Spring-Clean Your Brand: The Ultimate Brand Refresh Checklist

Comes Spring and we’re hit by an impellent urge of tidying up, organising, starting afresh on many different fronts of our lives. Spring cleaning shouldn’t stop to your closet or fridge, but your brand would find it beneficial too – for real! Get ready to discover the power of spring-cleaning your brand, with my ultimate brand refresh checklist…

Brands, like humans, are organic: they constantly change and grow as you do. When you neglect your brand, it starts falling behind your business goals and prospectives. As a consequence, you might be looking forward, but your brand is growing stale and slowing down your route.

What better time than Spring to finally consider an annual dust-down for your brand? Here’s my ultimate brand refresh checklist to help you out in this process:

Re-align with your ideal audience

First off, study your brand from the inside to make sure any changes planned will be purposeful and strategic.

As I mentioned, your brand changes and grows continuously, which means your current goals and ideal clientele might not look the same as only a few months ago. You might have gained new expertise, raised your prices, decided to serve a more specific niche and so on… All of these changes, as well as any other minor upgrades your brand has gone through lately, should push you to stop and re-analyse your ideal audience.

Remember your dream client is the true heart and lifeblood of your business. Any brand choices should be guided by the definitive goal to serve your very specific prospective client.

That’s why I highly reccommend you yearly take the time to identify your current ideal clientele and rearrange anything in your brand that’s not currently aligning with it.

A great idea, if you don’t know where to start, is to survey your audience. Ask questions, gather feedback, keep any suggestions into consideration.

Update your offers

Once gained a clearer idea of your current ideal client, you might decide it's about time to update your offers. This means simply trying to respond to your newly-identified current clientele’s needs, by serving it the best way you can. It might mean updating your current products or services to be more in line with your new goals, or simply revisioning your marketing strategy to prefer and prioritise the offers your current clients need the most.

Spruce up your design

After having taken the time to analyse your brand introspectively, you’ll most likely feel the need to update your brand imagery to match your current state. Which is an idea I highly support!

Your brand identity is the way your brand is presented to your audience and remembered by your potential clients. You can’t afford for it to look outdated when you’re so excited about the next new phase of your business. You brand design should always feel supportive and never constraining for your brand’s growth.

This might mean considering a rebrand if your business goals have changed drastically, or if your brand design is quite aged.

But even if your changes are minor, don’t forget to update and clean up your website copy and images to match your current phase. Not to mention any promotional imagery or stationery pieces: if your brand statement has changed (maybe because your target has shifted), these are the places you should update it first!

Dust down your social media presence

Now time to take care of the elements of your brand that are not design, but are just as fundamental, such as your social media and online presence.

When your goals change, you should make sure this upgrade is reflected in the way you’re presenting your brand online. Because, ultimately, your online presence is the way your target audience is perceiving your brand at the time being.

What you can do to align your social media presence to your new business phase, is as simple as updating your messaging, cleaning up your bios, updating your profile image, creating new photography and content, coordinate your branded visuals... All of which should serve the purpose to showcase your new direction and bring your ideal clients along the journey.

Tidy-up your SEO

Last, but not at least, don’t forget about SEO.

If your target and goals have shifted, you’d most likely would benefit from a new keywords brainstorming and tidy-up. With a new brand statement and maybe even a new target focus, you might want to attract different kind of users to your website and your keywords might feel outdated.

Or, if your changes are minor but tangible, and you’re not ready for a new dramatic indexation, you can consider updating your editorial calendar to match your new audience’s needs.

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Here you go! My ultimate guide to refreshing your brand, whether you’re doing it in Spring or any other time of the year.