2ND EDITION | ISSUE #175

Hey Reader,

You aren’t starting over from scratch.

You are making the most of what you already have,

and integrating one new thing, one new goal, with a plan for this season.

If you were here now.

And when I say here, I mean right here with me at my house. I would naturally take you back to my garden. It is one of the first things I do, weather permitting, whenever anyone visits.

And you would notice, she is really shaping up for the season.

Most of the beds are prepped.

A lot is already planted, in neat little rows for the time being, until they grow over and through all the paths.

There are shovels and rakes strewn around the yard wherever I need to grab them.

And a small collection of buckets.

You read that correctly.

Buckets.

Buckets of concoctions.

• There’s one, full of a compost byproduct that my cousin brings me from the farm they work at.
• There’s a small one coated in the leftover powders from seed inoculants.
• Another is full of fermenting alfalfa pellets.
• A smaller one, with a paver sitting on top of the lid, is full of weeds, mainly dandelions.

So yeah, I’m all in on this whole gardening thing.

And this is the first year I’ve started to make soil amendments beyond the typical strategy of just adding tons of compost in.

In fact, I canceled my compost load for the year because I realized I didn’t need it.

It wasn’t the right strategy for this season, which, from the outside looking in, was a complete mess.

And completely overrun with dandelions.

These were the biggest friggin’ dandelions you’ve ever seen.

I’m talking three feet tall in some places.

But I didn’t panic. In fact, I was able to diagnose my problem and figure out the right strategy because of how one simple Pinterest image made it easy to understand what the weeds in my garden were telling me, and how to fix it.

If only we could have the same kind of cheat sheet for our brands and businesses.

If you are experiencing X, Y is the problem. You just need more of this one thing, and it will go away.

When it comes to diagnosing what your strategy needs to be, it is and isn’t quite that simple at the same time.

But still, there are signs.

If you are stuck in the messy middle, unable to move forward with your big brand ideas, it is a sign of a lack of clarity. You do not have a plan you can take action on to get you from point A to point B, C, D, E, F, with G being the finish line for now (which is at the core of what a strategy is: a research-backed plan for your brand).

Or maybe you are like one of so, so many founders I’ve worked and talked with, who post about their brand to check it off their list, but no one is really engaging with the content, you, or what you do, for that matter.

The people you already work with know your value and how great you are at that nuanced thing that only you can do, but you can’t for the life of you figure out how to translate that into a brand that people actually get.

You probably get a lot of referrals, but marketing feels like a waste of time because you never actually get much of anything out of it.

You don’t know what to say, how to say it, or where to say it. So when it’s time to make some money, launch the thing, and promote your brand, you just end up:

• burning yourself out trying to say what you think you are supposed to be saying to your audience on every single platform, without any strategy for why you are marketing on that platform to begin with
• or some version of throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting to see what sticks.
• Only for nothing to stick, and nothing to convert, and nothing to resonate with whoever the hell your audience is.
• Which doesn’t exactly motivate you to continue creating content to market your brand

Instead, you could

• audit your brand
• learn about your audience, and how to market to them
• and create a content strategy that works for your creative process.

A brand strategy for the season you are in does all of the above.

It creates a framework for your brand and the person behind it, instead of just paying for someone else’s framework and copy-pasting it to your brand.

Notice I didn’t include:

• Running meta ads
• Posting more content
• Building out another funnel that isn’t linked to your long-term strategy or offers. It’s just building an email list.
• Building an AI chatbot or assistant to do it instead (which is not to say that AI can’t help you with your brand strategy and research process, because it can. But it is not the one coming up with the strategy. It is the one helping you find the patterns.)

These “quote-unquote” solutions can get you some short-term success, but behind the brand you are still just dealing with a big ol’ headache.

They are the Band-Aid equivalent of most of what you find at your garden supply center that promises big blooms and can even give you them for one season, but never treats the root (quite literally) of the problem.

Yet these are the investments that 99% of coaches that my clients work with have told them to do to reach the goals they have for their brand.

I mean, it honestly makes me mad how many people I have worked with 1:1 who have paid money for people to set these things up for them when they still don’t know how to leverage the positioning behind their brand.

It’s a waste of your time and momentum if you still can’t talk about what you do well enough to actually have fun creating content.

When I am designing a brand strategy, I’m not pulling the positioning out of thin air.

It is already there.

It is in the words you tell me when I prompt you.

It’s just not that easy to pull out and define for yourself.

Trust me, it’s hard for me to even do it for myself, and that’s why I worked with other people to reflect it back to me when I was repositioning my entire brand (or, more accurately, just really positioning it for the first time).

Positioning, in its simplest terms, is the things that you leverage, emphasize, and build your brand around that are different and unique in some nuanced way that will get your ideal clients’ attention and resonate with them.

Positioning is the core of your brand strategy.

Without it, everything else is kinda effed.

Your messaging, your copy, your content, and your marketing as a whole all rely on effective positioning.

A lot of the smoke and mirrors around building and growing a brand could be a lot clearer if you understood the process, the order that things need to be done in.

You wouldn’t plant seeds, then till your bed.

It would defeat the purpose.

So why are you

• creating a brand and a set of offers
• building or paying someone to build your website
• running ads to build an email list without a strategy or newsletter for it
• and expecting things to grow in your garden

You are planting seeds just to leave them dormant, or not prepping the soil properly in the first place. Not taking the time to understand what you need to do to grow them effectively. Because each seed is different.

Each garden is different.

Just because you have a website and a logo doesn’t mean you have a brand.

A brand is what people experience and understand.

So let’s break down this whole strategy process in a way you can replicate for any season, launch, and offer in your brand.

Step #1 Mission & Vision (the big idea you had in the first place)

Step #2 → Target Audience (but this needs to be research-backed, not just some fake person you come up with)

Step #3 → Brand positioning *we’ve already defined that

*typically you would see competitive analysis somewhere in here, and I realize this is a hot take I have never really touched on yet, but I don’t do competitive analysis for anyone, including myself, and that deserves its own piece of future content and explanation…

In the years since Covid the marketing world has been screaming at Creative Service Providers like Strategists, Brand Designers, Copywriters, and everything in between to “niche down” so loudly that we now have services so nuanced that most of my audience doesn’t know where one sub-industry starts and another one ends.

So not only do you now know what the weeds in your brand garden mean, but you don’t know where to invest to help them.

The truth is, having a 30-page brand strategy is great.

Gimme a pot of coffee and a Netflix binge, and I’ll get to work building everything you could ever need to know about your brand into a Notion dash, with pages upon pages of documentation.

That will only last you so long.

Putting all of these pieces together when you are building a brand is helpful. It is the way to build a foundation for a brand that can grow with you.

But no matter how good that initial strategy is that you put together for your brand, when you start to put your offers out into the world, and market and test them, you will learn so much. And that strategy will need to bend and grow with you as you pivot your brand through the seasons of your life and business.

Which is why the most helpful thing you can do, if you identified with this newsletter and feel like your brand isn’t at a place where things are really working for you yet, is to create a short-term strategy.

A way to identify the weeds in your brand garden, figure out how to treat them at the root, and then create a plan for this season.

Not a plan for the garden you want to have ten years from now (although that is sooo fun, so don’t get me wrong. Thinking big and into the future is a great way to determine your aim in the short term).

But the most effective way to pivot your brand is to have a strategy for that pivot, for the season you are in.

And that strategy won’t need allll the things.

The idea is: you identify your weeds to figure out what is missing, what to add, and where you need to put some amendments in.