After you invest time developing your brand strategy to position your brand to stand out then you’re ready to put your plan into action. You see all the opportunities to make changes but there are so many opportunities that it can be intimidating. So the big question at this phase is typically what “what should I do first and who can help me?!”
Today on the Real Food Brands Marketing Podcast, host and Food Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva addresses one of the most frequently asked questions during the Activation phase of her one-on-one work with food business owners: what should I do first and who can help me?
Katie walks through prioritizing actions, identifying capabilities needed, and finding the right people for the right roles as you build your team.
Getting Started: Prioritization
Getting your brand strategy defined (or refined) and documented it is the first step, but it’s just the beginning! This is not meant to be work that sits on a shelf. Now it’s time to think about all the ways you can bring it to life across all areas of your business. For some food business owners that looks like minor tweaks and refinements to what they are doing today, and for others, it is a comprehensive rethinking of how they approach everything they do. Either way, it’s common for people to have more ideas than resources (e.g. time or money), so choosing how to put ideas into action can feel overwhelming at first. As Katie often suggests, using a process to document your ideas is the key to be efficient and effective as you work towards your goals.
For the first step of this process, you will look at your work from the Align phase of Katie’s three-step process Define, Align & Activate, as noted above – the list of tactics. It’s usually fairly obvious to people what area of the business they need to focus on first to align action with the strategy – for example, operations, finance, marketing, sales.
Katie uses the example of Marketing in this episode. So she suggests listing out all of the tactical things that need to be done to align your marketing efforts with your latest thinking in a cohesive way. This typically includes things like your website, packaging, social media, email automations, etc. Katie walks through an exercise to sort these to-dos based on what’s high impact but low effort, high impact but high effort, and so on.
Take the list of tactical actions you created and plot them in the quadrants. This helps you think through the effort and impact related to each tactic and can help you prioritize the order of how you want to make updates.
Assessing Capacity & Capabilities Based on Priorities
Prioritizing helps you figure out where you can make some quick improvements, and where you might want to think about bringing in some help as you build your team. This is especially important for priorities that are high impact but high effort where you do not have the capabilities in your team or the capacity to build them at this time. Katie talks through ways you can build your team through “building, borrowing or buying” these capacities and capabilities.
Real Life Examples
Based on the Marketing example and one of her most frequently asked questions from her 1:1 clients, Katie goes over some specific advice for working with the common types of freelancers many food businesses choose to add as part of their team: copywriters, designers, and assistants.
One of the most important pieces of advice she has is about being mindful with onboarding: “Business owners move quickly and assume the new hire is on board but haven’t walked them through where they’ve been or where they’re going because the needs of today are so urgent.” So, Katie reminds us that it’s important to make sure the team understands at least the key points of the strategy so they know what story they are part of and how they can move the business forward.
Additional Resources
If you are interested in learning more about the process to position your brand to stand out, Katie’s new Brand Strategy Streamlined™ on-demand course will be introduced in a matter of days from when this podcast airs. Check back for details! You will get access to her step-by-step process to Define, Align & Activate your brand strategy, plus the ability to ask Katie questions on content or add 1:1 sessions to review specifics about your own brand.
You can also join Katie for a small group 3 day intensive Building a Brand That Stands Out course through the Food Finance Institute. This is something Katie only offers a few times a year and it’s one of her favorite ways to work with brands so she is fully immersed and engaged in the 3 days just as much as you will be. Her goal is to help you make as much progress as possible in a short period of time so you can shake up shopping carts, together!
Last but not least, Katie does offer limited 1:1 Brand Strategy Jumpstart spots each month. Please contact her for details at katie@realfoodbrands.com
Now, let’s go shake up shopping carts!
Quotes:
“The question I get asked frequently is what should I do first and who can help me make it happen? The answer can vary based on what stage you’re at, your goals and your current team.” – Katie Mleziva
“It’s important to ask yourself what else you aren’t doing if you’re spending your time on creating or quarterbacking all of these elements. There is a way to delegate this without losing final approval.” – Katie Mleziva
“Business owners move quickly and assume the new hire is on board but haven’t walked them through where they’ve been or where they’re going because the needs of today are so urgent.” – Katie Mleziva
“Part of the reason you are building out a team is because you want them to help you bring your brand to life, so you have to make sure they actually understand the brand strategy.” – Katie Mleziva
In This Episode:
- Next steps after defining or refining your brand strategy.
- How to organize and prioritize your efforts to implement your new strategy.
- How to identify where you might need help based on capacity and capabilities.
- Examples of prioritizing marketing efforts and finding people to fill marketing roles.
- How your brand strategy helps guide copywriters and designers so you can delegate the details and focus on approvals.
- The hidden cost of doing things yourself instead of building a team.
- How Katie’s new on-demand Brand Strategy Streamlined™ course can help you get started defining, or refining, your North Star.
Resources: