Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Your Website Has Lots of Room - And Why That's Great

Have you ever tried to write a 30-word promotion for your business? And to cover absolutely everything that you need to in that tiny bit of space?

Unless you've been in business for a while, and working on your messages, this is probably a pretty difficult proposition.

It's often harder to write a paragraph to promote your business - while making sure that it's effective - than it would be to write a page on the same topic. Your copy has to do several things:

1. Be easy to understand. Keep in mind that your prospects often won't know a lot about your field of expertise. Don't use too much industry-specific jargon, and be sure to fully and simply explain 

2. Be compelling. Talk about your target market's problems, and how you can help solve them.

3. Answers the prospect's basic questions so that your prospect gets comfortable with the idea of your product or service. Also, this can help stop your phone from ringing constantly with the same questions - and enable you to get more done.

4. Makes your offer - with all of the associated details. Things like price, how your service or product works, what the prospect will need to provide you with, etc. should all ideally be covered. Hard to do in just a few words.

5. Leaves the prospect wanting more information (or, to make a purchase). And, tells them how to go about doing that.

This is a lot of information - and it's even a lot to fit into a postcard or a brochure. With a website, you can create different pages, the pages can scroll down to accommodate more information, and you can even add new pages to the site to help explain new offerings or special offers. You'll have more space to expand, to test new things, and to grow.

Why Start With Your Website Copy?

If it is appropriate for a small business to have a website (and it often is, unless your target audience just doesn't use the web), then I often recommend starting your marketing writing with your website.

Why?

Because a website does not have the permanence or production costs of printed materials. You can write the copy for your website, post it, and then edit the copy as you get feedback from your clients and prospects. You can even get your designer to set up your website on a content editing program like Adobe InContext Editing and then you'll be able to get into the text and make those edits yourself. You'll be able to change out headlines to improve their effectiveness, add frequently asked questions, or just edit the text for more clarification.

Writing copy for your website, and then editing it, is much less scary and much more effective than designing and printing several hundred brochures. And, you have more opportunities to get feedback with a website and make changes as needed. Edits cost much less on the web (because you're not paying for printing as well). 

Once you've gotten your messages organized online, and fine-tuned, then consider moving on to creating printed materials to promote your business.

Writing your website copy

Many small businesses are afraid to write their own website (or even brochure) copy.

However, I highly recommend that an entrepreneur write their own text, for several reasons:

1. The copy you write will sound more like "you" than anything that anyone else could create. It's important for a small business owner to write their text in their own voice, so that your website copy can start to build the relationship with your customers from the first time they read your marketing materials. 

2. Your voice will also remain consistent throughout the marketing, sales and service process - you'll have written the text, you'll answer the phone to talk to the prospect, and you'll be the one providing the service to the customer. Consistency in all of these aspects will help to build trust with the client.

3. Writing your copy gives you a chance to work out your offerings. Creating text will allow you to scope out your services, decide how your process works, and craft your offers to your customers. If you give the writing process over to someone else, they might make these decisions for you - and you might find that you can't work with or live with the results.

That said, I do highly recommend that after writing up your content, you get it edited by a professional copyeditor - to make sure it makes sense and that all your commas are in the right place. 

I'm Speaking At The Self Employment Telesummit!

The Self Employment Telesummit When: September 10-22, 2009 Where: On your phone line  More Details: Here I am excited to be presenting at this event! Molly Gordon of Authentic Promotion is organizing this virtual learning event created to serve newly and about-to-be self employed people who are overwhelmed by the numner of things they need to do to launch and sustain a business. Whew! Basically, it's going to be several days' worth of in-depth information covering topics from branding to written communications, social media, PR, organizing your office, and what to charge for your services. Molly's pulled together a dozen experts in these topics and more to teach new business owners everything they'll need to know to get their businesses started out successfully. You get to attend the teleseminar sessions, a copy of a workbook, membership in the telessummit's forum so that you can talk with other attendees and ask questions about starting your business, and a bonus pack of special tools from each presenter. Advanced membership includes MP3s, transcripts, follow-up coaching and even a two-week coaching program with Molly. And the prices are really affordable - starting at as low as $255 (just 3 payments of $85.00). This program would have saved me from tons of mistakes that I made setting up my busienss - and I don't even want to think about the money I would have saved if I'd invested in this instead of the mess of materials that I bought because I didn't know where to get all of this information at once. I know, I have a lot to say about this event. But I think it will be pretty great! I'm speaking twice for this event. Here's the details!  Preview: The Top 5 Avoidable Start-Up Brand Design Accidents When you start a small business, one of the most creative, fun and exciting things you'll get to do is to create your brand. But, that also means that branding is a business "rite of passage" that is easy to get really excited about - and just like a teenager who's just gotten their drivers' license, many entrepreneurs make mistakes and have costly accidents along the way. Join small business brand designer Erin Ferree as she walks you through the directions for designing your brand. In this 60-minute class, you'll learn: The five most common entrepreneurial brand design accidents How to drive your brand safely (and affordably) to avoid those accidents The most important "Rule of the Road" for designing your brand Date: July 31, 2009 Time: 12-1 pm Pacific Time Sign up here for this free call. Even if you can't make it to the event, sign up to get the free recording after the event to listen to at your leisure! You'll also get access to all of the other free preview calls - even recordings of the ones that have already happened. A Roadmap For Designing An Effective and Affordable Brand Your business's brand can be a fork in the road. It can help your business stand out from the competition to help you bring in new clients - if it's designed right. If your brand takes a wrong turn, your customers can wind up lost, confused, or worse yet - turning to another provider. No one wants that! This talk will help you make sure that you're setting your brand up for success - and designing a brand identity that will really help your business to get customers moving in down the right road - towards making a purchase with you. Erin Ferree of elf design will talk about the elements you need to make sure your brand will help your customers get there: Your Branding Destination: where your brand needs to go to help your business go down the right road The 5 essential Branding Directions to keep you on the "right" path How to design the right brand as your vehicle The Telesummit Runs from: September 15-22, 2009 To learn more about the Self Employment Telesummit and to sign up, visit the website for the event.

When You Get Busy

What happens to marketing your business when you get busy?

Since most consultancies are 1-person businesses, it's good to make sure that you address this question and make a plan to handle it. One person businesses can reach their manpower capacity pretty quickly, and you need to make sure that no matter what, you're still marketing consistently.

Whether you've gotten busy with client work or personal matters, it can really help your business to have a few marketing pieces at the ready. These can also be helpful strategies when you go on vacation - to make sure your marketing is uninterrupted while you are gone.

- A couple of pre-scheduled blog posts. Your blog allows you to set up posts before it's time for you to publish them. You can either save these posts as a draft or you can actually set them up to be published on a certain date, automatically.

- Some pre-written articles. This is especially important if you publish a newsletter. Just having an article or two set aside means that if you get busy, you can release that to your list without a huge investment of time. If you've really got some time and space to set these up, consider pre-formatting the newsletter too so that it's all ready to go.

- Make your website answer some of the most frequently asked questions you get from your clients. If your website can field basic questions, like your getting-started process, or who you typically work with, or what clients need to have at the ready to maximize the effectiveness of working with you, then you can refer people there to really learn more about working with you. This can help protect your time, keep your business running when you're busy or out of town, and keep clients happy.

Which Marketing Materials You Can — And Can't — Print Yourself

In order to present your business professionally, you want all of your marketing materials to look as good as possible while being as affordable as possible to reproduce. How can you maximize your marketing materials' impact while saving money on printing while still making materials that look good and don't say "homegrown"?

By making a few simple distinctions between producing different types of designed materials, you can print some of your own materials while creating a kit of materials to promote your business that looks as professional as possible. That way, you can save some money on your marketing — but you can save that money in all the right places.

Which marketing/ branded materials can you print on your own? The best bets for printing yourself are marketing materials that can be created on a standard (letter or A4) sized page, with a margin around the edge, such as flyers or simple letterhead. Another factor to consider is customization — any piece that will need to be highly customized (think anything beyond "mail merge" capabilities) will need to be run on a piece-by-piece basis. Finally, if you're only planning to print a few of anything - like binder covers — you might want to print them yourself for convenience and to save money.

• Flyers: Since flyers are usually for a limited-time promotion, then their temporary nature means that you can take the liberty of printing them yourself. Of course, if you're handing out hundreds or thousands of flyers, it might make more sense for you to have them printed. Or at least copied. You can get really affordable color copies from digital print houses.
• Handouts or PowerPoint slide deck summaries: Since these are usually for a single event or talk, printing them yourself makes sense. It wouldn't make sense to print them professionally—unless you're presenting to thousands of fans!
• Proposals, Invoices: These materials are printed on a one-off basis and are highly customized; printing them on your printer is the only reasonable option. You could print them on your letterhead, but you'll still want to run the "meat" of these pieces on an individual basis.
• Letterhead: If you only print a few physical letters in a year, then printing up an entire batch of letterhead doesn't make much sense; especially when most printers have a minimum of 500 pieces. As a side note, letterhead and envelopes are also the only materials I don't recommend printing with digital printers because the paper stock doesn't look very high-quality.
• Mailing labels: Printing envelopes costs a lot, and many small businesses wouldn't use enough envelopes over the course of a year to justify the price. Mailing labels work on either #10 envelopes or larger envelopes or packages, and are a much more affordable option. Avery labels are a great choice for professional-looking labels.
• Binder covers and spines: Again, unless you're producing many copies of your binder, than buying blank binders at an office supply store and slipping your artwork into the plastic sleeve makes more financial sense than custom-printing on the binder itself.

Which materials can you absolutely not print on your own? This is a list of materials that will either suffer quality-wise or suck up all of your time if you choose to reproduce them yourself. You also want to make sure that you're not producing materials yourself that require bleeding to the edge of letter-sized paper — like brochures - because standard printers can't do that. And, you'll want to minimize trimming as well, because it can be difficult to do well and is very time consuming. Printing your own business cards or postcards may not be a good idea for this reason.

• Business cards: Between printing a bunch of cards, trimming them, the thin papers available for home use, and the low cost of printing cards digitally (currently less than $100 per thousand cards — and the minimum run starts around 50 cards for much less), there's no real reason to print these at home.
• Postcards: If you're printing a postcard, you'll run into some of the same problems with business cards. Trimming them straight, thin paper will all make your postcards look less-than-great. There's also the issue of aligning the fronts and backs of the postcard — which can be challenging on even the best non-professional equipment. Then, if you're doing a postcard campaign of any size, you have to factor in the added difficulty of mass production.
• Letterhead: I know, this was in the "can print at home" section as well. For letterhead, it really depends on how you intend to use it. If you use more than a few copies of letterhead in a year (or, if you could think of other ways to use more copies of your letterhead, like printing speech handouts, creating flyers on it, et cetera), then I recommend going to the expense of printing the letterhead. It will pay off in the long run by making your business look much better put-together.
• Brochures: Have you ever seen a trifold brochure that's printed on a personal printer? They're pretty obviously done at home, and they tend to look pretty poor. First of all, the paper is usually just regular printer paper—not thick or glossy like a nice brochure should be. And, home printers almost always leave some sort of margin around the edge of the page, instead of having a full bleed. Then, there's also the problem of folding them evenly — this is best left to the printing professionals with their professional folding machines.
• Envelopes: Unless your printer is pretty advanced, then printing envelopes might make you a bit crazy. I know that on every printer I've ever owned, the "envelope feed" function doesn't work smoothly. The printing may wind up crooked, or the envelopes might get jammed and make you fix your printer over and over again. This has gotten better over the years, but printing envelopes can often be more frustration than it is worth. Better to get them professionally printed and avoid having to pull your hair out in frustration.

This list will help you to determine where you can save money by printing your own materials, and when it would take more time for you to produce those materials yourself. It will also help you to determine when printed-at-home materials look good enough, and when your materials will need to be printed professionally in order to stand up to — and stand out from — the competition.

Should You Print Your Own Marketing Materials?

Clients often ask me if they can print their own marketing materials in order to save money. This is a tricky question, because, yes, of course it's possible to print your own marketing materials so long as you have access to a printer and some paper. So, of course, you can either take a PDF from your designer and print it, or lay something out in Word or Publisher and run it off.

But, beyond the question of whether you can print your own marketing materials is whether you should. This often boils down to a simple question of whether printing materials yourself will present the right image for your company — whether the materials you produce will actually look good enough to represent your company well. And, of course, whether printing the materials yourself will actually save you money, or if it will be worth the time it will take.

And, whether you should depends on a few factors:

• The age of your business. If you're just starting your business, then printing some materials may make sense. Printing yourself would be a cost-effective way to start getting clients in the door, and this way you can start by testing your designs and marketing messages. If you've been around for a while, clients may expect to see professionally printed materials.
• Your confidence in your text. You could use your early home-printed materials to test your marketing text with your audience — there's no use in professionally printing hundreds of copies of anything and then discovering that it doesn't connect with or make sense to your audience. Or that you've accidentally misrepresented some bit of information. Try printing a few at home to see if they're effective before producing thousands.
• The actual amount of money (and time) that you'll save. Printing things at home still has a cost associated with it. There are the hard costs of paper and ink, along with wear and tear on your printer. And, then there's the expense of your time — how much are you willing to spend waiting for your printer, fixing paper jams, feeding in new paper, and trimming the finished prints down to size? With the option of printing many pieces digitally these days, and discount printers available online (like www.psprint.com), the cost of professionally printing materials is not really that large — so do some research and see if you can afford to have your materials printed. It may pay off by saving you time and irritation.
• The loss of credibility that you'll face. What goes through your mind when you receive a packet of printed materials that are obviously printed on a home or office printer? Do you wonder if the business is stable? If they're worth their asking price? If they take pride in their work? Do you think about their level of sophistication? You don't want any of these sorts of thoughts going through a new prospect's mind. You want them to get your materials, be impressed, and then to consider hiring you — you don't want to create more questions in their minds.
• The likelihood that your competition's materials will look better. Unless you're in a very "homey" industry (like a babysitter or errand running service), then there's a good chance that your competitors are printing their materials professionally. You want your materials to look as good as — if not better than — your competition's materials. This includes print quality and design.
• What marketing materials you're planning to print. Printing a flyer out on your home or office printer sends out an entirely different message than printing your business cards yourself. So, ask if printing your piece at home is appropriate for the actual piece itself.

In the next article, I'll talk specifically about which types of marketing materials make sense to print yourself, and which ones you shouldn't print at home — and why.

Letterhead Fonts

QUESTION:

I am trying to create a quick letterhead template for my company. Is there

a certain type of font I should use for the address block?

ANSWER:

Here are the qualities you want to watch out for in your letterhead address block font:

1. Make sure your letterhead font is legible and prints well. If you're going to send faxes on your letterhead, test the fonts you'll use to make sure they're still legible after going through the fax process.

2. Think about how you'll use your letterhead. If it's a digital letterhead that will be used on several different computers, it will be easiest to choose a font that comes preinstalled on most computers so that you'll be able to open and use the letterhead with no technical difficulties. If you're going to be the sole user, then you might want to invest in a font for your letterhead that will make it more unique.

3. Think about the personality of your company, and match the font to the personality. Sans serif fonts are good for technology-oriented companies, and give your company a more approachable and friendly feel. Serif fonts are more traditional and can make your business look more established. In any case, you probably don't want to go with anything that looks like handwriting or is too decorative. Script fonts are also harder to read.

4. If you have a logo, you should make sure that the qualities of your logo font coordinate with the font that is used in your logo. This does not mean that it has to be the same font, but it's a good rule of thumb to match some of the characteristics - whether the "o" in both fonts is round or oval, for example.

Objectifying Your Small Business's Logo

A common thing to hear at the start of a logo design project is, "I just want a picture of a [insert object here] to be my logo." The object could be a hammer, a car, a golf club, a spine, a pile of books, a map—you name it. This object may or may not have a direct relationship with the business that the logo will be representing. For example, I've been asked to draw a sea horse logo for a financial planner, and recently, a client requested that I work a cat into the logo for her exercise company.

There are two major issues inherent with designing a logo with a picture of an object in it. The first is that your logo instantly becomes a "representational logo," and you'll want to evaluate whether this form of logo serves your business best. The second issue is that before committing to using that object as the face of your business, you'll have to carefully consider the type of object that you're including in the logo and all of its' possible meanings to the viewer.

So, let's tackle the issues with the first one first: The fact that your logo will be a representational logo.

What is a representational logo? And is it the right choice for my business?

"Representational logo" simply means that the icon of the logo has a picture in it that looks like a recognizable object. A representational logo is often most appropriate for a company that's on the smaller side, or one that provides business-to-consumer, or personal services (think dog walking, house painting, carpentry).

You rarely see representational logos for successful professional services companies (think accountants, lawyers, engineers), unless those companies are very small. So make sure that having a representational logo matches to the level of sophistication that you'd like your company to reach. You can evaluate the level of sophistication in terms of the object you choose to use as your logo and how the object is drawn. For example, a cartoon of a pile of money may not convey the right visual message for an investment specialist.

It is true that some big companies do have representational logos—the apple for Apple Computers, for example. But they've already made their business name a little abstract by combining words that don't go together conceptually, so having a representational logo in this case can help to make their incongruous name more memorable.

Choose your object wisely

If you commit to a representational logo, you should choose an item that makes sense in some way with your business—either based on your business name, what you sell, or if there's a more complicated story that you'll wind up having to explain to prospects. Also remember that you're signing up for your company to always have some sort of link to the item in the logo—so you may not want to start out with a picture of a product that you sell.

For example, say you operate a foods company making chips out of carrots, and you decide to go with a carrot in the logo. Then your company decides a short while later to change directions and start manufacturing chips made of corn instead. Suddenly, the carrot logo is less appropriate for your business; and unless you find some way that it does integrate into your new business direction, you might run into trouble.

You'll also want to think about the meaning of the item that you choose as your logo. Some items already have a traditional symbolic meaning—for example, a butterfly is often used to symbolize change or transition because it goes through a metamorphosis. Research your item so that you can become sure that you're not missing any of its' potential meanings. And in this way, you can make sure that your item doesn't have any unintended negative connotations as well. 

A representational logo isn't right for every business. But if you decide that a representational logo is the right choice for your business, then making sure that you choose your object wisely can help you to ensure that your logo will be a good fit for your business and that it will support the growth of your brand. 

Aviary online image editor

Aviary.com offers free vector editing (their Illustrator replacement is called Raven) and photo editing (called Phoenix) - has anyone used these tools? This might be a great resource for small businesses looking to make edits to their designs, or even create designs.