Taking your business from private to public is a big step that can have a major impact. Opening the door to additional investors means more opportunities to grow, find new customers, and make a greater impact through your work. However, the process can also be a big investment of resources for your team, which is why we are here to help.

Preparing your business to upgrade to NASDAQ or NYSE or go public is about more than just the financials, although that’s a crucial aspect of the process. One often-overlooked aspect of uplisting is branding and marketing. As a public company, the impetus to create a brand identity that is relevant, impactful, and future-proof is even more important. Depending on the nature of your business, it may be time to consider a rebrand.

What Does it Mean to Rebrand a Business?

Rebranding is the process of updating your company’s marketing strategy, including parts of the brand identity including the name, logo, design elements, personality, and message. Rebranding can help current customers see your business in a new light, while making you more appealing to new leads.

Rebranding can be helpful when confronting new challenges in your business, such as scaling products or services, creating new offerings, opening new locations, preparing for sale, or preparing for investors.

Why Your Company Should Consider a Rebrand for Investors:

Refresh your look to align with your goals

The first question to ask is, why are you uplisting your company in the first place? Many business owners choose to go public to increase their working capital and operations, others choose to cash out and exit the business.  The process of going public also adds an extra layer of transparency to the brand, giving customers and clients an intimate look at their business operations. While you prepare to take your business to the next level, a rebrand can ensure your company feels revitalized and aligns with the long-term corporate vision. Simply put, a fresh look and feel can inspire you and your team and prospective investors.

Align your brand with your ideal new clients

As part of the uplisting process, you may wish to enhance your product offering or acquire a new type of clientele. Rebranding your company to reflect the new clientele you would like to reach can help. Use sleek, upscale branding to signal to potential clients that your products or services are worth the investment.

Help your brand stand out

`In a sea of competitors vying for the attention of investors, strong branding can help bring your company to the top of the list. A strong rebrand can make the difference between a company that feels stale and one that feels original. GGS can help with competitive research, identifying branding trends, and creating an identity that aligns most with your business and your needs. We can also upgrade your website with automation to ensure that your business is compliant with disclosures and SEC filing requirements for a customized investor website.

Ensure your brand position is clear across all channels

Perhaps your social media channels are highly conversational, but your website content feels stuffy and “corporate”. Your emails use an outdated logo that’s never been high enough priority to fix. Whether you realize it or not, your business could be sending out mixed messages that can harm your brand. This tends to happen as teams become siloed, or when working quickly to get things done. Whether your business is a large conglomerate or a small family-owned affair, it’s easier than you might think for misaligned messaging to occur.

Luckily, a strategic rebrand of your marketing channels can help ensure a streamlined approach to marketing so no matter where customers find you, they see the real you across all channels.

Modernize your business to make it more attractive

As times change – and they change fast these days – your company must change with them. Signaling to your audience that you are aware of and considering real-world happenings can actually help your brand feel more nimble and evergreen. However, failing to do so can cause damage to your brand identity and the way your company is perceived. Outdated-looking logos, buggy websites, and old-school advertising can turn away customers and investors who may wrongfully believe you are “behind the times” and therefore unable to meet their modern needs. Branding that feels fresh clues customers immediately that you are available to meet them where they’re at.

Attract more qualified leads

Every business has the goal to grow and bring in more leads. However, a poorly designed website, outdated content, or lackluster social media channels can disqualify you from your dream investors and clients alike. A strategic rebrand can help you get a clear view of your brand and business holistically, so you can prime your channels to target, attract, and close more qualified leads. When your branding speaks to the heart of your ideal customer, landing leads become second nature.

How to Rebrand Your Business

Rebranding is not a process to be taken lightly. It takes strategic, out-of-the-box thinking and an investment of time and money. Rebranding can carry risks, including losing brand recognition if not done in a thoughtful manner. So, what’s the best way to tackle it?

1. Audit your current brand identity.

Start by taking stock of your brand identity, key messaging, and your touchpoint channels. What is the personality of your brand? Is that what you want it to be?

2. Shift brand positioning.

Take a hard look at the values, mission, and vision you have set forth as a company. Do they still feel aligned with your future as you prepare to go public? Can you alter your positioning to better align with your goals?

3. Get insights from the professionals.

Consider hiring Green Group Studio to help take your rebrand to the next level. At GGS, we know that rebranding an established company can be a challenge. We’ve worked with numerous companies to create a fresh, aligned new design that prepared them to elevate their brand to the next level. We will work with your team to identify branding and positioning, bringing it to life with a unified web design, marketing materials, and technology. Contact us here or give us a call at 561-594-7336 to learn more about how we can help.

The post Considering Rebranding Before Going Public (or Uplisting)? appeared first on Green Group Studio.

This past May, Instagram did the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the shocking—they updated their software to version 8.0. Gone is our beloved retro brown camera logo, replaced instead with a gradient rainbow that looks suspiciously similar to an old Microsoft background (see stage left). Like saying goodbye to an old friend whose presence is comforting and familiar, Instagram users now find themselves overwhelmed with emotion as they frantically search for the app among the hundreds of other brightly-colored icons crowding their phone screens.

While many others covered the change immediately after its initial inception, we here at Green Group Studio needed a moment to get out of our feelings—and let the internet’s uproar settle down into a gentle purr of resignation—before we decided to address them.

Instagram’s New Logo

While compared to a majority of other apps that updated their logos back in 2013 (spurred by Apple’s release of IOS7), Instagram’s 8.0 update made them the latest app to jump onto the proverbial bandwagon and embrace a flat design logo. Instagram’s head designer cited the change as a “reflection of the apps evolution.”

Instagram’s designers’ major struggle though (like most companies attempting to rebrand) was in keeping the recognizable and nostalgic elements of the original logo, while creating a new logo that embraced the colorful community that inspires them. The iconic rainbow is now visible in the gradient background of the icon, while the camera is inferred with simplistic shapes. Designing a new logo that successfully encompasses the passion and viewpoint of an established brand is an art that requires a deep understanding of the company’s culture, as well as where they want to position themselves in the future. To learn more about logo design, CLICK HERE.

Instagram’s New User Interface

Instagram’s changes didn’t just stop with their logo, the inside of the app received something of a major makeover as well. Instead of a blue bar spanning the top, the app is now extremely minimalistic with its black and white layout, void of any ornament that could potentially detract from users’ posts. This change is said to be caused by a desire to put more focus on user-uploaded images and videos, allowing them to take center stage.

Although the appearance has changed, the functionality has remained the same—allowing users to navigate the app as they always have. To learn more about App Development Services, call today at 561-594-7336.

The Final Stage: Acceptance

After watching the initial rocky introduction of the 8.0 Instagram update, and then the sudden cooling down, we picked up on something rather interesting about the company’s approach. In addition to shocking us with a new logo and UI, Instagram announced its decision to implement a feed based on an algorithm (similar to Facebook).

While some users were privy to the update back in May, the rest of us had to wait until the end of June (anxiously hoping that the next update wouldn’t make us this features latest victim). This upgrade would create a non-chronological feed that would show users the most popular posts on their feed, or what Instagram thinks you will be the most interested in, before the newest posts.

We suspect that even the thought of an impending update to their feed was enough to distract most people from Instagram’s rebranding efforts, allowing for an unintended acceptance of the company’s changes. Touché Instagram, touché!
In the end, Instagram users will get used to the new logo, user interface, and feed—just as they’ve done with every update before it. Instagram’s rebranding is a message of hope to all companies interested in an evolution of their own, it is possible to successfully rebrand your company! To learn more about Green Group Studio’s Rebranding Services, CLICK HERE or give us a call at 561-594-7336!

The post Instagram Rebrands Itself in 2016 – And the Internet Went Crazy appeared first on Green Group Studio.