Create a Branding Activity Calendar (Template Included)

At some point after initial development of your branding elements, sales and service activities begin to overlap and incorporate brand management.  To ensure ongoing progress toward the goal of building an established, identifiable brand, a “Branding Calendar” can be a very useful tool that helps to add structure to an amorphous task.

The following is a list of activities that can and should occur within a month to promote consistent progress . . . and results.

• Explore opportunities for charitable contributions/community involvement.  (Could involve a monetary contribution, a give-away item with a logo, OR the gift of time and can be used to develop promotional materials.)
• Prepare and submit press releases (could be personnel or product/service-related or more geared to civic involvement as outlined above).
• Send direct mail/e-mail to sell product/service but simultaneously support brand awareness. 
• Perform Social Media postings for product or community-related news (as mentioned above); every press release, ad, charitable gesture, mailing etc. can potentially benefit from a social media followup.
• Perform a customer care activity to try to make sure you know who they are and that they are well served.  Remember, your branding will only ever be effective when the customer’s experience is being reflected.
• Address SEO (search engine optimization) activities, evaluating current search results and exploring possible ways to improve such as running campaigns to increase backlinks, adding content to site, channeling contact and sales information through the web site to build traffic, etc.

All of these activities represent opportunities to promote your brand, circulate your logo, incorporate any slogans/by-lines, reuse standard boilerplate language etc.  We suggest utilizing our Branding Calendar as a guide to monitor and structure your progress and make sure your sales activity incorporates the branding elements you’ve decided upon. 

Obviously, we encourage you to use our calendar as a starting point for you to customize to your specific operations.  For instance . . .

• Perhaps telemarketing has proven to be a successful sales and service strategy for you.  Then, include that item and make sure your telemarketing staff has scripts that reflect your branding. 
• Perhaps advertising is a key for you.  If so, be sure to add several days to create ad copy, build web landing pages, submit your creative, etc.
• Tradeshows important to your operation?  Then, use them as an opportunity to promote your brand and deliver your message both verbally and in print, including the content of your trade show booth.

Our intention over time is to create separate articles about each of these potential vehicles for building your brand so we can explore the topic in greater detail and hopefully offer some very specific, concrete tips related to the activity.  Till then, hope you find our calendar a useful starting point in customizing your own. (Download our Branding Calendar template and activity worksheets.)