Planning your company’s year ahead is essential for hitting targets, staying top-of-mind and making a lasting impression during a time where marketing budgets are shrinking, and standing out is becoming more and more difficult. 

For purpose-led brands it’s crucial that the right message reaches the right people at the right time – to build trust, boost visibility, and grow long-term impact.

We’re taking a look at how to do this well. 

Strategies will differ from brand to brand, but as an example, we’re using a fictional, purpose-led skincare company, and calling it Skin Kind: A B Corp-certified SME, clearly positioned as sustainability-conscious and ethically-minded.

Why planning matters more than ever 

For our fictional skincare brand, there’s a lot of competition online, and visibility and brand recognition must be built through consistency and strategic timing. It takes intention, planning and commitment. 

For a sustainable and ethical brand like Skin Kind, planning the year ahead allows you to:

• Shape your narrative around key moments that matter to your audience
  
• Allocate budget effectively, so you get more value from every piece of content
  
• Build recognition steadily and healthily, without losing momentum

By planning proactively, you make every campaign and every piece of content work harder and stretch further.

Start with your tent-pole moments

Tent-pole events are anchors in your yearly calendar: high-impact dates that naturally draw attention from existing customers, potential customers, media and partners or collaborators. They give structure to your strategy and meaning to your content.

If you’re a purpose-led, eco-conscious skincare brand like Skin Kind, you should plan around the following tent-poles:

• Easter: a good time to talk about renewal, care and intention (think skin health, seasonal rituals, or conscious consumption: something that feels thoughtful and aligned with your brand’s values)
  
  
• Mother’s Day & Father’s Day: a chance to celebrate real stories and reconnect with values of care, appreciation and clean products (only the best for someone we love).
  
  
• A summer event of your own: create your own tent-pole event or campaign to bring your core audience/community together and generate buzz and attention. For our skincare brand, this could be centred around celebrating clean suncare products in a values-led way (a great way to get their core message to the right people).
  
  
• Halloween: an opportunity to be creative while still staying true to your brand’s identity. For our skincare brand, it could mean exploring content around ingredients (“scary ingredients” never present in their products), myths vs facts, or re-framing Halloween through a sustainability or wellness lens.
  
  
• Black Friday: but with an ethical twist that reflects your brand’s stance on consumption.
  
  
• Christmas, Boxing Day & the big January sale: use storytelling that ties back to impact, gratitude and your brand’s purpose and values. 

For each event, think: what does my audience care about at this moment? What story will resonate most? How can I communicate it in a memorable way?

Build a content calendar that tells your brand’s story clearly

A strong online presence reflects your brand’s story and mission, and makes it memorable for your target audiences. For an ethics-driven skincare brand, planning might look like:

• A ‘Hero’ brand film (or a series of Hero films) to sit at the heart of your marketing for the year. These inspire viewers, capture who you are, what you stand for, and why you’re worth following and buying from.
  
• Educational videos about sustainable ingredients (sourcing them, their benefits, the care taken, and why it’s better/the impact)
  
• Behind-the-scenes storytelling leading up to your summer event (creating a sense of excitement and buzz through “sneak peaks”, and by connecting with key-people whose excitement for the summer event is tangible and infectious)
  
• Mini documentaries as informative and entertaining ways to engage with your audience in an authentic way (audiences getting to know the people behind your brand strengthens trust and credibility)
  
• Customer testimonials for holiday campaigns
  
• Short, snappy social content around Black Friday with purposeful messaging

A strong, ‘Hero’ brand film can be edited into different versions, and be used across multiple platforms. Planning ahead means spotting these opportunities early.

When each asset aligns with ‘who you are’ and ‘what you stand for’, your audience begins to remember, recognise (and trust) your brand on sight.

Have a consistent, strong brand voice

A clear and consistent brand voice is just as important as your visual identity. It’s how people come to recognise you. By how you sound, what you prioritise, and what you choose to say (or not say).

For an ethical, values-led skincare brand, this means ensuring tone of voice is considered across every touchpoint. From ‘Hero’ films and social content to campaign messaging and web copy, it should always feel unmistakably you. 

When voice and identity are consistent throughout the year, your audience doesn’t have to relearn who you are at every campaign moment. Instead, recognition builds naturally and your messaging cuts through more clearly, even during busy or competitive periods.

Finally, craft stories that work harder for you

Great marketing is all about high quality content, thoughtfully timed and purposely tied to your brand identity and values. When you plan your year ahead with intention, you create space for stories that build trust, spark engagement, and reinforce visibility all year round.

If you’re ready to move from reactive to strategic storytelling, think of planning as your first, and most important, production phase, and:

1. Create a strong content calendar for the year (use this article for inspiration)
   
2. Work backwards from every post’s or campaign’s planned publishing date, to the point at which you need the assets for each of them (visuals, copy, venues – if applicable)
   
3. From this, build a clear, manageable plan of how to execute the above.
   
4. Come to us for creative ideas, and for someone to bring them to life in a way that aligns with your brand’s goals for the year.

Ready to bounce some initial ideas around? Get in touch with us here.