Those of you that know us, know that we both come from strong ag roots. We also have education in our blood and truly enjoy helping others. When we set out on this journey, we didn’t want to just work for others, we wanted to work with others to help them elevate their business. While we never want to work ourselves out of a job, we want to help people understand the “method behind the madness.” Therefore, this year, we are going to be intentional in communicating with you in hopes that you learn something along the way.
You may have seen that we recently celebrated our one-year “work anniversary.” When we started this business, we had all these great ideas and plans. We said we would do it this way and not that way. Well, we all have great intentions. The truth is, we were very fortunate to have many fantastic clients put a lot of trust in us to take their businesses to the next level in our very first year. In the process, we didn’t practice one of the main tactics we preach to our clients - consistency in communicating with your audience.
One of the keys to organizing all of the moving parts of a brand is consistency. You’ve heard the phrase “consistency is key” in various aspects of your life. The phrase holds a lot of merit, but let’s be honest - while consistency is key, consistency is not second nature or easy. Why is that? And, how do we make being consistent easier in marketing? Let’s dive into 3 tactical ways to start being more consistent in your business or organizational communication outreach.
Create Habits
Habits are the routines you establish that shape who you are. They are what you repeatedly do, sometimes without realizing it, and they form the person you are - the things you believe and the personality you portray. These habits can be positive or negative and can be changed (boy…that takes lots and lots of work). A habit is an action you perform with intention. It is something you make a priority so that it will become a habit.
For the purposes of consistency, a best practice is to establish a schedule of doing “something” for your business (like writing this monthly blog, posting on social media a certain number of times a month, week, or day, visiting with customers in the front of the store instead of just running the business from your desk) that will enhance it. Don’t try to change everything at once and don’t try to incorporate too many new, positive habits. Be realistic. Trying to do it all at once is a recipe for disappointment. One step at a time. It’s important to remember that communication and trust take time to do well and build. The same goes for building a brand - it takes time and consistency to get it where you want it to be. For example, if you aren’t in the habit of taking 30 minutes a day, stepping away from the desk, and walking around your retail store to visit with customers, planning to do it four times a day for an hour is unrealistic right now. If that is your goal by the end of the year, determine what you need to do each month to help you be successful at reaching that goal. Or if you know you need to post more to your social channels, diving in and saying you will post once a day right away is not realistic. Start once a week with really good, quality content. Consistency is a muscle and it takes time to develop.
Create Strategy
A strategy is a tool to assemble all the puzzle pieces. A strategy brings together the who, the what, and, most importantly, the why. By defining these key areas, consistency becomes a lot easier and you set forth the goals you want to achieve. If we don’t know who we are, what we do, and why we do them, being consistent or reaching our goals with anything is incredibly hard because it ends up being chaos with no clear end in sight. Strategy allows us to make the pictures of a bunch of scribbly lines intersecting one another look like beautiful art. Strategy also ensures that the right message gets communicated to the right people at the right time.
Now, we need to acknowledge that digital media can change daily; therefore, strategies can shift and move. And that’s ok. They need to be strong enough to be flexible and functional at the same time. The important thing to remember is to have strong foundational communication practices and concepts incorporated into the strategy to stand the test of time. Working on strategies, building upon them, and refining them each year builds your entity's communication and outreach muscle each year. Building a brand is a marathon, not a sprint. And, strategy is the practice component of running a marathon. You don’t just decide one day to run a marathon and actually do it successfully. You have to practice, learn, and adapt. By doing these things and creating lasting strategies, consistency will come with time and begin to be a strong aspect of your business.
Create Plans
Plans are great and they help us be consistent, but if the plan has no backbone (i.e. strategy), it ends up being a lot of everything with no clear goal and no consistency. Plans are the set of actions, or objectives, that use the strategy as the road map. The actions are the stops along the way to the destination - build an audience that trusts you and supports your business or organization. The plan takes into account all of the media channels and content to communicate about your brand. The plan has to have some type of measurable outcomes in order to see results.
The plan - not only does it clearly state what type of media, message, and voice you will use, but it also outlines when communication pieces go out. Having a content calendar is essential to being consistent and tying all of the pieces together. Many times we see people with a plan, but they don’t already have habits and strategies in place to make an effective plan. Bringing all of them together creates a deeply rooted communication effort that grows with authentic content that solves the customers’ or viewers' problems and makes their life better in some way while building trust.
Defined strategies with a dedicated plan help establish positive habits to enhance our businesses that lead to our ability to be intentional. Being consistent and authentic through your communication efforts leads to future dividends in the long game. Just like small efforts that add up over time in other areas of your life, small efforts over time build a brand community for your entity. Be consistent. Don’t quit working toward that goal!
We are excited at Oak + Willow Creatives to be consistent this year to share content with you to improve your branding and marketing efforts!