Roadmapping Your Strategic Initiatives

Brand Strategy Series

Many times we are approached to help an organization achieve their marketing goals, but to them, the challenge feels insurmountable. Strategies and tactics have gotten messy or confused for them. Inevitably the conversation starts with these types of comments:

• “We’re spending $$ on PPC, but our results have bottomed out.”
• “Our competitors have recently upped their game, and now we seem like a weaker competitor.”
• “Our offerings have changed or improved, but we don’t know how to communicate them in a way that resonates.”

A big part of the value we bring to our partnerships is structure. We know from our years of experience what dependencies are necessary to get great work done. Showing you how we get there is very important. Leadership teams are rarely comfortable with “trust the process”. Therefore we enjoy building sophisticated roadmaps to help you understand priorities, timetables, and dependencies. This helps everyone understand when you can expect your branding and marketing to function on a much higher level.

Our own broad-based roadmap to shape up branding and marketing is fairly simple and straightforward. It looks like this much of the time, unless we're inheriting existing marketing programs:

➡️ Brand Strategy ➡️ Brand Identity ➡️ Content & Collateral ➡️ Website ➡️ Marketing & Agency Services

This is rarely enough information for communicating to your leadership team, so during our work together, we’ll put together more sophisticated roadmaps. Here are some examples.

Example 1: Two Year Alignment of Multiple Service Offerings

This client had finished a large strategic alignment of their various B2B service offerings, as well as adding a service line that is completely new, requiring a different strategy. This was a two-year roadmap, outlining quarterly priorities.

Example 2: Rebrand Internal and External Rollout

In this example, the client had completed a comprehensive rebrand, and needed to understand what it was going to take to communicate to their internal and external stakeholders, eventually rolling in to ongoing marketing and business development.

Example 3: Event Marketing

This nonprofit client had two very important fundraising events in the fall and winter and had just completed a new brand identity. It was critical to ensure the new identity was deployed with quality before starting an intense marketing campaign. Our audience needed to understand what they were seeing was their favorite events, just modernized.

Tips to building a good roadmap:

• Build it in a spreadsheet or other tool to allow for detail, but then build a simpler one for clarity and simplicity. Less is more.
• Priorities and dependencies are critical to communicate.
• The plan will always change. Don’t get hung up on dates or timelines that are unreasonable. Communicate in phases or time periods instead of strict dates (unless there is an event that is immobile)
• Someone may not be excited about how long a particular phase might take. Don’t change the roadmap for them, especially if a date is unreasonable. Under promise and overdeliver and you will win a ton of trust.
  

Other Brand Strategy Series Posts:

• Why Your Brand Deserves a Concept
• Positioning Your Company for Differentiation
• Branding Behind the Scenes