A brand, like a tree continues to grow slowly over time. It continues to evolve in different aspects and outlets. With social media, your brand’s presence is essential and helpful in terms of customer service or brand advocate outreach. However, social presence is not initially a focus when your brand is early in development.
Brand and Creative Strategies
To most startups their brand is an important aspect, but usually not as important as their product. As your business grows and the product evolves, naturally so should your brand. It’s important that your customers can continue interacting with a consistent and cohesive experience across all platforms of communication. Creative Strategy Planning shouldn’t get in the way of your brand strategy but work along with it to be able to complement it. If your brand strategy outlines consistency as one of it’s important aspects, the creative portion would focus on how that consistency is formed. Is it photography, colours or illustrations?
Creative Strategy Planning Basics
The idea of Creative Strategy Planning is it helps anticipate and coordinate creative efforts into different parts of the business at specific times based on the needs of the brand. If your business is purely using a single website as communication to customers and potential customers, this may be a time to outline those efforts along with new creative outlets like print communication work, social media posts or any other area you anticipate expanding to. This allows you to build your team and design collateral to a point where you are comfortable hitting the goals you’ve outlined.
Your plan should cover:
- Area you are looking to explore/improve (i.e. social media imagery, blog imagery)
- Time frame (i.e. weeks/months/years)
- Ways to improve or where to focus (i.e. more brand centric imagery, better use of company colours in illustrations)
- Who will work on it
Focus on how you want your brand to be perceived, interacted with and most importantly experienced. An idea is worth nothing if not planned and put on strategy properly.
Example: Blog Cover Art
Area: Blog post cover art
Focus: Apply our unique illustrative style and colors to each blog post cover. This will get shared through social media and will allow us to create more meaningful and impactful imagery to entice interaction with our stories.
Time Frame: 4–6 weeks / Ongoing
Team: Communications / Illustrative Design
Create an Actionable Plan
The strategy above is pretty vague but will allow us to create a more detailed plan that is actionable within each team. This may be individual task distribution, where to focus first or how to proceed in the future. For creative pieces that are ongoing it will also allow us to spec out how these items get standardized going forward so that each blog post has a consistent design.
Creative Strategy Planning is meant to prevent small spurts of creative