What does your brand say about you?

An effective brand can give you the edge in increasingly competitive markets. It is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Branding is so much more than applying a logo in a consistent manner and using the right Pantone colours. Every form of communication should be pulling in the same direction, whether visual or tangible. Your communications should look and feel very similar, a bit like a uniform. Without the similarity you run the risk of losing your prospects and customers trust and loyalty because they can’t recognise, and then pinpoint communications back to you.

How can you develop your branding? A starting point.

Your logo should appear in a similar way on all marketing material and you should utilise the same typeface in all written communications (even email). It's a good idea to choose a small selection of colour ranges for your marketing material and you should always try and apply design styles consistently. Reinforce key messages in the same voice – the tone of your copy, put more of an emphasis on your key terms and the benefits of your services / products through repetition, but make it appealing (what do your prospects want to hear? We can save you time / money, etc).

Essentially, your material should present itself like a family – supporting and looking similar to each other.

But don't forget about other key areas:

If your staff need uniforms, make sure they match your company colours and have your logo printed on them. Branded promotional items should also reflect upon your services / products and your customer base, for example, it would be more beneficial and suitable for a web designer to giveaway branded mouse mats rather than umbrellas! Is the quality of your print up to scratch and does it look as good as your products / reflect the standard of your services?

Think long-term

With branding you need to think about the bigger picture and see it as being a long-term necessity, but start as you mean to go on. The core message of all successful brands never really changes and the leading brands are usually leaders because they have years of consistency under their belts.

The key is to have in place a very clear idea of what your brand is and how you will consistently communicate it. Why not start by writing the core proposition of your brand on a piece of paper and then put it in a prominent place where you will see it daily, next to a tick list of your achievable branding goals?

How to improve your website before you start to build it! Part 1

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Small business websites, before you build

We have found that many businesses do very little research into how websites work before they build their own. Our opinion is the more you know, the easier it is to get what you want first time.

This guide is aimed at small businesses who are thinking about purchasing or updating a website. Its purpose is to help you understand some of the important elements that make a website work, and will enable you to converse with your designer or programmer.

Hiring someone to build you a website

Many designers are not technical, many programmers are not designers, and neither are usually qualified for search engine optimisation. You should check how your site will be optimised for search engines and if this will be an additional cost to the design of the site.

Domain names

You will need to purchase a domain name (web address) and hosting facilities. These can usually be bought from one company. The web address will need to be registered to you (business owner) and the hosting is usually bought in 12 month plus blocks.

The cost of hosting can vary depending on the type of features you want to be included on your website and how large your site will be. Most small businesses with a 5-10 page website can get away with a basic package, if you are unsure talk to someone at the hosting company, they are usually quite helpful. Your designer or programmer may be able to help you too.

How to improve your website before you start to build it! Part 2

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Getting it right, the first time - Part 2

Page titles

Page titles are used by search engine robots to identify what your site is about and in which search results it should appear.

These can be found at the top left hand side of the page. Your title should reflect the content (text) of the page as well as being an outline of what the company does. Each page should have its own title that reflects the page content. If these two do not correspond you will find that your rankings in search engine results will drop lower.

Keywords

Keywords are words hidden in your page code, usally at the top of the page and are used by some search engines to understand where your pages should be listed in the search results. Goggle no longer uses them, but most of the other search engines do so it is important to include them in your site. You can view them on an existing site (yours or a competitors) by right clicking anywhere on a webpage and then clicking on ‘view source’ from the menu.

This is a great way to see which phrases etc your competitors are using. I usually recommend that you use about 8 words per page. Each page can have different words and phrases dependant on the page content.

Content

Content is the main body of text on your page. It should be descriptive of your products and services. I have the contact details on every page of my site and I made sure that my details are part of the page content rather than an image as most of my customers are based in the surrounding areas.

If you put your contact details on your website in an image file the search engines will not recognise them. They cannot read image or flash files.

Site maps

A search engine that finds one of your web pages will not automatically find all of the other pages of your website. The way to ensure that this does happen is to have a sitemap.xml file. This is an invisible file to everyone except the search engine robots. All they do is list all of the pages in your website and directs the robots to them. A web developer or designer should be able make you one.

Contact
People may be interested in your services but not ready to commit, produce a newsletter and offer copies of potential clients, this way you can obtain their contact details and gently keep reminding them of your services.

You should be ready to start gathering information for your build now.