The New Year is the perfect time to reflect and renew your brand’s focus. It’s not about resolutions. It’s about looking back on this past year of business and checking the alignment of your brand and business strategy. What things should you focus on in order to ready your brand for 2016?
We want to offer some purpose-led inspiration and advice on preparing your brand for success in the New Year. Here are three focus points to consider before you take the year by storm:
1. Make Meaningful Measurements
Take a moment to consider what you’re measuring and why. Ask yourself, do existing measurements help frame challenges and identify opportunities for better strategic and tactical choices? Measurements shouldn’t only act as business report cards and/or rear view mirrors. Meaningful measurements help you move forward with purpose, while evaluating what you’ve already done.
Numbers are of no use if you can’t derive meaning or create purposeful change from them. Don’t just analyze external brand engagement; analyze engagement amongst employees as well. Your brand promise should ring from the core of your business and, subsequently, measurements should target all your audiences, internal and external. Let analytics expand and guide your business, not limit it.
2. Elevate Alignment
Goals and objectives aren’t strategies. They are the measurable steps you take to achieve a strategy. Make sure these steps are aligned with your brand promise and purpose, are clearly outlined, and are understood by everyone involved in making them happen. This way, goals and objectives are achieved more efficiently and have greater strategic impact. Business calendars, check-ins, and weekly meetings can be very helpful for clarification moving forward.
It’s also important to evaluate whether your objectives are aligned within your market. What changes are happening and how have your objectives adjusted as a result? In what ways is your brand ahead of, in sync with, or falling behind shifts in your market? Make sure your objectives can adapt and use any shifting dynamics to their benefit.
3. Personalize Purpose
Engaged employees are key to your success this year. It’s important that you get your people fired-up about what you’re going to achieve in 2016. Make sure employees live your brand promise because they believe in it. Ask yourself what you’ve done for them that can help your whole business flourish. Inspired employees produce inspired work. They want to succeed because they believe their work matters, that they matter. Help them feel this way.
