Brand Planning Starts... ⏰ Now!
Hey Friends,
It’s the dog days of summer and I’m happy to announce the heat finally broke here in New Jersey. Cold frosty beverages aside, and it being the last few days of July, it’s time to start thinking about brand planning and what next year looks like for our business.
Brand planning is usually a mid-summer (unless your fiscal year is different than the standard Jan 1 - Dec 31 cycle) workshop I do with my clients to begin to proactively look at the coming year so we can prepare properly.
Branding Planning is…
How we take our brand strategy (the long-term plan to outmaneuver the competition through radical differentiation) and make it come to life through our marketing activities.
A way to see the forest through the trees and not just live in the ‘now’.
A great yearly (or bi-yearly) workshop to perform to stay on top of strategic imperatives that will drive your business forward.
Why do you need to plan?
Without proper brand planning, we can find ourselves to be on a constant treadmill with marketing, never getting ahead.
Like Ben said above, failing to plan is preparing to fail. With so many marketing channels and touchpoints, the more time we have to think and strategize, the better the results will be.
How Brand Planning Impacts Marketing Planning
By taking a proactive look at your marketing activities, you can begin to prioritize which marketing touchpoints need updating and/or attention. You don’t want to wait until the last moment to start planning development or design work that will take time.
More than likely you leverage some sort of vendor stack to help with your marketing. This could be a copywriter to write blogs, a designer to help with design, or even an agency to help with paid advertising. Regardless, these relationships should be reviewed yearly to ensure their scope and your brand strategy are still aligned.
With so many marketing touchpoints and channels out there, having a pulse on your brand plan will allow you to think strategically as to where you’re going to invest time/money/energy/resources and in which channels.
How to start
While I have templates and frameworks I leverage in my workshops, there is no one-size fits all process for going about brand planning. I do believe there are some core concepts that need to be followed, but we need to remember that brand planning is very subjective and one of the first exercises I run through is a prioritization of needs which helps to align expectations and outcomes.
Some core area’s I usually focus on are…
Goals for the following year
Analytics/Financial: Is there a revenue number we’re aiming for? Is there a ROAS number we’re looking to meet? What other metrics/financial obligations do we need to take into account?
Brand/Marketing: Do we have campaigns already planned? Do we have an idea of the marketing campaigns we want to run? What’s in the parking lot? Is there a new website we’re considering or an investment in a new platform?
Audience: Are we currently seeing a shift in our audience that we need to address? Do we have a goal in mind for audience growth? Engagement? Retention?
Strategic Imperatives: High-importance initiatives and/or campaigns
Giving campaigns: If we’re a non-profit, are we looking to raise money? Are we looking to bolster our donations by X%? How do we get there without it being an after-thought?
Events / Conferences / Tradeshows: Do we have specific events we’re looking to participate in? Are we designing a booth or just walking the floor? Do we need PR?
Product launch: What’s in the pipeline? What’s our product ecosystem look like? How much do we need to think through supply chain challenges and economic instability? How do these new products fit into our current ecosystem? Do we have or need a product playbook?
This is certainly a non-exhaustive list and as I said, brand planning is extremely subjective to your current business, but principles should be pretty universal.
The value is in having an outside perspective to help put all of this together in a digestible and implementable way.
How can I help?
There are a few different ways to engage with me on your 2023 brand planning.
My coaching package consists of a block of 4 60-minute sessions to talk through brand planning and help put together an execution plan
This includes access to a dedicated Slack channel
Access to my frameworks & templates
I have a few workshop slots (6-hour or 10-hour) still open for August/September and this would be great to do with your marketing team to put together your 2023 brand plan to really get a head start on next year. Like with my coaching program, this includes…
Access to a dedicated Slack channel
Access to my frameworks & templates
An added masterclass with an industry thought-leader based on some low-hanging fruit opportunities
That’s it for now. As always, if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to respond to this email or comment on the thread.
I’m off to Massachusetts (or as I like to say to Melissa, Dunkchusetts 🙃😂) for a few days to hang out near the water and eat too many Lobster Rolls with the family. 🦞
Cheers to summertime antics and brand planning. It’s a magical combination.
- Steven