How to Prepare Your Brand for 2019

Do you have your business goals ready for 2019? Furthermore, have you considered how the brand will contribute to your business goals? So often, businesses begin the year with good intentions and goals, but strategy and campaign planning fall by the wayside.

So if you haven’t thought about preparing your brand for 2019 or don’t know how to transition your branding goals into a pathway, then it’s time to create a brand vision. Not sure how? Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to build and develop your brand vision.

How to develop a brand vision for 2019

1. Conduct a SWOT analysis

It may seem dull but conducting a SWOT analysis is one of the best ways to determine the positioning strategy.

It can also help you to gain much-needed clarity for your brand vision. Block out an afternoon, gather some key people who can provide important insights about the business and start to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the business faces.

2. Build a personality profile

After determining the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the business, you can start to build up the personality of your brand. Furthermore, you should also look at the company’s culture and personality, and how that shines through in the brand. There will be some aspects of the business that just isn’t worth doing internally. Many businesses think that they have to do it all, but it’s often much more effective to outsource any areas of weakness or when it’s more economical to do so.

By matching up the internal culture and personality of the business with the brand, it becomes more apparent to see where the strengths really lie and the areas where your brand might need support.

3. Get to really know your customers

A core aspect of a business is the customer. However, it takes more than just building up a customer profile to fully understand your clients. It takes time to get into the mindset of your customers.

Think about key aspects such as:
• How do they talk and act?
• What do they care about?
• Who do they follow and why?
• Where do they spend their time?
• Why do they do what they do?
• What’s their motivation?

Once you dive into the customer mindset, you can start to work out how they interact with your industry and where your brand can help.

4. Take a trip down memory lane

After collecting all of the details that determine the present state of your business and customers, it’s time to reflect on the past year, to inform and help create a constructive brand vision for 2019. Again this will require a lot of soul-searching and asking questions. Think about what worked and what didn’t, the skills your business needed and the skills the team had but didn’t need.

Consider aspects such as timings, deadlines, urgency, client communication and relationships. Were there any supplier issues, customer problems or distributor hiccups that could have been done differently?

After writing down a list of all the highs and lows of the year, rank them in order of importance so that you know the key lessons and takeaways to bring forward into 2019.

5. Start looking ahead

Now the past and present are dealt with; it’s time to focus on what 2019 will bring you. Don’t be tempted to skip straight to this step. It may feel like you haven’t got time to reflect on the past or worry about the now, but all of this information and data will be invaluable for defining the future of the business.

Start by writing down business goals and what a perfect 2019 would look like for your brand. Then, quantify those goals with figures. For example if the goal was for the business to make more money, quantify this by being more specific and writing down that we want the business to increase revenue by 20 per cent.

So to achieve this goal, how much more will the business need to earn per month (considering seasonal sales forecasts)? Once you’ve figured this out, break it down further with weekly and daily goals. Now you know exactly what the business wants and how it can be achieved. All you need now is the solution in place to make it happen.

Remember, it’s all well and good setting these plans and having the goals of your business, but how can you make sure they actually happen? Can you put in place the KPIs and measures to check the progress? Who should be accountable for these goals and where will the commitment to reach them come from?

If there’s a series of goals, it may help to delegate goals to individual team members. They’ll love the responsibility of having a crucial business focus, and it also helps to delegate, so you don’t lose track of any of the goals.

6. Make the plan

You have all the information in place now to create a plan and prepare your brand for 2019. If the team lacks motivation, consider this key question: “What will a fantastic 2019 for the business mean to the business and staff?”

7. Reach out

Whether you are struggling to make a business plan for 2019 or you need some help to achieve your goals, don’t be afraid to ask for it. There are support services all around that help businesses achieve their brand vision for 2019. You don’t need to do everything on your own in order to succeed.

8. Get ready for action!

2019 is underway, so you don’t have a minute to waste. Start actioning your plan now by dedicating the time outlined in the plan. Avoid getting sucked into the daily grind and stay motivated to achieve your goals. Schedule in regular reviews throughout the year too. This will help the business to stay on track and also enable you to tweak the brand strategy where necessary.

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It’s time to see what 2019 can do for your brand. Contact the team at Liquid and let’s maximise your brand’s full potential.