Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Are you trying to say too much with your business brand?

One of the biggest problems that small businesses run in to is that they want their logo to tell an entire novel worth of their business story. Even though a picture can tell 1000 words, you don't have control over how your graphics are interpreted by your audience.

The best way to make sure that your visual message is interpreted correctly by your clients and prospects is to condense it to a very simple, focused statement, and then create your design to communicate that. Being focused helps you to be clear in your graphic communications.

Why it's important to pay attention to your visual language

Even though visual language is just half of your vocabulary for your marketing materials, it's still very important. Why? Well, becasuse:

• Some people are visual people, and react well to images.
  
• Your potential clients can read and understand visual language in an instant - before they even read a word of your copy.
  
• Images can hold more credibility than words.
  
• Images can convey a lot of emotion - in a clearer way than words can.
  
• Images can tell the rest of the story.
  
• Images can be used in a more repetitive way than words can, without seeming repetitive to your clients. This builds consistency for your business.
  

I'm sure I'll think up more of these reasons as I go along!

Your brand helps you talk about your business

There are many types of language - written, spoken, visual, body, etc.

Your marketing materials need to speak in two kinds of language:

• Written language - Which most entrepreneurs can put together to a reasonable extent. Everyone learns how to write throughout their education, so even if an entrepreneur is not an expert at writing, you can put that together.

• Visual language - This is where most small businesses fail. Not all entrepreneurs learn how to communicate visually - even if they can draw or use a drawing program online. They put together colors, fonts, images, and symbols that "look good" without knowing what they're really saying to their potential clients. That's like writing a sentence that sounds good without knowing what the words mean.

  Luckily, your customers already know how to understand visual language - but you just have to put your company's personality and message into that language in an accurate way that will be timeless - not following the graphic trends, because you want your designs to look modern at all times. You also want your graphics to say exactly what you need to tell you audience.
  

My new mission is to teach entrepreneurs about visual language and how to communicate easily with their clients.

Consistency vs. Difference in Graphics Strategy

There's a place for consistency, and a place for difference in your graphic approach.

I recommend forming an overall graphic strategy before really investing in designs. The two big components of this are:

• Figuring out your business's Brand Definition: This is the process of defining your business: Who you are, what you do, who you can best help, and what makes you different from your competition. You must have all of these factors well-defined to create an effective brand. If your thoughts in all of these areas aren't clear, concise, and well-put, then you can't hope to effectively direct your customers' thoughts about your business. Worse yet, you might wind up looking like you have "multiple personality syndrome," which can thoroughly confuse your customers.

• Figuring out your marketing system. What pieces are you going to be creating/designing to get the message out about your business? How do they all fit together? For example, with this eBook, how will people be getting it? What do you want them to do after they get it? What other marketing materials will they see, and how can you keep everything consistent? At the same time, you don't want them to glance at your big products and think they already got them because the picture on the cover is the same. Differentiation in the graphics between your materials can make prospects able to see quickly all that you have to offer.
  

Why “Which logo do you like?” Is the Worst Question You Can Ask For Your Brand

This question is so terrible because it places all of the decisions about a logo on someone's personal preference instead of in any sort of logic.

First, consider technical issues about your logo. How will you be marketing your business, and how will the logo be used? Or, how's the legibility when it's scaled down? The overlap of the image and the letters can also affect the speed of being able to read things - and, with the speed at which people are moving these days, you want to make sure that your company name can be read quickly. If your logo doesn't make reproduction, scaling, reading and designing it into all sorts of things easy, then it will do your business more harm than good in the long run.

Secondly, who's your target audience? Are the people you're asking in it? If they're not, then their opinions don't really matter about whether we like your logo... it can actually be better for people who aren't in your target audience to NOT like the logo, to help you disqualify people that you can't help anyhow. I've got an article all about Connecting With Your Target Audience on my website... right here: http://www.elf-design.com/articleConnectWithTarget.html.

Lastly, what are you trying to say with your logo? Before evaluating any business logo I really encourage all of my clients to get all of their business definition down all in one place. I have a tool for this available on my site too - my Define Your Difference Branding Questionnaire. It's right on the home page at http://www.elf-design.com/ . I really recommend it as a first step in any branding process, so that you can nail down exactly what you're designing for, and then we can all look at that as a source for strategic advice.

Subtle marketing vs. spelling it all out

I used to be all for subtle marketing, where you just tell someone enough about whatever it is that you’re selling, but you leave out a lot of the in-depth, “salesy” details. I thought it would work better because it respects the intelligence of the reader, and it isn’t too pushy.

But, when I started spelling out the problem for people, and writing more about how I could help, my sales actually went up. I think it's because once you specify the exact problem you solve, people have 2 reactions:

• They see your services as a potential match for their need when you talk specifically about their problems and situation
  
• They see you as an expert in their exact need because you’re not afraid to talk about it.
  

And that makes them more likely to buy.

So, what does this mean? You should be obvious in your marketing by:

• State your problem clearly in your text - talk about the details of the problem that you solve
  
• Write more, not less. Writing more copy gives you a chance to address all of the issues that your audience might have, to counter their objections and to spark their interest.
  
• Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. It takes several "impressions", or times for people to read your information, for it to sink in and be remembered. That's because the people you're writing to are often not familiar with the problem that you solve or the way that you solve it - and it takes some time for them to get used to the new ideas and solutions you're presenting.
  

Q&A: My ad’s not effective!

Question: We launched a new website in September 2006 - and began running some pretty expensive advertisements to drive business to it. Since then, we've had about 400 visitors pass through the first layer and view our registration page. And not one single registration. Help!

Answer: There are a few things that could be going wrong here:
What expensive ads are you running? And, where are you running them?

Are you reaching interested and qualified prospects with those to begin with?

Do people buy whatever it is that you do from ads? Or should you be marketing in some other way?

What does the ad promote? Your company in general? The website? The program (or whatever it is) that you want people to register for? All of these things? It's best to have the ad tell people exactly, and very clearly, what you want them to do. And possibly, to offer them a prize for doing it - especially if it's a paper ad and your want them to go to a website to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Does the ad point people to the home page of your website? You might improve your results by pointing it to a landing page that specifically promotes the offer that you want them to take action on.

Once I get to the website, I don't immediately see what you want me, as a new visitor, to do. There's a big attention-getting seal, 3 buttons at the top, all the text in the middle to wade through... what am I supposed to do once I'm here? How am I going to get whatever the ad made me want? (Make this step really easy - people are busy, don't have a big attention span and don't have a lot of patience for reading stuff or figuring stuff out).

Even when I click on "Register for Class", I don't really understand that page. I expect to see a description of the class, a price, where it is, and a "register now" button. But, that doesn't really look like any of that information is there. How would I register, if I got this far and wanted to?

I hope this is a helpful start!

(And, if any other readers have a question for me, send it on in!)

About Putting Google Ads On Your Website

Google Ads offers a great service where you can put little ads on your website and earn click-through revenue every time someone clicks on them. Sounds like an easy way to make a little money, right?

But, let’s look at Google Ads from your website visitor’s point of view.

So, imagine someone's looking for services like yours. With money in their pocket, ready to buy. They're a buyer of high-priced services like yours. They're looking for a high-quality website where they can learn about what you do.

They get to your site. It looks interesting, but there's these little Google ads on your site that make your site look cheaper. The prospect starts to wonder: Is this site really what I'm looking for? Why are these ads right up here at the top? Can they possibly be qualified to take care of my big-money project? Or should I click on one of these ads and take my big money elsewhere?

Do you want your visitors to buy your services give you their big money, or do you want Google to give you a tiny bit of money? Which is more important and beneficial to you?

If you have a purely informational website – with articles, etc. – then it might be appropriate to put Google ads on your website. But, I don’t recommend it for a service or product website.

Tech tip: Editing your PDFs

So, you have a PDF of a designed file that you want to edit. But, how to get it edited?

Part of the answer to that depends on what it is that you want to edit:

Go back to the designer or original files if you want to edit:

• The graphics, color palette, or photos in the document
  
• A PDF that's been locked for security purposes
  
• A significant amount of text
  
• The font that the text is in
  
• Tables or graphs
  

You can edit the text yourself if you have:

• The fonts that the text is in, installed on your computer
  
• Adobe Acrobat Professional Version
  
• The original document with the fonts not in an outlined format
  
• Only small changes (the text editing tool within Acrobat may only select a word or a few words at a time - changing long blocks of information would be tedious).
  

To make your changes:
1. Open your document in Acrobat Professional
2. Select Tools > Advanced > Touch Up Text Tools
3. Select the text you'd like to change
4. Make your edits
5. Save your file!

Tech tip: Making your PDFs smaller

If you've created a PDF on your computer, but it's come together with a huge file size, you may want to make it smaller so that you can email it more easily. There are a couple of ways to go about this:

• If you have Adobe Acrobat Professional - there's a command under File called "Reduce File Size". That should shrink the file.

• If that doesn't work, or doesn't take the file size down enough, then you can go back to the master document and make sure that your document is as small as possible. Make sure that any graphics are on the small side - file-size wise. If you have inserted large file sizes, then they'll add to the overall file size of your PDF.

  For example, if you've put a photo in your document - say, your headshot - but you have inserted the original photo that the photographer gave you, then it's likely that it will be much bigger than it needs to be. I suggest scaling and downsizing your images in Photoshop before placing them into the document that you're making the PDF out of. That should significantly reduce the file size.