The Left-Brain/Right-Brain Guide to Building a Brand – Part 2

Choosing and Using a Font/Typeface

WHAT?

In order to choose and use a typeface/font for your brand, it would be helpful to understand what they are. So let’s begin by defining what a font is and what a typeface is by today’s standards.

Typeface — is the design of the alphabet – the shape of the letters that make up the typestyle. The letters, numbers, and symbols that make a design of type. So when you say “Arial” or “Times” you are talking about a set of letters in a specific style.

Font — is the digital file that contains/describes the typeface. You can think of the font as a little piece of software that tells the computer and printer how to display and print the typeface.

WHY?

So why is choosing a typeface important to building your brand? Typeface is important because it attracts attention, sets the style or tone and how readers interpret the words. The typeface that you choose represents your brand personality, is your company formal or informal, technical, contemporary, traditional, etc.

HOW?

How do you choose a typeface for your brand?

Select two typeface families for all of your printed materials and web materials. Choose one rather plain, standard typestyle that you can use for text-heavy pieces, such as Times Roman, Garamond, Caslon, Helvetica, Arial or Futura. These classic typefaces are commonly available and come in a wide variety of styles, such as condensed, extended, bold, extra bold, etc. This offers you the greatest degree of flexibility to support your needs now and in the future.

Next select a typeface for your accents. You can use the accent typeface for headlines, slogans, call outs, and other text you want to accentuate. You can modify the typeface with attribute like bold, italic, small caps and color. Optionally you can select a display typeface. These are highly stylized and need to be used sparingly to be most effective and not scream “amateur.”

Your typeface should be easy to read in any medium – picture it printed in black and white or full color, on a shirt or the Web, or very small, like on a pen, and very large like on a sign.

WHEN & WHERE?

Once you have selected typefaces, use them on everything your client will see, including letterhead, envelope, invoices and checks. And remember to record the name of the typefaces you select so that you can provide this information to your suppliers for design, print, etc. This saves time/money looking for this information at a later time.

If you will be purchasing these fonts and you want to use them on Macintosh, Windows and the web consider purchasing “open type” fonts for maximum compatibility.

WHY?…AGAIN!

When used consistently, selecting distinctive fonts and using them effectively helps with name recognition and “brand building,” — think of Coke, Lego, MTV or Disney. Brand recognition makes people feel familiar which helps with relationship building and trust. People buy from people they trust. Ultimately, we can all use a little help with increasing sales.

If you have more questions about typography and it impact on your brand contact Graphic Matter!

The Left-Brain/Right-Brain Guide to Building a Brand – Part 1

At Graphic Matter, our blog posts are driven by our clients most frequently asked questions. Recently, we have had several inquiries from start-up businesses, about ways to launch a new brand that provides the best value for your budget.

Our past post have focused on promoting your website. Well, once they have found you, how will you stand out so that they remember you?

So let us offer our 2 cents….It’s all about BRANDING.

Wikipedia defines Brand as: The identity of a specific product, service or business. A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan.

One of your biggest challenges is building an awareness of your company and your brand. This is a two-fold process: telling prospective customers why they need your product or service, and promoting your company as the best provider of these products or services.

If there is already an established need for your business, as in the case of dentists or bankers, your task is that much simpler. Otherwise you must educate potential buyers about why they need your services, which can be a significant effort on your part.

As for promotion, to accomplish your goals you must be familiar, known and trusted. The process of establishing a reputation is called “brand building.” It’s a simple concept we’re going to break down into four areas: Choice of Font or Typeface, Use of Color, Creating a Logo, and the Implementation and Consistent Use of Your Brand. All of these areas are geared toward establishing your brand and being able to incorporate the creative decision making with an emphasis on the practical business requirements and constraints.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of The Left-Brain/Right-Brain Guide to Building a Brand. In the meantime, if you have questions about branding give Graphic Matter a call!

Graphic Matter’s Fab 5 “Shout Out”

In the spirit of “sharing the love”… here are our favorite blogs for marketing inspiration and technical tips. We like these resources because we feel they deliver information that fulfills our standards of practical, real-world advice and ideas that you can act on today and start seeing results tomorrow. Check them out and share your thoughts with our readers as well as what your favorite blogs and websites are by posting a response here!

		Technology Therapy, Jennifer Shaheen
		Inklings, Lisa Fahoury, Fahoury Ink
		The Marketing Mix, Ilise Benun, The Marketing Mentor
		The HubSpot Blog
		The MacCast

Conversions: Turning Prospects into Purchases

“A Conversion… is when a prospective customer takes the marketer’s intended action. [www.Wikipedia.com]

A Call to Action generally initiates a Conversion. We see them all the time: a retail business offers a coupon [call to action] to entice a purchase [conversion]. A service-oriented business may identify a service your business needs followed by an easy solution [contact form]. You may have several actions, or conversions, that are desired for your business. Your website should be able to generate most of them, and it’s likely that the point of conversion doesn’t always happen on the home page. How do you find the right page[s]?

[#1]: Identify Conversion Opportunities: Generate a list of all the desired outcomes, or conversions, for your business prospects. This could include requests for more information or follow-up, completed purchases, subscription enrollment, or submitting contact information to download a white paper – and there are many more possibilities.

[#2]: Locate Conversion Points: Where on your website does each of these occur? Is there a Call To Action? Make sure the opportunity is easy for the visitor to find and understand what action they should take. This may be a contact page, or a sign up or purchase form, for example.

[#3]: Optimize for the conversion: By embedding metadata on targeted landing pages, that are relevant to the specific search phrase of each visitor, you can create a virtual path to the desired outcome: conversion.

Some additional points to consider:

When we focus on search engine optimization we sometimes lose site of the fact that increasing traffic to our website is not the only desired result. In the end, if our traffic improved dramatically yet we have not sold more product or service, have we accomplished what we set out to accomplish? Conversions offer us a way to track our progress by creating opportunities for site visitors to identify themselves to us as prospective clients, or to potentially complete a purchase transaction directly.

Are you confident you’re getting great conversion rates from your website? A call to Graphic Matter will help ensure your website is working hard for your business 24/7.

Does Your Website Need An Alignment?

More specifically, is the content of your site in alignment with your searcher’s keywords? Is there a clear path to your virtual doorstep? The sample below will demonstrate the typical process:

1. Keyword or Phrase Searched: A searcher types in keywords into the search engine [google, msn, aol]. In this example: “iPhone 4G reviews”.

2. Results Listed: The search engine results are listed, showing organic search results and sponsored links. Also know as paid advertising or pay-per-click [ppc], sponsored listings are usually called out by a colored background and the words “sponsored link”, and appear in the main list and in the side columns as well.

3. Keywords Matched: The words that were included in the initial search phrase “iPhone 4G reviews” will be highlighted or bolded in each of the resulting search listings.

Click on one of the top sites listed on the first page and notice the keywords that are organically placed on this page. You can reference the SEO terms we described in our post Finding Hidden Opportunities On Your Website, to help you look for the keywords in each area – page title, file name, metatags, alt tags, etc. Note how many times the keywords you entered appear in each of the components of this page.

When the keywords appear in all of the page components listed above, and the content on that page is relevant to the keyword phrase, then you have organically optimized this page by making all of the components align with this keyword phrase.

This aligned page is known as a “landing page” for that keyword phrase. See our post about landing pages to refresh your memory.

Does this landing page have a “call to action”? Does it ask you to submit your information, or call the office, or to buy now? If so, then it is also a Conversion Page.

We know what you are thinking: What is a Conversion Page? This answer is coming soon in our next post, and may be your “aha” moment that puts all the SEO pieces together for you.

How can you be in that #1 spot in your prospect’s search results? By methodically “aligning” the key messages on your website, from the inside out. Your own [keyword] alignment is just a phone call away!

Get Pushy With Your Marketing: The Difference Between SEO & SEM

We’ve established that SEO [Search Engine Optimization] can effectively pull traffic to your website through the use of strategically planted “seeds” within your site. Search engines continually send out “spiders” or web crawlers, looking for those keywords that you’ve carefully embedded within your site as metatags, alt tags, page titles, page names and links – each of which is seen and recognized differently by the spiders.

Search Engine Marketing [SEM] pushes traffic to your website. SEM refers to the practice of increasing traffic to your website through the use of paid placements [advertisements, pay-per-click listings] and external directories [trade and business membership listings – Chamber of Commerce and similar networks, for example]. Blogs and social media are essential tools in today’s marketing world.

Search engines like links – both incoming and outgoing. Links from your site to other sites, articles, and resources are easy to add to your site, but the search engines know that. Incoming links carry a little more weight with the crawlers, but finding those opportunities might present more of a challenge.

There’s good news here: you can create your own incoming link opportunity with a blog or e-newsletter for your business. The beauty of these media formats is that they work double time for your business. Done correctly, they will literally push traffic to your site: the reader reads and then clicks – beautiful! But they’re also virtually pushing traffic via the search engines. Not only is your link from your blog to your website [incoming link] attractive to the crawlers, but so is the content of your blog. Search engines love fresh, keyword-rich content, so keep feeding them with regular blog posts [like this one].

Lastly, don’t discount the importance any Internet mention of your business: Has your business been in the news recently? Has it been recognized by a trade organization or received an award? There may be a listing [incoming link] as a result, and if you make mention of it on your site you can create a reciprocating [outgoing] link.

Ready to get pushy with your marketing? Call us, we’d love to help!

Who Will Read Your Blog?

Now that you have clearly defined the purpose of your blog, you need to identify who your audience is going to be. In the same way that you focus on who will be using your products and/or services, you need to figure out for whom you are writing this blog. This will dictate the content of your posts as well as the tone in which you write them, two elements which will influence how you are perceived by your readers. Your objective may be to demonstrate the expertise of your niche to prospective partners, or to create an interactive relationship with clients, or even to motivate your internal staff. No matter what objective you decide to focus on, each one will require a different approach to both what you write and how you present it.

In order to help you define who your target audience will be, ask yourself these questions:

1) Are you writing this blog to inform existing customers about the full range of your products and/or services?

2) Are  you trying to reach new customers or markets and introduce them to your products or services?

3) Are you using your blog to demonstrate your expertise in a certain area?

4) Are you using your blog to promote better or more efficient customer service?

These are just a few of the questions that you can ask yourself in order to define your market.

For more details or help with identifying your audience/target market, contact the team at Graphic Matter!

Part 3 – How to Set-up a Feed Reader Page in Your Internet Browser

Welcome to our final post in How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways, How to Set-up a Feed Reader Page in Your Internet Browser. In our previous posts talked about setting up internet browser bookmarks, how to subscribe to an RSS feed, and how to configure your email application to accept RSS feeds. In this post we will share with you how to set-up a feed reader page in your internet browser. Google offers a free reader service that is simple to use and very effective Follow these instructions to set-up your own Google Reader page.

What does Google Reader do? Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won’t miss a thing. New content comes to your Google Reader when it’s posted, so you don’t need to visit individual sites. Plus, Reader keeps track of which items you’ve read, so you only see unread items when you come back. If there’s a dark blue border around an item, Reader is marking that item as read. Google Reader displays all of your favorite sites in one convenient place. It’s like a personalized inbox for the entire web!

Use Google Reader on any computer. You can access your Google Reader account from any computer with online access. Whether you’re at home, at work or abroad, your subscriptions stay with you.

Ready to set up your own Google Feed Reader? You can set up your free Feed Reader page in Google at http://www.google.com/reader.

Google also offers a quick Google Feed Reader video tutorial to demonstrate this process.

Once there, Google will ask you to set up an account, using your email address as your user name and a password of your choice. After your account is set-up, you will see a page that looks like the picture below:

To add a feed to this page, click on the “ + Add a Subscription” icon in the upper left hand corner. You will be prompted to add the URL addresses of the blog you wish to follow. The subscription folder in the picture above shows all the blogs that I subscribe to, as well as how many new posts or “feeds” have been sent to my subscription folder.

It’s easy to see how Google’s Feed Reader page is like “one-stop shopping” to keep up with all the blogs you follow!

How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways! Part 2 – Configure Your Email Application to Accept RSS Feeds

In our last blog post we discussed two quick and easy ways you can follow a blog. While either of them will work just fine, they do put you in the position of seeking out updates yourself. Wouldn’t you prefer to have the information come right to you? In this post we will show you how to configure your email application to receive blog posts directly into a folder in your email. How great is that?

Configuring your email application to accept RSS feeds will allow you to effortlessly keep up with your favorite blogs. Each time an update is published to a blog you follow, it will also be automatically sent to the RSS feed folder in your email application. You will know immediately when the blog is updated and it will be there for you to read when you are ready. Although each email application is slightly different, the basic concept and process is the same: Open your email application and look for an RSS link [or email inbox] like this one pictured below.

Click on it and follow the instructions provided by your email application. It’s so simple, and will save you time each day, and allow you to effortlessly keep up with the blog posts as they happen—without going to multiple sites.

Did you find this tip helpful? Share your feedback in the comments section of our blog – we’d love to hear from you!

Next week is part 3 of our series, How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways: How to set-up a Feed Reader Page in your internet browser. See you next post!

How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways! Part 1

Now that you are reading our blog, or any other blog for that matter, you are going to want to know when there is a new post to read on that blog. So how do you know when there is a new post on your favorite blog? In our previous post, 4 Fabulous Ways to Follow Our 2¢, we identified 4 different ways to follow our blog. In this post we are going to explain how to set an internet browser bookmark and how to subscribe to and RSS feed.

1) Internet Browser Bookmarks:

Simply bookmark your favorite blog or blogs in your browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer etc) by using the Bookmark Tab in the menu bar. This will add the blog address in your bookmarks panel and make it easy for you to get back to that blog. You can pick one day a week to check out each blog to see what’s new and what’s been posted. This is an easy, low tech way to mark the blogs you like, however, it is somewhat cumbersome and it puts the burden on you to remember to go back and check those sites regularly for any new posts.

2) Subscribe to an RSS feed:

Before we tell you how to subscribe to an RSS feed, let’s make sure we define what an RSS feed is. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. But what does that mean? I spent some time poking around the Web for the most complete, yet simple, description of RSS to share with you. Seth Godin describes RSS as this: “ RSS is just a little peep, a signal, a ping that comes from a favorite blogger site, telling your computer that it has been updated.”

Most blogs have a little orange button that say RSS and look like this:

Subscribing to an RSS feed is simple and easy, you just click on the orange RSS icon on the blog you are interested in and add that RSS feed to your internet toolbar. This will put a notification in your browser tool bar that this blog has a new posting, and a link to read the post.

Next week read about how to configure your email application to accept RSS feeds in Part 2 of How I Love to Follow a Blog, Let Me Count the Ways!