In February, Adam, Marius and I presented tips for brand building at the Georgia Organics Conference and Expo in beautiful Tifton, Georgia. An inspiring organization, Georgia Organics promotes organic agriculture and works to provide access to local organic food for everyone in Georgia.
The audience was a mix of farmers, educators, nutritionists, chefs, restaurant owners, nonprofit professionals, activists, and just regular folks interested in the organic agriculture movement. It was a pleasure to showcase our tools for successful brand building and marketing to a group making waves in conservation and sustainability in their daily lives!
During the presentation, we summarized the strategies and tools that we have found to be the most effective for our clients.
We started the process with a deceptively simple question: WHY do you do what you do?
Using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, we talked about the importance of centering your WHY at the heart of your brand. And it’s a little harder than it seems. Most people can easily say WHAT product or service they provide or HOW they create it, but the WHY requires more vulnerability and introspection. With some of our clients, this process can take hours or days.
How do you know when you’ve found your WHY? For me, I get goosebumps and even tear up when we land on it. Try the exercise yourself, or contact us to facilitate this process for your organization.
After defining the WHYs, we talked about how to translate business ideas into action using the SMART approach. Use this worksheet to complete your own SMART goals.
Once the audience defined actionable goals for their businesses and organizations, we went into best practices for building a website, growing a following on social media, connecting with your audience through email, and building buzz through traditional (or non-digital) methods such as word-of-mouth. Participants also shared some excellent ideas that have worked for them!
We ended the presentation with an exercise to build a marketing plan. The plan defines your company or organization’s “voice” and is the foundation for all external communication.
If you’re interested in reading the whole workshop presentation, click here.
Thank you, Georgia Organics, for inviting us to speak and thanks to everyone who attended for sharing your inspiring insights! We wish you all the best!
