This delightful framework includes 12 essential branding and content strategy exercises (with examples!) to help companies clarify their strategy and develop unique content ideas.

This workshop is designed to help you (a strategist, creative pro, or marketer) help your clients (or your own company) align on brand fundamentals and generate content that reflects your brand purpose, empathizes with your audience, and helps you reach your goals.

Who’s this workshop for?

• Startups that are building a new brand

• Companies repositioning themselves

• Marketing teams who want to align their team on fundamentals

• Content teams developing new ideas or new content

How does it work?

This workshop provides 12 key exercises organized around the key things you need to know to have a conversation with any audience: who you are, who you're talking to, and what you're talking about.

Section 1: Who you are

Every creative decision begins with who you are as a brand, organization, or company.

1. Purpose: What greater good are you striving towards?

2. Vision: Where are you going?

3. Values: What do you believe in?

4. Personality: If your brand were a person, who would it be?

5. Voice: How does your brand speak to others?

6. Principles: What are your motivations?

Section 2: Who you're talking to

With your brand identity in mind, we turn our attention to who you want to speak to and what your conversational goal is. To account for other messages in your marketplace, we also examine what your competitors are saying.

7. Audience: Who are you talking to?

8. Competitors: Who else is talking to them?

9. Goals: What are you trying to get your audience to do?

Section 3: What you're talking about

With the context of your identity and your audience in mind, we turn our attention to what you want your audience to know, what your topics are, and how to express your brand messages as actual headlines that your audience will click on.

10. Themes: What do you want your audience to know?

11. Topics: What interests do you and your audience share?

12. Story Ideas: How are you framing the conversation?

Running the workshop

Each exercise takes about 30-40 minutes, and the whole workshop takes about six hours.

My advice: Schedule three separate sessions, one for each section. Or, run a day-long workshop with section 1 in the morning, and sections 2 and 3 in the afternoon.

Tips for facilitators

• Get buy-in from leadership. Brief the primary stakeholders on what's going to happen during the workshop. Enroll them on being a “partner” in the process. Explain what you are going to do and why it is important. Show them this framework and tell them what you're going to be able to accomplish together.

• Get the right folks in the room. Adults learn best when they’re participating with relevant content. Too many people, nothing gets done. Wrong people, nothing gets done. Content isn’t relevant, nothing gets done. Aim for diversity in experience, opinions, seniority, and interests.

• Consider all the moving parts. Space, light, sound, supplies, and food. You need all five for a great workshop.

• Set your ground rules. Help participants understand how to contribute and what the session outcome will be. Explain decisions that have already been made, and outline areas that are still up for discussion. Ask participants to be constructive ("yes, and" not "no, but").

• Agendas are key. Every 75 minutes of workshop requires a 15-minute break.

• Practice. It's important.

Zoom is good, In-person is best.

Document everything and provide that documentation to participants after your workshop.

Suggested roles:

1. Participants: actively contribute

2. Decider: makes the final call during discussions

3. Facilitator: makes sure the final calls get placed on the board and documented elsewhere if necessary

Have a good time!