Episode 7 – Key 5: Evaluation

Transcript:

Welcome to The Five Keys: Unlocking The Power Of Your Brand. This podcast is designed to give you the tools that you need to create a successful and dynamic brand. I’m Elizabeth King and I’m going to be your guide on this journey.

Hi and welcome back to The Five Keys: Unlocking The Power Of Your Brand. I’m Elizabeth King. And today we’re going to talk about the fifth and final key in The Five Key process, which is evaluation. So why did I give this little guy his own key? Because it’s probably the most overlooked but the most critical part of a communication and a brand strategy. Because you really have to evaluate, what’s working and what doesn’t. I know what you think – you’ve put in all of this hard work and you’ve, you’ve gone through all the keys and you’ve done the assessment, you have your company identity, you know your goals, you’ve put all of this information together and you’re going to launch the strategy and it’s going to be awesome. Not so fast. You’re going to launch this and you are going to have some things that work great and you are going to have some things that fail.

I’m sorry. It’s just the truth. I wish communication was an exact science, but it’s just not. It’s always requiring tweaks and sometimes it requires major overhauls because you’re going to find things that work for you or that, that do great, that don’t work for other people. You’re going to find things that work for your competitors that don’t work for you at all. It’s simply a matter of figuring out what is the right communication strategy that attracts your ideal customers. And so it’s going to be some trial and error. It’s going to be some wins. It’s going to be some losses. It’s going to be a lot of learning. But ultimately if you keep honing in and looking at the metrics, you’ll know what social media posts track the most attention, what offers drive traffic to your business. You’ll know what is really getting people excited and getting that communication going between you and your ideal customers.

Figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So that’s why I think it is so important to have strong evaluations. A lot of times it really is simple little tweaks. A lot of times with social media ads, you may think this is your target audience for this and you’re going to do an ad specifically to these people only to find out that you need dive in a little deeper and just tweak it. Figuring out exactly who your ideal customers are because they may not be who you think they are. And that’s probably the most common thing that I run into with communication strategy is who you think your ideal customer is initially isn’t exactly who your ideal customer is in the end. Sometimes you may have big fails. Especially when launching online products, that’s the one that, I’m just going to tell you now that’s hard.

I’ve tried it myself and I thought this is going to be the one, this is the ticket. I’ve launched it only to hear crickets. And so don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and say, okay, that didn’t work. Well, at least I figured it out fast enough that we can go back and figure it out and try again. And sure enough, some small tweaks. We figured it out and then it was working great. So I don’t want you to get too frustrated and just say, oh, this never works. Just be flexible and make sure that you’re constantly evaluating, constantly making small tweaks to make it better. That takes you through the entire Five Key process. I hope that this has given you some information in breaking down how you put together a communication strategy for your business, from assessment and figuring out who you are as a company and your identity and your ideal customers.

Making sure that you’ve got your goals in place, you know your big annual goals, and then your quarterly goals so you can really create strategic plans that really help you achieve those goals. And then that you constantly evaluate at the end, oh, actually I shouldn’t say evaluate at the end. You should evaluate as you’re going along. So you’re making those tweaks and you’re not wasting money on things that aren’t effective. But really that’s what this was designed to do.

Now that’s the next series that I’m going to go into. I’m going to bring in some people from the business world, people that I know, friends of mine in the industry that can give you a little bit more detail about how this all play out. And people who’ve used these different tactics to really create strong brands for their companies. So I’m really excited to bring them in and talk with you and get a little different perspective, not just what I’ve learned through my career, but what they’ve learned and what they’ve seen so that you can get a real idea of how The Five Keys can help your business grow.

So I hope that this has been helpful to you and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Thank you for listening to The Five Keys: Unlocking The Power Of Your Brand.