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Building your brand gap-fix action plan

So, you’ve conducted Step 1 of your brand audit and identified the brand gaps in your business.

What next?

Next are steps 2-6 of your brand audit

Starting with building an action plan to fix your brand gaps

Building your brand gap-fix action plan

Your brand fix action plan will have eight parts to it: 

  1. 1
    The brand gap description (pull this from step 1 of your brand audit)
  2. 2
    The relevant area of your business where you have identified a brand gap
  3. 3
    The actions to be carried out to close/fix the brand gap
  4. 4
    Who will be responsible for driving the action and who needs to be involved
  5. 5
    The time frame implementing the brand gap-fix will take
  6. 6
    Your KPIs – the anticipated brand gap-fix result
  7. 7
    A budget
  8. 8
    The actual outcome

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:

  • holding a staff meeting to explain why the way the phone is answered is important
  • getting everyone to workshop the new script
  • (the added benefit here is that staff will feel a sense of ownership and engagement and be more likely to commit to the change)
  • workshop to include an implementation plan for the new protocol
  • approve new phone protocol
  • share the new protocol and implement with the team
  • add phone protocol to new staff onboarding process
  • review outcomes after one month, six months and then annually

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. 

Download your Brand Gap-Fix Action Plan Template Here

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. 

If you need help with making your brand consistent let us know. We'd love to help you.

Book your free catch up here
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