What do you need to actually do?

For each brand gap you identify, list the actions needed to fix that gap.

For example:

The gap might be that the way the team answers phone varys greatly. Some are formal, some are casual, some include their name, others don’t. Some don’t even say the business name when they answer the call.

This affects all areas of your business because everyone answers the phone.

You identify your action as implementing a phone protocol into you business.

This could involve:

So your action plan might look like this:

As you can see, you don't need to complete your outcome until you've completed all the actions and conducted your reviews. 

Prioritising

Remember, you don’t need to do everything at once.

When working out your time frames for delivering your brand gap-fix, think about what’s impacting your business the most.

And priortise those actions.

You might like to add a priority area to your action plan, and prioritise in an A, B, C or High, Medium, Low format.

Make sure you budget for each gap-fix. Including a time budget.

You and your team have a value. If there isn’t a dollar spend to action the item, but you and your team are spending time on the action, then work out how long you think it will take and put a value on that time.

The reason for doing this, is that sometimes you may be able to outsource the brand-fix action and it may be a financially better option to do so.

Also, sometimes you might be tempted to delay a brand gap-fix if it’s a big-ticket item.

However, if that big-ticket item is going to have a positive financial outcome for you, consider postponing some of the easier and/or cheaper things instead.

I find using a simple calendar or table to highlight what you’re going to work on then helps prioritise. I can immediately see if I’ve put too many actions into one month, so can go and adjust the action plan.

You can plug in the dollars needed to help keep track of your budget and impact on your cashflow. 

Reviewing

Finally, brands are not set and forget things. You really do need to do an annual review as a minimum.

The first time you do a brand audit, yes it can take some time. But once you get your branding humming across every aspect of your business:

a) you notice a lot more quickly when a brand gap appears and that means you can fix it more quickly

b) your annual brand review takes less and less time

So, what are you waiting for? Your brand audit awaits.