Brand refresh checklist: what do you need to update?

Coca-Cola (boo, hiss) recently rolled out a brand refresh. If you’re an ageing smoker (like me), it just made me immediately think of Marlboro Red cigs. And it’s not just me; 35% of consumers surveyed thought the same.

Anyway, this got me thinking about why companies decide to refresh their brand, and how even giants can get it wrong – not just missing the mark on the new look and feel – but in terms of deployment across channels.

In the past few years, I’ve taken several clients through a brand refresh. While it’s not as much work as a full rebrand, there are still a lot of things that can end up being overlooked.

A refresh usually looks something like this: new brand colours, an updated tagline, a rewritten mission statement, or a shift to a different ideal customer profile (ICP). The logo often stays the same, or gets a light touch-up. Compared to a full rebrand, where the name, domain, and core proposition change, it feels easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

But sometimes, it actually ends up being difficult difficult, lemon difficult. Especially from a digital marketing perspective.

Here’s what often happens. The brand team shares the new guidelines, the homepage gets updated, and everyone moves on to the next project. But the actual footprint of a brand sits across dozens of surfaces that nobody’s assigned to check: template meta descriptions, automated email flows, paid ad copy, schema markup, GBP listings, the third page of blog posts nobody’s looked at since 2022. Most of it goes stale quietly, and nobody notices until a prospect lands on a page still selling to an old ICP, or an AI Overview quotes your old tagline.

This is the checklist I actually work through when a client says “we’re going to refresh the brand, can you make sure everything’s updated?”

Start with an audit, not a to-do list

Before touching anything, you need to be clear on exactly what’s changing. This sounds obvious, but I’ve seen teams jump straight to “update the website” without ever writing down what the actual differences are between old brand and new brand.

Set up a spreadsheet, and begin the audit with what is changing.

Colours and fonts (which ones, and are old colours banned or just deprioritised)
Tagline (old vs new, word for word)
Mission/vision statement (old vs new)
ICP (who you were targeting before, who you’re targeting now, and where they overlap)
Tone of voice (is the new brand more formal, more casual, different vocabulary entirely)
Value propositions or messaging pillars (are these the same three things said differently, or genuinely different priorities)
Logo (light touch-up counts as a change too, even if it’s not a full redesign)

Get this from whoever led the refresh (brand agency, internal brand lead, CMO) in writing. If there is a presentation or brand refresh document showing the before and after, this can be a great way of ensuring that no assets will be missed.

The brand refresh asset checklist

Once you know what’s changing, map it against every asset type, and decide who owns what.

This will usually cover:

Website

Homepage + all service/product pages + about us + blog posts (at a minimum)
Page footers
CTAs and forms
Case studies/testimonials
Downloadable PDFs/brochures/sales decks hosted on-site
Colour contrast/accessibility (WCAG)

SEO/GEO

On-page copy (all pages, not just homepage)
Schema markup (Organization, sameAs)
Title tags/meta descriptions (template defaults especially)
Internal linking anchor text
Redirects (if URLs change)
Entity descriptions across about pages, directories, schema

Paid search/social

Ad copy (headlines/descriptions)
Audience targeting settings
Landing pages
Display/banner creative
Ad extensions/sitelinks

Social media

Profile bios, pinned posts, header images (all platforms, including dormant ones)
Historical posts (decide: edit, archive, or leave)
Link-in-bio pages/linktree

Video/YouTube

Channel banner, profile picture, description
Video intros/outros
Video descriptions
Playlist titles/descriptions
Thumbnail templates
Older high-traffic videos
Embedded video on website
Video creative in paid campaigns

Email

Templates (header/footer, colours, signatures)
Automated/evergreen sequences (welcome, nurture, abandoned cart)
Sender name/reply-to

PDFs/downloadable assets

One-pagers, brochures, sales decks, technical documentation
White papers, reports, e-books
Case studies

Other content types

Podcasts
Webinars
Demos
Training sessions

Third-party listings

Google Business Profile
Review platforms (Trustpilot, G2, Clutch)
Industry directories
Partner/affiliate sites using your logo/boilerplate

Analytics/reporting

UTM naming conventions
GA4 event/conversion naming

Internal/sales docs

Boilerplate “about us” copy (outreach, proposals, signatures)
Sales elevator pitch/talk tracks
Internal templates (briefs, decks, video conference backgrounds)

Then, for each asset type, ask:

Does this asset display the tagline, mission statement, or ICP-specific language directly?
Does this asset use brand colours in a way that’s visible to the end user (not just internal templates)?
Is this asset evergreen (runs indefinitely without anyone checking it) or campaign-based (has a natural end date where it’ll get refreshed anyway)?
Who owns it? Marketing, sales, a third party, nobody?

Once I’ve built out the spreadsheet with asset type, current state, what needs to change, owner, priority (does this need fixing this week, or can it wait till it’s naturally refreshed), and status, you can work through it systematically.

Website

This is the bit everyone does, but usually half-arsed.

The homepage and top-level pages are updated with the new colours, the new hero copy, the new tagline. But a website is hundreds of pages deep, and a refresh checklist that stops there leaves a big old chunk of the site running the old brand.

To get started, run a crawl of the site using a tool like Screaming Frog, and have a dig about in Google Search Console/Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4 to surface any long-forgotten assets. Map anything that needs to be updated to the spreadsheet.

Things to check:

Every service/product page, not just the ones featured in navigation: old taglines have a habit of surviving in page footers, PDF brochures linked from three-year-old blog posts, and “about us” boilerplate pasted into service pages nobody’s edited since launch.
CTAs and forms: if the mission or ICP has shifted, does “book a demo” or “get a quote” still make sense?
Case studies and testimonials: if you’re now targeting a different ICP, old case studies might be actively working against you, showing proof points for a customer type you’re no longer chasing.
Colour contrast and accessibility: new palette means a fresh WCAG check. Nobody wants to find out three months in that the new brand blue fails contrast ratios on CTAs.
Downloadable assets: white papers, reports, e-books, one-pagers, sales decks, and technical documentation hosted on the site as PDFs.

SEO and technical SEO

This is where things often get missed. As an example, if you decide your business is now only focused on serving enterprise-level customers, audit content for anything that mentions SMEs/small businesses.

Content audit: does existing copy still reflect the new mission and positioning? Search engines are reading your content as a whole; so if half of it says one thing and half says something else, that’s a trust signal problem.
Title tags and meta descriptions at scale: template-level defaults matter as much as individual pages; if your CMS is auto-generating meta descriptions from an old boilerplate string, that’s a one-line fix that touches hundreds of pages.
Internal linking anchor text: if messaging pillars have changed, anchor text built around the old pillars is now slightly misleading, worth a pass even if it’s not urgent.
Schema markup: Organization schema is often the most overlooked piece. Name, description, sameAs links, all worth checking against the new brand story.
Redirects: if URLs change to reflect new ICP language, are no longer targeting a specific sector, or are changing/removing propositions, get 301s in place properly.
Backlink audit: you can’t always fix what other sites say about you, but it’s worth knowing if external links are pointing to pages with contradictory messaging, so you’re not surprised later (again, redirects will help mitigate this to some degree).

GEO and AI search

LLMs and AI-generated answers are pulling from crawled content and training data that may still reflect your old positioning, and there’s a lag between a refresh going live and AI systems catching up. You can’t force that to update faster, but you can make it easier.

Keep entity descriptions consistent: about pages, directories, schema, so AI systems converge on the new narrative rather than pulling conflicting versions.
Record where your tagline or mission language shows up verbatim in AI Overviews or chatbot answers for branded queries.

Paid search and paid social

Paid is often the last thing updated because organic gets priority and paid campaigns run quietly in the background. One of the first things I do is add labels or easy-to-filter differentiators to anything that is still in the old branding, so it doesn’t accidentally get reactivated after everything has been updated.

Ad copy: headlines and descriptions built around the old tagline or messaging pillars.
Audience targeting: if the ICP changed, check whether campaigns are still targeting the old persona in platform settings, not just in the creative.
PPC landing pages: this is the classic gap, paid traffic sent to pages that haven’t been refreshed because the website update prioritised organic-facing pages first.
Display and banner creative using old colours or logos: these often sit in ad platforms long after the source files have been updated elsewhere.
Ad extensions and sitelinks referencing old value props.

Social media

In addition to the brand channels, employees should be provided with updated assets and be told when to update them on their own social media channels – especially the leadership team.

Profile bios, pinned posts and header images: check across every platform, including the one nobody posts on anymore but is still live and findable.
Historical content: decide deliberately whether you go back and edit or archive old posts that clash with the new messaging, or leave the timeline as-is. Either is defensible, but it should be a decision, not an oversight.
Link-in-bio tools or landing pages linked from social profiles.

Video and YouTube

Video gets missed more than almost anything else on this list, mostly because updating it feels like a bigger job than swapping out a line of copy or updating a logo. But it’s often more visible and longer-lived than a blog post.

YouTube channel branding: banner image, profile picture, channel description, all likely to be carrying the old colours and old tagline.
Video intros and outros: if your videos open or close with an animated logo sting or end card built with the old palette, that’s now inconsistent with everything else, and it’s usually baked into dozens of published videos, not just new ones.
Video descriptions: these often repeat the old boilerplate “about us” copy word for word, worth a bulk pass.
Playlists: titles and descriptions, especially if they reference old messaging pillars or an old ICP by name (e.g. a playlist literally titled for a customer segment you no longer target).
Thumbnails: not usually brand-colour-dependent, but worth checking if thumbnail templates use the old palette or old logo.
Older videos featuring the old tagline or mission statement spoken aloud or on-screen: flag anything still getting meaningful traffic, and decide whether to remove or replace it.
Embedded video on the website itself: make sure the player thumbnail and surrounding page copy match the refreshed brand, not just the video content.
Video used in paid social or display: same issue as static creative; old intros/outros can end up running in active ad campaigns long after the source files elsewhere have moved on.

Email marketing

Email automations are easy to miss because, to some extent, they are ‘set and forget’.

Templates: header and footer branding, colour scheme, signature blocks.
Automated or evergreen sequences: welcome series, nurture flows, abandoned cart. These run for months without anyone looking at them and are one of the most common places stale branding survives.
Sender name and reply-to address: if positioning has shifted enough that these no longer fit.

Third-party listings and directories

Consistency is key across third-party sites too; not just owned assets.

Google Business Profile description and categories, especially if the ICP has changed.
Industry directories and review platforms (Trustpilot, G2, Feefo), bios and descriptions specifically.
Partner or affiliate sites using your old logo pack or old boilerplate “about us” copy, worth a polite email round to update.

Analytics, tracking and reporting

Easy to forget because it’s internal-facing, but it matters for anyone reporting on performance post-refresh.

UTM naming conventions, if campaign taxonomy shifts with new positioning.
GA4 event and conversion naming, if the new ICP means different actions now matter more.

Internal and sales enablement

Brief mention because it’s not core to digital marketing, but it’s worth flagging to whoever owns it if you want extra brownie points.

The boilerplate “about us” paragraph used in outreach, proposals and email signatures.
The pitch sales actually uses day to day: does it match the new tagline, or has it quietly stayed the same because nobody told sales the brand changed?

Plan ahead rather than scrambling to pick up the pieces

A brand refresh has a hard deadline and a clear owner, but its footprint across digital marketing doesn’t. It’s spread across dozens of channels, most of which nobody’s specifically responsible for, and updates tend to happen when people have time, rather than all being scheduled at once. This means some things get fixed a week, and some things get fixed months later when someone happens to notice.

A proper audit and a checklist that goes wider than the website will make this process easier to manage upfront, rather than it being a mad scramble as old branding resurfaces months later.

Brand refresh? Here’s everything else that needs to change