to a much more established and polished image.

A better brand will impact sales opportunities

The case study of the nuclear waste disposal solution start-up, Deep Isolation, shows how our work performed in 2019 created a platform for the company to scale and access new opportunities.

From the retouched logo to the functional color palette, the visual identity and improved website allowed the company to establish itself as a credible thought leader in the nuclear waste disposal space.

Deep Isolation also engaged influencers and thought leaders in a new podcast series we helped create, demonstrating a strong sense of alignment with its target audience challenges, a lasting trust, and brand credibility.

This success can be partly attributed to the brand work, as well as thoughtfully executed marketing campaigns we contributed to strategize and execute on. The full case study is here.

Increased Sales & Marketing ROI

A strong brand can lead to increased sales and revenues but also increase the ROI (Return On Investment) of your marketing dollars spent on advertising and conferences. The reasons are a more modern and consistent visual identity creates both trust and recognition, a messaging that better aligns with your customers’ pain points and differentiates your company solutions from the competition, coupled with a better website user experience, contribute to more website conversions, more repeat traffic, and justifies a higher premium in sales. Examining how your brand impacts financial results is key and many branding efforts demonstrate the direct correlation.

Brand and culture go hand in hand

Employees should be your greatest brand champions. Building a brand that everyone can rally behind, makes top employees less likely to leave, and the right employees more likely to come to your company.

What’s true about brand loyalty is also true about your employees, and your brand will help carry that.

This quote is from Howard Schultz, emeritus chairman of Starbucks. He’s built an amazing coffee empire, growing the business from 11 stores to over 30,000 worldwide.

For example, several people at RoseRyan have expressed pride to be part of a consulting company that was investing in its own brand, in digital marketing, creating its own series of thought leadership events, and bettering the image of the company in the market. They felt it was also positively reflecting on them and their careers. If your employees live your brand promise every day, the brand will shine from the inside out, and your business will, in turn, thrive.

The business case for a website tune-up

Website optimization can aim at applying a new visual identity and brand messaging to the cornerstone marketing asset that a website is, but also at building up web traffic and improving conversion rates.

Stemming from improvement in website conversion rates, higher rankings on search engines, and reduction in website bounce rates, we also typically observe a significantly higher rate of successful sales conversations.

Because the brand messaging better articulates what you do and how you do it uniquely, it should attract the right audience more often and deliver more, higher quality leads to your sales teams. In our experience, new websites help create inbound leads as well as a growing base of company followers (for example, see this company, Bikes Make Life Better which we support in continuously designing and developing new resources and on-brand design).

The messaging and the content give insights and guidance into how to set up and manage bike programs, it articulates the company value proposition and the content goes into specific examples and case studies.

Another example, in concrete terms, is another company website evolution allowed the company to move from a few website leads per year to more than 30 MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) per month, 25 qualified sales opportunities in 2019, and the closing of six and seven-figure projects that came from prospects discovering the website and utilizing the contact request or RFP (Request for Proposal) forms.

These results were not witnessed prior to the brand elevation and the website tune-up. Additionally, after adjusting the SEO/ SEM strategy (Organic search terms and paid search terms), the website witnessed a 91% in increased site traffic in the following three months.

Timelapse is a strategic creative agency with offices in San Francisco, Denver, and New York City. See our work at teamtimelapse.com