What’s the State of Your Brand?
December 11, 2024
The end of each calendar year provides an ideal opportunity to look back at your brand accomplishments and challenges for the past 12 months to complete a “state of the brand” check-in.
As a small business, nonprofit or personal brand, your mission and values offer a true north to focus your work. But in the day-to-day buzz of activities, it’s all too easy to forget to check the compass Try this approach to pull back and get a macro view of your brand’s mission and values alignment.
Skim through your campaigns and other content for the past year, considering social content, blogs, landing pages, emails, case studies, videos, media releases, interviews, etc.
Do a brand visual “quick look.” Pull up your website and your social channels. Now pull out some samples of your printed marketing materials.
Is the look and feel similar? Are visitors to your website having a similar visual experience to social media users? Would they automatically recognize all platforms as belonging to the same brand? Do your printed materials align with the digital experience?
Well-developed brand creative standards with a clear, easy-to-follow brand style guide will help you keep you on track with consistent visuals. If you don’t have one in place, let’s chat about developing one.
But even with a great style guide in place, this annual “gut check” can help spot creative differences between platforms (different designers can apply brand standards differently, particularly for flexible style guides). Remember, your various platforms and printed materials shouldn’t look exactly alike. But the visual transition from one channel to another should be natural and not jarring to your customer, so they can immediately recognize your brand.
Gone are the days when your website served as a singular “digital door” for customers to get to know your brand. We’re in the age where customers meet you at the side door, back door, or maybe even sneak through a window, with a plethora of social media networking platforms, from established to newcomer to niche.
Even in the current digital landscape, your website serves as a stable hub, where you control the content and the user experience. As a long-term asset, it stays consistent, while social media landscape changes and evolves. It’s a content source you can point your other channels to, providing customers a resources hub and source of truth.
With the demand to “feed the content monster” on your social channels, it’s easy to neglect your site and let it get stagnant. Or, sometimes website changes/additions are made quickly to meet a time-sensitive business need. Those quick changes can add up and have a snowball effect on navigation simplicity and the user experience.
It’s easy to have blind spots for website issues because you’re presumably looking at it a lot. The navigation may make sense to you, because you know where things are.
You can work with a reputable user experience research provider to get some in-depth feedback here, especially if you’re preparing to make significant site updates. But for small brands and nonprofits operating on a budget, a more accessible route is to recruit friends or family members, who don’t spend a lot of time on your site, to help out.
Ask them to look at the site for you with some pre-assigned tasks in mind (find an answer to a specific question, access a certain function, etc.). Then ask for feedback on how easy/hard it was to complete the task, any roadblocks they ran into, and their overall take on the experience.
The framework for evaluating this one is straightforward—pull out your annual strategy doc and take an honest look through it. Did you execute all/most of the tactics outlined? If so, what were the measurable results, and did you reach your goals?
If you weren’t able to execute tactics, what were the roadblocks? Time, budget or something else? Did you adapt alternate tactics toward the same goal? If you executed your tactics but didn’t reach your goal, now’s the time for a closer look. Was the goal achievable in the first place? Were there outside circumstances that impacted goal performance? Or could a change in tactic be required?
But what if (GASP!) you didn’t put together an annual strategy in the first place? Taking time to strategize and plan as a small business, where you’re wearing many (ok, all) hats is never easy. Now’s as good a time as any to start planning for the coming year—and maybe even block some time near the end of next year to do the same so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
© 2024 Better Way Branding/Misty Ebel Communications LLC