Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

8 Secrets to Designing A Super-Fabulous Flyer

How do you design a flyer that will stand out on a crowded bulletin board and get people interested enough to grab one of your phone-number tabs? 

1. Write a compelling, interesting headline - focused on what your ideal client wants. Use interesting words to say it!

2. Outline the benefits to using your service. Don't use a lot of words - the people reading your flyer won't have a lot of time. Make your point quickly, clearly and concisely - why do people want to call you?

3. Add visual interest with a photo. Using a photo of yourself can build credibility and make your service seem more real. If you don't have one, or don't want to, you can use a stock photo in the design of your flyer.

4. Highlight a special offer. Make it a great deal to get response, and make it very prominent on the flyer.

5. Make your tabs big and bold. Include your website and phone number on them. And, if you're wondering if tabs are the way to go, think back to the last time you tried to write down a phone number from a flyer, or tried to remember a website. How well did that go? Make it as easy as possible for new clients to contact you.

6. Use color to reproduce your flyer. You can get color copies that are extremely affordable these days - watch your local color copy shops for sales, or try PS Print. Black and white just doesn't cut it - even if you use neon paper. That's just so 1999!

7. Include license numbers if you're required to. If your industry makes you use your license number on your marketing materials, stay compliant on your flyer by listing it at the bottom.

8. Think bold when it comes to graphics. Bold colors, fonts, shapes, and layout will help you stand out and help people read your flyer quickly.

Branding Question: Getting A Consistent Look When No One Is On The Same Page

How do I get a consistent look when no one appears to be on the same page?

Consistency is incredibly important - and sometimes hard to get. This is especially hard when you have many designers working on different projects. Here are some tips on how to make this happen:

1. Create your brand story, and circulate it to everyone in the company. This means giving it to the sales team, your vendors, your contractors and all of your staff - down to the administrative assistants. It should be a part of your training package

2. Make sure you have a set of logo files and that you make them available to all designers. This way, they'll have clean, usable copies of the logos to work with.

3. Create a consistent visual vocabulary and make the elements and specifications available in a brand asset collection and supporting documentation. The supporting documentation is often called a Brand Guide and lays out the rules for how the brand assets and visual elements should be used. These books also frequently have a "how not to use" section where you can put past mistakes and call out why they didn't work.

4. Consider creating templates for major marketing campaigns, or for certain marketing tools. Have your designers work off these templates so that everything does match.

5. Tell everyone that brand consistency is incredibly important, and that it will be a focus of the company's marketing from now on. Telling people specifically what you want can help. If they can't get with the program, consider hiring new designers who are really good at consistency.

6. Pare down to 1 designer. If you can, hire just 1 designer full time. It's easier for 1 person to be consistent with themselves. If you can't, make sure the designers have frequent check-in meetings to make sure the projects they're working on are consistent.

New Testimonial Rules

 Do you use testimonials to market your small business? (You should - they're great credibility-builders. But, I digress...) 

The FTC changed the rules about what your testimonials can say back in October of 2009. Here's how it boils down: 

1. If your testimonial talks about outstanding results, and these results aren't those seen by everyone who gets your product, you have to add a disclaimer stating "results not typical". 

2. You have to disclose if you gave payments or free products to the people giving your testimonials. 

3. Celebrities have to disclose their relationships with advertisers. 

If you already have testimonials, consider reviewing them and making sure that they're "up to par".

More details via www.ftc.gov

How To Start Out With Designing Printed Materials

Do you absolutely need to market with printed materials when you're first starting your business? It can be less expensive to go with online materials at the start, and offer you more chances to edit your copy - but, if you go to a lot of live networking events, or if your target audience just doesn't read or respond to online communications, you might really need to start with printed materials.

How do you design printed materials without messing up?

Printed materials have several elements to consider:

• The design of the page, to make sure it's eye-catching but not too busy or distracting
• The copy, to make sure it's easy to understand, compelling and leaves the prospect wanting more information or to purchase
• The offer, to make sure it's clear, easy to buy, and includes all the important details
• The printing, to make sure it's on good paper, has good color coverage, and that your files are prepared right to print correctly.  

This is a lot to go into a marketing piece, and it can be pretty overwhelming for a business owner who's just starting out. To simplify the process, here's what I recommend:

Choose a printed piece to design that's not too expensive to print. Starting out with a flyer or postcard makes a lot of sense - online printers like PS Print have low minimums on these pieces, and the cost per-piece is not very high. Starting out with something like a trifold brochure can be costly - the folding really adds to the price.

See if you can design a template that you can then edit yourself. Consider designing a flyer header (or having one designed),  and then place that into a Word file. Then, you can go into the Word document and edit the copy to create different flyers that are targeted to different prospects, or that have different offers, or even just different text. If you only need a few copies, you may even be able to print them out on your home or office printer. 

Then you can go to an event, hand them out, get feedback from actual prospects, and then go back to your computer and edit the flyer for the next event. 

Once you've perfected a piece that really works for you and for your prospects, then you can invest in having it professionally designed and printed.

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.

Follow Your Print Pieces With A Website

You can make your marketing materials more effective by including a call to action and a website address on your print and emailed materials, and then creating your website to offer more information and help the sale along to the next stage. Depending on the offer, your client, and the price point, the website may - or may not - be able to make the sale for you.

You've probably seen this in action on postcards and flyers. But, don't forget to use it on brochures, and even on your business cards (the back side is perfect for that). And, you can put a call to action on the bottom of your email, and use links in your email newsletters.

Car Marketing And Cell Phones

I was driving to a meeting yesterday, and got stuck in traffic behind a landscaper's truck.It was nicely branded - logo, phone number, and landscaper's license number all there on the truck. 

While I was sitting there, I started wondering whether the new cell phone laws in California have affected the effectiveness of having your phone number on your vehicle. People can't see a number and pick up the phone immediately - they have to make sure they have a headset and all that sort of thing. Does that result in the companies that have on-car branding getting fewer calls?

Postcard Design Thoughts

There are two ways to go when designing a postcard:

1. Relate the design closely to your brand. This can help to build a small business's overall brand recognition. But, if your brand has a very clean, light look and color palette, then your postcard might get overlooked in the mail.

2. Design the postcard first to be eye-catching. This doesn't mean you shouldn't match your brand at all, but instead that you should think first about the viewer's reaction when pulling the card out of the mailbox. Make sure you capture the viewer's interest with the look and offer, and then match it to your brand secondarily.

How To Get An Affordable Headshot

A bit ago, it was suddenly that dreaded time - time to get a new headshot taken for my business. My old headshot was terrifically out of date - since I'd had it taken, I'd lost a bunch of weight, cut all my hair off, and gotten Lasik, so I didn't wear glasses any more. As a result, I was pretty much unrecognizable when using the headshot as a point of reference when telling new clients who to look for when I'd do meetings at a Starbucks.

So, I needed new headshots. But I wanted a low-stress, low-cost way to get that done.

I can't take credit for this idea - my friend Kelly O'Neil of Uplevel Strategies actually suggested it. She suggested heading over to the local mall and going to the photo store - you know, the one in every mall where parents take their kids. I was a bit unsure about this - I didn't want to take a photo with giant blocks, or with a "fall leaves" background. But, I gave it a try.

I called in on a Wednesday, and got an appointment for the next day, right after the lunch hour. I walked in, asked for the white background, and took photos in 3 different shirts I'd brought for the occasion. I headed across the mall hallway for a sandwich, and by the time I was done, my proofs were ready. I looked through them all, and chose one - then ran a couple of errands while they printed it up.

Total time? An hour and 15 minutes. And I got a bunch of other stuff done while I was waiting. 

Total cost? Just over $18 for an 8x10 that I brought home, scanned, and resized for my website.

And, I don't think the result is half-bad!

So, now, no excuses for having poor photos to go on your marketing materials - next time, just try the mall. 

Don't forget the web for marketing

Many small businesses who are locally based (house painters, pet sitters, nannies and baby sitters, tutors, etc.) occasionally forget to use all of the marketing avenues that are available to them. Since most of their competitors' marketing is typically done via flyers, classified ads, referral, and occasional brochures, they can concentrate on making sure that they have matching marketing materials - flyers of their own, classified ads, and trifold brochures - instead of branching out into other types of materials.

To expand your business, consider developing marketing pieces that are different from your competitions'. More and more customers are looking for services - even local ones that used to be bought and sold on community bulletin boards - online these days. 

So, put up a simple website - with a bit of information about you, some info about your services and rates, testimonials from happy customers, and your contact information. It doesn't have to be terrifically complicated to be effective.

You can also use a blog service to set up a very simple website at an affordable price.

Then, get your website listed on local directories. Google has a local search, and you can get listed on directories like backfence.com or smalltown.com. Look up your local area in the search engines and see what directories are available to you, and take advantage of those.