People often panic when a slow season hits. The truth is, every business has busier times and slower times. Knowing how to maximize each is essential. Believe it or not, there are benefits to slower seasons, especially when it comes to building strategies. Our minds are less distracted and more focused.
Maintaining your brand can often feel overwhelming. And when you are creating content at the speed of a bullet train, it doesn’t always happen. Using slow seasons to recalibrate your brand can be a huge help when things pick back up.
Here are 3 brand maintenance strategies you can start implementing during your slow seasons:
3 Easy Brand maintenance Strategies for slow seasons
1. Review Your Brand Strategy
Slower seasons are a great time to step back and review your brand strategy and ensure it aligns with your core values, mission statement, and long-term objectives.
If this process feels daunting, try doing it as a brain dump. Jot your ideas down and then go back to refine. We recommend that you set aside at least an hour in a quiet place and get to work.
Some areas you can start with:
- Begin by clearly identifying your target audience and understanding their needs.
- Analyze your competitors to pinpoint your unique selling proposition.
- Review or define your brand’s personality traits and tone of voice.
- Evaluate how your current marketing efforts are supporting your brand strategy.
- Review any branding inconsistencies that may shift from how you communicate about your brand. For example —
- Do you keep changing how you describe what you do and who it’s for
- Are your brand colors helping you build meaning toward your brand
A thoughtful brand audit can be invaluable. It can help you assess the consistency of your messaging across all platforms, from language to design elements, to ensure they align with your goals. This alignment reinforces your brand identity and enhances trust and recognition among your audience.
Want more guidance with this process? Check our our free Brand Building Starter Guide.
2. Update Branded Templates
The pressure to create new content 24/7 is real. Branded templates help you streamline your content creation process and work smarter. When you create branded templates that support your strategy and marketing efforts, you spend less time reinventing the design wheel and more time focused on your business.
Take a look at your current templates and make sure that you:
- Establish font consistency and make sure it is large enough to read on digital devices.
- Leverage brand colors for specific call-to-action items to speed up recognition.
- Ensure you have enough contrast between your text and backgrounds.
- Have diverse images or illustrations that reflect who your audience identifies with.
You can also dedicate time to creating more engaging content, like an animated post, using Adobe Express. In the video below, we show you how to create an animated reel for your brand.
Next, consider your brand outreach. You may also do speaking engagements, lead presentations, or pitch for funding and will need a branded deck. You can create engaging presentations that are on-brand WITHOUT using PowerPoint. And once you have these done, you can cut down time and focus on the delivery—not the design. Here’s a great tutorial to help you create a branded presentation using Adobe Express.
Did you enjoy the videos above? We’ve got a fantastic course that can take your marketing efforts to the next level. And the best news? It’s less than 30 minutes. Head to LinkedIn Learning and watch Adobe Express: Designing Marketing Materials.
3. Write Your Content Ahead of Time
When you are in the middle of a busy season, you might find yourself hitting publish because you feel like you have to. Consistency is important, but half-thought-out social posts or emails rarely perform well. Slower seasons offer us some breathing room and capacity to think creatively about content creation.
Think about the year ahead, identify the types of content you need, and get to work drafting! It’s even better if you schedule some posts ahead of time. Things can always be moved if needed, but you will feel much better knowing you have content ready to go when you get busy again.
We recommend using an organized project management system and assigning categories. Notes on your phones can be convenient but can quickly get disorganized. For example, we’ve created a content bucket list of over 200 types of posts we can use. We wrote this content over time when we weren’t pressuring ourselves to write.
Slower seasons can be stressful for brands, but if you lean in and see the potential, you can use them to your advantage!