Mastering Quarterly Brand Planning for Startups: A Roadmap to Success
It’s that time of the year - the midpoint. Where all the questions are asked and reluctantly answered. Has your company achieved what you set out to do at the start? Sound familiar? Are you moving in the right direction? What lessons and changes have contributed to or constricted brand growth? Regardless of the answer - both expected and not - it’s critical to ask these questions and set a course for the back half of the year so you can drive the goals you need and generate that next level of revenue.
In the health and wellness industry establishing a strong holistic branding presence and growth roadmap has become even more crucial for driving profit, building awareness, and increasing brand equity, as the market continues to expand. One powerful tool that you should be utilizing is quarterly strategic brand planning. By developing a comprehensive strategy and executing it in quarterly increments, you can optimize and measure your brand growth potential and keep your eye on achieving long-term, sustainable success. Which is the point, right?
Three key steps in quarterly strategic planning will help you drive holistic profit, build awareness, and increase brand equity in your health and wellness niche through a brand growth roadmap. Before we dive in, let's align on the power and purpose of strategic planning.
Understanding the Power of Strategic Brand Planning:
Strategic brand planning goes beyond mere marketing tactics and focuses on aligning your brand with your holistic, long-term vision, revenue, and growth. Ultimately, strategic brand planning creates a growth roadmap that transformers your business.
Through effective strategic brand planning, you can:
Cultivate a consistent and compelling brand identity that resonates deeply with your audience.
Continuously stand out from competitors by highlighting your values in relation to everyone else your audience is exposed to.
Establish or reinforce trust and credibility with your customers, increasing brand equity.
Drive customer loyalty and repeat business through strong emotional connections.
Optimize profitability by attracting new customers and maximizing the value of existing ones.
Establish a brand roadmap to increase revenue, profit, and sales.
If you want to meet your quarterly business goals and develop an airtight roadmap for growth, connect with us. We help health and wellness startups use strategic branding to hit goals that transform their bottom line.
Begin quarterly strategic brand planning with this three-part process:
Step 1: Define Your Brand Objectives
Just like your financial objectives, your branding objectives should be clear and mapped to your overall vision for the business 3-6 months down the line.
Break down your larger overarching goals into specific and measurable brand objectives for each quarter so you can prioritize your efforts, resources, and focus. These objectives may include increasing sales, expanding market reach, launching new products or services, enhancing brand visibility, or improving customer engagement. Your brand objectives should ladder up the overall financial objectives within your business. Alignment is critical otherwise you won’t make the headway you need.
Ensure your team members are aligned and support the overall directions to ensure you don’t run into conflicting interests during execution. It seems like an obvious statement, but frequently brand strategy gets truncated because other teams do not necessarily see the value of the investment. You’re looking for holistic branding buy-in here. Strong holistic branding drives profit. It’s not a theory, it’s a measurable fact.
By setting clear brand goals, aligning them within your team, and laddering them to your overall business objectives, you create a strategic brand roadmap to meet those goals efficiently and then measure their success.
Step 2: Audit Your Current Brand Strategy
If a dog came into a vet with a broken leg, the vet wouldn’t set it without first running an x-ray. Otherwise, he might not set it right, cause more damage, or extend the recovery time. Running an audit is just like running an X-ray for your brand. Why would you move forward without understanding where you are?
The most important rule, before you map tactics to your strategy, is to take measures of where your brand currently stands. If you know a brand audit will transform your strategy but don’t have time to do it yourself, get in touch. We lead dozens of brand audits yearly to create strategic growth roadmaps to increase profit.
The purpose of a quarterly brand audit is to evaluate your current brand performance and identify areas for improvement. This becomes a gap analysis your team can use to establish a brand roadmap to meet the goals you’ve already established.
In this audit, take a look at the following key areas:
Holistic brand identity: Assess your branding visual elements, including your logo, colors, typography, and imagery. Ensure consistency and alignment with both your brand strategy and across all channels and communication platforms.
Messaging: Evaluate your branding tone of voice, key messages, and value proposition. Are they effectively communicating your branding's unique value and resonating with your target audience?
Customer perception: Analyze customer feedback, reviews, and social media sentiment to gain insights into how your brand is perceived. Are there strengths to leverage or weaknesses to address?
Competitive intelligence: Assuming you’ve previously done some competitive analysis, take a look to see if there are changes with those existing competitors or if there are new ones you need to assess. This will help you identify opportunities for differentiation and assess industry trends.
Digital presence: Review your website, social media channels, and other online channels to ensure they accurately reflect your brand and deliver a cohesive user experience.
Customer journey: Take a high-level look at the consumer brand experience end-to-end, from the awareness phase through customer service. If there is a specific phase that needs more attention, this review will highlight that so you can optimize accordingly.
Once complete, you should have a clear understanding of your branding values, impact, engagement, and perception in the marketplace so you can determine the strategic approach to reaching the goals you identified. Focus on the gaps uncovered between your goals and your brand audit. These gaps become your strategic brand roadmap for growth.
Step 3: Reveal the Roadmap: Translating Goals into Tactics
As a business owner and leader, you understand the importance of setting strategic goals to drive your businesses forward. You know a brand roadmap will get you there. But how do you translate these goals into actionable tactics (a roadmap) that lead to transformative results?
By establishing a clear roadmap and implementing targeted actions, you establish a path to meeting and exceeding the goals you’ve set.
Here is what you should focus on once your audit is complete to create a branding roadmap for quarterly growth:
Break Down Goals into Key Milestones/Actionable Steps: To translate your strategic branding goals into actionable steps, break them down into smaller, manageable tasks. Each goal should have milestones driving it to completion.
For example, if one of your quarterly goals is to enhance brand awareness, actionable steps might include developing a content marketing strategy, optimizing your website for search engines, leveraging social media platforms, and engaging in influencer partnerships.
Align Actions with Brand Values: It's essential to ensure your actions and milestones align with your core branding principles and values. Your actions should reflect and reinforce your brand identity, messaging, and positioning. Consistency builds and maintains trust and connection with your audience. And, a deeply invested audience drives loyalty and sales. Each milestone on your roadmap should align with at least one core branding element.
Ask your team this: How can your execution organically reinforce the shared values of you and your customers? Always align your messaging, visuals, customer experience, and communication with your branding.
Prioritize and Set Resources: Evaluate each action based on its potential impact, feasibility, and resource requirements. Prioritize actions that align closely with your overall business goals to have the highest potential for driving results. Prioritize against the biggest gaps you uncovered in your audit, since this is the branding area that can benefit from the most attention. Within this prioritization process, outline resources needed to support these goals and allocate accordingly. Determine where the best resource exists, either internal or external to the company.
Monitor, Measure, and Adapt: Implement key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate progress and track the success of your actions to keep you honest. To gauge the effectiveness of your tactics, and their impact on your strategic branding goals, it's crucial to monitor, measure, and adapt along the way.
This becomes information that effortlessly feeds into your next quarterly strategic planning. It becomes a continuous cycle that feeds itself. You can easily operationalize a process for this every three months when you ensure you’re tracking results.
Your strategic branding roadmap organically comes into view from the business goals, the branding goals, the branding audit, and prioritization process. Once this is complete you measure your results which will drive your strategy in the process next quarter.
When you start a strategic brand planning process quarterly, it builds a solid ground foundation for you and your team to monitor your impact in the marketplace. Your ability to drive profit, market effectively, and support sales small comes from having solid holistic branding that connects with your audience and is executed with a strategic brand roadmap. This process is how you determine if your audience is seeing value in your products or services.
If your audience doesn't see the value you provide, your marketing won’t convert, and your sales won’t increase. If they do see the value, your goals are easy to meet, and you can focus on scaling.
What side of the fence are you standing on at this 2023 midpoint?
If you need help determining where your brand stands in the marketplace or want to develop a strategic brand roadmap for customer growth and sales, start a conversation with our HDG health and wellness strategic brand marketing agency. Let's see if we’re a good fit to drive the success of your quarterly goals.
