Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Strategic Branding Ideas For The Down Economy

How can small businesses make the best of the slowdown in the economy while still growing and expanding their brands? Here are a few ideas:

1. Design and produce only marketing materials you'll really use. Print marketing materials will only ever help your business if they get out of your office and into your potential customers' hands (handing out business cards, mailing out postcards, or distributing brochures). Online marketing materials need you to publicize them (in the case of a website) or update them (in the case of a blog or custom Twitter page), or updating and distribute them (like an email newsletter). So, make sure that whatever you design, you'll actually do your part to help your materials reach escape velocity.

2. Test your designs in a low-budget way. Testing your designs with your target audience is more important now than ever. But, be smart with your marketing budget and do your testing early in the process, and in some easy to produce ways. Two of the easiest, least expensive ways to implement your designs (and even your marketing messages) and get testing are through designing a blog or an email newsletter. In both of these options, you can make good use of templates that are available, and add in a customized header graphic, and edit your color palette a bit. Then send it out to your customers, and ask them what they think about it. Their feedback will be invaluable.

3. Take advantage of the down time to really examine your brand and revise your marketing plan for the future. If you're like a lot of businesses, you've been running around like crazy doing business for the last while. Use the time to strategize, plan, and maybe even get a head start on some future marketing campaigns so that when things do pick up, you can be ready.

4. Use the time to get up to speed. If you've been avoiding blogging, email newsletters, Twitter or social networking because you haven't had the time to set them up or figure out how they work, now might be a good time to look into it. Now is a great time to catch up on your learning, and to really get these types of marketing efforts started so that when things start getting better, you'll have learned the technical side of things, and initiated a process for keeping up with these marketing methods into your business's marketing plan. 

Global Foresight Website

Another website that I designed a while ago - and am just now having a chance to post here!

A Fair Exchange

When you ask for someone's info on a website, you have to make the prize you're offering them more valuable than the info they're providing. So the free report, MP3 download, teleclass, etc. has to be more valuable than the personal information you're asking for in return.

Here's the hierarchy of things you can ask for:

• Email (this is expected so that you can email the new contact their prize)
• First Name
• Website
• Last Name
• Business Name
• Location/ Time Zone
• Phone Number
• Address
• Income Level or other private information

Does Your Small Business Need A Digital Or A Printed Letterhead?

A small business's letterhead is one of the most essential marketing pieces. A letterhead enables you to send your company's brand out on all of your communications with your clients and vendors. This not only gives you the opportunity to build up more recognition of your brand, but it also makes your business look established and credible.

But many small businesses don't wind up sending out a lot of printed communications—instead, they'll send out an email with their document attached. And if they do need to print up a piece to mail, it will often just mean printing a few documents over the course of a year. Which brings us to the question of whether it's really worth the cost for your business to invest in a stack of printed letterhead.

The disadvantages—and advantages—of print letterhead

One disadvantage of printed letterhead is the cost of getting it printed. Many traditional printers will begin to print with a minimum order of 500 pieces of letterhead. The price per-piece of letterhead will often be very high at this low of a quantity. It makes more sense from a pricing standpoint to print at least 1000 or 2000 pieces of letterhead.

Another disadvantage of printed letterhead is its' permanence. Once you've printed those thousand pieces of letterhead, you're stuck with them as they are. If you move or change any of your other contact information, your letterhead immediately becomes outdated. The same goes if you change your tagline or your logo—all of those costly printed pieces head directly to the recycling bin.

The advantages of print letterhead are that it often looks more professional than printing up a single copy of a digital letterhead on your home printer. When you create a professionally printed letterhead, you can also have bleeds—where the ink goes all the way to the edge of the page—whereas on a digital letterhead, you have to leave space around the edges for your printer's margin allowance. Bleeding the ink off the edge looks more sophisticated.

The advantages and disadvantages of digital letterhead

A digital letterhead's biggest advantages come from the fact that it is a digital file. That makes it easy to change contact information in a digital letterhead; you just make changes to the header image file and pop the new file into Word. A digital letterhead also doesn't have the added up-front production cost that printing physical copies of a letterhead has; so it's less expensive to create a digital letterhead. And with a digital letterhead, you can choose to either print out the finished piece or you can create a PDF of the document and attach it to an email. If you choose to attach the document to an email, then your document will get to its' destination more quickly than it would by mail. Plus, it's more eco-friendly to send a digital file than to use a piece of paper.

The biggest disadvantage of digital letterhead is that it is digital—and if you're printing it out, it will look like a digital letterhead. Clients will be able to tell that you've printed the letterhead on your home printer (though, if you invest in a nice printer and some high-quality paper, this can be less obvious). And, as mentioned before, you'll have to design the letterhead to take the margins of your home printer into account. If you're planning to email the document out, you may want to make the margins pretty large so that the recipient's printer won't cut off your contact information when they print out your document.

The other disadvantage is that if you're emailing a PDF to someone who's not technologically savvy or who is having computer problems, it can be difficult or even impossible for them to get the document to open. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it can be frustrating for the recipient.

With all of these advantages and disadvantages, how do you determine which route is the correct path for your business to take? Do you need a printed letterhead, a digital letterhead, or possibly both?

How to figure out which form of letterhead you need

1. Determine how you plan to use your letterhead. Common uses for letterhead include:

• Writing personalized letters and other correspondence
• Direct mail and letters of introduction
• Invoicing (though if you use an invoicing program such as Quickbooks, you'll just need to insert a digital copy of your logo or a digital page header into the template invoice design)
• Creating estimates and proposals
• Formatting contracts and other client intake materials (such as questionnaires or forms)
• Reprinting your articles
• Creating speech handouts
• Submitting orders to vendors

Think about how many of these uses (and any others you can think of) apply to how you run your business.

2. Decide if you're more likely to send a physical mail piece or an email. Matching your letterhead format to your business preferences can help to streamline your business. For example, it may help to speed up your client acquisition process to have a digital letterhead for your contracts. Or, you may get paid faster if you have a digital invoice, since clients won't have to wait to receive their bill in the mail. But if you give talks frequently, you may want to get printed letterhead created so that your handouts will look fabulous.

3. Think about which format your clients would prefer to receive your communications in. The simple step of considering your clients' communication preferences can help you to create a better—and smoother—client relationship. If you're catering to eco-friendly businesses, they will appreciate the reduction in paper that digital correspondence brings.

4. Weigh this information along with the advantages and disadvantages of each type of document as listed above. For example, if you know you'll be moving soon, then creating a digital letterhead may be the way to go so that you can change your address when the time comes. But, if having every piece of communication that comes from your business look as professional as possible is important to your business's success, then consider creating a printed letterhead so you'll make the best possible impression. 

Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of printed and digital letterheads, and then going through the process of evaluating what you need in your business can help to make sure that you get the right kind of letterhead designed to serve your business's needs. 

Ian Baldwin: Think Like Customers package design

I created this package to match Ian Baldwin's brand (which I created a couple of years ago). We designed a binder, workbook cover, and disc faces. And, I also created these 3-d promotional images to use when marketing the kit.

Find out more about this project here: 

http://www.ianbaldwin.com/

How To Design a Website

This is a big, big topic. But, in the interest of posting and not taking all night typing, do think about these areas when you're working on it. 1. Design: The basics of how the page is laid out, color palette, how the look of the site reflects your company's brand, how it will look to a prospect, and how the information on the site is presented (navigation, text, printability, etc.). How each of these factors comes into play is determined by your company's brand, services/products, target audience, online goals, online lead generation strategy, and probably a bunch of other factors that I'm not thinking of at this second. 2. Content: Everything from page names to headlines, and the actual text of your site to SEO. The content is a very very important part of your website - so make sure you don't overlook it in the frenzy of designing and coding your site. 3. Functionality: What's your site's job? If you had to choose one or two things for your site to do for you beyond the very basics of getting found on the search engines and giving basic information to your customers and prospects, what would that job be? Growing a mailing list? Selling a product? Selling services? Getting media attention? Something else entirely? I suggest that a business just starting their website not drive themselves up the wall by trying to split their focus and concentrate on too many website functions at once - build the site to do the basics, then add on a functionality or two at a time in rounds of revision. That way, you'll have realistic amounts of work to do to get your site up and live - and then you can come back and tweak it over time. And once you see how it's actually working for you, and once you get customer feedback. 4. Managability: You want your site to be something that you can work on and with over the years. Ideally, your design, content and functionality will all be coded and set up in a way that you can get in there and mess around with it. This is really important for testing/ modifying the site over time as well as for SEO, and just for the general purpose of keeping the site updated and current. Whether you build the site in Wordpress, or even just code an HTML site and pick some easy-to-use website updating program like Adobe Contribute - it doesn't really matter - as long as you can get in there and edit your site.

Rev Up Your Revenue Audio Postcard Sign-up Page

I created this page to help my client gather names and email addresses of interested prospects. We also set up an autoresponder series on the back-end of this page, so that once a prospect signs up, the website will automatically follow up with them once a week with new audio recordings. The client doesn't have to do anything after a prospect signs up. Neat, huh?

Word It: Saturated

My Google Alert the other day popped up this link - I drew this long enough ago that I'd forgotten all about it.

http://www.underconsideration.com/wordit/archives/saturated/0501-saturated-Erin-L-Ferree.php

Making A Great First Impression With Your Marketing Materials

It's said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. This is certainly true with your company's marketing materials. A new client often takes many pieces of information away from their first glimpse of a marketing piece or website. And this impression can make the difference between whether they choose to read the rest of your material or if decide that your piece is a waste of time and (gasp!) recycle it.

You want to make sure that the marketing piece you spent time and money writing, designing, and printing—or hosting online—actually grabs viewers' attention and encourages them to read the information you've worked so hard to put together. Or keep your business card in their files, bookmark your website, consider your proposal, or whatever the goal for the marketing piece may be.

Before they start reading the text, studying the figures, or even looking at the details of your logo, viewers will first get an overall impression of the marketing piece you just gave them. They'll be most likely to see these 5 elements first:

1. The layout of the elements in the piece, which is the overall arrangement of information and graphics on the page. You want to make sure your layout displays your content well, organizes it in a way that makes the most sense, and also looks appealing at a glance.

2. The color palette, which can instantly communicate a visual message about your company through color psychology. Colors evoke many meanings and emotions, and what they typically evoke has become somewhat standardized, at least within certain cultures.

Make sure your color choices are on-message for your brand and your marketing piece and that the colors you use are appropriate for your audience's ethnicity. For example, red is the color of urgency and emergency in the United States and also means "stop". But in China, red is the color of luck and is often worn at weddings.

3. The rhythm of the distribution of those colors on the page. Are they equally distributed? Is one color dominant, with highlights of a secondary color? Is the top half of the piece mostly one color, and the bottom half another? Each of these approaches creates a different mood in your marketing piece or on the screen. You need to look at color distribution as more than just what looks good or not and understand the message it's communicating.

4. The white space. White space can make a design feel free and open. It also gives viewers' eyes a place to rest while taking in design and text. If white space is balanced with text and graphics, it can encourage viewers to move around the page and to actually get around to reading the text.

5. The photos. This article is getting dangerously close to being chock-full of cliches, but a picture really is worth a thousand words. When you include a photo in your marketing materials, your viewers immediately assess its overall mood, color palette, visual message, quality, and even how up-to-date clothing and hairstyles look. All these bits of information add up to those "thousand words" you're looking to convey—so make sure that your photos are really the right ones and not just "good enough".

How to tell if your material is making a good first impression:

1. Do the glance test. If you're designing a marketing piece that you'll distribute in printed format, then print a test copy. If you're working on a website, email newsletter, blog, or some other online design piece, then pull it up on your monitor. Leave the test copy on a table or your computer turned on, then leave the room and look at something else for a few minutes.

Turn on the TV. Look out the window. Look at a magazine or a coffee table book of art. Don't think about your marketing piece at all. Then, go back and look at it with fresh eyes. Try to look at it as though you've never seen it before. (This is hard, but it can be done!). What jumps out at you?

2. Next, think about your piece in the context of the 5 elements I've mentioned. Really look at the layout, color palette and rhythm, white space, and photos—and be critical. Think about each of these elements in the context of the message that you're trying to convey. And think about these elements from your target prospect's perspective—what do they want to see?

3. Gather some comparison materials. Your customers will not be looking at your materials in a vacuum. They'll likely receive your materials at a networking event, trade show, in the mail, or during a web search or surfing session. So you'll want to know how your materials rate in comparison to other materials they'll be looking at.

Networking events and web searches are the most accessible and easiest routes to take when trying to compare your works-in-progress. Go to the networking events you'll be attending, and bring back the cards you gather and then spread those out on the table along with your sketches. Do your cards look appealing in comparison?

Do a web search for your company category and on keywords that you hope to rank for. Look at the sites and blogs that are already showing up in those categories. They will be your competition in web searches, and you have to compare your site's look against them. If a prospect was pressed for time and searching for a company to do business with, would yours stand out from the other sites in your category? Another online option is to subscribe to your competition's email newsletters and pit them against your design to see which looks more impressive.

4. Ask clients and prospects to tell you their first impressions. This is easiest to do in person, but you could also schedule a phone meeting with a good client or potential client and then email them your sketches or documents while you're on the phone. For a printed piece, you could mail the document to your evaluator enclosed in a second envelope, with instructions not to open the inner envelope until your designated meeting time.

For a first-impression test, you want to limit the amount of time your testers have to think about the material they're looking at. If they look at a piece for a day and then give you their thoughts, they've had time to read it, think about it, and process their thoughts. This is not what you want when you're concerned about making an immediate impression—you want to know what prospects think about a piece in the instant they first see it. Getting their opinions in more detail later can also be helpful, but you can never get a first impression again, so get it while you can. 

If you keep the 5 elements of a good first impression in mind while designing your marketing materials and evaluate them while you're creating them, you should be able to create marketing materials that will make an excellent first impression on your target clients. 

Nina Price Website

I actually designed this a bit ago, but I don't think I got around to posting it here. So, this is a website I created for Nina Price, a business and wellness coach who works with high-tech professionals.