Crafting a Perfect Brand Strategy for Any Brand Without the Headaches
As a business manager, there are always challenges on the horizon and ways to improve.
Maybe your company is launching a new product or deciding to target a new audience. Or maybe you just want to continue to execute at the level you’re at. No matter what they are, clear goals are vital to growing and maintaining your brand.
The hard part, however, is figuring out just how to reach those goals. That’s where brand strategy comes in. Deciding what that strategy looks like can be challenging, but as a brand manager, I’ll share the perfect, simple strategy for every brand!
Map it out
Every great strategy starts with a rough plan.
Start with a clearly defined goal. Let’s say your goal is to sell more shoes; it may not seem very clear, but it’s more than enough to get the ball rolling. After you have your overarching goal, begin to think up a few tactics.
“Tactics” aren’t actually synonymous with “strategy” like you may think. If strategy is the overall plan to sell more shoes, tactics are the individual steps to accomplish that goal. In this example, some tactics could include buying cross channel advertising space, sending a monthly newsletter, or even hosting popups on running trails.
Whether or not you actually do each of these ideas isn’t the key concern at this point, it’s more important just give the plan some possibilities - the more ideas you have, the more likely your end plan will succeed. The key underlying idea, however, is to stay flexible!
Flexibility is vital throughout the planning stage and beyond in any strategy. There is no brand that plans everything out perfectly - there will always be unexpected factors. In our example, you may not have time to write a newsletter or it might be more effective to host a popup in a farmers’ market than a running trail, but the most important thing is to be able to adjust on the fly.
After you pare down your long list of ideas and have a rough draft of the plan established, it’s only a matter of editing and testing until you have a solid strategy you can pursue, backed with field research. But in order to do all that editing and testing you’ll need some help, which brings us to the next step…
2. Communication is Key
The old adage “teamwork makes the dream work” comes to mind.
It’s perfectly fine to develop an initial idea by yourself, but if you want the best results for your company, you’ll have to talk with your team early and often. The benefit of group input is immeasurable because there are always ideas that seem obvious to someone else that never would’ve occurred to you.
On top of that, you simply won’t have the time or ability to pull off an entire project by yourself. If you’re a business of one, this still holds true, albeit in a nonprofessional sense. Ask someone you trust like a friend or former coworker to listen to your strategy and take their feedback seriously.
The more input you receive, the more you’ll narrow and focus your strategy early on. And don’t stop there; keep talking about your progress and give ideas for improvement throughout every stage of the strategy.
With all that said, there is a danger to keep in mind with lots of feedback going back and forth. “Meeting burnout” is one of the biggest enemies in an organization. If you spend all your time in endless meetings talking about the strategy, rather than executing the strategy, your team will check out and your goal will stay out of reach.
Stay in touch, but don’t breathe over your team’s shoulders. They’re competent people, they work for you after all.
3. Have a timeline
Along with meeting burnout, another strategy killer is an undefined timeline.
Let’s go back to our example above: you want to sell more shoes by buying ad space and hosting popups. But when will you start? How will you know when you’re done? If you never establish dates associated with each milestone in your project, you’ll never know whether you’re on track or when to hang up the “mission accomplished” banner.
The start or launch date is particularly crucial because it forces you out of the paralysis of planning. Planning, brainstorming, and editing will never stop unless you have a deadline… The brainstorming and strategy-building stage can easily last literally forever. The desire to make sure everything is perfect before setting off is understandable, but in business a little uncertainty is unavoidable.
Unlike your launch date, your end date contains a lot more freedom.
You never want to have a never-ending strategy, but you also don’t need to know the expiration date of a plan before it’s launched (unless you’re launching a new product, which ironically makes the “launch” date of the product the end date of your strategy).
If your ultimate goal is to sell more shoes, it’s not like you want to sell less shoes once your strategy is complete. But it’s still important to have a time in mind when this strategy is officially over. If you’re still operating under the same strategy years after you’ve started, it will be unrecognizable from where you started and too out of touch with the original plan.
The key? Create end goals instead of end dates. Some good examples from our shoe situation would be to sell X number of shoes total (non-time based) or to sell 20% more shoes per month by November of next year (time based). Once completed, you can head back to step #1 and move onto the next great idea to continue to grow your business.
Pro Tip: Even if you have an end goal in mind, don’t forget to be flexible if your original strategy isn’t quite panning out in a timely manner.
4. Execute!
A strategy is only as good as its execution. If you spend all your time brainstorming with your team and nitpicking over the launch and end dates, you’ll realize it’s been three months and you haven’t sold any more shoes.
These steps are the bones of any good strategy and if you follow them with your brand’s mission and goals in mind, you’ll have no problem accomplishing whatever you set out to do.
If you’re still unsure of how to develop a strategy or too busy to plan one yourself, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’m a professional brand manager and I specialize in making your goals become a reality. I can’t wait to speak with you soon!