How to prep your brand and marketing for 2021, Part 2

Flush 2020 (and these first couple weeks of 2021) down the toilet.

The last day of 2020 went down at our house in true 2020 fashion.

On New Year’s Eve at around 5 in the evening, my daughter and my husband and I noticed a smell in our house.

At first, we blamed each other.

After many insistent denials, we blamed the dog.

But the smell lingered.

We checked the upstairs bathrooms. They seemed fine.

We checked the downstairs bathrooms. A-OK in there.

Then we took the stairs to the basement.

We peeked into the laundry room, and gagged. A couple times.

Because there it was: one last parting gift from 2020.

We shuddered as we saw raw sewage seeping out from under the washer and the dryer and the workbench. It was gross. I’ll spare you more details.

Suffice it to say that moving everything out of the laundry room (including the washer and dryer) so we could spend 4 hours cleaning up the basement floor and reminding the kids to only use the water in four second intervals and figuring out why the drain was backing up was not how we had planned to spend New Year’s Eve.

Turns out there was a clog that had built up in the pipe down by our septic tank. Fortunately, it was no match for Jesse from Roto Rooter who came out the next day (on New Year’s Day, God bless him) and fixed it in about 30 minutes.

The Rees family has never so gleefully run faucets, turned on showers, and flushed toilets than we did on January 1, 2021.

And this is exactly how we’re going to approach getting our brand and marketing ready for 2021. We’re going to clean up whatever needs cleaning from 2020, and run with joy into 2021.

Without further disgusting narrative (but with a few more plumbing references), here's part 2 of how to get your brand and marketing ready for 2021:

(If you haven't seen part 1, take a look here where we talk about steps 1-3 and what you need to do inside your business to set your brand up for domination this year).

Step 4: Clean everything up (aka: complete a communications audit)

Make a list of every way your company communicated over the last 12 months. Your website. Your Instagram. Your LinkedIn profile and page. Your emails. Your packaging. Your ads. Your signs and flyers. All of it.

Now to the best of your ability, gather all those materials and open all those tabs on your browser. Then, evaluate everything by asking these questions:

• What messages are we communicating? Are they consistent across communications? Do they speak to the customer about how we help them? Do they represent what we stand for as a company?

• How are we communicating our messages? Does all of our writing sound like us? Is our personality consistent throughout? Visually, do things look consistent? Are we using the same set of colors, fonts, and type of photos in everything we do?

• Which communications were most effective for us? Which types of communications brought in the most leads? Resulted in the most sales? Had the most worthwhile engagement?

Now take that info and let’s use it in steps 5 and 6.

Step 5: Clear out the gunk (aka: clarify your brand)

The best, most compelling brands are specific about what they do and how they serve. To move toward this, you’ll need to get clear on your ideal customer and how you serve them. Look back at your communications audit. Are you communicating consistently to your ideal customer about how you serve them? If not, this is your first priority for 2021.

Step 6: Turn on the faucets! (aka: clarify your marketing)

Once you’ve completed step 5 and you know what you’re saying, time to get the message out there. Reference your communications audit again, this time looking for things that were the most effective. Repeat those tactics, and do more of them. Take what didn’t work in 2020 and stop doing it. I know it's basic - do more of what's working and less of what's not! But I also know how we can get so caught up the running of our day-to-day business that we forget to stop and evaluate things from a higher level. This is your reminder to do that for your marketing.

If you want to dive into a little more detail about steps 5 & 6, grab my KNOWN brand to marketing framework for free. This is my 7 step process you can use to define your brand and create a custom marketing strategy, then implement them to start growing your business faster. It's the process I work through with clients inside my KNOWN Brand Coaching and KNOWN on Video programs.