Ways to Refresh Your Small Business’ Brand in 2025

A new year can be a great reminder to assess your small business’ current operations and evaluate your performance. Whether there are areas of your business plan that need improvement, or you want to enhance your strategies to help meet your business goals, identifying ways to refresh and strengthen your approach can benefit your brand in the year ahead.

Are you effectively communicating to your target audience? Keeping up with the latest trends in your industry? Enhancing your customers’ experience? There are several areas within your small business that you could consider refreshing. Keep reading for tips to enhance your performance in 2025.

Update your branded marketing materials

What is the status of your marketing materials? Could they use some work? Whether your font feels dated, if the aesthetics and personality you’ve developed on social media don’t match your current vibe, or if your visuals fail to showcase your products or services in the best light, it may be time for a refresh.

Consider starting with small tweaks to make sure your materials and budget align with your vision. On the digital front, this could include:

• Modernizing your logo to be more minimalistic (a design trend for 2025)
• Archiving old social media posts that no longer align with your vision
• Investing in high-quality images of your product line to use in branded material
• Incorporating your colour palette into your social media posts to push branding

Keep in mind that consistency is an essential factor in building brand recognition. Don’t let 2025 be another year where you use outdated or undesirable branded materials on your website, social media, merchandise, packaging, and more. Updating these elements can better align with your business goals.

While refreshing your digital marketing is important in today’s tech-focused world, now can also be a great opportunity to assess your print materials. From banners and posters to flyers and business cards—are you using these mediums effectively? Whether you hand someone something tangible or they encounter it around town, at your store, or at an event, print marketing can be a great way to capture attention, establish your identity, generate local buzz, and, when done effectively, create a positive in-store ambience.

Print material should accurately represent your brand. Be sure to incorporate your logo, colours, and typography (as well as a QR code to direct to your website) to communicate your business’s identity to prospective customers and encourage engagement. Creating or updating your brand guidelines can help make sure you consistently adhere to these visual elements. While your marketing materials should reflect your business, consider incorporating some of the latest trends in visual design to make your print materials stand out.

Looking for assistance from the experts? The UPS Store has made printing a breeze for your small business! We offer services in-store at a location near you. We also have online printing options, which makes designing and dropping your files into our platform a quick and effective way to get the products you want.

Optimize your social media content with videos

Building customer connections and standing out from the competition can require an effective strategy. One way to do so is to enhance your social media content so that you can generate more engagement, build an audience that wants to interact with your content and get your products/services in front of more people.

If one of your goals this year is to boost engagement rate on your social platforms, determine what areas of your social media need refreshing. Is it the types of posts or how you’re crafting your captions? Could you lean more into the latest trends other businesses in your industry are implementing?

If it’s the type of posts you’re considering refreshing, 2025 can be your year to post more video content. From Instagram Reels to TikTok to YouTube Shorts, short-form videos have become a consistent part of our daily content intake. Since 83% of consumers want to see more videos from brands in 2025, create a content plan so you can determine the types of videos you want to create. Here are some steps to help you get started:

1. Research content within your industry, from big brands to small businesses like yours, to get a feel of what’s popular.
2. See if you can apply popular video trends to your small business. While your content shouldn’t be too out of left field, don’t be afraid to tap into your creativity that may stray from your typical branded material if you find it could work with your audience.
3. Create relatable content that’s not overly produced or product-pushy, as 63% of consumers would rather see relatable and authentic videos than those with high-production value. This can include Q&As, behind-the-scenes content, tutorials, etc.
4. Keep videos native to the platform you’re posting on. While it can be great to reuse content across platforms, consider adding text or visual material that’s specific to that platform.
5. Make video content accessible to all audiences by adding captions and/or alt descriptions to posts where applicable.

While on your social accounts, use the built-in analytics tools to see what your audience is engaging with the most and build on that.

Enhance business operations with AI-powered tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to improve and gain popularity. By now, you have likely used some form of AI in your small business, and if you’re unsure, you might be part of the 27% of Canadian entrepreneurs who don’t know they’re using it!

Just like you’d strategize other parts of your business, you can create an AI strategy to help refresh some of those recurring tasks you do daily or help generate material for you to assist in your daily operations. 97% of small and medium-sized enterprises have reported tangible benefits when they’ve used AI, including improved customer service, increased efficiency, and more.

For example, the use of generative AI has picked up steam, especially over the last while. This type of AI can generate new content, including images, text, video, and more, by using machine learning models to analyze data. A recent survey found that 65% reported that their organizations use generative AI regularly, so if you haven’t already tried it out, it can be a great way to refresh some of your business’s operations.

Using generative AI to brainstorm new social media caption ideas, for example, can be a great way to align your copy with your brand’s personality. There are several tools available for this, including ChatGPT or this free AI caption generator by Hootsuite.

You could also use AI to refresh your website (and your customer service approach at the same time) by using an AI-powered chatbot. If you’re already using a rules-based chatbot, which essentially acts as an FAQ in chatbot form, 2025 can be the year to take it a step further with AI, as it can generate human-like responses to make the interaction feel more natural.

Gemini for Google Workspace, for example, can also be a great tool for small businesses, helping to streamline your work. From bookkeeping to operational efficiency to customer service and more, you can implement this AI tool right into the Google software you may already use.

Looking to leverage more AI-powered tools in your small business? Check out our recent post on top productivity hacks.

Let The UPS Store help make 2025 as successful as ever for your small business

Our Small Business Solutions are here to help you start or grow your small business, while our GET MORE Reward program can help you save on a variety of our services. Reach out to a location near you to see how our team can assist.