Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Update your website like you update your wardrobe

Like the clothes in your wardrobe can go "out of style" as fashion changes through the seasons, your website graphics can begin to look dated after a few years. As new design trends become popular, and as web technologies change and grow, your website can soon begin to look behind the times.

To avoid having a website that's out of style, revisit the look of the website, the photos on your site, the color palette, and even the way that the site's written and coded over the years. You don't want everyone in your industry to have a Facebook link on their site, while your site is missing this simple update that makes you look up-to-date.

People buy based on both emotion and logic

Customers will buy your products or services for both emotional and logical reasons.

Your marketing has many components, and each is suited to both emotional and logical buying triggers. But, these components are often more well-suited to one or the other.

Design Layout: Logic. You need a logical design layout to make your marketing easy to process and to make it make sense.

Color Palette: Emotion. People make strong emotional connections with certain colors - they'll evoke a feeling or a memory for them. Play off some of the most common color meanings to get the most bang from your color palette.

Descriptive/ "Marketing" Text: Emotion. Think of the short text or voice script in commercials or print ads. This sort of text plays to the buyer's emotions - tries to create a scene, feeling, or to describe the benefits of whatever it is that you're selling.

Factual Text: Logic. Most longer marketing pieces - sales sheets, web pages, brochures, etc. - have to have some sort of factual text. Information about the features of your product 

Logo: A good logo appeals to both. Emotional is handled by the icon (in the way that it's drawn) and color palette. And logical is handled by the icon (which needs to make sense) and the company name.

Keeping these roles in mind can help you to create the most effective design and marketing materials.

Why you should get a P.O. Box

Well, not necessarily a P.O. Box, but a mailbox for your business. I actually recommend contracting with The UPS Store if you have a local branch that's convenient for picking up mail a couple of times a week. They accept packages, and are usually very good about not making you wait in line to get them.

1. Having an address on your business cards makes your business look more credible and established. Think of all of those business cards you've gotten over the years with no address - don't you immediately know that those people are working at home? And don't you fear that they're working in their pajamas? Not the most professional and credible thing that can be done for a brand. You can secretly work at home, in your pajamas, with a mail box address.

2. Have a shipping and receiving department on call to receive packages. Your UPS store will accept your packages, and let you sign for them at your convenience. If your mail man is constantly leaving you "pick up at the post office" slips at your home, or if your UPS deliveries are constantly getting you little post-its on your door instead, then this could be a better way.

3. You'll have an address to put on your outgoing emails. CAN-SPAM laws require that you place some sort of mailing address on your outgoing promotional emails - for your newsletter, email marketing, autoresponders, etc. So, instead of putting your home address on those emails, you'll have a "business" address to post.

How to avoid having two separate businesses to market even if you have two services

I get a lot of questions from small business owners who have two major problems or two services that they solve in one business. I'm not really sure why this is so prevalent - but I have a feeling that it might have to do with the reluctance that a lot of small business owners feel when it comes down to paring down their services or target audiences to a single item.

I know I'm extra-guilty of this - I've been advised to just offer logo design, marketing material design or website design - not all three. But I can't bear the thought of limiting myself to just one area - I think the three are so intertwined that they all need to be addressed together. Since they're so intertwined, it's easy to talk about them together.

But, what if the two things you do aren't actually directly related?

If you're trying to market two seemingly separate services or products, then it might be tempting to separate them out and create two companies - one to promote service A and another to promote service B. But, along with two companies comes marketing twice - that means two logos, two business cards (and wondering which one to hand out to get the most out of your networking events!) , two websites (and maintaining and updating two websites), and two newsletter lists to keep in touch with your clients. 

Two newsletter lists means at least two articles per month, and two mailing lists, two newsletter template designs, and formatting two newsletters in your email program. Then you have to add the articles to your website. That winds up being a lot of work every month - and that's just if you're putting each newsletter out once monthly.

How to avoid this extra work

Instead of separating your two (or three) services out into different companies, or even separating your lists within one company, then work on finding out what your services all have in common. After all, you're offering both services or products, so they must have a common skill, interest or problem that they each solve, right?  

I call this exercise "finding the thread". Take a piece of paper and write down your different services, and then draw some lines connecting them all. These lines are your thread - the single connecting factor between all of the things that you do for your clients. 

Try to keep the thread simple - you don't want the connection to be too oblique or to not make sense to your clients. 

The thread is often something that comes as second-nature to you - you just think that this thread is so important that you may do it without noticing. So, asking some of your clients to help you connect the dots, or asking a friend or spouse, may help you identify the thread more easily.

Once you have found the thread

Then, use that thread as the basis for all of your marketing materials. Instead of focusing your home page copy on your services, focus on the thread, or the problem that your clients are facing that can be mended with the thread you offer. Build your logo around the thread (which is also often what makes you different from your competition - your competitors probably don't have this same thread holding their services together). Write the articles in your newsletter with an emphasis on the thread instead of just writing about the services you offer. And, sew everything you do together by always concentrating on this thread.

If you focus on finding and talking about the thread that hold all of your offerings together, then you won't have to separate them out into different businesses - you'll be able to make everything you do make sense for your clients all in one package. And, you won't have to do all of that extra marketing work.

The Jobs of your Marketing Materials

• To bring in new clients: Of course, this is the basic reason why most small businesses market. But, it had to be said!
• To help you keep in touch with past clients and to let them know how they can continue to use your services, or what other products they can buy. This can help you make more sales to customers who already trust you.
• To be consistent: This consistency is in terms of not only the look and design of your marketing materials, but also in terms of the words that you use in them and the timing with which you send certain things out (like your email newsletter). 
• To extend your brand: A brand is not made up of a logo alone. You need some printed, emailable, and other marketing materials to help form a full picture of what your business is all about for your clients. And, you need to put that logo on something...
• To remind your customers to act: By sending out marketing pieces, you'll remind your customers and prospects that you're there, that they wanted to buy something from you, and to go ahead and do it. This can be enhanced by also including a call to action on each marketing piece - a couple lines of text (usually highlighted in a box or some other stand-out graphic) telling them what to do next. 
• To give you a full range of marketing capabilities: And to enable you to "touch" your customers in multiple ways: online,  by email, by mailing them a postcard, by handing them a flyer. If you have many different ways to get in contact, it increases the chance that a prospect will pay attention or notice a marketing piece.
• To inform your clients: Not just of what's available, but of how your offerings can improve their businesses or lives. 

Your logo's jobs - continued

3. Your logo needs to be technically well-done. This means that it needs to be:

• Scalable: Your logo may need to be blown up to the size of a billboard, or shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp.
• Created as a vector art file: You need to have your logo as an EPS or Illustrator vector art file to enable it to be scaled, and to make it as easy as possible to use in the future.
• Assigned PMS colors, as well as CMYK and RGB colors. Having Pantone (PMS) colors on your logo will make printing your materials on a press more affordable. And, having CMYK and RGB colors as well will make your logo more flexible and consistent across different media, like online.
• Available to you in several file formats: You may get a request from a partner company to put your logo on their website as a GIF file. You'll need that format, as well as TIF, JPG, EPS, and probably a few others. Make sure you get these from your designer so that you don't have to spend time and money recreating these formats later on.
• Legible. You need to have your company's name be readable in the logo - no matter how big or small it is. And, this should be an easy read: no using flowery cursive fonts that make it hard to read your company's name. Your clients don't want to work that hard.
• Archived on a CD.  Better yet, archive it on a few CDs - keep one at a friends' house, another in your car, another in your home, and another in your office. It may seem excessive, but you never want to lose all your logo files. CDs are cheap and easy to burn these days, so you might as well go overboard.  

4. Your logo must be timeless. Don't develop your logo based on a trend - otherwise, you'll wind up looking dated, like all of those computer/technology companies from the late 1990s that had "swooshes" in their logos. You don't want your clients to be able to tell when you started your business just by looking at how outdated your logo is. Also, if you're creating your logo based on a trend, you'll be more likely to look like your competition instead of creating a logo that looks unique. 

You want your logo to be able to last the entire lifetime of your business - so that you will be able to build up brand equity by using the same logo for years. You'll also be able to make a better connection with your clients by using the same logo again and again. Just repeating your graphics can make your company more memorable and can help your customers feel comfortable with you.

Even the "big companies" who rebrand their companies usually use some of the same elements in their redesigned logo. And, when they don't, they're looking at an expensive marketing and advertising campaign just to roll out the new logo and to retain their customers' trust. As a small business, you don't have the time or the money to throw away introducing a redesign - so if you do wind up with a logo that needs updating, just doing a few tweaks will probably be more beneficial than throwing the whole thing out and starting over again.

Your logo's jobs

Your logo's jobs are: 

1. To communicate to your target audience. Your logo should tell your business's story to your target audience. The 4 things you need to know: 

• Who you are (your personality, values, and mission - as a business)
• What you do (the products/services you provide, and how you deliver them)
• What makes you different from your  (what makes you stand out?)
• Who you can best help (what customers do you enjoy working with?)

Remember that your brand's job is to communicate the first 3 points above to the audience described in the 4th - not to "explain yourself in your own words", but rather to explain yourself in words they will connect and identify with.

2. To stand out. The logo has to stand out from the competition's art, and to be memorable for your prospects and clients. If it doesn't look different from your competitors' logos, then it may be mistaken for theirs - which can mean that they'll assign your communications to your competitors in their minds - which is definitely not what you're going for.

And, if your prospects can't remember your logo, then it will be harder to catch their attention. It's not often that someone will have a need for your product or service the second that they come across your materials - it's much more common for someone to shop around for a product or service. If they can't remember your logo, and by extension, your company, then you might not get the project or sale.

The Marketing Money-Pit

I did a lot of home improvement last summer, and found myself thinking about that old Tom Hanks movie, "The Monday Pit" - where a couple tries to repair a house that just keeps falling apart under them. The stairway falls apart, the bathtub falls through the floor, the chimney collapses... the repairs go on, but the house keeps getting into worse and worse shape.

Now, my house was never in that state - the changes that we made to it were mainly cosmetic (and, making those improvements were hard enough!). But, we specifically bought our house because it was newer, and to avoid "Money Pit" type problems - I didn't want to face those types of projects and problems with my first house. 

But, of course, I started thinking about how the concept of a Money Pit house relates to a small business brand. I've run into a lot of entrepreneurs who tell me "I've been marketing my business for years - but I just feel like I'm making more and more promotional materials and not getting anywhere with it".

And you spend postage or e-zine credits sending these promotions out into what seems like a big, empty customer-less void. Or, you spend money on your yearly website hosting fee - without getting any leads from it. You go to networking events, tell people your "elevator pitch" - and then get a blank stare in return.

That's how it feels to have a brand that's a Money Pit. 

You hire designers, and writers to put these promotions together, or maybe you're just writing and designing things yourself - in which case it's just a Time Pit, but your time is worth a lot, right? And it just never seems to get you anything in return - no customers, no inquiries, and no work! This is definitely not what you're spending your time and money to get back - you want to create promotions that go out into the world and get results.

How to create a brand that's a client machine instead of a Money Pit.

1. Create a Brand Definition: Having a clear definition of who you are, what you do, what makes you different and who you best help can help drive your marketing efforts.

2. Market consistently: In both a sense of timing - how often you market (not sending out a newsletter every day for a week and then going silent for 6 months!) and in a brand sense (how you design your materials and how you write them). This consistent repetition helps your prospects to remember you when they have a need, and increases the chance that your materials might be in front of them at the right time.

3. Create a marketing plan: By having a plan, you'll be able to set out a strategy that will get you the marketing exposure and kit you need without running around in a sense of panic trying to "fix" things. Part of the frustration of having a Money Pit is that you're just bouncing from project to project while things seem to be getting worse. But, if you sit down and plan out your marketing efforts instead of just reacting to events and panicking, you'll be able to create materials that look like they've been created more intentionally instead of thrown together - which can help you communicate with your prospects.

4. Mix up your marketing - but with a strategy. Instead of marketing one service one week, and something completely different the next, create a time line where you're marketing one product or service for a while, and then move on to the next. This will help you develop a conversation with the client around one product or service, and reinforce that feeling of consistency. 

Also, mix up your marketing methods - but not to the extent that you're printing things or creating web pages that won't be used. Always ask yourself how you'll use a marketing piece - if you're creating it just for one networking event, that might not be the best use of your time. Try to get the best bang for your marketing dollar and time.

If you market with intention, strategy and consistency, you'll be more likely to see great results for your marketing - instead of being dragged down into a branding Money Pit.

Branding Is Like a Fairy Tale

"Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a little girl who wore a red hood everywhere she went.

One day, her mother sent her to her grandmother's house in the next village, with some goodies in a basket. In order to get there, the little girl had to go through the woods. And, in the woods, she met a big, bad wolf. The wolf wanted to eat her up right there, but there were some woodcutters not so far off who would have chopped him to bits, so instead, he started talking to her.

"Where are you going with all those nice goodies?" the wolf asked. Now, the little girl didn't know that wolves were scary, and had no idea that one would want to eat her up. So, she told the wolf all about her grandmother's house, and the goodies, and whatever else she could think of.

The wolf took this information and raced to the grandmother's house, where he immediately ate the grandmother up. Then the wolf got dressed in her clothes and climbed into the grandmother's bed, and waited for the little girl, who would be much tastier than the old woman.

Finally the little girl arrived. They had a nice conversation about how big grandma's ears had gotten, and her teeth, and how well suited the wolf's mouth was for eating up little girls. And, finally, he got to eat the little girl all up."

It may not seem like the story of Little Red Riding Hood has much of a parallel to your business's brand. But, a good brand can be a lot like a story. Instead of being a story of a little girl going on a journey, and overcoming different challenges, the brand is the story of how you take your customer from just learning about your business to becoming a customer.

"Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a little girl who wore a red hood everywhere she went."

This is what the introduction to your brand should look like. Notice that instead of trying to tell you all of the details about what's going to happen in the story, this story picks out just a couple of important details. And, one of those details - the red hood - is a big differentiator for the main character. 

This is what the first introduction to your business - your main brand statement - needs to look like. Instead of trying to tell your clients every detail about your business and creating a confusing introduction, stick to the must-know facts - and if there's a differentiating factor in there, then that can be a big help.

"One day, her mother sent her to her grandmother's house in the next village, with some goodies in a basket. In order to get there, the little girl had to go through the woods. And, in the woods, she met a big, bad wolf. The wolf wanted to eat her up right there, but there were some woodcutters not so far off who would have chopped him to bits, so instead, he started talking to her."

Now, here's a bit of background - the situation that all this is set in. Plus, you've got the first problem statement - what big, bad wolf do you help your clients tackle?

"'Where are you going with all those nice goodies?' the wolf asked. Now, the little girl didn't know that wolves were scary, and had no idea that one would want to eat her up. So, she told the wolf all about her grandmother's house, and the goodies, and whatever else she could think of."

This section parallels how you should ask your clients questions about their needs, wants and problems, in order to uncover how you can really help them (not eat them up!)

"The wolf took this information and raced to the grandmother's house, where he immediately ate the grandmother up. Then the wolf got dressed in her clothes and climbed into the grandmother's bed, and waited for the little girl, who would be much tastier than the old woman."

Now, this is a bit extreme - you don't want to take the feedback you get from your customers and use it to trap them. But, you should write your brand statements and marketing packages to address their needs, in their words. And, think about who your best (tastiest) clients are - and how you can set yourself up to fill their expectations.

"Finally the little girl arrived. They had a nice conversation about how big grandma's ears had gotten, and her teeth, and how well suited the wolf's mouth was for eating up little girls. And, finally, he got to eat the little girl all up."

Again, tell your clients what characteristics make you stand out - this may be your personality, your services, your differentiators, or the type of client you specialize in serving. While you probably don't want to eat your clients all up, you do want to form a good business relationship with them, by letting them know what to expect beforehand. And, telling them what makes you stand out can make the job of sales and of working with them easier for you.

What does your business's fairy tale look like? And how can you create a story that you can tell to your clients to help you live "happily ever after" together?