A rebrand is a critical phase for any business that is merging, growing, changing direction or simply looking to refresh and stay relevant. In other words, sooner or later, every business will find themselves rebranding and updating their visual brand identity.

Brand updates are exciting and bring fresh opportunities for any company. But the ultimate success of your rebrand depends on lots of factors – at Templafy, we’ve thought about smart strategies to roll out your internal brand updates, come up with a must-do checklist with all the essentials for a smooth rebranding process, and shared our top tips for a smooth transition to your new brand identity. Meanwhile, the web boasts plenty of resources on how to roll-out your rebrand efforts across marketing, packaging, advertising and everything else that brings your customer face-to-face with your brand.

However there’s another important factor that can make or break your rebrand: team buy-in.

Marketing experts attest that your best brand ambassadors are your employees – and as one of the most crucial assets when it comes to promoting your brand, it’s critical that your staff are on board with the rebrand so that everything they do in the workplace helps to build your new brand identity.

For one, it’s a cost-effective way to boost brand recognition for your new look – it takes few resources for your employees to share news of your rebrand on social media channels, but vastly widens the outreach of your new brand identity. For another, employees who are enthusiastic and on board with your rebrand will generate positive energy about your brand to your customers – encouraging customer buy-in, too. This is why marketers recommend that rebrands start from the inside-out.

The only problem? People shy away from change, and they definitely shy away from the thought of extra work. So how do you sell your rebrand to your team and secure their enthusiasm and engagement with your new branding campaign? Here are some key strategies to get them on board with your brand update:

1. Get their input

Everyone likes to feel as though their opinions are valued. So it naturally follows that if you get your team involved in the rebranding process from the start, they are much more likely to feel emotionally invested in your brand identity update and resonate with it on a personal level. And if each of your team members feel like they had a hand in your rebrand process and can take pride in the end result, they’re more likely to share your brand-new brand look on their social media channels, promote it to customers, participate in brand launch events and get talking about the rebrand.

Start with their input – use a tool like Survey Monkey to pose a questionnaire or survey about what your current brand’s strengths and weaknesses are, how they would like to see the brand portrayed, what values the brand should reflect and what they would change, if they could.

Other strategies to get your team involved in the rebranding process include staging an internal logo-design or tagline competition, or inviting employees to nominate designers, designs or creative agencies. This also helps to make a rebrand feel more like fun, and less like work.

Of course, soliciting constructive feedback is different to getting your employees to make the final call – make sure you’re clear about where the lines are, and let your team know that management is ultimately behind the decision when encouraging them to think about your brand. By taking stock of their input, your staff are bound to take more interest in watching the rebrand unfold from start to finish.

The benefits of engaging your team in the rebranding process are twofold – after all, who knows your brand better than your employees? Getting input from your staff can lead to new insights about your branding, as well as shed light on how your team view your company’s vision and values.

2. Invest in tools for your team

No matter how much you strive to generate enthusiasm about retooling your brand identity by getting staff involved, one thing will inevitably leave your team wary about a rebrand: the thought of an additional workload. After all, there’s no question that rebrands can take up a lot of time and resources to address all the tiny, niggling details – as our rebranding guide will attest – and your team know it, too.

However there’s a key way to making your employees feel like you value their time and reassuring them that the rebrand will be as smooth and pain-free for them as possible: invest in software to help carry out the internal brand rollout for you.

For example, Templafy integrates with your office suites and automates the process of rolling out internal brand identity updates. It automatically updates your templates with your new logo, brand colors and visual elements, and making them instantly available across the entire organization. It also takes out the work of monitoring countless documents and templates manually – alerting users if a document is off-brand and out-of-date. And because Templafy works across multiple devices, your employees will be able to access the software remotely, no matter where they are when your internal brand roll-out takes place.

By investing in tools to make your rebrand process smoother, your team won’t be burdened with the task of manually updating old documents, templates and presentation decks, and will be left feeling like their time is valued. That way, they can sit back and spread the enthusiasm about your new brand identity to your customers and beyond.