The pandemic has caused countless changes in the way we live and work. Virtually no business has gone unaffected by COVID-19, and many brands have been forced to completely overhaul their business model to adjust to the new normal. If your company has had to shut down or pull back during the pandemic, you may be preparing now for relaunching. This could be a great opportunity for your business to reconnect with old customers and gain a new audience, but it’s important to go about your relaunch strategically. The world is still dealing with COVID-19, and the model you once used may not be appropriate anymore.

Here Are Seven Tips for Relaunching a Brand after the Pandemic

1. Connect with Your Customers

Everyone has been through an ordeal in the last year, and many people are still stressed and confused. Compassion and empathy should be at the forefront of your communications as you reach out to your existing customers. People look for stability during crisis, so they appreciate brands that are straightforward and organized yet understanding.

Think about the concerns that may be most common among your customers as you relaunch. Are your customers worried about social distancing in your store, or will financial issues make it difficult for your usual shoppers to engage with your business? Your customer base may be facing new problems or worries, and you should be prepared to address them when you’re relaunching.

Use social media as you plan your relaunch strategy. Check out what your target demographic is saying on social media to get an understanding of their main concerns regarding the pandemic. You could also set up a virtual conference to hear questions and suggestions directly from your customers.

2. Talk about Health and Safety Measures

Consumers tend to be wary of brands with questionable health and safety protocols. Even as we near the end of the pandemic, it’s still important for businesses to take precautions. To help your customers feel at ease, be open and honest about the measures you’re taking to protect both your employees and your shoppers.

Before relaunching, release a statement on your website and on your social channels explaining your health and safety protocols. Talk about your standards for employee testing, sanitation, and social distancing. Be realistic about what your business can offer, and avoid promising measures that you’re not able to put in place.

3. Find New Ways to Offer Your Product or Service

Although options like indoor dining and shopping are becoming more available, the pandemic has led to the popularization of some other business models. Systems like curbside pickup, delivery, and online shopping aren’t entirely new, but they’ve become much more widely used in the last year. Many shoppers prefer these low-contact, convenient options, and they may continue to use these methods even after the end of the pandemic.

If your business primarily offers in-person shopping or services, think of ways to make it even easier for customers to patronize your company. Even once it’s no longer necessary, these options will likely still be popular.

4. Offer Something Exciting

Relaunching is a big event, and this is a great opportunity for your business to celebrate. If possible, offer something special to mark the occasion. You could host an outdoor event if you have the means to maintain social distancing recommendations, or you could set up an online launch party.

Another option is to offer a new product to celebrate your reopening, which will give you a chance to further advertise your business. You could give a discount or promotional offer to your returning customers, too. Many brands are relaunching with some financial uncertainty, so offering a steep discount may not be possible. However, your company will get more attention if you give your customers something to talk about.

5. Strengthen Your Customer Support

An efficient, helpful customer support system has been the key to success for many businesses throughout the pandemic. Whenever there’s uncertainty, customers will look to brands with responsive and available customer support. Relaunching also requires strong customer service because your customers may be unclear about what has changed or what they should expect from you.

Most likely, a good deal of your customer support will now happen remotely. If you plan to have employees working with customers through email or phone calls, make sure they’re equipped with the right technology to reduce errors or delays. Consider investing in an AI chatbot to offer customer support, too. Chatbots are available 24/7, so your customers won’t have to wait until business hours to get a response.

6. Set Objectives

It may feel difficult to set specific and measurable objectives when planning your relaunch strategy. Many businesses have been in survival mode for the last year, and no one has known what to expect in the future. However, objectives are essential for measuring the success of your relaunch.

Each objective should include which metric you plan to change, how much you plan for it to change, and when you plan to achieve this goal. The purpose of your objectives is to become specific and methodical with your relaunch strategy and to determine whether or not your business had made progress. Don’t panic if your brand doesn’t reach an objective, though. It’s still hard to predict what the future looks like, so you may need to adjust your objectives along the way.

7. Market and Publicize Your Relaunch

This step may seem obvious, but you should never underestimate the importance of marketing. Even if your business was thriving before the pandemic, you may have lost some momentum when you had to close down. Unfortunately, it will probably take some time and effort to build up your customer base again.

Do everything within your power to publicize your company’s relaunching. Post frequently on social media, and put signs or banners outside of your storefront. Send announcements to your email list detailing your plan to relaunch. Some of your customers may simply need a reminder that your brand exists, and they’ll be excited to see that you’re reopening.

If you have the budget to invest in marketing, consider launching a paid search campaign with Google or other search engines. Paid search targets people who are actively searching for your product or service, so it almost always delivers excellent results. Another option is paid social media marketing, which delivers your ads on social platforms to people within your target audience.

Relaunching after COVID-19 may seem daunting. You might be unsure of how your customers’ needs have changed or how people will interact with your business post-pandemic. Remember that everyone else is facing this uncertainty, too. Although you can’t be sure of what the future will bring, you can research and plan for what’s happening today. Most importantly, be honest, clear, and compassionate with your customers. The last year has been immensely challenging, but brands that focus on togetherness will bring the security and stability that people crave.

Logos are important. You knew that already. A good logo represents your company, helps people to remember your brand, and even attracts new customers.

A bad logo, on the other hand, can undo all the hard work you’ve done to get your company up and running to begin with.

There are several basic elements that go into designing a logo. The color, font, shape, graphic choice, spacing, and style all play an important part in whether your design is successful or not. But just as those basic elements need careful attention, there are also several mistakes that are shockingly easy to make.

Fortunately, with a little advance warning, they’re also easy to avoid.

Let’s take a look at seven mistakes that are frequently made by new designers, and how you can keep from falling prey to them.

Use A Raster Image

This is a very basic one, but it’s important. And if you don’t have a lot of experience with design, you may not know this off the top of your head.

Logos need to be flexible and scalable. Your design will be used in a variety of ways, across a plethora of platforms — from your website, to your social media, to print ads, emails, maybe even billboards! Obviously, your design needs to be able to go from very small to very large without losing its clarity.

A raster image, however, is based on pixels, which means that when it is sized differently than its original, it gets pixelated, or fuzzy. A fuzzy logo not only looks amateurish, it also is completely ineffective because it’s impossible to see the true, authentic logo as it was mean to be.

Your design needs to use vectors, rather than rasters. Vectors are built of mathematical equations using lines and curves, allowing them to be resized without losing their integrity. Make your logo effective at any size by using a vector design.

Design Is Too Complicated

There’s a reason why “simplicity” comes up as a popular design trend year after year — simple is effective. Simple works.

Conversely, if your logo design is too complex, too busy, has too many elements, the effectiveness will be significantly reduced. In fact, the more elements you have, the less likely the brand design is to be remembered and recognized — two major factors of what makes a good logo to begin with.

Rather than letting your brand identity be a free-for-all and shoving as many elements as possible into that little space, be choosy. Strip your elements down. Keep removing them until the logo operates at the lowest common denominator, as simple as possible. Remember, simple = memorable, and memorable = effective.

Using a logo design tool for ideas can be helpful in this regard, as they usually offer you the simplest of suggestions, rather than anything too complex.

Too Reliant On Trends

Trends certainly have their place, but that place usually changes from year to year, or even from season to season. It’s difficult to predict what trend will come up next; and it’s equally difficult to predict when, exactly, a given trend will end.

This means that if your design is too reliant on a popular trend, it will look dated as soon as that trend is over. You could choose to update your design on a regular basis, of course, but that won’t help with recognition or memorability.

Instead, design your logo based on classic design principles rather than individual trends. Looking at the long-term for your logo makes more sense than leaping onto whatever bandwagon comes your way.

Bad Font Choice

Individual elements such as fonts need attention, too, because they play into the overall effectiveness of your logo as a whole. If you have a well-designed logo, but have chosen a font that doesn’t fit or is downright illegible, it will tear at the effectiveness of the brand image.

One important tip when it comes to fonts: ask for feedback. A font may seem perfectly legible to you, but may not be nearly as clear to others. Remember that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sometimes good font choice is, too.

Poor Color Choice

Running right along with the issue of choosing a font is the issue of choosing your colors. There are several sub-mistakes that can be made here.

• Choosing colors that clash. Don’t design your logo in a palette that makes the viewer’s eyes bleed. Just don’t.
• Choosing colors that render text or other elements invisible. If you don’t have enough contrast between your text and your background, there’s going to be a problem.
• Choosing colors that just don’t fit your brand. Take a look at some of the information on the psychology of color.
• Making your logo completely reliant on color. Remember that your logo may be printed or used on different platforms, and not all of them will have the exact same color capabilities. It’s even a good idea to make sure that your design plays well in black and white, just in case.

Doesn’t Fit The Brand

Branding is the act of creating a visual representation of a personality, and allowing it to communicate with others. The personality belongs to your brand — the others are your audience. Your audience identifies with your company on a personal level because of branding.

Which puts a lot of pressure on visual branding elements, such as your logo design. If the design doesn’t fit the brand personality, it sends a wrong message to your customers, and hinders their ability to identify and engage with the company.

Basically, if your company is traditional, values-driven, and family-oriented, your logo should be, too. This is true if your company is edgy, youthful, and quirky, as well as if your company is grassroots, home-grown, hand-made, your logo should be, too.

To create a logo that doesn’t align with the brand personality is to create a communications misfire. Make sure that the brand and the design are cut from the same cloth.

Your Logo Looks Too Much Like The Competition

A final mistake that is frequently made in logo design is the creation of a copycat, or lookalike. This can be attributed to one of two things:
● Lack of market research, so you don’t know what your competition is doing and you accidentally stumbled onto a lookalike logo design.
● Desire to capitalize on an existing design; you’ve done your market research, found a competitor that is doing well, and created a logo that could be mistaken for the competition in order to draw sales away from confused customers who aren’t paying enough attention.

Both of these causes are detrimental to your company, and both of them need to be avoided. Market research is always recommended before you start a company, anyway — and it’s a vital part of excellent, effective branding.

On the other hand, choosing to create a lookalike logo won’t really do you any favors, either. People will catch on, and your brand will suffer because of its apparent inability to trust in its own uniqueness.

Trust your brand — and create a logo to match

Logo design isn’t as simple as some may think, but that doesn’t mean it’s beyond your reach. Just make sure to avoid these seven potential mistakes, and you can create a successful, effective, memorable logo that perfectly aligns with your company brand.