6 Things Creatives Should Do For Their Brand Every Quarter

Do you ever take some time out to reflect on how your brand is performing, or if its values are still in line with the direction you want to go in? If not, we defs think you should.

If you wanna improve your business and make sure your brand is firing on all cylinders, you need to be regularly reflecting, reviewing, and making plans. Taking time out to do this can be hard, especially if you're doing this creative biz thing on your own and have only one set of hands and one head to manage it all. But, we've made the whole thing easier for you by coming up with 6 easy things you can do each quarter to keep your brand on track.

If you can, take an hour, an afternoon, or even a day or two out of your regular schedule, sit down, and work through each of these. Doing this will make sure you can move into the next three months with clarity and confidence knowing everything's on track, on brand, and intentionally working towards crafting the creative life of your dreams.

1. Check in on your vision and mission

First things first, it's a good time to revisit the most important parts of your brand. Your vision and mission are the overarching things that guide (or should anyway!) everything that you do, so it's important to make sure they're still aligned with what you're passionate about, and that you're actively working towards them.

Questions you can ask yourself are:

• Does my vision still represent the future I want to see for myself, my audience, my industry, or the world?
• Does my mission clearly explain what I do on a day-to-day basis to make my vision happen?
• Do I still feel called to that mission?
• Have the things I've worked on over the last few months been in line with my vision and mission?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then take some time to revise your vision and mission. If or when your answers are yes, then remind yourself of your vision and mission, let them fuel you, and make sure that whatever you plan in the next steps is working towards achieving them.

2. Audit your brand assets

Next it's time to look at the other parts of your brand. Each quarter is an excellent opportunity to audit all of your assets to see what's missing, what's not working, or what's kicking ass. So review your brand strategy, your visual identity, and any branded material you have and see where everything's at. Is everything on brand? Are they working practically for you? Do things need tweaking? Is there anything missing?

When you've looked through everything and have a good picture of where everything is at, you can make a plan for what to work on next quarter. Maybe you need new photos, your website could do with a rejig, or it's time for a whole new rebrand! This process will let you know.

The Ultimate Branding Checklist shows you everything that your creative brand needs to have. Download yours for a quick and easy way to audit your brand assets.

3. Review your insights & analytics

Next, you want to understand how your brand has been performing over the past three months. Whether it's your finances, your SEO results, your social media engagement, or other numbers, seeing how your brand is impacting your business is a game changer! When you can see that your Instagram engagement increased 50% after you niched down and pinpointed your people, or your website views blew up once you started posting on Pinterest, for example, it'll help you figure out what to keep working on, what to forget about, and what to start doing!  

4. Reflect on and set new goals

Once you've honed in on where you're going, where your brand is at, and what's working and not working, you can set your goals going forward. First, take a look at the goals you had for last quarter and the year as a whole. Have you accomplished what you wanted to? Are some in progress? Or are there some goals you haven't started working towards yet at all?

Decide which of these goals you want to continue or bring forward into the next quarter, and add any others that you want to achieve in the next 3 months.

The way we like to set goals at Maker & Moxie is with OKRs. This stands for Objectives and Key Results and means that you set a goal as well as the results you're aiming towards for that goal to be a success. For example, if your objective is to launch a Twitch channel, your objectives might be to stream once a week, reach 50 followers, and have an average of 5 viewers.

5. Prioritise your plans and projects

Now it's time to make some plans and set up some projects so that you can achieve those goals you just came up with!

Take your OKRs and figure out what steps you need to take to make them happen. These tasks can be plugged into your project management system, given deadlines, and assigned to someone else if need be. Make sure to give yourself enough time to get things done without burning yourself out, and don't forget to take public holidays and other events into account.

6. Create an updated marketing plan

If you're putting all the effort to set goals, make plans, and work on projects, you wanna make sure people see what you're creating! So last but not least, put together a marketing plan for the next three months. If you're doing digital marketing, this includes prioritising the platforms you're going to use, knowing what you're going to sell when, plugging in any key dates that you need to post on, and what you're going to talk about between launches or other big pieces of content.

This plan can also include any other forms or marketing you're planning on doing, like guest speaking, putting posters up around town, sending your newsletter, or going to networking events, for example!

And there you have it. 6 simple steps that you can do every quarter to make sure your brand is doing its job! Will you set some time aside this quarter to work through them?

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