Showing posts with label Brand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brand. Show all posts
The Importance Of Branding
When we meet someone new, within the first few seconds, we
instinctively formulate assumptions about who he or she is, what he or
she does, their personality, and so on. These assumptions are based on
nothing but visual communication, this universal facet of human
interaction holds true for the brands we interact with as well. Just as
we analyze people’s hair, clothes and polka-dot socks; a brand’s
corporate identity speaks volumes about the brand itself. A brand’s
corporate identity is far more than a mere collection of colors, fonts
and a logo. A brand’s corporate identity is in fact a promise, a promise
to your audience. Communicating the brand’s attributes, beliefs and
overall personality. The Googles and Coca Cola’s of this world
understand that about their brands.Brand Promise
A lot of time, money and design go into ensuring that when you pick up a Coke anywhere in the world, you do so with the promise of quality and refreshment. The red and white color pallet and iconic logo go beyond distinguishing the brand apart for the competition it also gives the audience a sense of the Coca Cola Company’s personality. Design professionals go to great lengths in creating exquisite corporate identities, which perfectly encapsulate a brand’s identity; every minute detail and design decision is carefully calculated, scrutinized and passed through a filter of expertise, talent and experience in the field of visual communication.Consistency
The paramount importance of a brands corporate identity emphasizes the need for consistency in adhering to the brand’s identity guidelines. Once design professionals have meticulously executed a brand’s identity, it runs the risk of counting for nothing if implemented incorrectly.Confusion is costly
Consider for a moment, that you visit a doctor, and you are diagnosed with a particular ailment, the next day you go back and you are diagnosed with a different ailment. The symptoms are the same but the diagnosis is wildly different, would this not cause you to lose confidence with your doctor? The same basic idea is applicable to the relationship between a brand and its audience. If a brands presence is not consistent across all platforms it results in doubt and confutation from your audience. If a brand uses a different hue of red in their stationary and their digital material or has varying types of fonts for their logo, the brands stands very little chance of establishing itself as a trusted/recognizable entity in its industry. It all boils down to the simple truth that people will not trust a brand if they do not understand what said brand stands for, what it believes and what it promises…Its Identity!Ready to start promote your business by website design? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
About the Author: Quite simply a design Super Amadeus!
Creative Design Easy Process
1 Brief:
Meetings to discuss the project in detail and clarify any technical
issues including objectives, budget, timetable and corporate identity
guidelines.
2 Research:
Information gathering phase. Research client offering(s) market and competitive landscape. Analysis of goals and objectives of client
offering(s) to deliver design and content in an effective campaign.
3 Visualize: Critical thinking phase. Develop
conceptual strategy and approach using analysis and conclusions of data
gathered. Conceptualize visual presentation methods based upon strengths
of client offering(s).
4.Design:
Articulation phase. Create the visual architecture of the conceptual
approach. Explore / develop color, type treatment, look and feel of the
design. Present comps and sketches for client review and discussion.
5 Create: Production phase. Designs created in final
format for print production and / or media outputs, online integration
or media presentation as needed. Production and delivery of
deliverables.Ready to start promote your business by Creative Design? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
Project Plan for Website Design
Average Completion time = 10 working days1. Client quotation acceptance (Receive 50% deposit)
2. Five working days for website design concept to be presented to client
3. Receive website text and pictures from the client. Five working days
(this can run parallel with task number two)
4. After website concept and content approval, it would take an average of
5 working days to populate the website with content.
5. Go-live with the new website will take 1 day
6. Final Payment
5 working days to populate the website with content.
5. Go-live with the new website will take 1 day
6. Final Payment
7. Content Management Training 4 hours
8. Free telephonic and email support for 1 month
8. Free telephonic and email support for 1 month
Ready to start promote your business by website design? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
5 Questions | Brand Development
Brand development is a process that, when properly executed, can produce results that drive both top and bottom line expectations inside the c-suite, AND better position your company in the minds of your customers.
However, conditions must be right (notice I didn’t say perfect) in order for your new brand building venture to be successful. Before you begin, you need to get real and ask yourself these five important questions.
1. Do you have total buy-in from everyone in the c-suite?
If the CEO, CMO, and CFO don’t believe in the branding process and the tangible financial outcomes, you’ll never get it off the ground. Brand development is something that needs to start from the top. It’s a culture change. Everyone in the company needs to know how important the process is, and only the CEO can make that crystal clear.2. Do you know why your brand matters, or should matter, in the eyes of the customer?
You should know why you’re in business in the first place. Is it just to make a profit? Probably not. Behind every great brand is a story of why they are in business. Find yours. It’s worth its weight in gold.3. Do you know what differentiates your brand from your competitors?
Many companies are in a price-driven commodity type businesses. Why drive to Walmart when I can go to Target? Why go to Burger King when I can go to McDonald’s? Every brand has something that makes them different than the competition. (hint: don’t say “best service” or “lowest prices”) Your differentiation is your brand essence. Protect it and be true to it.4. Can you prove it?
If you can prove those points of how and why you are different, you’ll be better positioned in the eyes of your customers. Perhaps you say you have the best selection of auto parts in the industry, yet customers consistently can’t get the parts they need from you, there’s a disconnect. If you make a claim of distinction around your brand, you better be able to follow through on it.5. Can you continue to prove it?
Big deal, you proved it. Can you keep proving it? If you claim to have the best-trained group of plumbers in Atlanta, then you better keep training them, over and over. If not, your competition will overtake you before you know it and your claim of distinction will become antiquated – and your customers will notice. Make it a point to continue to prove your claim(s) of distinction and stay true to your brand essence.So, did you pass? Are you ready to embark on the brand development process? Branding your business is a difficult job, but if you’ve asked the right questions, you’ll be well on your way to building a company that is successful in both your P&L and your customers’ eyes.
Brant Kelsey is principal and founder of Kelsey Advertising & Design, a brand marketing and strategy firm in LaGrange, Georgia. He is a Certified Brand Strategist through the Brand Establishment.
Ready to start your project? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
Content Marketing to Create an Irresistible Brand
Blog
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Brand
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Digital Marketing
,
Digital Pro
,
Online
Content is the cornerstone of modern marketing. Instead of forcing your message onto a reluctant audience, your business can use content to attract visitors, leads and sales. Better still, with its low costs and high rewards, content marketing offers an incredible ROI. So how can your business get started with content marketing?
What is Content Marketing?
For a succinct definition, we need look no further than Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute:
‘Content marketing is the strategic
marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and
consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience –
with the objective of driving profitable customer action.’
In other words, businesses attract customers, instead of
forcing their products and service onto a reluctant public. There’s less
of a need for expensive ad campaigns; no need for invasive phone, email
and web marketing; and lower costs and greater marketing efficacy as a
result.How does it work?
Content marketing relies on 3 core tenets: value, relevance and consistency.1) Value
For content marketing to attract people to your business, your content has to be valuable. It has to offer something – be it advice, guidance, interest, intrigue or controversy – that your target audience genuinely care about. Thankfully, value isn’t hard to create – and with a bit of effort, and a bit more strategy, you can create truly irresistible content.
- Problem solving content: Whether your website visitor is looking for advice, opinions or products, they’re trying to problem-solve. If your content manages to answer your visitor’s questions, and solve these problems, you’ve created genuine value.
- Market-beating content: Your content can improve upon existing content, adding greater depth and detail than anything that’s gone before.
- Emotive content: If your content can elicit an emotion, from delight to disbelief, you’ve created material that people care about.
- Convenient content: Most of the web’s useful information is spread across dozens, even hundreds, of websites. By compiling resources and information together, you create value through convenience.
2) Relevance
Value is completely subjective, and one man’s trash may literally be another man’s treasure. In order to attract the right type of people to your business, your content needs to be relevant to your target demographic. A ‘Complete Guide to Local SEO’
is a perfect piece of content for attracting small business owners –
but it’s no help if your website sells bespoke leather shoes.
3) Consistency
Selling requires trust – and most of the time, wowing a new
visitor with a stunning piece of content isn’t enough to ensure a sale.
Your business needs to regularly impress, and offer its visitors
valuable content time and time again. This consistency builds trust
between brand and visitor. It implies an understanding of a visitor’s
problems, and a desire to put their needs first. In other words, the
more value your business offers to a visitor, the more value you can expect in return.
Types of Content
‘Content’ can be a bit of an ethereal concept, with dozens of conflicting definitions floating around the internet. As Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains, the reality is much simpler:
‘Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.’
Virtually any medium can be used for content marketing – as long as
your target audience will engage with it. There’s no sense in creating a
technical whitepaper for a teenage audience, in the same way that blog
posts may be too casual for the technical director of a digital security
firm.Blog Posts
Blog posts are the heart and soul of thousands of successful content marketing strategies – and the stats explain why. HubSpot surveyed over 7,000 businesses, and reached the conclusion that blogging businesses generate 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages than their non-blogging counterparts. That means more traffic, more leads, and more sales.
Guides
There’s a lot of crossover between blog posts, articles and guides. Whilst a typical blog post probably clocks-in at 500 words, a guide might be more comprehensive and in-depth. Some subjects (like content marketing!) can’t be adequately covered in a short post, and may require multiple blog posts, or a longer guide. There are benefits to both approaches – and the ‘right’ choice will depend upon your target audience, and how they prefer to engage with content.
eBooks
eBooks allow businesses to show-off their expertise in the most in-depth and insightful way possible. Typically several thousand words long, an eBook acts as an authoritative resource on your chosen topic – often containing analysis, commentary, quotes, references, images, illustrations and statistics. Creating such valuable resources requires an investment of time and energy – but these efforts are quickly rewarded. By placing eBooks behind a CTA or contact form, you can trade your content in exchange for select details about your visitor – perfect for long-term lead-nurturing.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers tend to be super-technical, and require a relatively high
level of specialized knowledge and expertise. Whilst whitepapers will
offer low appeal to the everyday website visitor, they’re a powerful a
tool to use with more sales-qualified leads, and audiences from
specialized fields.
Videos
Sites like YouTube allow you to quickly create, share and embed videos. These videos are perfect for visually illustrating your content, and help to add variety to your content plan.
Infographics
Another visual medium, infographics make use of eye-catching design elements to create engaging and easy-to-digest content. Whilst infographics can’t contain as much information as a post or guide, they’re extremely easy to share and engage with.
Content Strategy
In order to attract the right people to your website, and engage with them in a productive and profitable way, your business needs to define its content strategy. This strategy will vary from business to business – but you should always address the following 4 elements:
1) Buyer Persona
Who are you targeting with your content? What are their ‘pain points’? How can your content solve these problems?2) Sales Funnel
Which part of the sales funnel are they in? Are they new leads, looking for basic information? Are they sales-qualified, and looking for technical information and case studies? Tailor your content according to their progression through the sales funnel.3) CTAs/Landing Pages
How can you tie your content into your own sales funnel? Which offers, promotions and CTAs will you use to nurture your leads?4) Distribution Channel
Which distribution channels will lead to the most productive engagement? Do your leads prefer social media, email or blogging? Choose a channel that resonates with your audience.
Ready to start your project? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
About Paul Letourneau
I'm a Digital Creative Strategist with with years of experience working for entrepreneurs, startups and international brands.
Source : http://turny.co/use-content-marketing-create-irresistible-brand/
How To Build a Brand Development Strategy That Works
What is your brand development strategy? You do have one, don’t you?
It may seem like common sense that if you want to grow your business you need to grow your brand, but how do you come up with a brand development strategy,
and how do you know if it is a good one? It may help to realize that
when you clear away all of the unnecessary details, a successful brand
development strategy has three main elements.- Understand Your Customers
- Be Relevant
- Be Patient
Understand Your Customers
The first element of your brand plan is to make sure you truly understand your customers.
Understanding what really drives their behavior will inform all your
branding decisions, as well as determine the direction your brand
development strategy will take. The more you understand your customers
the better you can predict how they will respond to your marketing, and
that really is the key. Understanding them is key to being relevant to
them, too.
Be Relevant
Once you’ve determined what motivates your customers you can start to
answer the question, “What need does my product fill?” This is quite
possibly the most important question you will ever ask in regards to
your brand development strategy. For your company and its services to
become meaningful in the eyes of both present customers and future ones,
your product needs to be relevant; it needs to fulfill a need.People have many needs and it is quite possible that your product could fulfill several of them. This is where understanding what motivates your customers will help you decide which needs are most fundamental and therefore most effective. Customers are often very creative creatures. Listen carefully to what they tell you and your sales/service staff. Once you identify a need that your company can satisfy, the goal is to associate your product with the fulfillment of that need in the minds of the public. If you can do that, you’re well on your way to solid brand development. Strategy aside, it’s just common sense to ask yourself what your product can do for your customers. When it comes to your advertising, they are certainly asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?”
Be Patient
The third element is simply to be patient. Implementing a solid brand
development strategy can be a very long and slow process. It takes time
to change the way the public thinks abou your product, and it is
important that you be prepared to take the necessary time to do so
effectively.For your brand development strategy to be truly effective it needs to result in strong communication and positioning that lasts. If you are in too much of a hurry, if you cut corners and take shortcuts, your carefully built image could be as fleeting as a morning fog. Take your time, play the long game and build your brand slowly and patiently on a solid foundation. If you’ve taken the time to discover and communicate the needs your product fills, your patience will be rewarded.
Ready to start your project? Get in touch with us via our Contact us!
Brant Kelsey is principal and founder of Kelsey Advertising & Design, a brand marketing and strategy firm in LaGrange, Georgia. He is a Certified Brand Strategist through the Brand Establishment.
Reference:
http://www.kelseyads.com/how-to-build-a-brand-development-strategy-that-works/
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