Why You Need A Brand, Not Just A Logo
When it comes to branding, your first thought is probably an eye-catching and memorable logo. Indeed, a great logo is important, but it is only one tiny aspect of your brand. A brand is more than a logo, and furthermore, it is more than a presence of company colours, taglines and logo’d business products. In fact, your brand is the architecture of your business from which you build all business activities on.
The Definitions
Logo – The visual identification of a business by a distinctive marking or symbol.
Brand – All of the senses and emotions a person feels when interacting with your business.
Developing The Perfect Branding
Compared to branding, creating a logo is easy. The difficulty in creating the perfect branding is the fact that a brand is actually formed from customer perception. You cannot make people feel a certain way about your brand, but you have the tools available to create branding material that can help to shape and influence the audience’s perception.
You can create the imaging of your business and align these images with your goals. However, it is up to the public to form the impression of your brand. You then need to capitalise on this perception to ensure that your brand remains relevant and consistent.
How To Build A Great Brand
- Meet expectations
Through your interaction with customers and prospects, you should remain consistent with your approach and always meet their expectations. Every interaction should be the same so that your customers can build their own expectations of what they should receive from your brand.
- Don’t give up
Many businesses feel their branding isn’t working and begin a rebrand too soon. However, a brand is built through perseverance over time. Continually deliver on-brand messages to improve brand awareness and relevancy.
- Be you
It is tempting as a new business to spread and expand into different markets. However, this can dilute your brand and make your message unclear. Try to refrain from developing too quickly, until your branding is starting to take effect.
Want to start building your brand today? Speak to Brand+Code and we can help you get started!
Opens vs Clicks: How To Measure Email Marketing Success
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing methods out there. In fact, 59% of B2B marketers say that using email newsletters is still the most effective marketing tool to generate revenue. However, all businesses are vying for space in their customer’s inbox. So, how do you check your campaign is working and measure its success? Is the best way through opens, or clicks?
How Should You Measure Your Success?
It is important to know how you will measure success before you begin any campaign. Having a goal in place and your metrics ready to measure is essential. Every email you send needs to be tracked. For emails that aren’t hitting the mark, you do not want to be posting similar content out again.
Opens
This measurement is tracking the number of people that have opened the email to view the content. Your open score only measures the people that wait for the images to load and sees the email. It does not count the people that open it to close or delete it immediately.
You also have an open rate; this will be the number of individuals that opened the emails divided by the number of emails you sent to individuals. This will exclude the number of bounces.
Clicks
The click-through rate is the number of people that not only read your email but scroll to your call to action and click on it. This shows not only people being interested in receiving emails from you but interacting with your content too. This helps you to determine which content your users enjoy and resonate with the most.
Which Should You Measure?
Quite simply, you should measure both. Your open rate will help you to determine how catchy your subject and header is. This will show you how compelled individuals are to see your content. However, for more significant analysis of your email content, the number of clicks will show you what is working well and what is not working at all.
In fact, with all metrics in place, you help to refine your target audience and work out what they want from your emails. With over 196 million emails being sent every single day, it is essential to use all the metrics you have available to ensure your emails stand out.
Why You Need Social Media Management
In the scheme of digital marketing, social media will dominate a large proportion of your strategy. Social media is incredibly effective at not only growing small businesses but maintaining customer relationships and influencing conversions. However, with so many platforms, it can be hard to develop your presence across all of them effectively. This is why your business needs social media management.
Can’t I Just Focus On One Social Media Platform?
Of course, if you want to simplify your social media management, it is possible only to use one platform. However, this will dramatically reduce your reach, and each platform serves a valuable purpose, especially when you consider these incredible statistics:
- Facebook is the most visited website of all websites.
- 53% of Twitter users recommend products and companies on the platform
- There are 800 million active YouTube users.
- Five million photographs are uploaded to Instagram every single day.
It is clear that each platform has a valuable function for your business. However, many organisations neglect their social media because they;
- Don’t have the time
- Don’t know what to share
- Are unsure of the best social media practices #confusion
- All of the above.
That’s completely understandable. Businesses should focus on what they do best and leave the digital marketing to specialist social media management businesses.
What Does Social Media Management Involve?
Research has found that small business owners spend around 33 hours every single week on marketing activities. This is no surprise as marketing is an intensive task. However, wouldn’t businesses be more successful if owners were spending the majority of their time on running and growing their business by focusing on what their business does best? The key to success is to delegate the tasks to people who are experts in their field.
By outsourcing social media management; you have a team of experts to;
- Create an editorial calendar
- Respond to messages and stimulate audience engagement
- Come up with the perfect, timely updates
- Engage with other thought leaders and relevant contacts in your industry
- Curate content and re-purpose shareworthy news
- Utilise analytics to determine the best times to post content.
These are just some of the tasks that social media management can help you with. By outsourcing these activities, you not only maximise your social impact but also give your business back the valuable time it needs. Therefore, you can save money as well as having one less thing that your busy organisation needs to worry about!
Don't wait to start utilising Social Media Management, speak to Brand+Code today!
Are You Mac or PC?
Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have spent endless amounts of time pondering some of the most important debates in history: Did Han shoot first? Or was it Greedo?, Were Ross and Rachel on a break?, Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke? Now, we all know that Han did, in fact, shoot first (regardless of what George Lucas would have you believe) but what about Macs and PCs, which of these titanic machines really does reign supreme?
It may seem pretty obvious that for designers, it’s got to be a Mac. And many would agree. But they can be pretty expensive – for the money you’d spend on an iMac, you could potentially build a PC from scratch to the same specifications and also save yourself some cash.
Macs do tend to be the best platform for design and creativity, that’s mainly down to the strength of its applications and the fact that Macs are usually top quality machines.
Not to say there aren’t PCs that could do the job just as well. Considering you can build a PC, it can basically be anything you want it to be (You could even install a Mac OS on to it if you were so inclined). The only real issue is that there are applications that only run on Macs, and sometimes their PC counterparts can be bug-ridden after-thoughts.
Until I started my first ‘proper’ job in design, I was a champion of the PC (mainly because I couldn’t afford a Mac) and it was fine. It had enough RAM and good enough hardware to cope with the Adobe applications I needed it to run.
Macs always frightened me with their lack of buttons and simple app icons, but by the end of my first week working on my Power Mac G5 (old school, I know) I had fallen in love with the fluidity and simple elegance of the machine. And I firmly believe that once you’ve had Mac, you can never go back!
But that’s just me! What’s your preference? And more importantly, why?
Typography & Truth
The New York Times ran an experiment which concluded that typography can influence our perception of the truth. For instance, if we read a fact that was written out in the dreaded Comic Sans, we’d perhaps view that fact differently than if it were written in a more aesthetically pleasing font like Helvetica.
For the uninitiated among you, a font is an assortment of type that shares a style and size and a typeface is the style or design of the font (i.e. bold, italic etc). Serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Garamond have small lines at the ends of character strokes. They’re commonly used in books and newspapers, due to their high readability on paper.
Sans serif fonts are a category of typefaces that do not use serifs. Various studies have come to the conclusion that sans serif fonts are more difficult to read on paper. That’s why in print they are seen more often as headlines and captions.
Looking past the physical properties of these typefaces, there is also the cultural significance. What does the font you choose say about you or your business, and what impact might it have? Serif fonts are associated with academia and authority, which may be important to you if you’re looking to instil feelings of trust in your reader. Or, if you want to align yourself or your brand with youth and modernity, a sans serif font would be the way to go.
In the New York Times experiment, readers were shown a statement written in one of five fonts: Georgia, Helvetica, Trebuchet, Comic Sans and Baskerville. Interestingly, more people believed the statement when it was written in Baskerville – a serif font – than the other four typefaces.
So, does the font you use really matter? If the New York Times is to be believed, then the answer is yes.
Your font choice could really affect people’s perception of you and your services – it may hold the power to make people choose your service over the competition, upgrade to a higher ticket product or even pay the premium rates you’ve always wanted to charge…
