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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Copper Penny Marketing

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A penny isn’t much.  It doesn’t buy anything really and the amount of copper in it is pretty negligible nowadays.  However, as Melinda from this week’s Small Business Spotlight points out, most everyone has a pretty specific, penny-centric memory.  For me, it’s collecting pennies with my dad and bringing to the bank for some extra spending cash.

Copper Penny Marketing believes marketing should be like a penny:  subtle, relatively inexpensive, but highly evocative.  Melinda has a ton of experience working in the world of agriculture and learned that small farmers have only a small voice when it comes to conversations about food.  Yet, they often have stories that reach back generations.  Copper Penny Marketing focuses on celebrating this kind of heritage, primarily in B2B relationships.

Melinda answered a few questions I had:

How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother? 

 Just one short month ago, I left my previous position to start my own marketing and PR company, Copper Penny Marketing.  Our goal is to  helps small business in agriculture, food or any segment of small business, bring voice to their ideas and their products.  What I understand is that small businesses have nominal resources in both staffing, time and financial inputs and they need affordable creative solutions that provide direct ROI and make significant impact.  That’s the whole premise behind Copper Penny Marketing.

What made you use crowdSPRING? 

I use in-house and freelance designers, but I’ve also been using crowdSPRING for the past several years.  It is often an opportunity to jumpstart creative and get a lot of ideas on the table for a reasonable amount of money.  Single designers often only present a few ideas and have a very specific style.  Having multiple designers participate in a project opens up the boundaries of what’s possible.

What are some industry specific challenges you faced?  

Budgets for many clients continue to be the biggest hurdle when implementing new marketing projects.  Many clients are often inexperienced and underprepared for the cost of marketing.  It’s also sometimes difficult to quantify marketing in dollars and cents.  A production change can be quantified by a cost savings, efficiency, etc.  Marketing often just looks like an intangible expense since the results of success and brand impact take time to build.

What was your biggest learning curve/experience? 

My biggest learning curve throughout my career has been understanding the continual importance of educating those around.  People want to learn.  They want to understand what you know, how it impacts them and why its important.  Many clients in the last few years know Facebook is important, but they don’t necessarily understand why if they aren’t on Facebook.  It’s important to sit with them and walk them through the process of creating their own accounts, getting them connected and letting them experience the result.  The education creates a new perspective that helps justify future activity.  Many projects and ideas are similar.  People don’t want to know about what you sell.  They want to know about what you know…people connect with people.

What’s the craziest story you have from starting your own business?  

My craziest story really comes from the fact that I operate my business from my home.  I’m pretty Type A and I want to be responsive and take every call.  I had a client call fairly early in the morning just as I had gotten out of the shower.  I took the call wrapped in a towel and 30 minutes later I was able to get dressed for the day.  Thank goodness we weren’t on video chat.  It reminded me that I have voicemail for a reason and I could have returned the call a little later.  I still haven’t decided if it was professional because I took the call or unprofessional because I was in a towel.

Six words of advice to those looking to start their own company.

Passion (do what makes you happy).  Persistence (keep at it).  Curious (always be learning).  Fear (great motivator).  Personality.  (Be yourself).  Change.  (embrace whatever happens).

If you could go back, would you do anything differently? If so, what and why? 

I would have spent a little more time getting my brand position complete before I hung out my shingle.  My transition from one job to my new business was rapid and left me a little “the shoemaker has no shoes.”  So 5 weeks later, the business cards just arrived and the website is still under construction.  It makes it difficult to promote your company when there’s nothing to look at.

How do you see your company growing in the future? 

I see my company on an upward trajectory driven by great word of mouth advertising from happy clients.  Small business and entrepreneurs know the importance of word of mouth success and if I can help clients achieve results, they were recommend my work to others.

What’s your working relationship like now with the crowdSPRING designer’s project you chose?  

I have two active projects on crowdSPRING currently.  They are the same project – but with different creative positions to get different creative results.  The designers have been very responsive to feedback and making changes to their submissions so we can get the client exactly what they are looking for.  It’s been a very positive experience for the client.

Copper Penny Marketing’s most recent project, for Val Verde Co., received 86 entries.



The State of Business To Business (B2B) Content Marketing In North America

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MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute recently released a report on 2013 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends for North America. It’s a fascinating report with insights into the challenges faced by B2B marketers and how they are leveraging content marketing to promote their businesses. Although the sample size (1,416 respondents) wasn’t huge, it represented respondents from a range of industries, functional areas and company sizes.

If you are just getting started with your content marketing strategy or want to learn more, I recommend you read How To Grow Your Business With Content Marketing.

The most effective content marketers spend a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing (compared to other strategies), and use more tactics than the average to distribute their content through more social networks. And of course, the most effective content marketers produce a great deal of useful and engaging content.

Not surprisingly, all content marketing tactics are being used more frequently, including research reports, videos, and mobile content. Today, the vast majority of marketers use content marketing and B2B marketers are spending one third of their marketing budgets on content marketing, an 8% increase over the prior year.

percentusingcontentmarketing

LinkedIn was the most popular social network for B2B content marketers, just slightly edging out Twitter, which held the top spot for the prior two years. But content marketers aren’t limiting their activities to LinkedIn.

percentage-content-marketing

B2B marketers are using an average of five social distribution channels and the majority use 10 or more tactics.

averagetactics

Content marketing tactics vary, but there’s much useful insight in the tactics used by other marketers. The fact that others are using certain tactics doesn’t mean you should blindly adopt the same tactics. But it should inform how you think about content marketing and help you assess what you’re currently doing and what else you can be doing.

content-marketing-usage

Adoption of content marketing tactics does vary by industry. For example, marketers supporting manufacturing businesses use video and print more often than marketers in other industries. If you run a manufacturing business, you might want to take a look at the data the Content Marketing Institute put together focusing on manufacturing businesses. The below graph shows a snapshot of tactics for the manufacturing industry (compare it to the graph above, representing a cross-section of all industries).

mfg-content-marketing

Brand awareness and customer acquisition are the top goals for organizations leveraging content marketing. I expected to see thought leadership and lead generation to rank a bit higher.

content-marketing-reasons

You should take a look at the full copy of the report, in PDF format - it contains much more valuable insight.

What can you share from your own content marketing strategies and tactics? Do you agree with the findings in the report? How do you use content marketing? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

 

 

Twitter Link Roundup #343 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers!

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If you’re like most people, you own a smartphone.

And if you’re like most people, you use it. A lot.

Full-time access to a smartphone has obvious benefits but comes at a price: that nagging feeling that maybe we should be spending our time doing more than just staring at a screen.

If you’re seeking a healthier relationship with your favorite inanimate companion, take a look at what your habits are and precisely where you’d like to make some changes. Need some suggestions on where to start? Read more to get some ideas on how you can choose a more balanced approach to your phone use.

Now, we hope you enjoy another great set of links and articles that we shared with you over the past week on our crowdspring Twitter account (and on Ross’s Twitter account). We regularly share our favorite posts on entrepreneurship, small business, marketing, logo design, web design, startups, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Enjoy!

smallbusinessblog

startupsblog

socialmediablog

designblog

otherblog

 

The post Twitter Link Roundup #343 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers! appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

13 Powerful Ways You Can Manage Customer Expectations Better To Grow Your Business Faster Than Ever

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“…it looks cold in there…”

A prospective customer looks to your business to provide something they need or want.

This is the beginning of a very important story for your business.

And, starting with your very first interaction, this story can develop in one of three ways:

  1. You fail to meet their expectations.
  2. You meet their expectations.
  3. You exceed their expectations.

The first scenario will lead to an unhappy customer and poor word-of-mouth marketing.

Scenarios 2 and 3 will likely lead to a loyal new customer and positive word-of-mouth marketing.

The tricky part is that each customer supplies their own expectations. And, they won’t necessarily tell you in advance about their expectations.

Psychologist and professor John A. Johnson Ph.D. explains:

My research on moral psychology tells me that expectations among people are often based on an implicit social contract. That is, without actually verbalizing expectations about give-and-take in a relationship, people construct stories in their heads about legitimate expectations of each other. So, people in a relationship have a “deal” in which the specifics of the deal are never really talked about.

Having worked in both retail and customer service (among other fields), I can tell you that people apply this logic to their interactions with businesses as well as with people.

So, it’s in every marketer’s and business owner’s best interest to learn how to effectively manage customer expectations.

But, if this were truly as simple as it sounds, there would be a lot more happy customers in the world.

So, let’s examine the science of expectation… and explore 13 ways that you can better manage your customers’ expectations, create loyal brand followers, and grow your business faster than ever.

First Impressions Set Subsequent Expectations

We’ve all heard that first impressions are important.

Why?

When it comes to setting expectations, a first impression is powerful. This is because we tend to make snap judgments, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Your judgment about a situation becomes the expectation the next time you find yourself in a similar or identical situation.

And, those initial judgments tend to stick around because expectations are not just a state of mind. According to Loretta Breuning, Ph.D. (professor, author, and founder of the Inner Mammal Institute) expectations become a part of your physical being:

…expectations are surprisingly resistant to adjustment. Expectations are real physical pathways in the brain. Past experience built these pathways but new experience does not easily modify them.

Once a pathway has been established, it requires repeated exposure to new information to alter that pathway.

Moreover, it’s harder to improve a negative first impression than to tarnish a positive first impression.

A study by Nadav Klein and Ed O’Brien at the University of Chicago investigated how difficult it is to reach what they call a”moral tipping point”. This is the point at which a person goes from being viewed as a good person to a bad person – or vice-versa. They explain:

…this moral tipping point is asymmetric. People require more evidence to perceive improvement than decline; it is apparently easier to become a sinner than a saint, despite exhibiting equivalent evidence for change.

In other words, it’s hard to rebuild a positive reputation when people already have negative expectations. And, it’s easy to gain a negative reputation even in spite of people’s positive expectations.

We expect businesses to be “in it for the money.”  And so people are naturally inclined to be suspicious of businesses’ intentions.

So, if your business makes a poor first impression, most people won’t stick around to give you a chance to fix it.

Not when their hard-earned money is at stake.

Actionable Tips For Your Business

  • Focus your marketing efforts on creating a positive first impression. Work with your marketing, sales, and customer support teams to make sure that they fully understand your efforts and can deliver on your marketing promises. The positive expectations generated from this first impression will prime your consumers to see your subsequent interactions in a positive light.
  • New businesses without a known brand reputation have to work harder to help their customers identify and recognize them. So, (much like a television pilot episode) provide enough background information to generate a good first impression. Be sure that your branding (including your company name and your company’s logo design) are clear, visually interesting, and memorable. And be sure your branding is consistent.
  • Work hard to maintain your positive impression. Always deliver on your brand promises. It’s easy to lose your good reputation and negative expectations are very hard to overcome.

 

Magical Thinking – And What it Means for You

Magical thinking sounds fun.

And, in some instances, it can be. But, magical thinking’s implications for your business may not be so fun.

Magical thinking is the false belief that something will happen just because you expect it to.

Children subconsciously imbue their thoughts with the power to directly affect the world in a tangible way.

Many adults continue to believe this is possible to do. Dr. Johnson points out that:

…many normal adults continue to engage in various forms of magical thinking. Prayer can be a form of magical thinking. Witness the huge popularity of The Law of Attraction, which says that our thoughts attract events into our lives. For many of us, it is difficult to let go of the idea that expecting something to happen will make it happen.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that your thoughts have no power to affect change – they do. Your thoughts can directly impact your actions.

However, your thoughts cannot make a bad product or service great or deliver the specific product you’re seeking at your perfect price.

But, that doesn’t stop people from reacting negatively when their expectations go unmet.

In fact, these negative reactions are unavoidable. According to Professor Wolfram Schultz, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, dopamine levels are depressed in the brain if our expectations are not met.

Unmet positive expectations make people feel bad.

Consumers bring their own set of expectations with them, and when those expectations go unmet, disappointment and displeasure follow.

Actionable Tips For Your Business

  • It’s best to manage expectations for customers from the beginning of your interactions with them. This will help you to control the dialogue instead of scrambling to react to unrealistic consumer expectations. Be sure you understand the difference between empathy and sympathy.
  • Make your marketing offers as clear as possible. Don’t make vague assertions that can be easily misinterpreted and lead to flawed expectations that work against you.
  • Don’t make implications in your marketing that you can’t or won’t deliver. If you claim to have a 100% money-back guarantee, deliver that refund every time it’s requested.

 

Negative Expectations Lead to Negative Perceptions

We’ve discussed how magical thinking can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.

So, is it better to encourage customers to set their expectations lower so that you’re more likely to meet them?

Yes, but be careful.

While it is good to create realistic expectations that can be reasonably met, it’s important not to lower expectations too much.

If you lower consumers expectations too much, instead of creating an easy-to-hop low hurdle, you may find yourself stuck in a ditch.

It turns out that people who approach a situation with a negative expectation often find their negative bias confirmed. You may have heard of this phenomenon – the self-fulfilling prophecy.

A team of Columbia University students confirmed this in their research study, “Try it, You’ll Like It: The Influence of Expectation, Consumption, and Revelation on Preference for Beer.

The study revealed that participants who were warned in advance about an unpleasant “secret ingredient” (balsamic vinegar) in a beer showed the lowest preference for that beer as compared to other participants who were not warned in advance.

It turns out that the anticipation of a negative experience delivered a more negative experience. This is because our complete experience of an event is determined not only by our physical senses but by our psychological perception of the experience.

The Columbia research article makes this very clear:

The quality of an experience is jointly determined by bottom-up processes, which reflect characteristics of the stimulus impinging on the perceiver’s sensory organs, and top-down processes, which reflect the perceiver’s beliefs, desires, and expectations.

So, it’s important to consider the entire customer experience – sensory and perceived – to create the best possible results.

Actionable Tips For Your Business

  • Use your marketing language and visual design to set positive, realistic expectations whenever possible. For example, positive business taglines perform better than negative taglines.
  • Lead with the good news. Highlight tangible product or service benefits early on and feature special discounts or offers prominently.
  • Use customer testimonials and reviews to create anticipation for new customers that they’re about to have a great experience.
  • Review your website design to remove friction that might make customers cranky before they get to the check-out page.

 

The Power of “Surprise and Delight”

So far, we’ve focused on the downsides of expectations.

But, don’t get discouraged – expectations aren’t all bad news.

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, meeting your customer’s expectations is a good thing.

And, if you manage to exceed your customer’s expectations, the positive impact is even greater.

Cambridge’s Professor Schultz found physical evidence of this.

We already know that his research revealed a drop in dopamine levels (that neurotransmitter that controls the pleasure center in our brains) when our expectations are not met. But, he was also able to confirm that dopamine levels increase when we are pleasantly surprised by what Schultz calls a “positive prediction error.”

A positive prediction error is simply a fancy way of saying “surpassed expectation.”

This is why the concept of surprising and delighting your customers is so powerful. By surpassing their expectations, you are creating a physical reaction that makes your customers feel good.

That kind of experience will make customers take notice, remember your brand, and keep them coming back.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that leads to habit-forming and addictive behavior. People are driven to seek out ways to trigger their brain to release dopamine. Dr. Breuning explains:

Expectations are the core of our brain’s strategy for making sense of the world. Your brain is constantly generating an expectation and then comparing new inputs to it.

When our experiences match up with our expectations, we’re rewarded with a happy dopamine reward. When our expectations are disappointed, we lose our happy dopamine and receive the stress hormone cortisol instead.

Our biology controls our reactions. And, it’s hard to fight biology.

Actionable Tips For Your Business

  • Set clear and attainable brand promises – and meet them every single time. Consistent, reliable, good service over time is surprising in and of itself.
  • Find creative ways to go above and beyond. Provide a surprise free add-on gift with their purchase. Design a fabulously fun “unboxing” process to make your product’s arrival even more special. Send a handwritten thank you note for their purchase along with a discount coupon for their next purchase.
  • Try to anticipate related customer needs and do your best to satisfy them. For example, if a customer purchased several packs of diapers in the largest available size, consider sending an invitation to try out your new pull-ups with a coupon code for a nice discount.

If you want to create the best possible customer experience, your marketing has to play a proactive role to define and then meet or exceed your customers’ expectations.

If interacting with your business regularly produces pleasurable reactions, you’ll see customers coming back again and again.

 

The post 13 Powerful Ways You Can Manage Customer Expectations Better To Grow Your Business Faster Than Ever appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Why Social Media Stories Are a Big Marketing Phenomenon (And How To Use Them to Market Your Business)

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It doesn’t seem like that long ago that everyone touted Facebook’s newsfeed and Instagram’s feed as the new world for marketers to go forth and conquer.

How quickly times change.

Initially dismissed as the playground of Millennials, “stories” have grown to become a viable media format in their own right.

Not bad for a format that mostly consists of photos, pithy text overlays, and concise videos that sometimes disappear within 24 hours of being posted.

Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox predicted at this year’s F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference:

The increase in the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.

This is a surprising admission from a company that has put an incredible amount of effort trying to make its newsfeed as sticky as possible.

It’s even more surprising when you consider that Instagram (also owned by Facebook) only added Stories two years ago, in 2016. The addition of Instagram Stories was mostly seen as a “hey us too” catch-up move to SnapChat.

Today, Instagram Stories has more than double the number of daily users than SnapChat, based on numbers announced in June of 2018:

The company, owned by Facebook, announced on Thursday that more than 400 million people use the popular feature each day, up from 250 million one year ago. That makes Stories more than twice as popular as Snapchat, which saw 191 million active users in the last quarter, according to the most recent earnings report from parent company Snap.

Stories matter.

Let’s take a look at how some popular brands are using Stories and then we’ll discuss best practices and tips to help you get started with Stories for your own brand.

Examples of brands using Stories effectively

Brands have flocked to Stories, and there are many examples of companies using the format to great effect.

Converse

Shoe company Converse integrates Stories tightly with its other Instagram posts, as they’ve done here with the recent launch of a new shoe collaboration.

Nordstrom Rack

Nordstrom Rack is another fashion brand that uses Stories effectively to highlight products and promotions.

They don’t merely just post photos of their products. They include behind-the-scenes clips from photo shoots and boomerangs (short looping video clips) of their clothes in action.

The fact that Stories are consumed as tiny, fleeting bursts of content makes it easy for a brand like Nordstrom Rack to get a lot of product in front of its followers quickly.

And the fact that Stories are visible for just 24 hours before disappearing means that brands can keep up a steady stream of new content without creating a massive backlog of posts for customers to wade through.

Nike

Nike is one of the most popular clothing brands on Instagram with almost 80 million followers.  The sporting company leverages this popularity well with savvy, well-designed Story posts that (appropriately) encourages customers to “just do it” and participate.

A recent example: the sports brand recently launched a design competition for its new Air Max shoes. Through well-designed videos and slideshows, the brand inspired followers to involve themselves in the production process for this new product. This gave followers a reason to keep coming back to vote for their favorites and submit ideas.

By making its customers’ ideas a key part of this campaign, and taking advantage of Story’s frequently updated nature, Nike was able to create a contest that made customers feel like the brand valued their ideas and creativity.

National Geographic

Stories aren’t just for clothing brands. The venerable publisher is renowned for its stunning imagery and its deep commitment to environmental and humanitarian causes.

This reputation has led it to become to one of the most popular accounts on Instagram, with nearly 90 million followers.

The publisher uses Stories to educate its followers through the use of beautiful photos and videos.

The stories don’t end on Instagram, though. @NatGeo takes great advantage of the ability to “swipe up” on Stories, which sends users on to more in-depth reporting and articles on its website.

This is one of the most potent differentiators between Stories and regular Instagram posts. As of now, you cannot create a call to action or “next step” from a regular Instagram post. Each Story post can have its own “swipe up” destination, which creates even more opportunities for marketers to engage with customers.

New York Times

The long-running newspaper uses Stories in exciting ways. One particularly smart way is the section they call “Good News”.

The paper puts together brief slideshows with overlaid text that gives followers a quick burst of good news, with a call-to-action at the end of each one to read the full story on the main site.

This is just one of many different Story “sections” @NYTimes has on its profile. It’s a smart way to take advantage of Story’s 24-hour lifespan to transform the format into social media versions of the daily newspaper.

How to leverage Stories to market your business

If you’re considering using Stories as a marketing tool, we wanted to share some best practices and tips.

Our advice is specific for Instagram success stories, but there are more similarities than differences between Instagram’s version of Stories, SnapChat’s, Facebook’s, or WhatsApp’s [which are called “Statuses”]. Most of the best practices and tips we’ve assembled here apply on other social networks as well.

Integrate your Stories and Posts

Even though Story’s short lifespan can be a big plus, it does mean that followers might miss a particular story if they don’t happen to check out your profile while it’s available.

For Stories you don’t want followers to miss, do an announcement as a regular Instagram Post letting people know ahead of time when the Story will go up.

It’s also possible now to save a particularly good Story as an image or a video slideshow and repost it to your regular feed. Use this feature judiciously, as it’s a good idea to keep some separation between your regular posts and Stories to differentiate them.

This flexibility means you aren’t stuck having to invest time and effort in a powerful Story only to have it disappear into the ether 24 hours after you post it.

Cheerios users Instagram Stories to send positive personal messages to its followers

Get your @ On

Just like regular posts, you can @-mention users in your Stories. So use it! Part of the power of social media is making connections and lavishing attention on others, and your followers will love being mentioned in your Stories.

Once again, the temporary nature of Stories is a big plus here as it not only means you have lots of opportunities to @-mention followers, it also means the mentions won’t persist as they do on your regular feed.

This makes @-mentioning safer (because it’s not a permanent connection), and means you can rest assured that your brand will not be permanently tied to a particular follower.

Just as with any other social media feature, however, it’s best not to overuse this one. Make it count, and make it special.

Interested in other ways of increasing your customer engagement on social media? Read 7 proven ways to rise above the social media noise and better engage your audience on social networks.

Effortless creation

You could, if you wanted to, spend a ton of time on your Story posts. Because they live for such a short period, however, no one expects that you do.

This opens up the possibilities. You might want to invest time to get your regular Instagram posts right, but all you need for a Story post is a good idea and some creativity.

The New York Times “Good News” posts we mentioned earlier are a good example. They tend to reuse existing imagery from the newspaper with a short blurb on each one that briefly tells the story.

It probably didn’t take very long to assemble each story, but the payoff (via the call-to-action to read the full story at the end of each one) is big enough that putting a few minutes here and there makes creating them worthwhile.

You can do the same thing. Reuse imagery you already have (such as catalog photos, or clips of existing videos) and take advantage of the built-in editing and text tools to quickly add text to them.

It’s okay to have the occasional Story that doesn’t quite land right, knowing that 24-hours later is another chance to try again.

But remember to connect these stories to your brand. It might be fun to share various photos and videos, but if they are completely disconnected from your brand, how would this help you to market your business?

Be sure that the name of your company and your company’s logo are visible in the stories you share. And consider your brand’s colors to maintain consistency with your website and other social channels.

Consider Stories like a channel

Just because Stories don’t stick around for very long doesn’t mean you can post without giving it too much thought.

One way to use Stories effectively is to treat the feature like it was a TV network. You might want to “schedule” certain Stories or types of Stories to appear on specific days, or try grouping posts into themes or recurring “episodes.”

Think in advance about how your Stories will flow together, and how they relate to other marketing events or campaigns so that there’s a cohesiveness to what you’re posting.

Repost from other channels

As we mentioned, Stories tend to be very similar from social media network to network. Nothing is stopping you from cross-posting a Story you’ve created for SnapChat on Instagram, or vice-versa.

Facebook even has built-in Story sharing from Instagram, which makes cross-posting easy and painless.

Even with Instagram’s 1 billion active users (!), there are still many people who are only on Facebook, so posting Stories on multiple sites isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s also possible to save a SnapChat post as a video that you can then repost on Instagram and Facebook. So if you wanted to share Stories between those sites, it’s also easy.

Another benefit of reposting your content on other channels is that you are certain to maintain consistency in your posts from one network to another.

Consistency is vital if you want to build consumers’ trust.

As we wrote previously:

Customers can’t get to know (and trust) your business if they don’t have the opportunity to experience your brand in a consistent manner. Here are some compelling ways that consistent branding ban strengthen your business:

  • Easy brand recognition leads to positive associations.
  • Consistency provides an advantage over the competition.
  • Increased perceived value leads to higher sales.

Inconsistent messaging inevitably leads to confusion about your brand’s identity.

Making sure each story posted has a similar look and feel will help build your branding voice into one your customers know and trust.

Include a call to action

As we mentioned earlier, the “swipe up” feature in Instagram’s Stories is a powerful way to direct traffic off of Instagram to your site.

When you post a story, consider where you might want to send followers. If you’re posting about one of your products, for example, send users from that Story to the product page on your site.

Another effective way to use swipe up is to stick it at the end of a sequence of Story posts. Then you can use the posts as a way of building up interest or give followers a reason to swipe, so by the time they get to the end they’re more motivated to continue to wherever you want to send them.

An example of how a poll can be integrated into a Story post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Get interactive

There are a lot of different features you can integrate into a story post to make them more exciting and more engaging.

Besides tagging and @-mentioning others, Instagram has new features like polls and questions that you can add to a Story post. Ask followers to vote for their favorite, or get them to send you a short text reply to a question.

You can also tag stories with a location, repost other Instagram posts as a Story (which sends followers to that post if they swipe up), and get followers to send you a direct message in response to a Story.

The latter is a great way to solicit feedback from followers, and also make your Stories more interactive.

MeUndies uses text-only stories to not only make shout-outs to followers, it also uses them to promote hashtag campaigns such as #MePlusWe.

Text-only Stories

Instagram recently added the ability to have text-only Story posts. This is a great way to integrate more text content into a sequence of Story posts to help tie them together or to tell a brief story in words rather than pictures.

Many brands are using text-only Story posts with #hashtags and other links to help propel a narrative forward, explain a new technique or teach followers something, and many other things.

Story highlights

Did we say that Stories are ephemeral? This is true, but if you have a particular Story that you want to stick around for longer, now you can!

Story highlights stay on your profile as long as you want, which gives you a lot of flexibility. Besides “pinning” a Story so it doesn’t disappear after 24 hours, you can use Highlights to create simple story categories similar to what the New York Times has done with their “Good News” Stories.

You’ll probably want to use this feature strategically, and not overwhelm your profile with a lot of highlighted stories. A large content creator like the New York Times can get away with more highlights, but most brands should highlight fewer stories. Make them count.

Use Micro-Influencers

Want to expand the reach of your Story audience?

If you are a small business and don’t have the budget of a larger company, consider working with a micro-influencer (people who have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers).

As we wrote:

With high engagement rates and lower fees, micro influencers are an excellent choice for businesses just starting to expand their brand’s reach.

Micro-influencers give smaller businesses another great advantage by allowing those businesses to target smaller, more unique audiences.

When you ask brands and marketers for the best platform for influencer marketing, the vast majority of them will answer Instagram. Many surveys support this view – they are frequently citing Instagram as the No. 1 platform for 92% influencers.

That makes it a great choice to integrate into any Story-related marketing outreach.

Wrapping up

Stories represent a new and exciting way to present content, run marketing and advertising campaigns, and interact with your social media followers.

Social media is all about connection, intimacy, and storytelling. It’s no surprise that Stories have taken off the way they have.

Whether you’re a small business, a start-up, or an established brand, Stories are quickly becoming the de-facto way to reach your customers with quick, easily-digestible bits of content.

After all, marketing and branding are all about telling the story of your business. Stories are a powerful, accessible way to do just that.

 

Need help developing an awesome social media presence? Let crowdspring’s community of over 210,000 creatives help you develop content worth engaging with – without breaking the bank. You can get started on a social media assets project, infographic project or any other design project here, or request a free design consultation with one of our design experts.

The post Why Social Media Stories Are a Big Marketing Phenomenon (And How To Use Them to Market Your Business) appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Twitter Link Roundup #344 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers!

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You probably know plenty of middle children. Maybe you’re a middle child, yourself.

Middle children, the long-suffering sibling stuck with a bad reputation and a number of complexes, are experiencing an increased appreciation in popular opinion.

Regularly regarded as jealous, overlooked, and attention starved, middle children are indeed a misunderstood and underappreciated group. This, however, has begun to change – ironically, and possibly because, the number of middle children is decreasing in number across the country.

Interestingly, there now exists a “revisionist school of middleness” describing middles as natural innovators, free of the weights shouldered by their older and younger siblings; they are natural diplomatics standing as a mediating bridge between warring brothers and sisters.

To read more about how Middle Child Syndrome is becoming less syndrome and more strength, read this fascinating piece from Quartz. Middle children everywhere, you’ve been seen.

Now, we hope you enjoy another great set of links and articles that we shared with you over the past week on our crowdspring Twitter account (and on Ross’s Twitter account). We regularly share our favorite posts on entrepreneurship, small business, marketing, logo design, website design, startups, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Enjoy!

smallbusinessblog

startupsblog

socialmediablog

designblog

logodesignblog

otherblog

The post Twitter Link Roundup #344 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers! appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

How To Market Better and Grow Your Small Business Faster Using The Psychology of Reciprocity

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“Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

You may call it paying it forward, quid pro quo, or just returning the favor, but science has a word that describes this trait: reciprocity.

What is reciprocity?

Our need to return a kindness given or shown to us is deeply ingrained in our psyche. Psychology Today explains the science behind reciprocity:

This tendency has survived and been present throughout human history because it has survival value for the human species. The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey describes the essence of what makes us human is this system of reciprocity. “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation.”

One of the best-known books on the subject is Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of PersuasionIn it, Cialdini looks at the Principle of Reciprocity and how even the smallest gestures can often have a powerful effect.

In one example, Cialdini observed that when waiters gave diners a mint at the end of a meal, the average tip amount increased by 3%. If two mints were given, tips increased by 14%.

And if the waiter left one mint with the bill, but then quickly returned to give a second, the tip increased by a whopping 23%.

Examples of reciprocity in action

Reciprocity, when used correctly, can be a powerful tool to inspire action. Marketers have used the principle of reciprocity in many different ways, and to significant effect.

Dunkin’ Donuts turned wins by the Philadelphia Eagles into free coffees and huge mobile downloads.

Dunkin’ Donuts 

Dunkin’ Donuts ran a campaign that leveraged reciprocity and the idea of “giving to getting” effectively.

Called “Eagles Win, You Win,” the campaign offered Philadelphia area customers a free coffee the day after the Philadelphia Eagles won a game. The free coffee was redeemed via the Dunkin’ Donuts mobile app.

The campaign was a big success, with the donut chain reporting over a quarter million customers taking advantage of the free coffee offer every week after an Eagles win. This drove huge downloads of the mobile app, which exposed customers to carefully targeted promotional messaging and incentives.

Sales and general foot traffic increased because of the free offer, which demonstrated the power of reciprocity.

Morton’s Steakhouse

Morton’s Steakhouse also used reciprocity to gain lots of free publicity and advertising.

They used a method commonly known as “surprise and delight.” The basic idea is to surprise customers with something that delights them, in the hopes that the principle of reciprocity will kick in.

Multichannel Merchant explains:

One of the most viral examples of the “surprise and delight” strategy came from a rather traditional, old-fashioned brand: Morton’s Steakhouse. In 2011, a traveler jokingly tweeted Morton’s, requesting for a steak to be waiting for him when his plane landed. So Morton’s went ahead and sent a tuxedoed staff member to the airport to wait for the traveler with a big, juicy Porterhouse – free of charge! A positive, memorable experience is a win-win for everybody: it makes customers happy, drives word-of-mouth, and keeps them coming back to your store.

Zappos

Another company that uses surprise and delight to great effect is Zappos, whose customer service exploits are legendary for encouraging deep customer loyalty and viral word-of-mouth.

One great example is the time a traveler to Las Vegas checked into her hotel, only to discover she had forgotten her favorite shoes at home. She went on the Zappos’ site to buy a replacement, but the site was out of her size. So she called customer service. The company didn’t have her size in stock, but it found a pair at a Las Vegas mall not far from the company’s headquarters.

Someone from Zappos went to the mall, bought the shoes, and then hand-delivered them to the customer at her hotel, all free of charge.

Practical Ecommerce looked at the benefits Zappos got from this “act of customer service heroism”:

It almost certainly cost Zappos money. So why is this one of the secrets to online retail success? To get the answer just imagine how the customer felt. No doubt, she’ll shop Zappos again. She probably told lots of friends, who told their friends. And the goodwill that the company generated most certainly did more for the business than any advertising or marketing program Zappos might have spent those dollars on.

How can you use reciprocity to grow your business?

Here are ways you can use reciprocity in your own marketing initiatives, and some things to keep in mind.

Be authentic

The principle of authenticity goes hand-in-hand with the principle of reciprocity. As we recently wrote,

Authenticity is a significant factor in increasing your customers’ trust in you and your business.

In a global study completed a few years ago, The Age of Authenticity revealed that 63 percent of consumers would choose to buy from a brand they perceived as authentic over less-authentic competitors.

Customers will see right through any attempts at currying return favors or actions if they don’t come from an authentic place.

Studies have found that it’s less about what is being given or when it was given but more how it was given.

By focusing on how actions are exchanged, each type of authenticity determines the symbolic value imputed to the benefit and that value directly influences the party’s decision of whether to repay the benefit and the determination of what an appropriate repayment would be as well as indirectly influencing exchange behaviors toward their partner.

Also be sure that your customers and prospects are aware that when you give them something special, it came from you. This means finding creative ways to incorporate your company’s name and business logo so that the customer knows the source of their happiness.

Saying thank you

Saying “thank you” to a customer can seem like a small, mostly insignificant act, but it can have a noticeable effect on a customer’s behavior.

A study that looked at restaurant tips found that when the server wrote thank you, included a happy face, or added a tip about an upcoming special to the back of a bill, the amount of tip left by customers increased by 17-20%.

Writing a thank you note or email to a customer can leverage the same reciprocity that restaurant servers used on customer’s bills.

Three ways you can say thank you include:

Thank you pages
Create a thank you page for downloads, registrations, purchases, and other customer actions. You can also include on this page details of what the customer did to help tie their action to the thank you.

Thank you emails
Similarly, send customers a short email thanking them for a recent transaction. You can provide them with the information they may need or be looking for regarding the transaction as well.

Handwritten thank you notes
These may take more effort and time, but they can be very effective. Companies like Stitch Fix include handwritten thank notes inside all of their clothing shipments, which not only act as a seed for reciprocity, they also help increase the authenticity and personalized nature of the service.

Make customers feel unique

Stitch Fix’s personalized notes demonstrate something that helps increase the possibility of reciprocity: the customer should feel like whatever is being offered is being individually provided to them.

Besides personalized notes, you can also help increase the sense that a gesture is for that specific customer by using demographic or geographical targeting (give them something specific to who they are or where they live), or by offering a set of things and letting the customer choose.

Offer something of value

Give customers something they find valuable outside of the existing relationship or services you already offer them. Coupons and deals are always an excellent way to encourage repeat business, but inspiring the customer to return the favor often requires something above and beyond.

For example, don’t just give your customers individual discount codes, but also give them codes they can share with their friends or family.

Meal prep services like HelloFresh uses this technique extensively by providing new customers with free meals they can send someone else as a gift.

Free gift inside!

A great strategy is to add in an unexpected gift to customer’s orders. Gameklip does this in a very simple and low-cost way: they include a package of candies (specifically Smarties) with every order.

As the social media posts show, this small surprise is something that people love, and they return the favor by sharing it with their friends and network.

Suggest how customers can reciprocate

Once you’ve provided your customer with a nice gift or surprise, give them some ways they can pay it forward. Make it easy for them to do something of value for you.

If you’re looking to build word of mouth, make it easy for customers to pass along your business to others. Give them simple ways to share content with their social media contacts.

The referral process is a great way to encourage reciprocity because it makes it obvious to the customer that they’re receiving and giving value when they pass along the gift to a friend.

Make your customer feel special, and they’ll return the favor and help your business grow.

 

The post How To Market Better and Grow Your Small Business Faster Using The Psychology of Reciprocity appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

How The Anchoring Effect in Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow Faster Or Fail

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Marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners assume that most people make decisions by conducting research and then weighing the options.

But, that’s not how most people make decisions.

People frequently act illogically, making their behavior difficult to predict. And, they rarely take the time to learn the full facts before taking action.

Instead, people tend to unconsciously latch onto the first fact they hear, basing their decision-making on that fact… whether it’s accurate or not.

This phenomenon is called anchoring.

Why should you care that anchoring affects people’s decision-making?

The anchoring effect can work for you or against you. It’s one of the most important effects in cognitive psychology.

When anchoring works for you, it becomes easier to market your company’s products or services. When anchoring works against you, it’s increasingly difficult to do so.

Before diving into ways that the anchoring effect can help or hurt your business, let’s look at how it works.

In 1974, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published a research article titled “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” This article documented the first clinical evidence of the anchoring effect.

Amos Tversy and Daniel Kahneman – Image courtesy of Time Magazine

In the article, Kahneman and Tversky describe an anchoring bias experiment which challenged two groups of high school students to complete a lengthy multiplication problem.

One group was asked to solve the following problem: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8. The other group was asked to solve this problem: 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.

The answers to the two problems are, of course, the same. The problems are identical – the numbers are just reversed. But the experiment was never really about math.

Neither group was given sufficient time to solve the problem and arrive at a confident answer – only 5 seconds! The tight timeline forced them to estimate.

The group of students who solved the first problem (1 x 2…etc.) estimated that the solution to the problem would be significantly lower than the group that solved the second problem (8 x 7…etc.).

Tversky and Kahneman concluded that the final estimates (on average 512 and 2250, respectively) were influenced by the numbers with which the two sequences began.

The anchoring effect led the students whose problem started with lower numbers to estimate lower. While the students who solved the problem in reverse anchored to the higher numbers, resulting in a higher estimate.

Both groups were wildly off in their answers. The solution to both problems is 40,320.

The takeaway here is that each group was unduly affected by the first numbers they saw.

Kahneman, in a video interview with Inc. magazine, claims that the anchoring effect routinely happens “everywhere” and calls it “one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology.”

The implications of the anchoring effect for businesses cannot be denied.

So let’s take a deeper look at how you can take advantage of the anchoring effect to price your company’s products or services, negotiate more effectively, market better, and make better business decisions.

 

The Anchoring Effect in Branding and Design

First impressions matter.

For example, when it comes to website design, if you don’t help people understand in a few seconds how you can solve their problem, they’ll leave your site.

First impressions are quick. A Google study showed that they can be made in 17 milliseconds!

When a prospective customer first learns about your brand, they hear your company’s name or see your logo.

First impressions matter when it comes to your company’s name and your logo. After all, it’s impossible to anchor and create an advantage if your prospective customer can’t remember or spell the name of your business.

The same holds true for your logo. Far too many struggling businesses created their logo from a generic template or an online template logo maker.

The problem is that thousands or tens of thousands of other businesses have identical or similar logos.

It’s impossible for a brand to use the anchoring effect to its advantage when a consumer can’t recognize the brand!

So, how can you apply the anchoring effect to create a stronger brand and make sure that design works for your business and doesn’t undermine your marketing?

How to use the anchoring effect to improve branding and design

 

The Anchoring Effect in Pricing Products or Services

Anchoring has a deep impact on a person’s perception of value – which makes it an essential tool when considering a pricing strategy for your business.

A price without a value attached to it is a number with no power.

The value you assign to a price gives it meaning and helps consumers decide if they are willing to pay it.

Anchoring provides a context for estimating value.

Think of it this way: you walk into a convenience store on a hot summer day hankering for a fountain soda. The sign says you can get a 20 oz Coke for $1.79 or a 32oz Coke for $1.99. For a measly 20 cents, you can get almost twice as much Coke!

Having anchored that a 20 oz Coke is worth $1.79, that 32 oz for $1.99 suddenly seems like an awesome deal! It doesn’t matter that both are overpriced.

So, how can you apply the anchoring effect to how you price products or services for your business? Here are a few options to consider…

How to use the anchoring effect to price products and services

  • When setting your pricing, remember that the first option the client sees is likely to be the price that anchors in their brain. So, if your goal is to move your mid-price option, anchor the top-priced item by placing it first or by placing it in the center in a larger font to draw focus. This will make the mid-price option look like a great deal in comparison.
  • Want to sell your most-expensive option? Make sure that you set the lower price in a similar range and show how much more value comes with the slightly bigger price. Remember that fountain Coke? How do you say no to a much higher value for a minimal price increase?
  • Show a discounted price based on a higher original price. You see this often when someone posts the suggested “retail” price which is crossed out and you’re instead presented with a lower price. Even if the final price is still high, the initial price was anchored and influenced how consumers perceive the actual price.
  • Customers can subconsciously anchor to any number – it doesn’t have to be a price. So, featuring any higher number next to your price increases your chance of a sale. Consider showing the number of items sold, the number of customers who have purchased, or even another unrelated item with a higher price.

 

The Anchoring Effect in Negotiations

The anchor effect plays a role in every negotiation.

The bottom line is that the person who makes the first offer sets the anchor.

And, whoever sets the anchor helps determine the range of the negotiations.

So if you put your offer on the table first, the odds are in your favor that you’ll end the negotiation in a place that you’re comfortable with.

But, if you’ve already missed your opportunity to go first and set the anchor, there is a way that you can reset the playing field.

Daniel Kahneman revealed in this interview with  Inc. Magazine that the best way to defend against being controlled by an anchor in a negotiation is to utterly refute and discredit the number proposed.

Assertively denying the credibility of the proposed number helps to wipe it from your own mind and the mind of the opposing party. At that point, you can then propose a new anchor to reset the terms of the negotiation in your favor.

Whatever you’re negotiating, you stand to benefit if you remember the anchoring effect.

How to use the anchoring effect to negotiate better

  • If you’re hoping for a higher salary, plan ahead by listing a higher salary requirement right in your application. Ask for more than you expect to receive. This will naturally raise the amount of all subsequent salary numbers offered.
  • Are you auditioning vendors and looking for the best price? Then start the negotiations off with a low amount. This will lead the prices to trend lower for the remainder of the negotiation.
  • If the terms offered are way off for you, then say so. You can reset the anchor by pointing out that a competitor has made a stronger offer, or simply by assertively discrediting their offer. Do this with conviction and you’ll be in a position to reset the anchor in a more favorable place.

 

The Anchoring Effect in Marketing

Today’s marketing is ruled by data and metrics.

How do you determine if your efforts are a success? Metrics.

But, choosing the right metrics to measure can mean the difference between success and failure.

And, anchoring doesn’t only impact numbers. The anchoring effect can manipulate how you perceive and value concepts as well.

The anchoring bias in marketing can easily mislead you.

So, when planning your marketing strategy, and how to measure it, keep the anchoring effect in mind.

As marketing expert and author Linda J. Popky explains for the Harvard Business Review:

The Internet of Things will collect and transmit unprecedented amounts of data. This poses a big problem for marketers, who can end up down a rabbit hole of fruitless information.

The anchoring effect may lead you to latch onto pseudo-useful metrics because they were the first to appear on your radar. But, don’t get stuck there.

Don’t just aim for low-hanging fruit (data) that’s easy to collect and right in front of you. Instead, be mindful and carefully consider each option to be sure you’re making strong choices.

How to use the anchoring effect to market better

Careful consideration allows you to escape the pull of the anchor. Ask these questions to ensure that your chosen metrics have value…

  • Will this metric really tell you what you think it will tell you?
  • Is the metric likely to reinforce a cognitive bias you already hold?
  • Or, will it tell you nothing at all?
  • Can the metric be easily replicated and gathered?
  • Does the metric provide actionable information for your business?

 

The Anchoring Effect in Your Business

People naturally anchor to concepts – so much so that we often don’t question why we do things.

We just do them that way because we’ve always done them that way. And by then they’ve become a habit.

This sets us up for living with decisions that don’t serve us well because we haven’t taken the time to examine why we made them in the first place.

And, when the decisions you make cost your business money, anchoring on the wrong options may drain your financial resources like a silent vampire.

From the paper supplier you use to your internet provider, it’s worth examining your choices on a regular basis. What are your costs for doing business? And, can they be optimized?

Settling for more of the same just because you don’t have to think about it may cost you in the long run.

How to use the anchoring effect to make better business decisions

  • Set up a yearly audit of all your vendor or service provider costs. You may be missing out on stronger, more cost-effective options.
  • Create a culture of constant improvement. Examine your internal processes for flaws. Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean that you have to. And, reward your employees for suggesting more efficient or rewarding processes.

 

Anchors Aweigh!

As humans, we’re all prone to cognitive biases that impact our decision-making.

It just comes with the territory.

However,  by being mindful of these cognitive biases, we can begin to avoid their traps and make better choices.

The anchoring effect is everywhere.

It can work either for you or against you.

 

Are you ready to anchor your success with awesome branding design for your business? Our team of over 210,000 creatives is ready to help you with custom logo designwebsite designnaming your business and more – everything you need to build a great brand. Get started now and request a free, no obligation design consultation with one of our design experts today. 

The post How The Anchoring Effect in Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow Faster Or Fail appeared first on crowdspring Blog.


Real Estate Signage: How to Create Signs That Sell

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Real estate signs say more about you and your business than they do about the properties they advertise.

Whether you deal in residential or commercial real estate, your signs are ambassadors for your business – speaking for your brand when you’re not there to do it in person.

So, it’s vital that you take charge of the message your signage communicates.

Don’t leave it to chance.

Unique bench signage. Image courtesy of The Jeremy Amyotte Real Estate Team.

Most traditional real estate signage (“For Sale” signs, open house signs, bench ads, and billboards) fall under the auspices of Out-of-Home (or “OOH”) Advertising.

Let’s look at the best practices for creating unique and custom real estate signs that raise awareness about your brand and start a conversation with your potential clients.

Real estate sign design elements you should consider

The first decision you’ll want to make as you plan your signage strategy is what kind of sign you are going to use.

You have options! The most quintessential real estate sign is the traditional “colonial post” style but that’s just the beginning.

Here’s a run-down of real estate sign styles that you might want to consider…

Common Real Estate Sign Styles:

  • Colonial Post – A sturdy, wooden, inverted L frame with a sign suspended from it. These are perfect for marking residential homes for sale.
  • H-Frame Stake – This is a light-weight H-shaped wire frame good for temporary signage. Think “Open House” signs. The frame legs (stakes) poke into the ground, making it easy to set-up and remove.
  • Frame – Frame style signs are made of sturdy, metal frames enclosing a sign. They’re available in Standard (just one sign) and Single or Double Rider (including one or two extra smaller signs or “riders”). These are another good option for lawn “For Sale” signs.
  • A-Frame – These portable “sandwich board” style signs are great for drawing attention to an open house or another event. But, be careful – don’t leave these easily mobile signs unattended or they may go missing.
  • Vinyl Window Cling– Vinyl window clings are a non-adhesive film that clings to window glass. These are a great option for commercial properties with large plate-glass windows.
  • Feather Flag – A feather flag is made up of a tall, flexible frame attached to a narrow fabric flag. The fabric is loose on one side allowing it to flutter in the breeze, making it an eye-catching signage option. You can print your content directly on the fabric flag.

Each of these signage options offers unique dimensions and mediums on which to print. And, the amount of space available (and the shape of that space) will directly influence your sign’s design layout.

This is why you’ve got to decide on the type of sign before you can begin to design the content or graphics.

And now, one last logistical consideration to ponder before we begin taking a look at design specifics… Be sure to brush up on the laws regarding signage in your area.

Many towns and cities (and some residential developments) have ordinances or rules that specify what types of signs (and how many) can be used, as well as where they can be placed. Knowing what types of signage are allowed to be used in your area will naturally help to guide you as you select your next signs.

Signage design essentials

Whether you’re making a classic lawn “For Sale” sign, branding signage to raise awareness for your business, or an “Open House” event sign, the same design guidelines will apply.

So, let’s get started!

Design Consideration #1: Branding

Image courtesy of The Baltimore Sun.

As we’ve already mentioned, real estate signs are a form of out-of-home advertising. And, as such, they are ideal for creating brand awareness.

Use your logo on your real estate signs

If you fail to feature your company’s logo on your sign, then it becomes almost worthless from a branding awareness perspective.

So, start by making sure that your most valuable visual branding tool – your logo – is featured prominently on your sign.

For more on real estate logo design, read 6 Unique Real Estate Logos That Can Help You Close The Sale.

Use your brand colors on your real estate signs

You should also use your brand colors on your signage to help create a consistent visual presence. This will help potential clients get to know (and quickly recognize) your business.

Creating a consistent visual presence across all of your signage will help develop familiarity and trust between your business and your audience. That’s how random passers-by become clients.

For all the people who walk or drive past your signs, most of them are probably not looking to buy a house or lease a commercial space at that time. But, if you’ve used your signage to create a consistent visual presence over the years, you’ve planted a seed.

So, when those same people find that they do want to purchase a home or rent a commercial space, they’ll remember your business.

Design Consideration #2: Readability

Signs are intended to communicate. It’s their raison d’etre.

So, every design choice you make should support the sign’s ability to communicate clearly.

Of course, there are other factors at play… Aesthetics and brand awareness are both important, too.

But aesthetics and brand awareness should never trump readability. After all, if the sign cannot be easily read, it will not help you to communicate.

Your real estate open house sign won’t attract visitors if they can’t understand what it says.

Ease of readability is the number one design consideration for OOH signage.

Choose Fonts That Are Easy to Read

Font choice is one of the most important elements of creating an effective and easy-to-read sign.

Sign pairing easy-to-read font with elaborate script logo. Image courtesy of Candy’s Dirt.

And, the rules for signage are different than in many other forms of graphic design. While you can get away with a fabulous script font (like the Ebby Halliday logo on the sign to the right) or funky serif typography in a logo, that won’t work for regular sign copy.

To be effective, signage must be easily read from a distance and from a moving car. Otherwise, your message won’t reach a large portion of your audience.

This applies to your company name and all other information on the sign – make sure everything is crisp and easily readable.

For any non-logo text, aim for straight-forward serif and sans-serif fonts.

Landmark Sign Group recommends these as their top five best signage fonts:

  • Helvetica
  • Garamond
  • Trajan
  • Futura
  • Verdana

These fonts (or others like them) can be paired with your logo to create a readable sign that clearly communicates your brand identity. That’s the best of both worlds.

For more on picking the right fonts for your business, Use These Powerful Psychology Strategies To Choose Fonts For Your Business.

Embrace white space

Elegant and readable sign with plenty of white space. Image courtesy of D Magazine.

White space is the area of a design that is left without lines, color, shapes or text. Put simply, it’s the empty space.

However, white space (which isn’t always actually white) is a vital contributor to an overall design in terms of both aesthetics and readability.

Mark Winter of IdentityPR explains:

The empty space surrounding text and graphics is just as important as other design considerations. There is a tendency to want to “fill up” the available area with as much copy as possible. But when text is crowded, it becomes harder to read. Thirty-to-forty percent of the sign’s face area should be left as white space for optimal readability.

Aesthetically, leaving sufficient white space gives a design a feeling of ease and breathability. Packing a design tightly with text or other graphic elements increases visual tension.

Ideally, it’s best if your audience associates ease rather than tension with your business.

Don’t jam too much copy on your signs. Be concise – tell your audience who you are and what you want. That’s it.

Prioritize white space if you want a sign that communicates confidence and peace of mind while also being easy to read.

Make smart color choices

Image courtesy of Kelly Right Real Estate

The color choices you make for your signage have the power to make or break the design.

Poor color choices can make a sign down-right illegible. But, smart color choices can make a sign a joy to read and stand out from the crowd.

It’s all about pairing your brand color (or colors) with contrasting colors that will make your sign pop.

For instance, the Kelly Right sign pictured above features their unique tangerine brand color with white and a lovely cool grey. The three colors create a unique palette that is brand-specific and easy to read. Perfect!

If you’re wondering what color combinations you should use for your sign – always start with your most prominent brand color.

From there, check out the color contrast guide included in this article to see which color combinations are most legible according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.

Your signs are one of your most valuable advertising tools. They’ll be appearing on properties all over your territory. It’s important that they make a strong impression for your brand.

 

Is it time to update your real estate signage? You don’t have to go it alone. Crowdspring’s team of over 210,000 designers is ready and waiting to handle your business’s design needs. Get started now with a new signage design project, logo and business card design project or vehicle wrap project today.

The post Real Estate Signage: How to Create Signs That Sell appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

5 Powerful Psychological Triggers That Can Help You Improve Your Marketing To Increase Sales And Profits

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People like to think they’re in control, especially when it comes to their behavior.

Science has proven otherwise.

Most human behavior can be at least partially attributed to deep-set psychological traits or triggers. We may have control over our actions, but science has shown that we have cognitive biases and can be persuaded to take specific actions.

In fact, the higher a person’s motivation and the easier something is to do, the higher the chance an emotional trigger will successfully influence behavior.

But what are psychological triggers and how can you leverage them in your marketing to boost website sales and improve the user experience for your customers and prospects?

What are triggers?

Digitalpsychology.co explains triggers:

Triggers are anything that sparks us to complete a particular action. They tell us what to do next, and come in the form of internal and external triggers.

External triggers are things that happen externally to the person. They can take many forms but are generally tied to our senses.

For example, they can be visual, such as the way a page is laid out or the color or positioning of a “Buy Now” button. Or they can be scent-related, like how realtors try to add the smell of baking to a house they’re trying to sell to trigger feelings of coziness and home in potential buyers.

Such persuasive design techniques can create external triggers that influence how people react to something, and what they do.

Internal triggers are impulses that happen inside of us, in our minds. Digitalpsychology.co describes internal triggers like this:

Memories, emotions, or situations provide information for what to do next. For example, the fear of losing out on a moment triggers some people to take a photo and post it on Instagram. Internal triggers are a major factor for building habit-forming products, and are the drivers for the growth of billion dollar companies.

We already talked about the psychology of reciprocity as a major trigger that can influence people’s behavior, but there are other useful triggers your should know.

1. Calls to action

The “Call to Action” or CTA is one of the most powerful triggers used to influence behavior.

Understanding what makes a CTA successful is a fascinating mix of psychology, design, and strategy.

CTA’s can be as simple as text saying “Click Here” or as complex as the way a page is laid out, the copy on the page, the value proposition of what’s being offered, and much more.

People expect that any page or screen they encounter has an action that it wants them to take, so they’re already primed by their experience.

Then there’s the curiosity of what happens after the person follows a call to action. What happens after I click this button?

The CTA is possibly the most important trigger because no service, product, or idea can truly succeed without getting people to perform some action.

The trouble is, not enough companies and marketers are using CTAs effectively, if at all.

In fact, a study by Small Business Trends found that 70% of the surveyed B2B websites lacked an effective call to action.

How can you use CTAs to boost sales?

You can take advantage of CTAs by ensuring that any touchpoints you have with your customers (whether it be email, website, app, marketing campaign, and more) are optimized around a clear action that you want them to take.

Whether you’re asking a customer to buy, subscribe, sign up, inquire, share, download, or something else, make sure your call to action on your website is meaningful and provides value both for you and your customers.

2. Social proof

People are influenced by others. Dr. Robert Cialdini explains:

Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important guides in defining the answer.

Scientists have studied the importance of social proof for decades. A great example of social proof in action comes from an experiment done by scientists in 1969. They found that if they had a single person standing on a sidewalk looking up, very few people joined in to look up as well.

As they increased the size of the initial group of people looking up, the proportion of passersby that joined in and looked up went up as well. The behavior of the people passing by was triggered by the increasingly large group of people looking up.

Social proof explains why major brands invest so much money on influencers. Brands hire well-known athletes to promote sneakers, models to promote clothing, actors to promote insurance, etc.

How can you use social proof in your business?

  • Add links to reputable sites or publications to your website,
  • Collect reviews and testimonials and display them on your site,
  • Show the number of subscribers to your service on the sign-up or registration page,
  • Display links to related products, like “Customers who bought this product also bought” or “Customers also viewed”, and
  • Show how many people have shared your products or content on social media.

Be sure that your social proof connects smartly to your brand. For example, if you run an ad in a local paper or online, make sure your company’s name is visible and near the social proof and be certain that your company’s logo is clear and readable. Too many businesses forget to connect their brand to social proof or have unremarkable, unmemorable logos that are easily forgotten by their customers and prospects.

To learn more about effective logo design, read The Psychology of Logo Design: How Fonts, Colors, Shapes, and Lines Influence Purchasing Decisions and Is Your Small Business Committing These 7 Deady Logo Design Sins?

3. Scarcity

No one wants to miss out on an opportunity they’re interested in, and that’s where the principle of scarcity comes in.

People tend to want what they can’t have, and giving the impression (hopefully a true one) that the thing they want may disappear, sell out, or otherwise become unavailable is a powerful trigger.

One of the most commonly cited studies on the power of scarcity was done in 1975 by Stephen Worchel.

Worchel tested the attractiveness of two different cookie jars: one that was full, and one that only had a few cookies in it. Test subjects were told that there were fewer of one of the cookies due to an accident or high demand. As a result, People rated the cookies there more scarce as being more valuable and more desirable.

How can you use scarcity to improve your marketing?

A common way that businesses use scarcity as a trigger is through inventory or availability numbers.
Amazon uses this trigger when they display “only 1 left in stock” on product pages. You see this as well on travel sites where they report “only 5 tickets left at this price”.

You can also create time-limited promotions. For example: “Sale lasts only two days. Visit our store now!”

Companies also can use scarcity through limited-edition versions of their products. We illustrated a great example of this in action when we looked at food packaging design:

Nutella introduced seven million different versions of Nutella’s graphic identity, each sold on a single bottle. The company used an algorithm to randomly generate the designs and stamped each jar with its own unique code so it could be authenticated by collectors.

The campaign ran in Italy and was a huge success, selling out in just one month.

4. Framing

Framing is the idea that people tend to make comparisons when making a decision. This means you can influence how people perceive something by the way it’s compared to something else.

Via William Poundstone‘s book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It)

A well-known example of framing in action was described by author William Poundstone in his book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It). Poundstone wrote about how a New York restaurant, Balthazar’s, used framing on their menu to influence people.

People tend to look at large images first when they scan a layout, and the restaurant took advantage of this to put two of their most expensive items right below a large copy of their logo. The two items cost $115 and $170.

Poundstone explained why the restaurant chose this strategy: “The main role of that $170 platter is to make everything else near it look like a relative bargain.”

Another example of framing is how companies display the regular price of an item along with the cheaper sales price, or when there’s a buy one, get one free offer. The focus is reframed from the original price (or the existing price of the item, for buy one, get one free) to the perceived new value.

How can you leverage framing to increase revenues?

As mentioned, displaying the pre-sales price of a product is one way to leverage framing.

Another way is to use what’s known as the Goldilocks pricing technique. Using this technique, you show a number of different prices from low to high (Good, Better, Best). Just like the fable it draws its name from, most people will choose the middle option as it seems “just right” – a good balance between the low-end and high-end options.

5. Salience

The principle of salience deals with the idea that people’s attention is drawn to the thing that is the most relevant to them at that moment.

One of the most common uses for this principle is seen in things like the ubiquitous up-sell during the checkout process.

Companies do this because consumers are already primed to buy as they’re already in the process of paying for something. This is also where companies often include promotions or other marketing because people’s minds are generally more receptive to taking advantage of a promotion during the checkout process.

People tend to take the path of least resistance and seek out the most important (or salient) thing for them when they arrive on a website. Designers can take advantage of this by knowing what people are looking for and then arranging the page to group similar things close to that primary goal.

How can you use salience to increase profits?

Integrating salience can be more difficult than some of the other triggers because it depends on what kind of goals your customers have in mind when they interact with you. The key here is to identify these goals and integrate related experiences that can take advantage of this innate focus.

As we mentioned already, up-selling is a great example of how you can use the principle of salience. We suggest you take a closer look at why your customers use your site or products and integrate related goals or products.

Conclusion

Understanding how your customers think and how you can influence their actions will help you to boost sales and profits.

But remember to use these strategies wisely.  After all, the best and most valuable connections with customers are built on trust and care.

 

The post 5 Powerful Psychological Triggers That Can Help You Improve Your Marketing To Increase Sales And Profits appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Twitter Link Roundup #345 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers!

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Are you one of the millions of people who have started using coconut oil?

It may be time to reconsider the fervent adoration this cooking ingredient has accrued in recent years.

The American Heart Association recently reviewed the evidence on coconut oil. An astounding three-quarter of the US population believes that coconut oil is a healthy choice and a panacea for just about everything. Startlingly, the review discovered that only 37% of nutritionists came to the same conclusion.

To read more about the rise (and risks) of coconut oil, take a close look at this review from The Guardian.

Now, we hope you enjoy another great set of links and articles that we shared with you over the past week on our crowdspring Twitter account (and on Ross’s Twitter account). We regularly share our favorite posts on entrepreneurship, small business, marketing, logo design, website design, startups, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Enjoy!

smallbusinessblog

startupsblog

socialmediablog

designblog

logodesignblog

otherblog

 

The post Twitter Link Roundup #345 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers! appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

How A Strong Logo and Brand Can Help Your Etsy Store Thrive

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2018 has been the year of a lot of things, but towering over all of them in bespoke heels has been the year of the crafter.

With 1.9 million sellers, 31.7 million active buyers, and 45 million products, Etsy offers an enormous marketplace filled with ample opportunity for the nimble-fingered entrepreneur.

Etsy can take credit for many stories in which a good old-fashioned side hustle explodes into a legitimate, sustainable business.

But with so many sellers and products, the competition is fierce and success on Etsy requires more than just a unique craft or product.

Whether you’re rebranding a store you launched a few years ago or are starting a new store, read on to learn about ways you can transform your Etsy store into an attractive and memorable experience for your prospective customers.

The importance of branding your Etsy store

To succeed on Etsy, your store should offer interesting, creative products. But you also need to be sure that your Esty store branding, and the branding on your products and product packaging, is memorable and stands out.

In any crowded market, having outstanding branding is the key to making sure you stand out as an appealing, reputable place for shoppers to spend their hard earned money. We’ve previously talked about the importance of branding in creating a good first impression:

A strong brand increases the value of your company, creates an identity and motivation for your employees, and makes it easier for you to acquire new customers. A brand represents how people know you (or your business), and how they perceive your reputation or the reputation of your company. In today’s noisy world, a strong brand is more important than it has ever been.

Your Etsy store’s products are displayed right alongside your competitors. The products and the photos you use to sell them are the first hooks to draw customers.

Once a prospective customer clicks on a product, however, the way you present yourself and your store become important.

A major part of Etsy’s appeal for people is the authentic, local-shop feeling of the store and product – even if that store is actually located thousands of miles away.

A professional logo design will help you close sales.

Jewell Ray is a jewelry maker on Etsy whose store shows off the maker’s personality and individuality.

People shop on Etsy because they want something unique made by a real person, so imbue your logo with your personality – that special flavor and je ne sais quoi that belongs to you and you alone.

Etsy describes a brand as “the promise that a shop makes to its customers.”

Your brand tells your customers what they can expect from your products and what differentiates your products from your competitors’. Simply put, your brand is a combination of the image you are trying to project for your business, plus the associations and memories that your customers bring to the table when they encounter that image.

When it comes to showcasing a logo on Etsy, authenticity and representing yourself in a real and honest way is what counts.

Think about people visiting your Etsy store like they’re walking into an actual, physical store – that local experience that people instinctively are drawn to. The transaction between you and a customer on Etsy is personal; it’s a one-to-one, intimate relationship.

Your logo and store branding should reinforce this.

Your logo offers a visual way to reinforce your personable, real-person identity to customers, and a further reminder that what you’re selling came from you, not a mass produced factory. You want customers to come away from a sale with a positive impression so they tell their friends and become loyal customers.

A well-designed logo and thoughtfully executed brand experience are valuable assets if you want to cement a positive customer experience in every buyer’s memory.

The elements of a strong logo

As we explained previously:

At its most basic, a logo is a small, symbolic piece of artwork that represents a business. But, we’ve dug a bit deeper than that. When you set aside all the design trends and fancy fonts, at its core, a logo must:

1- Embody your brand.

2- Be instantly recognizable.

3- Be versatile.

4- Be timeless.

Everything else is optional.

In fact, I’ll go one step further. Every design choice in your logo should exist only to serve and strengthen the four items listed above. And, if you meet these four requirements, many other commonly cited logo must-haves, like simplicity and memorability, naturally follow.

We’ve written a number of useful guides that can help you with your Etsy store logo:

Beyond your brand: what’s your unique selling proposition?

Once you have your branding in place, consider your unique selling proposition (USP).

Your USP is, at its heart, what makes you unique; it’s what makes your products and your store stand out amongst your competitors.

Are you crafting your products from the highest quality materials, or are they created with a charitable purpose in mind? Maybe there’s one-of-a-kind exclusivity to be found in your products, and you can showcase the luxury your storefront offers.

Whatever it is, look for ways to incorporate and illustrate your USP somewhere strategically within your store. This will help provide a concrete identity for your Etsy store, and craft your brand as more than just a one-off point for purchase.

Connect your Esty store design to your brand

Logos provide the first touchpoint between your brand identity and your customers.

But your overall design also needs to tie in with your logo to maintain a consistent feel. As we wrote:

Your company’s brand is, in many ways, its personality.

Your brand lives in everyday interactions your company has with its prospects and customers, including the images you share, the messages you post on your website, the content of your marketing materials, your presentations and booths at conferences, and your posts on social networks.

Etsy provides key opportunities for you to deliver that kind of consistent brand experience.

Every storefront on Etsy is provided with four separate visual elements for any store’s main page, and all of these should be consistent and work together to reinforce the personal brand and message you want customers to see.

The four image sizes used on an Etsy store page are:

Cover photo: 3360 x 840
Banner: 760 x 100
Shop logo / icon: 500 x 500
Profile photo: 400 x 400

Be sure you use consistent or complementary colors and imagery in those elements.

 

Spread it around

Your logo and branding shouldn’t just live on your Etsy store.

Part of a great purchasing experience extends to the unboxing experience – make sure yours is on point. If you really want to thrill your customers and make certain they’ll be back, use your logo and branding elements in every aspect of your store experience: use them both online and offline.

Make sure you pay attention to:

  • Packaging: Any product a customer buys on Etsy must be shipped to them. The product packaging and packaging design you use to deliver your products is a perfect place to use your logo and branding. Even something as simple as having your logo printed on a sticker can go a long way. Use them in your product’s shipping box and give buyers a surprise pop of your brand when they receive it.
  • Business cards and stationery, and more: Make sure you display your logo on any business cards or stationary you might use. Many Etsy sellers include a handwritten note embossed with their logo along with the products they ship to customers. This extra special touch helps add the crucial human element to help personalize the buying experience.
  • Social media: Make sure all of your social media profiles reuse your store’s branding. You can resize and reuse your store’s cover image on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and you can display your logo as part of your Instagram profile.

People may come to Etsy for its unusual and novel wares, but they also look for the personality and humanity behind the products. Make sure your logo and brand puts you and what makes you special first, and don’t forget to take advantage of every branding opportunity available to you.

 

The post How A Strong Logo and Brand Can Help Your Etsy Store Thrive appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Twitter Link Roundup #346 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers!

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You’re standing in a long line, and you’re dying to cut to the front.

Try using the magic word.

No, it’s not “please”.

In 1978, Harvard professor Ellen Langer found that whenever a “because” is used as a follow up to a request, compliance increases by over 50 percent. That’s a remarkable statistic, especially considering that the because can be followed by something utterly nonsensical.

The next time you want to get someone to do something your way – or get to the front of that line – make sure you’ve got the “because…” at the ready.

Now, we hope you enjoy another great set of links and articles that we shared with you over the past week on our crowdspring Twitter account (and on Ross’s Twitter account). We regularly share our favorite posts on entrepreneurship, small business, marketing, logo design, web design, startups, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Enjoy!

smallbusinessblog

startupsblog

socialmediablog

designblog

otherblog

 

The post Twitter Link Roundup #346 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers! appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

How Strong Political Branding Can Help You Win Your Next Election

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Politics today is more polarizing than ever.

Nearly every race is filled with candidates from multiple parties, and it’s tough for candidates to stand out.

Good design can help. Design acts as a powerful tool for communication and persuasion, both of which are hugely important to political strategy and tactics and to political campaigns.

For a long time, design in political campaigns has followed a certain set of unspoken guidelines: be safe, follow tradition, don’t stray from the red, white, and blue of our forefathers.

But in the past few decades, design has also been used to promote propaganda. In fact, some people believe that any branding efforts crafted by political teams exist only to serve as disingenuous political marketing efforts.

Ultimately, in today’s crowded political environment, it’s impossible to effectively execute political strategy and tactics for a campaign without good design.

Good design is increasingly helping to fuel underdog candidates. As design leader and author Steven Heller said on Twitter:

Design is personality. When used well in election campaigns branding it says more than a candidates name. Color, type, and image contribute to the perception of that name, sometimes the person, too.

Let’s take a closer look at political branding examples and how design has helped candidates succeed in recent elections.

How good design helped ¡Ocasio! win her election

Look no further than the campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a recent example of how design effectively expressed a candidate’s personality and paved the way toward a win.

Just 28 years old, newcomer Ocasio-Cortez boldly ran against Joe Crowley, a heavily favored incumbent for the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

In its coverage of the campaign, Vox.com pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez’s brand played a big role in securing her the win:

While she’s a vocal candidate with progressive ideals, she has an equally communicative, but silent, tool at her side: her visual brand. On the streets of New York’s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of eastern Bronx and northern Queens, you might spot vibrant yellow campaign posters printed with a portrait of Ocasio-Cortez with her last name bookended by Spanish exclamation points, and calls to action in bold type, set at an attention-grabbing angle.

Ocasio-Cortez ran as an outsider, and the design and branding of her election campaign reflected this. You can see this in her visually bold poster design above.

The design of her opponent’s campaign was rooted in the traditional (with the colors red, white, and blue used prominently).

When compared to the centrist, comparatively safe designs of Crowley’s traditionally styled posters, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign materials stood out. Ocasio-Cortez’s used purple, yellow, and other bold choices to visually differentiate her campaign from her opponent.

Her political branding strategy was to sound different and to look different. It’s no surprise that Ocasio-Cortez created a compelling argument for shifting toward a revolution – in design and in politics itself.

Lindsay Ballant, an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art, attributes the success of Ocasio-Cortez’s branding to her “fearlessness in taking on a comfy establishment figure.”

Ballant explains that by doubling down on her persona in her election branding, Ocasio-Cortez clearly emphasizes her strength as a lawmaker and as a non-traditional, radical candidate.

Ocasio-Cortez tapped Tandem Design NYC to create the design for her campaign. Tandem took inspiration from past grassroots campaigns and movements by labor and civil rights activists to create the striking brand.

Tandem’s lead designer Maria Arenas explained some of the motivation behind the design to Fast Company:

She is a non-traditional candidate running a non-traditional campaign, and we wanted her visual identity to reflect that, to be true to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The colorful and engaging visual style of Ocasio-Cortez’ campaign materials defiantly stepped outside of the stale boundaries established by the establishment.

The power of a word and a logo in political branding

What lessons can political brand strategists, marketers, and politicians learn from the role design played in Ocasio-Cortez’s success?

First, the power of a single visual or brand element cannot be underestimated in political candidate branding and political brand management.

Take, for example, Obama’s 2008 “Hope” campaign. Whatever your political leaning, it’s hard to dismiss the power of the message Obama’s “Hope” logo had in swaying voters.

There were many other elements to Obama’s election campaign design, but that single word and logo design, and the consistent use of the branding throughout the national election helped strengthen his message.

But not all logos created for political candidate branding were as immediately successful as these, however.

The logo for Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was greeted with much derision and ridicule when it was first released. The logo was very simple: a blue H with the cross-bar turned into a red arrow that pointed to the right.

Many of the complaints centered around the idea that it was too simple. So simple, a child could have designed it.

It wasn’t until long after the campaign was over that its creator, famed logo designer Michael Beirut, revealed that this was actually the plan all along. Beirut told podcast 99% Invisible about his inspiration and motivation during a longer discussion on logo design:

The result was intentionally simple: the letter H with an arrow pointing forward, rendered in the primary colors of the American flag. Bierut recalls saying: “I want something that’s so simple that a first-grader could do it with construction paper, Elmer’s glue and kindergarten scissors.” He “didn’t want a fancy thing you needed to know software programs to create, [rather] something that was easy to draw as a heart or a peace sign or a smiley face.”

Throughout the criticism, the Clinton campaign stood their ground, and eventually, the perception of the logo changed over time.

This is the second lesson that political branding strategists and consultants should take to heart: haters gonna hate. But given time and consistent usage, most designs can overcome the initial rush to judgment.

The power of a simple message on a hat as a political strategy

Election branding isn’t limited to candidate logos. Politicians have successfully used articles of clothing, such as t-shirts or hats, to promote strong messages.

Take for example Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan on a simple hat. Michael Beirut noted that Trump’s consistent use of the hat turned it into a powerful branding element:

 It’s meant to be the kind of thing you associate with hard-working, salt of the earth Americans. As a wearable object, the hat became both highly visible and a signal of particular commitment. It is also reflective of the candidate — one can read echoes of his speaking style into the bold capitalized white letters against the stark red background.

Corey Lewandowski, one of Trump’s campaign managers, explained how the hat helped to focus voters around a singular message:

“It’s just a disruptive technology,” Lewandowski told CNN of the campaign hats. “People who weren’t involved in politics, that didn’t have a political background, wanted to show their support for something different and their way to do that was to buy hats.”

Whatever your opinion on the hat and the slogan are, they were incredibly effective and persuasive to Trump’s supporters.

The branding of a political candidate used to be a fairly straightforward affair, but as the political landscape has become increasingly heated, political marketing strategists and consultants have increasingly relied on design to enhance and differentiate their candidates.

If you want to create a strong and lasting impression, use design as a weapon in your political marketing, advertising, and branding strategies.

 

The post How Strong Political Branding Can Help You Win Your Next Election appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Packaging Design for Cannabis Products: How to Build Trust and Gain Customers

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The research is piling up.

Science confirms that cannabis – specifically hemp – may have incredible health benefits.

There’s mounting evidence that this historically-maligned plant may have a positive impact on conditions as wide-ranging as epilepsy, inflammation, anxiety, cancer, and multiple sclerosis.

And, with all of these potential benefits, hemp is anticipated to become a billion dollar industry. More broadly, the medical cannabis market in North America will growfrom $9.2 billion in 2017 to $47.3 billion a decade later.”

Hemp is high in cannabidiol (or CBD) – the star performer of the cannabis health roster. For those who don’t know what CBD is, it’s important to note that it’s also naturally low in THC (the compound that makes people get high), which makes it pretty user-friendly.

But not everyone is on board with cannabis’ shiny new image as a health superstar.

After years worth of bad PR in our society, cannabis’ reputation is pretty tarnished.

And, as a newcomer to the health supplement scene, cannabinoids are not yet regulated by the FDA.

These perception issues may prevent many consumers (who might otherwise benefit) from giving cannabis products a try.

What can you do to improve your cannabis products?

To sell more cannabis products, you must build trust with your customers. Design Shack Magazine explains:

Trust is a key component of user loyalty, and a reason why people come to your company or brand.

But building trust is a big challenge for new medical cannabis businesses. That’s where good design can help:

While a lot of trust comes from past performance and a brand’s track-record, it also comes from the design. How a website, poster or package looks can impact how users feel about it and whether they take the leap from casual looker to brand loyalist.

For a cannabis health supplement business, the product packaging design is one of the most important ways to reassure consumers and build trust.

When a prospective customer first sees your product, they see the packaging before they can touch or see the product. Good product packaging can raise concerns or instill comfort and confidence in a potential buyer.

If you don’t get your package design right, people might simply ignore your cannabis products.

So, let’s take a look at what your business can do to create great product packaging designs that will win over the skeptics and gain customers.

Include the right content on product packaging

Image courtesy of Kannabia Seed Company

Designing packaging that inspires trust starts with including the right content.

Start by telling people exactly what’s inside your packaging. For example, specify what your product is (CBD Extract Oil Tincture vs Full-Spectrum Hemp Oil Caplets), how much of it there is, a production lot number, and a potency level.

Include any qualifiers that may reassure your customers – such as “Organic,” “Non-GMO,” or “CO2-Extracted.”

Communicate this information in clean, concise language that shows you have nothing to hide.

And, speaking of not hiding – include contact information for your business. Many businesses bury their contact info on their websites and packaging.

Don’t do that.

People trust businesses that are transparent and easy to reach. Customers want to know that if they have a question or something goes awry with an order that they can get help.

Including your web address, support email, and phone number is a powerful way to reassure clients that your business is legitimate and trustworthy.

And, no packaging is complete without branding elements to help customers identify who your business is and what you’re about. This should include your company’s logo, identifying brand colors and any other small visual elements your brand may use.

Finally, make sure to follow the FDA guidelines for dietary supplement labels.

Your content checklist for product packaging

  • Include the essential details
    • What’s inside?
    • How much?
    • What’s the potency and dosage?
    • When does it expire?
    • What’s the lot number?
  • Include reassuring qualifiers that your audience will value
    • Organic, CO2-Extracted, Full Spectrum, Contains Less Than 0.3% THC, etc.
  • Include your company’s contact info
    • Web Address
    • Customer Support Email
    • Customer Support Phone number
  • Include your visual branding elements
    • Logo
    • Tagline
    • Brand Colors
    • Small branded graphic elements

Keep the packaging design simple

Image courtesy of Receptra Naturals

Clean, simple design is reassuring and inspires trust.

That’s because simple design makes it easy for customers to find what they need or want to know.

It’s easy to miss information in a cluttered design – and people know this.

People naturally mistrust the dense chunks of text at the bottom of many advertisements and product packages. Virtually everyone knows that the dense chunks of text contain many loopholes and regulations.

On the other hand, clean, easy-to-read fonts and plenty of white space ensure that your audience can read your product packaging and find the information they want quickly without too much trouble.

With fewer words and graphics competing for attention, the important stuff naturally stands out.

And, a simple design also sends the message that there are no hidden loopholes or secrets that may work against your customers.

Keep the design of your product packaging professional

It doesn’t matter how great your product is if your business comes across as unprofessional.

And, for medical cannabis businesses, the bar for establishing professionalism is even higher than for most companies.

Keep these tips in mind to communicate professionalism and reliability.

Make sure your packaging is error-free

Image courtesy of The Local Rose

Mistakes don’t look professional.

How many times have you wondered how an error could have passed through so many hands unnoticed that it made it onto the final version?

Consumers notice errors in your packaging design. They see typos and often, discover incorrect or misleading information. Errors make customers think that your business is incompetent. Or worse – they might think that your business is deliberately misleading them.

Make sure you proof-read everything before your packaging goes to production.

Showcase your cannabis products well against competitors

Image courtesy of Tylenol Professional

People buying your cannabis products will have other options.

Don’t ignore your competition and be sure to understand how other dietary supplements and medicine is packaged.

Want to build trust by encouraging consumers to group your CBD products with other trusted medical brands? Follow these tips:

  • Provide a list of ingredients and instructions for safe dosing and usage. People expect this from reputable medicinal brands. Your product packaging should do this too. And, remember to follow the FDA’s labeling requirements for dietary supplements.
  • Incorporate a safety seal into your packaging design. You’ll notice that most medicines, vitamins, and supplements have a safety seal to protect the contents. Whether you opt for a shrink-wrapped seal over the lid or a foil seal under the cap, adding a safety seal shows that your product has not been tampered with and implies that it’s safe to use.

Incorporating these elements will create a mental link between your product and other trusted medicinal products.

Be authentic to your cannabis brand

Image courtesy of Direct Cannabis Network

Last, but not least, your packaging design must align with your brand.

When consumers sense a disconnect between the brand identity they’ve come to identify with your business and the packaging design for your products, it creates discomfort.

But, packaging that is in line with (or expands upon) the brand identity consumers have come to know will create comfort and trust.

Kevin Keating at PKG Brand Design explains:

Your brand’s packaging design must reflect your company’s story, product, and values. If your packaging claims a “simple” snack product with dozens of ingredients, consumers are going to be left with a disingenuous feeling about your products and company. By ensuring that your messaging, design, and visual impact is in line with your company and your consumer’s preferences, you can build instant trust.

So, ensure that your packaging design is consistent with your existing visual identity. This includes the name of your business or cannabis product, your cannabis business logo, website, and marketing design.

A united and cohesive visual brand presence looks professional and helps to build familiarity – which is key to developing trust.

Ultimately, many people judge products based solely on the product packaging. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your product packaging sends the right message.

 

The post Packaging Design for Cannabis Products: How to Build Trust and Gain Customers appeared first on crowdspring Blog.


Twitter Link Roundup #347 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers!

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A young family, a retiree, a career-breaker and a disabled traveler all embark on a backpacking trip.

Sounds like the start of a terrible joke, or a great adventure.

If you’ve considered striking out on an adventure of your own but worried about how to do it, fear not. These four stories show that anyone can survive a long-term trip – and come away with the experience of a lifetime. To get inspired and pick up some tips along the way, read these amazing travel tales here.

Now, we hope you enjoy another great set of links and articles that we shared with you over the past week on our crowdspring Twitter account (and on Ross’s Twitter account). We regularly share our favorite posts on entrepreneurship, small business, marketing, logo design, web design, startups, leadership, social media, marketing, economics and other interesting stuff! Enjoy!

smallbusinessblog

startupsblog

socialmediablog

designblog

otherblog

 

The post Twitter Link Roundup #347 – Terrific Reads for Small Business, Entrepreneurs, Marketers, and Designers! appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

3 Compelling Product Packaging Design Strategies To Turn Millennials and Gen Z Into Zealous Advocates

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Great product packaging design is the first tangible experience your customer has with your product. In many cases, it’s what draws them to your product in the first place.

Product packaging can make or break product sales. It’s no wonder that marketers and business owners commonly ask:

  • What is good packaging design?
  • How important is packaging design?
  • What is sustainable packaging design?
  • How does packaging design influence consumers?

As we recently wrote:

There is impressive evidence in support of the power of packaging design:

  1. Attractive packaging triggered more intense activity in areas of the brain associated with impulsivity than neutral packaging.
  2. Unattractive and attractive packaging lead to less activity in areas of the brain responsible for reflective thought than neutral packaging.
  3. Attractive packaging triggered reward responses in the brain whereas unattractive packaging triggered areas associated with negative emotion.

Packaging design today is different from the way product packaging was created in the past. Today’s consumers are younger, more opinionated, driven by social causes, and selective when buying products.

This means that every business, from startups to small businesses to the largest Brands must either redefine and evolve the way they create products and product packaging, or go out of business.

This is especially true if your business sells to Millennials and Gen Z.

These generations dominate product sales today and will continue to wield a great influence well into the future.

Millennials’ US spending will represent 30 percent of total retail sales by 2020 and within a few years, is expected to grow to $1.4 trillion annually. Generation Z will account for 40 percent of all consumers by 2020.

Millennials and Gen Z pay particular attention to product packaging – but not in the same way that older generations viewed packaging.

So how do you catch the attention of the most valuable spending generations in the history of the nation?

Ron Sasine, a packaging consultancy expert from Hudson Windsor, identifies three critical Millennial and Gen Z trends for packaging design:

  • Authenticity,
  • Experience, and
  • Values.

These values inform new trends in packaging design, and they are transforming the way brands formulate their packaging strategies.

Let’s take a look at the important packaging design trends and how you can create exceptional product packaging that speaks to Millennials and Gen Z.

Method is a well-known company whose sparse, clean packaging echoes its commitment to eco-friendly cleaning solutions.

Trend: Millennials and Gen Z want packaging design to reflect their values and interests

Millennials and Gen Z both consider environmental issues as high priority concerns.

Studies show that 70 percent of Millennials and over 75 percent of Gen Z cares about their impact on the planet. Both generations factor environmental issues into their purchasing decisions and both hold companies accountable for harming the environment.

Today, it’s both easier and cheaper to make environmentally friendly product packaging.

More importantly, according to a recent Nielsen study, 3 out of 4 Millennials and 72 percent of Gen Z polled would pay more for a product with sustainable packaging.

A Tetra Pak study on Millennial purchasing habits echoes those findings.

Millennials globally are choosing eco-friendly products and are willing to pay for them. They actively seek out information about a product’s sustainability credentials and expect brands to help them consume smarter, with less packaging, less waste and more recycling.

Large brands and many of your competitors now place greater emphasis on using sustainable, ethically sourced materials for product packaging.

If you want to sell to Millennials and Gen Z, you must evolve your product packaging and find ways to create custom packaging that’s recyclable or reusable.

Canny is a UK-based snack company that sells flavored milk targeted at Millennials and Gen Z.

Trend: Millennials and Gen Z want packaging design to be a fun experience

Design is playing an increasingly important role in product packaging for Millennials and Gen Z. The days of stern, no-nonsense packaging are fading faster than you can say “plain cardboard box.”

The trend toward lighthearted, irreverent branding has accelerated, and it’s showing up in trendy product package graphics designs everywhere.

Anything targeted toward Millennials or Gen Z must be more fun, more energetic, and more alive if you want to capture their attention and brand loyalty.

This includes your company’s name and logo design. In fact, some Brands have created product names specifically targetting these generations.

Fun product packaging helps companies create zealous advocates for their products. This is especially true for Millennials and Gen Z. Both groups actively use social media and love to share product pictures and stories.

Millennials and Generation Z expert, Jeff Fromm describes this phenomenon:

Through social media, they meticulously curate their personal brand to reflect how they want to be perceived.

The wine industry has tapped into this urge for playfulness.

Companies like the Union Wine Company have turned to cheeky advertising – they sell wine in cans as a way of differentiating themselves.

This approach has borne fruit for wine companies, with Nielsen reporting in 2016 that boxed wine sales were up 16.2 percent. Wine sold as tetra packs were up 21.7 percent, and canned wine sales grew by an astounding 125 percent.

The combination of unorthodox packaging design and biting advertising are a potent mix. If you want to appeal to Millennials and Gen Z, add some playfulness and whimsy to your packaging design.

Trend: Millennials and Gen Z want product packaging that demonstrates authenticity

Millennials and Gen Z both value authenticity and personal identity. What’s more, they care deeply about investing in brands that stand for more than an easy sale.

Product packaging must communicate that your brand is authentic and deserves to be trusted.

Designing packaging that inspires trust starts with a great brand identity. We wrote about this high value of authentic brand identity recently:

You should know by now that Millennials value authenticity in the brands with which they do business.

This is true for Generation Z as well.

But, Gen Z takes it one step further. Like their older cohort, Gen Z is vigilant against ads and being “sold.” But, they also expect to be a part of something bigger. Deep Patel points out:

“Your messaging needs to be intelligent, thoughtful and inclusive. It’s not about proving that you’re right and someone else is wrong. It’s about including everyone together.”

Millennials and Gen Z are more comfortable with technology and social media than any other generation. This creates challenges for companies trying to connect to them.

It’s no longer possible for companies to have a superficial presence in this new marketing landscape.

Companies need to engage on social media, communicate with impactful visuals, and demonstrate that they’re socially aware and responsible.

Today’s consumers value action, not talk.

If you claim to be authentic and value-driven, show this. If you sell physical products, use sustainable design, equitably-sourced materials, and showcase your company’s values.

If you want to sell to Millennials and Gen Z and create loyal, long-term customers, be ready to create the kind of branding and packaging that attractively speaks to the values of those generations.

 

The post 3 Compelling Product Packaging Design Strategies To Turn Millennials and Gen Z Into Zealous Advocates appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

5 Important Book Cover Design Tips to Help Your Book Stand Out

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Like it or not, people judge books by their covers.

We all know that we’re not supposed to… But we do it anyway.

And, honestly – how else can you really choose? In a store packed with books (or sitting at home browsing Amazon) your book cover design is the most effective way to catch people’s attention.

It doesn’t matter what’s between the covers if no one ever bothers to open them.

A shoddy book cover will make prospective readers question the value of the content within.

But, a strong cover design will catch a reader’s eye, capture their interest and communicate what the book is about.  These are the things that inspire someone to buy your book.

But, unless you are an artist or graphic designer, you probably don’t know how to create a powerful and professional cover design. And you likely aren’t following contemporary book cover design trends.

Let’s take a closer look at book cover design tips and best practices to help you create a book cover that makes readers want to crack the spine.

Make your title prominent

Design by smarikaahuja

The title of your book should be the primary focus of your book cover and must be clearly visible.

Your title communicates the essence of your book and differentiates it from the other books on the shelf.

Imagine if a shelf in a store or your computer screen contained nearly identical titles or titles that a person could not read. How would they be able to distinguish your book from other books?

If you want to attract a reader, they should never, ever have to search to find the title.

In practical terms, this means:

  • choosing a font that is easy to read,
  • selecting a font color that stands out from the background,
  • using a font size that is easily visible even when your cover is a thumbnail on Amazon, and
  • positioning other text and graphic elements to avoid competing with the title.

Ben Sobieck points out in Writer’s Digest that many people shop for books online. This means that your book cover must be legible even when appearing at a fraction of its actual size.

Even on a small phone screen, your potential readers must be able to read the title of your book.

So, whatever you do, don’t let the cover design get in the way of your title.

Choose fonts and colors to make reading easier

Design by espacioM

Your book cover should be easy to read.

This may seem obvious – but it bears saying anyway.

If you let design choices get in the way of readability, you’re undermining your ability to communicate with your audience.

It makes no sense to share your title, summary, and reviews if no one can see them.

So, make font and color choices that support readability.

  • Avoid color combinations that are garish or hard to look at for any length of time.
  • Do choose font colors and background colors that contrast sufficiently for easy visibility.
  • Select fonts that are easy to read (consider serif vs sans-serif)

Typographic consultant Ilene Strizver shared in an article for Fonts.com:

Serif typefaces have historically been credited with increasing both the readability and reading speed of long passages of text because they help the eye travel across a line…

This is why the print inside your book is most likely in a serif typeface.

You can and should choose a more creative font for your title and name on the cover; but, we suggest pairing it with a simple serif font for any reviews and the synopsis on the back.

And, limit yourself to only 2 fonts – more than that can start to look disjointed or busy. Speaking of which…

Don’t over-crowd the cover design

Design by godfreyw

Staring at a page of solid text, it’s hard to tell which word or sentence (if any) is most important.

They all look visually the same. Just letters in the same size, color, and weight.

A crowded design will render it impossible to pick out the important stuff.

Readers don’t approach a book cover with the same engagement that they do when reading a page from your book. If they’re perusing covers, they’re simply browsing. They’re not ready to invest any deep concentration in your book yet.

But, that’s what your cover should persuade them to do! Briefly. Don’t make the reader have to work for it.

So, leave plenty of white space (a design term meaning blank space without text or design elements). This will allow the important information you share to be easily visible.

Your book’s title, your name, reviews, and the synopsis are all important. Keep your design uncluttered and readers will easily find them.

Embrace your genre

Design by RedOne22

While every book is unique, honoring your genre is important.

Genres exist for a reason. They’re a shorthand for helping a reader to guess if they’ll like your book or not.

For instance, I like horror, supernatural thrillers, and comedic fantasy. If a book is well written and falls into one of those categories I’ll probably enjoy it.

And, each of those genres has its own design style. So, when I’m browsing, I can easily pick out a book in one of my preferred genres without even reading the title.

A horror novel looks like a horror novel.

So, when searching for book cover design ideas, start by browsing other popular books in your genre. What colors, layouts, fonts, and graphic elements are common in that genre?

Which of those elements make sense for your book?

Always create a unique book cover design that remains true to you and your book. But, do it within the larger framework of your genre’s design style.

Fans of your genre will be drawn to your book subconsciously, getting your foot in the door. Then your quality writing and fascinating story can take care of the rest.

The cover should feature a key theme from your book

Design by Wilson_Fernando

If you’re looking for book cover design inspiration, look no further than your own writing.

The best path to a unique, creative book cover design is to visually represent a specific element or idea from your writing.

The cover should communicate as much about your book to your potential audience as possible.

But, you don’t want to try to overwhelm them with everything on one small cover.

Book covers have limited space in which to communicate. So, think carefully about the most important theme or element to feature.

Let’s say your story includes a paranoid android, mice, towels, and a spaceship shaped like a giant running shoe (this is a real book!). It’s a bad idea to cram all of that imagery into just one book cover.

Choose just one element – the one that communicates the most relevant information about the book.

And then use colors, imagery, fonts… and of course, your synopsis, to tell a visually compelling story on your cover that will grab peoples’ attention.

For more on book cover design, read 10 Smart Tips To Help Authors Create an Amazing Book Cover Design.

The final word

A book cover communicates what your book is about and if done right, motivates people to look closer at your book.

If you want to inspire people to pick up your book and buy it, you have to create a design that’s easy to read and visually appealing.

 

The post 5 Important Book Cover Design Tips to Help Your Book Stand Out appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

Your Travel Website Should Do These 3 Things Well – Do You Know What They Are?

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Imagine you’re on a Hawaiian beach…

Or, maybe you’re strolling the streets of Paris with a fresh baguette in hand.

Sounds delightful, right?

A recent AARP study revealed that 47% of surveyed baby boomers planned to travel internationally in 2018. And they will each spend roughly $6,300 on travel this year. Millennials are even more likely to travel internationally (64%) and will each spend around $6,800 on travel in 2018.

Travel can be exhilarating. But, planning a trip can be overwhelming, confusing, and scary.

For most people, planning a trip starts with seeking out their trusted advisor – Google. People research where they want to go, what they will do when they get there, where they will stay, and more… right from the comfort of their own computer or phone.

And, the wealth of information at their fingertips can be a lot to take in.

So, if you want to attract clients your travel website must be user-friendly.

Strong travel and tourism websites will remind users of the awesome parts of travel while helping their clients overcome the more tedious and complex parts of the travel equation.

To achieve this goal, make sure your travel website is designed to do the following three things well.

Your travel website must build trust

Travel is often a “bucket list” item.

The details and destinations may differ, but the desire to be whisked away to far-off places is nearly universal. And, for many, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience that they scrimp, save, and plan for.

In other words – the stakes for your potential customers are high.

People planning a trip want to know that their money will be well-spent, that they won’t be taken advantage of, and that they will be physically safe when traveling. For this reason, your website design must inspire trust.

Prioritize professionalism

Luxury Retreats’ concierge service and guarantee make a professional impression.

Visitors to your website won’t feel comfortable trusting in your expertise if your site is riddled with mistakes, amateur graphics or dated design.

The first step to inspire trust is to present your brand professionally. As we wrote previously:

A brand is the sum total of the experience your customers and customer prospects have with your company.

A strong brand communicates what your company does, how it does it, and at the same time, establishes trust and credibility with your prospects and customers.

Your company’s brand is, in many ways, its personality.

Your brand lives in everyday interactions your company has with its prospects and customers, including the images you share, the messages you post on your website, the content of your marketing materials, your presentations and booths at conferences, and your posts on social networks.

The name of your company and your logo are two important elements of your brand, but your brand is much more than the name of your business and your logo.

Here are a few guidelines that will help you create a professional impression on your website and build trust with your prospective customers:

  • Proofread all website copy for typos, grammatical and spelling errors, and factual accuracy.
  • Use graphics that are vectorized (especially your logo!) and can be sized appropriately on your website without showing degradation.
  • Feature professional travel photographs that are sized appropriately for web use.
  • Avoid stock photos if you can help it – custom photography is always a stronger look for your brand.
  • Hire a professional website designer to make sure your site looks and functions beautifully.

In a nutshell, make sure your website looks great. Poor photography, typos or inaccurate information, and clumsy design are likely to make your website visitors take a hike.

But, a professional, beautifully designed website will reassure visitors that you’ve got the necessary skill and expertise to help them plan their important trip.

Feature accreditation and security badges

Flathead lists 3 accreditation badges at the bottom of their website.

Another way to build trust with your audience is to prominently feature your professional accreditations on your website.

Accreditations from the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA), the International Air Transport Association (IATA) or the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) all underscore your professional status and credibility.

Maria Polanco, General Manager of Vallarta’s VIP Travel, endorses the value of her business’s ARC accreditation, saying:

The ARC accreditation sign is a welcome sign of trustworthiness that clients want to see. I really do not believe we could have grown and remained in business without ARC.

Accreditation badges reassure your visitors that your business is legitimate and can be trusted.

There are many accrediting organizations. Research which ones will serve your business best. Then proudly display your membership on your travel agency or tourism website.

And, if your website includes e-commerce functions, feature those badges or seals as well. If your website is PayPal Verified or protected by VeriSign, that will give site visitors confidence and peace of mind doing business with you online.

Your website must make research and booking travel simple

Airbnb’s clean design and simple form is user-friendly.

Travel involves many different decisions and moving parts.

Deciding where to stay, how to get there, what airline to choose, where to eat and what to do once you’re there can be overwhelming.

Travel planning is rife with the danger of decision fatigue.

Your website should demystify the travel planning process and make it as stress-free as possible. Create a clear path for your visitors to follow from the moment they arrive on your site.

Whether your business helps clients search for the best flights, offers pre-determined travel packages, or helps road-trippers plan the best route, it’s important to clearly guide the client through the process.

Creative travel website design is great. But it should never get in the way of communicating with your site visitors. If the client isn’t sure how to proceed, they are likely to leave your site for a simpler one.

To create a clear path for visitors, avoid visual clutter. Clean graphics, plenty of white space, and concise, relevant copy will serve you and your visitors best.

Here’s a list of some other great ways to simplify your website visitors’ experience:

  • Only include one call to action on each page of your website so the user knows what is expected of them.
  • Remove navigation buttons that are not relevant to the task at hand so people don’t accidentally click away.
  • Show the user their progress status if signing up for an account or booking a trip on your website requires navigating through more than one page.
  • Use color to help your calls to action visually stand out and draw attention. And, keep this “action color” consistent throughout your site.
  • Gather only the information you absolutely need to help your clients. Keep forms short and to the point.

Finally, consider adding educational information to your site. Travel tips and activity recommendations help to establish you as an expert resource; as well as making it easier for visitors to plan their trip. For more on website design best practices, read 10 Important Web Design Best Practices and Tips for Small Business Websites.

Think about user experience every step of the way.

Your website should project the travel dream

Maryland’s tourism page boasts unforgettable experiences and immersive photography.

Every time someone wants to take a trip they ask “what if?”

What if I was this fabulous beach goddess sunbathing on the Amalfi Coast?

What if I was a rugged adventurer climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro?

And for a few days or weeks, they get to live that alternate life.

Travel, at its best, is about making dreams come true. Your website needs to help visitors envision those dreams.

In order to accomplish this in practical terms, start by identifying your audience.

Does your business cater to affluent recent grads looking to take a year off and explore Europe? Maybe your ideal clients are adventurers seeking challenging get-aways to test their survival skills. Or, you do serve retirees who want their “bucket list” trip of a lifetime?

Knowing your audience will allow you to focus on what imagery to share and the language you use to evoke the services you sell. Using targeted imagery and language will help your website to resonate with your potential clients.

Once you know what locales or activities to feature, acquire photographs that or represent your target audience enjoying those locales or activities.

The photographs you use must be high quality and large enough that a viewer can be transported to that scene in their mind. Small, poorly-lit, grainy photos won’t suffice.

The copy you use is also important. Use vividly evocative and concise language to support the photos and help carry the visitor away.

Travel is exciting. But, it can also be intimidating.

So, make sure your travel website is designed to build trust and give your visitors peace of mind.

Clear calls to action and unambiguous design will pave the way for clients to enjoy the fun and excitement of their trip instead of getting mired down in the planning.

 

 

The post Your Travel Website Should Do These 3 Things Well – Do You Know What They Are? appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

5 Proven Steps That Will Help You Create A Powerful Brand Identity For Your Small Business

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It’s impossible to build a successful business without creating a strong brand.

So what is a brand and what are the elements of brand identity?

Here’s what you need to know – 5 proven steps that will help you create a powerful brand identity for your business.

What is a brand identity?

As we wrote previously:

A brand is the sum total of the experience your customers and customer prospects have with your company.

A strong brand communicates what your company does, how it does it, and at the same time, establishes trust and credibility with your prospects and customers.

Your company’s brand is, in many ways, its personality.

Your brand lives in everyday interactions your company has with its prospects and customers, including the images you share, the messages you post on your website, the content of your marketing materials, your presentations and booths at conferences, and your posts on social networks.

Any aspect of your brand that fosters a connection between you and your customers is part of your brand identity.

Your company’s logo, color scheme, slogan – those are all essential elements of a compelling brand identity.

However, it’s important to think beyond the visual experiences of your brand and extend your branding to include the emotional component of customers’ experiences with your business.

A truly memorable brand identity is an expression of your business at its core.

It is the interwoven fabric of what you make, how you make it, and why you make it – all of the emotionally driven elements that connect people to your brand.

Why does your business need a strong brand identity?

First impressions are everything for a business, and especially for a new business. In fact, 48% of consumers report that they are more likely to become loyal to a brand during the first purchase or experience.

90% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, making it vital for companies to create a brand identity that evokes positive emotions.

If you want your business to make a positive first impression on customers and prospects, you have to be sure that your brand identity works in your favor.

A strong brand increases the value of your company, creates an identity and motivation for your employees, and makes it easier for you to acquire new customers. A brand represents how people know you (or your business), and how they perceive your reputation or the reputation of your company. In today’s noisy world, a strong brand is more important than it has ever been.

How do you build a strong brand identity for your business?

Step 1: Conduct a detailed brand audit.

The first step to build a strong brand identity is to understand who your customer is and what they want and need. We recommend you ask the following questions about your customers:

  1. Who are they? – Are your customers men, women, or both? Are they Boomers or Millenials? Where are they from? These are all foundational pieces of knowledge that you need to know.

  2. What do they do? – Knowing what your customers do for a living and what they’re interested in is a great way to more precisely target your marketing.

  3. Why are they buying? – Do you know the reason why they’re in your market? If you do, it’s easier to pair their needs with what you can give them.

  4. When are they buying? – Find out when your target market typically makes this type of purchase. That way, you can increase your chances of getting their attention they want to give it to you.

  5. What’s the purchasing medium? – Are they buying from a website? Do they prefer a brick and mortar establishment?

  6. What’s their budget? – Make sure you’re targeting customers whose budgets appropriately align with your product or service.

  7. What makes them feel good? – Knowing what gives a customer that precious good-feeling glow is key to making sure they become repeat customers.

  8. What do they expect? – Understanding expectations is critical in order to meet those expectations. Whether your customers expect fast delivery or 24/7 customer support, knowing what they want from you is half the battle.

  9. How do they feel about your company? – Hearing praise about your company is nice. Hearing where the pain points are is even better. You have to know where your business could use a little improvement to, well, improve!

  10. How do they feel about your competition? – You know what they say. Keep your friends close – keep your competition closer.

Step 2: Create your unique selling proposition and messaging.

Once you understand your customers, you should establish your company’s core values and philosophies.

Why should your customers care about your brand? How does your company stand out from the competition?

You’re looking for your unique selling proposition (USP).

But uncovering your USP can be difficult because your USP may not be something physical or tangible like a product, but instead might be thematic or emotional. Entrepreneur outlined this in their look at USP:

Pinpointing your USP requires some hard soul-searching and creativity. One way to start is to analyze how other companies use their USPs to their advantage. This requires careful analysis of other companies’ ads and marketing messages. If you analyze what they say they sell, not just their product or service characteristics, you can learn a great deal about how companies distinguish themselves from competitors.

For example, Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, always used to say he sold hope, not makeup. Some airlines sell friendly service, while others sell on-time service. Neiman Marcus sells luxury, while Wal-Mart sells bargains.

As we wrote about a company’s unique selling proposition:

Ultimately, a USP is what your business stands for.

For example, you could say that Apple’s USP is found in “user experience”: everything they do is meant to have the user at its core.

Google’s USP might be in the way they connect people with information, whereas Amazon’s might be providing whatever product you need quickly, efficiently, and at as low a cost as possible.

Figuring out what your USP is can take time, but it’s a crucial piece of your brand. Knowing what it is can help you sell better to your existing customers, and more importantly possible customers.

Step 3: Develop the creative elements of your brand.

Once you understand your customers and know your unique selling proposition, it’s time to develop the creative elements you’ll use in your company’s brand.

Creative elements are the look, feel, and voice of your brand. You’ll communicate them consistently across all marketing channels and it’s extremely important to get them right.

The key creative elements of your brand include:

  • The name of your company – A strong company name identifies your business, tells your customers and prospects something meaningful about your brand, and helps to differentiate your business from your competition.
  • Your company’s logo – Your company’s logo is the distillation of a brand into one single visual element. It acts as both the calling card and “avatar” for a brand and is one of the most important elements of a brand’s identity.
  • Color and color palette – As we’ve discussed, color gives your brand personality and it delivers a psychological impact as well:

    Color has a deep and often subconscious effect on our behavior. Color is often used to persuade or influence us. According to a study examining the effect of color on sales, 92.6% of people surveyed by the CCI: Institute for Color Research said that color was the most important factor when purchasing products.

  • Typography – The fonts you choose for your brand identity have an impact on how your brand is perceived. We examined how the type of font you use can affect customer perception in our guide Find Your Type.
  • Style guide – A style guide is a set of rules to follow any time a member of your organization wants to publish, present or promote content for your brand or use branding on marketing materials or the design for product packaging or package graphics.
  • Tagline – A business’ tagline is an opportunity to get your brand’s value proposition communicated directly to the customer. A great tagline should be short, catchy, and emotionally persuasive.
  • Personality – Brand identity may change and evolve as time and trends pass, but a brand’s personality mostly stays the same. Brand personalities typically include 3-5 key characteristics (like rebellious, empowering, and adventurous, for example).

How do you choose appropriate brand elements?

Here are six things you should consider when choosing the brand elements for your business:

  • Memorability – The brand elements you choose should be memorable and attract attention in order to help customers remember and recognize them.
  • Meaningfulness – It’s important that the elements you choose meaningfully communicate your brand. Brand elements should give consumers information about your brand, service, or product that furthers its positioning and image.
  • Likability – Do customers find the brand element appealing? Is it likable, pleasing, and fun? You want elements that leave a positive impression.
  • Transferability – Does the element work across all market segments and mediums? Does it translate well across geographic boundaries and languages? Avoid elements that are constrained to a specific medium (like mobile, or print) or don’t translate well across your customers’ languages and cultures.
  • Adaptability – Adaptability is all about flexibility and longevity. Choose elements that can stand the test of time and the fickle nature of trends and tastes. Always be willing to change things up when necessary.
  • Protectability – No matter what you choose, if you can’t protect it legally and competitively you’re in trouble before you’ve started. Do your due diligence early and avoid legal and trademark issues further down the road.

Step 4: Develop and execute strategies to build brand equity.

A strong brand identity is built over time.

When you create brand elements and your brand, you’re not finished. You still must develop and execute strategies that will build a strong brand equity.

According to Shopify’s Business Encyclopedia, brand equity is:

 …A marketing term that describes a brand’s value. That value is determined by consumer perception of and experiences with the brand. If people think highly of a brand, it has positive brand equity. When a brand consistently under-delivers and disappoints to the point where people recommend that others avoid it, it has negative brand equity.

A company like Apple or Sony has high brand equity, and that creates value those companies use to their advantage.

Brand recognition is one of the best-known ways to build equity, but it’s only one of many.

How can you build brand equity?

Provide a great customer experience

Besides having a great brand identity and strong brand elements, there’s one thing that builds brand equity faster than any other: a great customer experience.

Give your customers a positive experience that builds trust, memorability, and increases the chance they’ll return for more. This leads to higher customer preference (where they choose your product over a competitor’s) and customer retention (where they remain your customer).

Great experiences are not just about delivering a good product. It includes the pre- and post-sales experience as well as your customer service and support.

All of these work together to elevate the merely okay to great, and that boosts brand equity.

The bottom line? Focus on customer relationships, and high brand equity will follow.

Step 5: Evolve your brand identity over time.

Few brands can remain static over time. Even the largest, most successful companies must regularly evolve their brands and brand identities to keep up with the times.

We’re seeing this currently with Dunkin’ Donuts, Uber, Papa John’s, and Weight Watchers. These brands are evolving their identity and branding in response to changes in social norms and bad press.

You should regularly assess your brand and consider refining brand elements and your brand identity when the brand no longer stands for the unique selling proposition the brand delivers. For example, we talked about why and how you should rename your business when your company’s name is no longer compatible with your goals. Similarly, there are many good reasons you should consider redesigning your small business website.

A strong brand identity isn’t just a vague idea bandied about by big companies with deep marketing pockets. It’s a critical component of any business’ longevity and success.

Build a strong brand, create brand equity through great customer experiences and relationships, evolve your brand to keep it strong, and you’ll create a brand identity that will help your business grow.

 

The post 5 Proven Steps That Will Help You Create A Powerful Brand Identity For Your Small Business appeared first on crowdspring Blog.

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