The Importance of Logo Design
Your Logo is a Part of Your Brand
Your logo is one of the most important aspects of your brand identity as a company. Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business. But what exactly does “branding” mean? How does it affect a small business like yours?
Branding is your competitive edge, and your promise to your customer. It’s what your company can offer to your customers that others can’t. What makes you unique? Are you the cutting edge maverick in your industry or the experienced, dependable one? Is your product the high-cost, high-quality option, or the low-cost, high-value option? The biggest mistake companies make when establishing their brand is trying to be all things to all audiences. Who you are should be based on who your target customers want and need you to be. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates you from your competition.
Your website, packaging and promotional materials–all of which should integrate your logo–communicate your brand. Too often, businesses are quick to change or alter their identity (this includes your logo, the colors used in your logo, marketing materials, and website, as well as other important parts of your company’s mission statement). Too much of this can be confusing to your existing customers. One rule of thumb is that when you have become tired of your logo, tagline, and branding efforts, that is when they begin to sink in with your customers. Branding, first and foremost, is about consistency.
Your logo
The foundation of your brand is your logo. When designing a logo, graphic designers try to present your company’s values visually. Be prepared to discuss your company’s values, goals, and information about your target audience, as this will help the designer develop your logo. Once the designer has a good idea of the image you hope to portray, he or she will use fonts, color, placement, size, graphics, and design motifs to convey this to your customers.
Thanks for Reading!
Amy Fedele, Creative Director
BullzeyeDesign.com
Add comment September 25, 2008
Brand Strategy: Tips on Creating and Defining Your Brand
Branding is not marketing. Rather it is an integral part of your marketing strategy. It’s also an important part of how you interact with clients, prospects, vendors, employees, and anyone else with whom you come in contact. Branding creates an image.
Your brand strategy is how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand messages. Where you advertise is part of your brand strategy. Your distribution channels are also part of your brand strategy. And what you communicate visually and verbally are part of your brand strategy, too.
Consistent, strategic branding leads to a strong brand equity, which means the added value brought to your company’s products or services that allows you to charge more for your brand than what identical, unbranded products command. The most obvious example of this is Coke vs. a generic soda. Because Coca-Cola has built a powerful brand equity, it can charge more for its product–and customers will pay that higher price.
The added value intrinsic to brand equity frequently comes in the form of perceived quality or emotional attachment. For example, Nike associates its products with star athletes, hoping customers will transfer their emotional attachment from the athlete to the product. For Nike, it’s not just the shoe’s features that sell the shoe.
Defining Your Brand
Defining your brand is like a journey of business self-discovery. It can be difficult, time-consuming and uncomfortable. It requires, at the very least, that you answer the questions below:
- What is your company’s mission?
- What are the benefits and features of your products or services?
- What do your customers and prospects already think of your company?
- What qualities do you want them to associate with your company?
Tips
Do your research. Learn the needs, habits and desires of your current and prospective customers. And don’t rely on what you think they think. Know what they think.
Because defining your brand and developing a brand strategy can be complex, consider leveraging the expertise of a nonprofit small-business advisory group or a Small Business Development Center.
Once you’ve defined your brand, how do you get the word out? Here are a few simple, time-tested tips:
- Get a great logo. Place it everywhere.
- Write down your brand messaging. What are the key messages you want to communicate about your brand? Every employee should be aware of your brand attributes.
- Integrate your brand. Branding extends to every aspect of your business–how you answer your phones, what you or your salespeople wear on sales calls, your e-mail signature, everything.
- Create a “voice” for your company that reflects your brand. This voice should be applied to all written communication and incorporated in the visual imagery of all materials, online and off. Is your brand friendly? Be conversational. Is it ritzy? Be more formal. You get the gist.
- Develop a tagline. Write a memorable, meaningful and concise statement that captures the essence of your brand.
- Design templates and create brand standards for your marketing materials. Use the same color scheme, logo placement, look and feel throughout. You don’t need to be fancy, just consistent.
- Be true to your brand. Customers won’t return to you–or refer you to someone else–if you don’t deliver on your brand promise.
- Be consistent. I placed this point last only because it involves all of the above and is the most important tip I can give you. If you can’t do this, your attempts at establishing a brand will fail.
As always, Thanks for reading
Amy Fedele, Creative Director
Bullzeye Design – Targeting Your Graphic and Web Needs!
Resources:
Wikipedia: http://www.graphixstation.com/branding.html
Add comment September 24, 2008
Your Holiday Marketing Timeline
September
- Craft some text for your holiday specials. Have a brainstorming session to come up with some creative copy. Ask everyone you know which one they would buy. Once you’re happy with the offerings and your text, talk to your graphic designer about implementing the special onto your website. They can create a graphic or button for you to draw attention to your new special.
- Double check to be sure your supply chain can accommodate your specials. There’s nothing worse than having time sensitive orders you can’t fulfill.
October
- Put the specials up on your Web site, make them pretty and appealing – link from your homepage or feature specials on the homepage. On these pages you’ll be able to market “seasonally” for these specials. Instead of just saying “unique ties for men” you can target it towards the holidays; “christmas and holiday ties: gifts for the man in your life”.
- Design an email marketing blast to go out to everyone on your list. If you’re really prepared, you’ve collected these from every online buyer you’ve had over the last year (or five), and you have a wide base of possible customers that want to be exposed to your holiday specials.
- Put the email blasts on your Web site. (Yes, before you send them out to your email list – it’s okay, I promise.) Email blasts are news, so put them on your Web site or blog, go visit some other blogs or forums, and talk about what you’re offering, then add the link to your email signature. Optimize this new content and get the search engines looking into what’s going on ahead of time. If you’re putting this up in early October, those pages should be indexed and ranking by Christmas.
- Send out the first blast in October – you probably won’t get many buyers yet, you’re just planting the seed with this email campaign.
- Write three more email marketing blasts to capitalize on shoppers in early November, the week before Thanksgiving, and the week before the last possible day you can ship your product to reach customers prior to the holiday.
- You want to be prepared for Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving). The term Cyber Monday, a neologism invented by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division, refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, which unofficially marks the beginning of the Christmas online shopping season. In response, many retailers now encourage people to do their online shopping at home on Thanksgiving Day itself by offering their Black Friday sales online that day.
November
- This is when your hard work in September and October will pay off. Send out the emails you prepared for early November and Thanksgiving week. If you have a great email marketing team, send copy to them in October with instructions on when to send. You’re going to be busy and won’t have time to think about it then, so have it done and ready to go.
- Visit (or have friends visit) some social networking sites. Find out where people are talking about holiday shopping and online shopping, letting them know you’ve got specials and packages. A link from these sites will always help. Myspace, Facebook, or any industry-specific blogs you can find will do the trick. If you are in the electronics business, search google for “electronics blogs or forums” — sign up and start posting about your specials. This can be time-consuming, but it’s free advertisement for your company. Be sure to add your URL and keywords to the SIGNATURE of your account and any relevant information you post in these forums can help get you visitors to your site and help with your search engine ranks.
December
- Send out your last email blast and then take advantage of last-minute shoppers by offering them “one click” buying from the homepage. Give them last minute gift options in the email. Feature a description of your special, a “buy it now” link straight to the credit card form, and it’s done. Make sure you let them know when the last possible day to buy online is, so they can get the item shipped to them or their gift recipient on-time. Don’t worry about shipping; procrastinators know last minute shipping is expensive, and they’ve learned to deal with it.
- Tip: One thing I look for when I’ve procrastinated is the lovely phrase, “free shipping.” I’m just dumb enough to pay a bit more for a product if the shipping is free. Wrap some shipping cost into the product price, and give the impression of a discount along with the “package deal” you’re already offering.
Have a Stress-Free Holiday Season
Plan ahead. Get content on your site early to rank for the holiday season. This time of year is extremely competitive, and if you have a strategy that makes it easy to execute when you’re busy, the holidays won’t seem so hectic. Give it a try, jump on board with those early holiday revelers, and hopefully, your holidays will be merry and stress free.
resource: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626915
Add comment September 24, 2008
Design & Marketing for the Holiday Season – Tip #8
Allow Shoppers to Narrow Their Search
Giving the customer advanced search features will help them to make a purchase more quickly and easily
This is my last tip for your holiday marketing plans. Creating a custom sort feature can help your customers narrow down their search into a price range and category that is customized to them. Another way to do this is by doing a “sort by price” feature within the category. For example, if you sell guitars and accessories and someone clicks on acoustic guitars… they can range anywhere from $150 – thousands of dollars. Once they are in the section if you give them the option to sort the items by price, they wont have to scroll through possibly dozens of pages to find something in the price range they are looking for. And by using that feature they are less likely to miss items for sale from tunnel vision of scanning so many items that are irrelevant.
That’s all I have for this year. I wish you all the best of luck and success this holiday season. Remember these tips to help prepare your store for the holidays and make the most out of this busy online shopping season.
Amy Fedele
Creative Director
BullzeyeDesign.com
Add comment September 23, 2008
