2ND EDITION | ISSUE #176

Hey Reader,

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about strategy.

There are certain sticky spots in your brand, that signal you need to work on your strategy in order to find the solution. But what about when things are working?

• Or when you are more on cruise control right now and not really launching anything new at the moment.
• Or, you’re totally booked out.

If you are anything like me - an eldest daughter - type A-ish - wanna have it all written down, figured out, and on the to-do list kind of Solopreneur, you are probably asking - Do you still need to worry about your Brand Strategy?

And honestly, this is a great question.

And one that I have been mulling over for some time now.

For almost two years, to be exact.

During my initial beta rounds of my Brand Bestie mentorship & management offers in the summer of 2024. I realized that I needed to:

A. Be able to separate the work I was doing from my clients' results

B. Be able to see how the work we were doing together on their brand was paying off

Even if it immediately it didn’t seem like it was.

The truth is - especially if you are just one person. Or maybe 1.5 because you have help.

The majority of the work doesn’t get done overnight; the growth doesn't show up right away. Most of us don't start a brand and just go viral.

Even if you have a team.

The work you are doing now takes time to compound.

So back in the summer of 2024.

I had just returned from a 6-week sabbatical - only to lose one of my retainer clients early in their contract. The work we were doing quite literally wasn’t paying off.

And there was a part of me at the time that took that so personally.

I felt like it was my fault.

And I wanted to understand what went wrong.

What was - or was not working.

Despite doing a lot, running ads, posting content, launching programs, sending emails- their brand and offers weren't converting the way we wanted them too.

And I didn't feel like mine were either.

I started to doubt if I knew what I was doing at all.

So I made myself the guinea pig. And went back to the start. Tasking myself to redefine every step of the brand building process based on what I had learned in the years since starting Cedar June in 2022.

There is a part of me that feels like I am always straddling the line of strategy and design, not ready to fully commit to one or the other, loving them both too much to give the other up (at least not yet)- but at the same time - it's in the after-the-launch part where you need them both all of the time.

I haven’t wanted to talk about the Brand Bestie at all (there’s not even a sales page for it on my site) because it’s the last step in the process. I knew I had that one nailed down.

It was the earlier stuff I wanted to work on.

If you look at my site now, you would see:

• ​The Studio Session (which is step one, and 1000 at the same time - because it works for and with whatever season you are in to help you create a strategy for what you are working on right now).
• Then Brand Brushstrokes - my brand identity design & illustration offer
• Then The Signature Site my custom website & sales page design offer.

But every single person that had been through every iteration of my brand building process over the years finished only to say - "Okay, but now what!"

It became my mission to make sure everyone had three options:

1. Have enough resources from me that they could manage what they’ve built on their own
2. Have an option to keep working together (through mentorship, my Brand Management & Brand and Design Retainer, and Studio Days, my day rate offer)
3. Or some hybrid of the two

And I love that part of my business.

I love that I get to work with clients for years.

And they always know that they can reach back out to me for help.

Especially because I know it's that part of your brand that makes the difference.

What you do with it after you launch.

What you do with it after a couple of months, or years.

How it grows with you and evolves.

I craved a sustainable way to track progress, to understand how the strategies I had created for my clients and myself were paying off - what was working and what wasn't - so we could know how to pivot our aim over time.

First, I tried doing a monthly brand recap. And it was just way too much work. Plus, it was hard to track growth month over month. I didn’t really feel like I was learning that much.

Then, at the end of 2025 I decided to switch to a Quarterly Brand Reset model.

I did it again at the end of Q1 for both of my retainer clients - and now that Q2 is coming to a close - Quarterly Brand Resets are on my calendar once again. Not only for my retainer clients but also for myself.

Instead of asking yourself how often you should revisit your Brand Strategy - ask yourself how often you feel like the behind-the-scenes of your brand needs a reset? I find for most brands, the answer is once a quarter.

That doesn't mean you are rewriting your mission and vision - it means you are analyzing what's working, and what's not - so you can figure out how you need to shift to reach your goals moving forward.

I wanted you to have time to save this Newsletter, look at your schedule for July and schedule out a few sessions on your calendar to break this down doing your own Quarterly Brand Reset. So that's why im sending it now

Let’s dive in.

Step #1: Brand Reflection

Task Type: Writing

Time: 60 minutes

What you’ll need:

If you keep a paper planner, digital calendar, or a diary of some kind - you’ll want these on hand. Grab your journal or a blank google doc.

Make it somewhere fun. I like to think of this as a “dreamspace” task. A task you want to do alone, with good vibes, a coffee, and quiet.

• Go through your calendar, diary, planner; I also find my camera roll on my phone helpful - and make a list of every win you’ve had. Everything you’ve accomplished. Anything you got done that you feel really proud about looking back and seeing it crossed off as done.
• Review your plans for the year (for me that looks like my version of the 2026 Cedar June Brand Roadmap), checking in with the goals that you’ve set for yourself and updating your progress so far.

​You can click here to get a free copy of the prompts I use in a Notion template​

View them as a web page & print them off, duplicate them straight into your Notion if that's more your style. Write them out on paper or type. There's no right or wrong answer, and in fact you dont even have to answer them all - just use them as a jumping-off point and write what comes to mind. No one has to see this - in the words of Hootie and the Blowfish it is all for you, my love.

Then you move on for the day. Until your next time block, A day or so later - block out another hour - this time you are collecting data.

Step #2: Data Collection

Task Type: Admin

Time: 60-90 minutes

What you’ll need:

Just your computer & a window open for everywhere where you create content.

• If you do email marketing, download your analytics from Flodesk or ConvertKit for the last 12 weeks (April, May, June). For email, I am mainly looking at click rates, open rates, audience growth, and overall conversions.
• Same goes for your website - some platforms have analytics for you - but Google Analytics is always going to be the gold standard. Some of the analytics I am downloading CSV’s of include traffic acquisition and traffic per page.
• If I had launched anything in the quarter and done some kind of post-launch retrospective, I would include that document in the data collection
• You can also include sales data from any digital products you sell, or your 1:1 offers.
• As well as analytics from social media - Substack has these you can download - and Instagram of course does not - but they are making a monthly wrap-up à la Spotify now that is helpful, and you can still create a quick report for yourself. Based on the data you have - and just being the one at the helm of this brand - it should be pretty easy to identify which pieces of content performed well. This could look like shares, saves, comments, and follows on Instagram. These are the metrics that I am looking at to determine our most successful content on Instagram.
• Lastly, if you have received any feedback from customers/clients in the quarter, include that in the data you are collecting (create a Notion or Google Doc that serves as a master for the past quarter)

***Once you’ve identified your more successful pieces of content, open up a Notion or Google Doc on your computer and copy and paste each piece of content in - the email copy, blogs, post captions, link to the Instagram posts too - you are just creating a big document. Include the titles and publishing dates so the AI chat can cross-reference with the analytics you are going to upload.

At this point

• You’ve gathered a ton of data on your brand
• And reflected on how you feel about it.

Now what do you do with it all of it?

This is where the robots come in.

Step #3: Report & Brand Strategy

Task Type: Generate

Time: 60 minutes

What you’ll need:

All of the data you just collected, a Claude account with access to Opus 4.8

The use, or not using AI Is a huge conversation point right now. My own relationship and creative process with AI has changed a lot in the last 6-8 months, and I have more to say on the subject in a future piece of content - to start I'll say that when it comes to research, cross-referencing data, and locating patterns. AI is a computer and can do these things incredibly well and in a way that separates emotion from fact, which is why I utilize it as a tool to create quarterly brand reports for myself and my 1:1 clients.

• Open up a new chat , and paste the following script in (customize the brackets with your own answers)- then attach all of the files from all the data you’ve collected.
• If you typed up your answers to the Q2 reflection - paste those in as a resource as well - or take a beat to type up some notes about what worked and what didn’t from your POV and experience as the human behind this brand.

You may need to go back and forth a bit, or answer questions - but the more data you can give the better. Notice - i’m not asking for advice I just want the facts.

Once you are happy with the report, you can save it to your Google Drive to reference and use as future data for your brand.

At this point we’ve created a report. Documentation - but we don’t really have a Brand Strategy unless there is a plan.

So let's make one. But I want to warn you that this is where AI can go off the rails a little bit, so pay careful attention to the prompts below so that you are getting a result that is actually realistic for a human.

And yes, I say please to AI a lot without thinking about it - at least if they ever take over, we will be friends?

Notice I am only asking for three ideas that are going to make the biggest impact. Because if you just say “Make me a Brand Strategy for Q3” It is going to spit out a somewhat repetitive 15 point long plan that is just going to overwhelm you in the present.

The idea here is that you are separating the emotion from the data. And letting a computer find the patterns that you may not be seeing.

Step #4 - Sleep on it

Time: 24 - 36 hours

What you’ll need:

Anything but this Brand Strategy, go touch grass, get some sun, open a window.

• Walk away for a couple of days then come back to revisit the ideas that you’ve come up with, with help from the data and facts you already have on your brand.
• Read through it all out loud and dont be afraid to hit the delete, make it your own, and add thoughts to it.
• Then - find a way to implement it. What did you come up with in this process that you feel excited about? Is there anything you are really clear, full body I can feel it - I want to move in this direction? How can you prioritize your creative energy and time toward that project?

If you do this report I would love to hear how it went for you - what you learned and enjoyed about the process!