Thursday 11, February 2010

New Year Resolutions

I realized towards the end of last year that it had been a while since I sent my last email newsletter. So I made it a resolution to get back on track with my communications. Since it’s February already I better get going :)

First I’d like to thank all of my clients for their ongoing business. I feel very fortunate to have such a great group of clients and I look forward to our on-going business relationship.

One of my other resolutions was to find companies that were the best of the best and find a way to help them get their word out. So far this year has been shot out of a cannon and I have brought on some fantastic new clients from technology and telecomm to restaurants and online stores it's been a great start to a great year.

My last big resolution was to take a look at my own branding and give it a face-lift. It's been almost 8 years that I have been in business and it's time. I'm very excited about launching something new. So this newsletter is a little sneak peek to what my new website will look like. If you would like to stay in touch with all the changes I'll be making please become a fan on my facebook page or follow me on twitter. You can click the icons on the left to stay connected.

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Don't Be Just A Brand in the Crowd

Create Distinct Pieces That Make You Stand Out

While you are designing and developing your materials, make sure that they stand out from the crowd. One of the biggest mistakes business owners do is “Copy Cat Marketing.” If someone else in your industry is doing something then do something totally different. Be creative, and if you need help then talk to a professional designer.

Differentiate your products or services: Differentiate so that your business, because of its unique identity, comes to the top of mind when your potential clients really need you—or when they have the opportunity to refer your services.

Get to know your competitors’ materials: If your competitors use certain colors or design elements throughout their materials, it is better to avoid using those components in your materials, so that your materials are not easily confused with theirs.

Your visual identity is the supporting graphics that work in tandem with your logo to form the graphic face of your business. Combining your logo with these additional graphic elements to develop a solid identity has several benefits, including:

• Increasing your brand’s memorability: Give your marketing materials more designed graphic elements and adding more visuals makes your materials, and your company, more memorable.
• Making your brand designs more flexible: Defined graphic elements can provide you with a set of visuals that are more loosely tied to your business than your logo–which means that you can exchange and recombine those elements for different campaigns, service offerings, or products. You can also redesign your graphic elements during the life cycle of your business, updating and refreshing your materials as necessary, while still backing them with a solid logo and brand identity base.
• Making your business’s materials stand out from the competition: These graphic elements can add a lot of personality to your materials, and differentiate them from your competition’s marketing pieces. You can also add visual information to your materials, such as a character, to help to tell your business’s story. Just be creative and think outside the box.
• Adding to the consistency of your marketing materials: When you use well designed graphic elements across all of your marketing materials, you’ll have more to add to your visual consistency.
  
• Making a small business look larger: By expanding your brand design with more surrounding graphics, you’ll make your business look much bigger. When you have a polished professional looking design it shows that you care enough about your business to invest in it. This gives the impression that you larger then you are because most small business don’t invest in their marketing materials. So your prospects will think you’re not a small business.

Added design elements provides a powerful key for your target market to better understand your business—what you offer and how you work.

The more you can distinguish your business from the competition the easier it is for your customer to remember you, find you, get to know you, and hire you when they’re ready for your services.

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