Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

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.

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. 

Consider evolving your designs instead of starting over

If you need to make changes to your logo, marketing materials, or website (or all of the above), then consider evolving it slightly instead of throwing everything you have out and starting over again.

Evolving your designs will allow you to retain the visual history that you've developed while still refreshing your brand. And that can be valuable - to enable you to 

Also, evolving your designs will probably be less of a cost- and time-hit than it would take to redesign everything from scratch. And what small business doesn't like that?

Of course, if your designs really aren't working for your business, then you may want to consider redesigning - just consider also whether evolving them may work for you.

Make sure you have a market

When you start a business, you have to make sure that there are people out there who will buy your products and services. (Your mom doesn't count.) 

Ideally, you want a market group that will either have to buy from you over and over again, or is re-filling all the time with new members, or just a market with money and want. 

In any case, your market needs to know that they need you, and want you enough to pay you. Your product/service can be great, but if the market thinks they can do/make it themselves, then it will probably be difficult to convince them that they should make a purchase from you. And if the market refuses to believe that your service is as important as you think it is, then that can also make sales difficult.

Even your wardrobe can be a part of your brand

Your company's visual brand includes your graphic designs - your logo, business card, brochure, and website - but it also includes all of the visual elements that your clients see.

• Your clothes. Especially those clothes in your head shot.
• Your hairstyle.
• Makeup.
• The interior design of your office, if you have clients and vendors over for meetings.
• The kind of car that you drive.

I'm not saying that you should go crazy trying to impress clients with these elements, but do make sure that the appearance of these elements aligns with your brand message. 

You may also consider matching your clothes to your brand colors for greater visual reinforcement (though this isn't required, and you should make sure that whatever you wear looks great on you).

Recognizing change in yourself and your business

Sometimes you wake up and just feel like everything's different. That you've changed, and that in that change, your small business has changed as well. Just that in the space of living, and growing, that it's time to change everything

This snuck up on me - and once I finally realized that things had changed, I realized that it was time to remodel my business and change up the website to match. And, that means both redesigning the look to match my new brand direction (though the logo's staying the same - both because it's trademarked and because I'm not absolutely crazy!) and rewriting all the copy and content to explain my slightly-new focus.

So, I just wanted to say that if you look up one day and discover that your life has changed, you might look into your business as well. It's likely that the change would sneak across those lines and spread around a bit.

Give yourself a pat on the back

Or, better yet, a prize!

I've been going through this grueling website redesign/recode/rewrite project (redoing my own site), and it's really taking a lot of time and energy. I've been working on it full time for a couple of weeks now. 

About 4 days into the project, I found myself asking myself "Hey, it's summer! Why are you in here, coding HTML like a crazy person, when you could be in a chaise lounge at the gym by the pool, or off on a romp with the puppy? Are you crazy?"

That's when I realized that doing this project was extra-important to me, and that I had to keep going. If I didn't get my site updated, and the fall crush of business hit, then it'd get pushed back and back and back again until my business changed all over again and then I'd have to toss everything I've worked on and start again. Considering how much headway I've made, that sounds like a pretty awful idea. I could even go with "gross".

So, I decided that I needed to get extra motivated now that I could see the alternative to being cooped up in my office, typing away all day. (And that alternative seemed delightful!) So I gave myself a reward item. This works just like getting paid at the end of a professional project. Once the website is completed, I get to do something really nice for myself. It might be a spa day. I might go buy a new purse, or check out the fall fashions. Or go to the fabric store and splurge on craft supplies. I know I need to define the reward better before I finish, or I'll want all of the options to be the reward, but even just putting a prize to it is helping me to keep motivated on this beautiful weekend... 

Book recommendation

I just finished reading "The Reach of a Chef" - and I was surprised how much this book talked about branding and growing your business. If you're interested in food or cooking and you're thinking about branding your business or growing your brand, then give this book a read.

Check out the book

Being just you vs. being a company

If you have a one-person business, there are two ways that you can go about branding yourself. 

You can brand yourself as just yourself, and create a logo based on just your name and your personality. The advantage to this is that the business brand can be very tied to you - which means that your customers will typically expect to have you involved directly in their accounts and possibly even the day-to-day management of their projects.

Or, you can brand yourself as a larger business entity. In this type of brand, you typically give your company its' own name and concentrate on separating your personality from the company's. This can help you manage customer relationships, and can also help your company grow later on. But, it can take more soul-searching and work to initially set up.

What don't you do?

When you're creating your business brand, it's as important to think about what you don't do as well as what you actually do.

Some questions:

- Who don't you help?

- What services don't you perform? 

- What sort of results don't you create?

- What sorts of things would you refer out to colleagues for?

- What would you be relieved to not have to do any more?

- If you had to talk your clients out of going with one aspect of your services, which one would you choose?

And, then, some new questions about what you really want:

- If you had to pick one or two things to do day in and day out, what would those be?

- If you had to focus down to one single thing, what would help your clients the most?

- What do you want to be known for?

- What do you prefer to do? 

- What comes easily for you?