10 Ways to Transform Your Business Image

With the global business continuing to evolve rapidly, companies are faced with the reality that they often have to update their image to remain relevant in the minds and hearts of their customers and target audience. 

If your audience sees the same old look and feel to what you offer, they may conclude that you aren’t putting any effort into following the trends or even leading the way. Or, it may be that you have had some issues in recent months that have tarnished your business image due to a bad decision or an unfortunate turn of events in the market. Whatever the case, your audience and customer base may seek out a competitor.

However, you can work quickly and effectively to stay relevant and rebuild trust by transforming your business image in these 10 ways, including numerous solutions that get you there faster:

1. Strategize on a new direction and approach. One of the most challenging aspects of changing your business image is adjusting your operating model to best suit the customer’s needs. Often, it’s hard to separate from longstanding approaches or preconceived notions of departmental responsibilities and employee job descriptions. That makes it more difficult to figure out how to redesign the structure of your business to enable it to address the current and future needs of your target market. This is when it helps to bring in a company like ON THE MARK, which assists in seeing this bigger picture and offering a new blueprint of what your business model looks like and how it can run effectively.
2. Change how you interact with customers to shape how you transform the company. Listening to what your customers are telling you about what they want and what you can change to assist them with a better experience should be part of your plan to transform yourself. When your customers see that you have listened to them and adapted to suit them, you will go a long way toward making the right changes in your strategic direction and delivery, but you will also strengthen existing relationships. You may already have that information to tell you how to transform in your available data but no way of actually knowing what it all means. A company like Salesforce can provide a CRM platform and project management system that organizes and highlights those areas where you may need to make changes or that can define how you transform your image.
3. Engage your audience with content that illustrates your new business image. Today’s audiences rely primarily on written and visual content to make their decisions about a company whether it is on a website, on a blog, or on a social media profile. This is an opportunity to leverage their interest in content to get your messages across about what defines your new business image and, most importantly, how it specifically helps them with their issues or problems. Your content becomes your new business image because it is the communication channel and conversation platform between you and your customers. They can tell you what they think of the new business image or ask questions about what that image means for them. Since it’s an integral way to get noticed and share your new image, it’s critical to have expertise in content marketing from a company like Contently, which can help you to formulate your messaging and craft the content necessary to get the best reaction to this new business image.
4. Put the new business image into your visual presentation. It helps your audience to have imagery that represents this new business messaging because these are symbols that help your audience connect and remembers the new brand attributes you want them to know about. When you want to change your business image, it’s an opportune time to update your logo, slogan, and website in terms of symbol, color, and messaging. This is where graphic design becomes your best friend, offering a way to consistently revise all visual representations of your company. You can use tools like SummitSoft to create a logo and Wix for a website without having to claim artistic status to make a great impression.
5. Add expert talent in areas of your business where you lack skills. You can change logos and websites all day long, which will help to a certain degree with a business transformation, but it’s really the people you surround yourself with that can make a transformation stick. While you may not be in the financial position to hire a team of full-time talent, you can tap into outsource workers and freelancers that specialize in areas that can help you transform how your business operates, especially in improving technology, marketing and sales, and customer service. Look to agencies like Toptal for IT talent and iFreelanc for graphic designers, marketers, salespeople, writers and even virtual assistants. All these talented individuals can do a better job than you in these areas because it’s what they do, which then allows you to focus on those aspects of your business that you do well.
6. Put influencers to work selling your new business image to the target audience. Influencer marketing is one of the biggest areas of marketing to have a significant effect on convincing target audience members to purchase a specific product or service. With more interaction becoming virtual, consumers and businesses are relying on others to recommend and review products and services before deciding to buy them. It’s these influencers that almost become more critical to a business reimaging than trying to go directly to the audience. Influencers often have more leverage and can sell the message you want to transmit more effectively. Platforms like the AI-driven Influential connects you with the best influencers for your particular segment and helps get your business image revamp to those audience members that can most often be converted.
7. Improve the financial underpinnings of your business. Having the right financial knowledge and tools can help you transform the operational aspects of your company by increasing cash flow, informing sound money decisions, bolstering the security of your transaction systems, and adding opportunities to fund the transformation and growth of your business. Business transformation isn’t always about the public image but it is often more important to focus on behind the scenes mechanisms like anything related to company finances that can make the biggest difference. Financial partnerships are out there in the form of companies like InDinerothat provide the information and platforms you need to revamp your financial processes and approach.
8. Deploy thought leadership strategies to build credibility with your audience. By establishing credibility with your audience that you know what you are doing and have the most visionary, insightful information on a particular topic, you can drive the message of your revised business image home. Your byline and syndicated articles, as well as blog posts, can be the basis for explaining why you revamped your business image in relation to industry trends and issues that your audience understands. Aligning these can make the transition in your business image as seamless as possible and actually build greater trust because the audience sees that, as a leader, you realized changing your image would be more useful to the audience and in response to market evolution. Most industry publications accept bylined articles while news syndicates also readily accept new and relevant content.
9. Take your business image message to Livestream video. In order to get your message to the right people, you need to use the mediums and platforms where they want to hear from you. Livestream video on Instagram, Periscope and Facebook have become very popular due to the interest in consuming video content at a nearly voracious pace. You will be able to reach a larger audience with your revamp messaging and present it in a format that they are most receptive to, helping to create a visual picture of what your new image represents.
10. Plan a campaign around the business image refresh. Turn the business image makeover into an event by creating a marketing and ad campaign around it with a set of collateral designed to excite your audience as though you are launching the business for the first time or even a new product or service. In many ways, that is what you are doing. Create a set of messages to be broadcast on social media by using Hootsuite to blast it out as well as develop an email blast, blog post, and landing page on your website.

Don’t forget to track every tactic you use to transform your business image to see what type of impact it has on your audience. It may take the time to sink in so you may need to repeat some of these approaches and continue the dialogue with your customers and audience until the new image of your business replaces the previous one.