Technological advances have provided options that are so much more accessible to small businesses, like blogging, creating our own online promotions, Smartphones, QR codes, and digital printing. While these wonderful tools provide solutions suitable for smaller budgets, some of the “old” ways are still viable and necessary options.

Digital Printing is one of these tools. We print everything from photos to business cards to flyers and tri-fold brochures from our home & office printers and retail quick print services [Staples, Kinko’s, etc]. How do we know which is the best choice for our needs? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Digital printing is quick, and ideal for lower quantity runs. It offers the option of variable data allowing you to personalize the message, addressee, and/or images on each printed item – an effective marketing tool that enables your message to be customized for each recipient. This alone brings targeted marketing within reach of the small business.

On the downside, inks used in digital printing are not absorbed into the paper. As a result, folded edges will often show “cracking” in the color, where the paper color is peeking through. There are limitations on the stock and sizes that can be used in digital printing as well.

Commercial Offset printing still offers the highest quality printing and best color control. If your color matching needs are critical, this is the only method that provides true control. This method also offers the ability to print spot colors, which are produced by printing a custom or PMS color [not process color] using a separate plate. Many special effects such as spot varnishes are produced this way. Offset printing allows many more options for size, specialized inks, and paper stock, which are not cost-effective using a digital press.

Since much of the cost in offset printing is due to the pre-press preparation, printing large quantities will decrease your cost per item, and printing is dramatically faster than digital printing. We hope these tips have helped you to better understand the choices available to your business for your marketing needs. Graphic Matter’s print specialists have an exceptional degree of experience in the technical aspects of commercial print, offset, digital, variable and prepress, as well as image retouching services. Give us a call.

How do you know what’s being said, and what control can you have?

1. Own all variations of your domain name. Think of the most likely errors [misspelling, plural vs. singular, etc] someone might make when searching for you, and purchase those domains if you can. Also purchase domains for your own name [not your company]. They don’t cost much and it provides peace of mind. Have you ever misspelled a web address and reached an incorrect website — perhaps it belongs to a competing business, or even one that is a bit [eek] awkward?!

2. Set up Google Alerts for your business name and product names. This FREE and easy-to-set-up Google feature will advise you when there is any Internet mention of the terms you have specified, so you can see the good, and even the bad, of what’s being said. You can even have alerts for your competitors and target clients too. Unfortunately you can’t always change what’s out there, but again, knowledge is power.

3. Use only White Hat SEO. There are good SEO practices, and not so good ones. The good kind – White Hat SEO – consists of the appropriate & ethical embedding of keywords and metadata into your copy and images. Black Hat SEO refers to sites where the SEO techniques are not in compliance with search engines’ guidelines for webmasters [Search Engine Optimization, An Hour a Day. Grappone and Couzin, 2008]. Search engines don’t like Black Hat SEO and you may find your rankings suffer as a result.

Your online reputation will say as much about you as your personal reputation does. Protect it and promote it accordingly. Want to know more about the Do’s and Don’ts of Internet marketing?

January 2010 – Launch of Our 2¢, Graphic Matter’s blog, opening a new line of communication and resource for our clients. We covered the topics that our clients asked us about the most – everything from blogs, SEO, branding, and client projects.

February 2010 – Graphic Matter attends WPEO Done Deals and Matchmaker Event in NYC and has matchmaker meetings with various corporations.

March 2010 –Mitushi Banerjee joins the Graphic Matter team as web designer.

April 2010 – Graphic Matter attends the WPEO Done Deals Challenge Reception in NYC.

June 2010 – Graphic Matter is awarded 3rd place in the NJ AD Club 42nd Annual Awards for the exercise booklet we designed for the Pink Ribbon Program, Recovery for Breast Cancer Survivors.

June 2010 – Graphic Matter designs trade show graphics for NTSG, Inc., providing visual impact for their sponsorship booth at WBENC’s Women in Business 2010 Conference, This visually compelling marketing tool is both versatile and portable for use at future events.

June 2010 – Graphic Matter renews WBENC Certification.

July 2010 – Graphic Matter attends New Jersey’s largest industry networking event sponsored by the NJ Marcom Council.

August 2010 – Graphic Matter celebrates our 8th anniversary as a Hillsborough business.

September 2010 – Graphic Matter creates a new business plan for growth in 2011 with the Haufman FastTrac Growth Venture program

October 2010 – Graphic Matter wins the WPEO/WBENC Done Deals Partnership Award for securing the most WBE-to-WBE contracts.

November 2010 – Graphic Matter designs advertisement and accompanying micro-site for Pink Ribbon Program’s Breast Cancer Rehab.org, marking our first ad placement in a national publication [USA Today].

December 2010 – Graphic Matter wraps us another exciting year and prepares for a productive 2011.

Thanks for reading our blog. Let us know what you would like us to discuss in 2011. We look forward to more rewarding project with our clients in 2011!

Here they are:

1. How I Love to Follow A Blog, Let Me Count the Ways! Parts 1 – 3

2. Organic Marketing? Really?

3. Get Pushy with Your Marketing: The Difference Between SEO & SEM

4. Graphic Matter’s Fab 5 “Shout Out”

5. Graphic Matter Client Spotlight – NTSG, Inc.

We hope that you have enjoyed our blog posts and have shared them with friends. We look forward to hearing from YOU and invite you to share with us your favorite tips from 2010 as well as what questions you would like to see answered in 2011.

The team at Graphic Matter wishes everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year!

In recent posts, we identified the main challenge to building your brand is to create awareness and recognition of your company and brand, and we broke it down into four areas:

1. Choice of font or typeface

2. Use of Color

3. Logo Design

4. Choosing a Designer

To complete the series, we are offering some ideas about how you can promote your brand consistently with everyday or off-the-shelf items. The most important tip we can give you is to be CONSISTENT about promoting your brand.

OFF-THE-SHELF ITEMS

Many office supply stores stock business supplies and accessories that you can purchase to reinforce your brand. Will you need binders, presentation folders, envelopes, boxes, or labels? See how many of these items you can get that are consistent with the colors that you have chosen for your logo or brand. Since you haven’t invested any money in these types of items at this point, you can adjust your color choices for them as necessary. For example, instead of bright blue, you might need to switch to a light blue or a grayish-blue. Make these decisions early, before you start to accumulate materials. Consider searching online — you might get a wider selection of colors. Companies like Paper Direct and Paper Access specialize in creating pre-printed materials for small business owners.

BUILD THE BRAND

Now that you have selected your basic elements, use them relentlessly. Find every opportunity to reinforce your brand.

When you select checks, include your font, color(s) and logo. Take a look at your email; create a standard signature that incorporates your complete business name, address, phone and Web address in the footer. Use your colors, your font and if you know how, add your logo. Evaluate all of your existing support materials – not just marketing materials. What do your invoices, estimates, and contracts look like? Do they reinforce your brand and the professionalism of your company? Pick up each piece and ask, “Does this help or hinder my brand in the eye of the client?” More importantly, if prospective clients see this support material before they meet you, will it encourage them to contact you or will it send a clear message to go elsewhere?

Thinking about how both prospective and existing clients view your business is very important. You want to make sure when they have a need they think of you first and ask you to help them fill it. By branding your business, and then building your brand, you create brand recognition, which turns into more sales for you!

For more information on how to build your brand, contact Graphic Matter!

Choosing Color

“Research reveals people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.” Why Color Matters

Where to start?

One of the key elements of building a strong brand is color selection. Every color has a different feel and association. By choosing a color combination for your brand identity, you will take on those associations. Consider these associations when you select your colors so they will represent your identity effectively.

If you own a color in your industry, this color will symbolize your product. Think of Dunkin’ Donuts use of pink and orange and how quickly you can recognize their signs on the highway, at fast speeds. This can act as a great identifier. For example, if you sell a product your packaging will stand out from the competition.

Select two basic solid colors. You can pick unusual color combinations if you want to appear unique or stand out. One color should be a dark base color for large bodies of type or diagrams, typically this color is black, dark blue, brown or gray. The second color is for accent. When working with a small budget, consider colors that are readily available in off-the-shelf items. For example, let’s say you chose bright blue and dark brown. The bright blue can be used for all accent items and the dark brown is for large bodies of text, illustrations and charts, etc. Once you select your colors it is critical that you use them consistently. If you select bright blue, use the same shade of blue every time –not light blue once, dark blue the next time. This will only confuse your brand, not build it.

Want to have a little fun selecting colors? Try this web site which recommends colors based on word association - Cymbolism

If you have questions about how to choose color or how to use it in your brand, call Graphic Matter, we can help answer your questions!

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!

“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.

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!

[#1] The Page Title is the text that appears at the very top of your browser window [not the URL or address that you type in, above that]. It is the most prominent piece of information displayed in the search results. There is typically a 40-60 character limit to what you can include, and your title should be pleasantly readable, not awkwardly stuffed with keywords.

[#2] The HTML Page Name, aka the File Name, should be comprised of words that actually describe the contents or function of the page. [Hint: keywords work really well]. This is another opportunity to distinguish your company from the competition. Think of how many pages there are out there called “services.html” or “contactus.html” and how you can use the page name to focus on and attract the people looking for your services by being more specific. [example: “nj-graphic-design.html”].

[#3]  There are several types of metatags:

A Meta Description Tag is metadata coded into a web page that describes the content of the page. This text should also be concise, yet pleasantly readable as it may be featured prominently in the results. Meta Keywords Tags are metadata that contain keywords related to the content of the web page. Search engines use these keywords to determine relevance. It is recommended that in addition to your targeted keywords, you include some that are not on your “short list.” Also add your company name and common alternate spellings, regardless of whether they are correct. If people misspell your company name or a product you sell when they type in the search request, you want them to find you anyway.

Metatags are not evident on the web page, but can be seen by selecting “view source” from the browser menu. To maximize your SEO opportunities, each landing page of your site should have a unique metatag description and keywords targeted specifically to the content of that page.

Also coded into a web page, Alt Tags are “alternative” descriptive text coded into an image to describe the image in the event that it cannot be viewed. An example: when a browser is set to display only text, as is common on mobile devices. Alt Tag text may also appear when your cursor hovers over an image, but is typically not seen otherwise.

Did you realize that there is so much happening behind the scenes of your website? And while this data may be “out of sight” to you, search engines and web crawlers are attracted to them like moths are to light. Graphic Matter’s web design team will help you uncover the hidden opportunities on your site. Call us and begin optimizing your site for greater search engine visibility.

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!