A special thanks to the amazing tech community in Little Rock, Arkansas and the inspiring team at the Little Rock Tech Fest for allowing us to spend time learning and sharing.

In our session we took a look at effective ways of getting everyone on the same page, minimizing scope creep and having less stress when it comes time for product launch as well as how this helps to create a stronger foundation for business growth.

If you missed my talk on “The Art of Working with Non-Developers”, you can find the slides below.

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On Saturday, September 24th, Angelica had the privilege of joining the largest blogging conference in the state of Florida at FLBlogCon. She had the pleasure of presenting an extended version of her Content Strategies for WordPress talk. This version included two exclusive worksheets, 75 blog title prompts and a social media scheduler. If you were in the session and you’re looking for the talk slides, you will find them below. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email. We look forward to seeing you at our next event!

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Gain knowledge and understanding the fundamentals to the success of any brand strategy.  Data is the key to whether a business thrives or dies. But even with its importance, how do we use it in our everyday businesses?

In our session with WordPress Orlando, we had the opportunity to share how we use data to help our client partners develop and execute on brand strategies.

Photo courtesy of Katherine Delorme

We covered how entrepreneurs and business owners can use data to create new products, discover and expand into new customer audience segments, and the 3 important metrics to consider when making brand strategy decisions using analytics data.

Here are the slides from the session, we hope they prove to be a useful resource in the growth of your brand!

http://www.slideshare.net/sevenality/the-analytics-of-business-decisions-using-data-to-build-a-smarter-brand

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We’re so excited to attend WordCamp NYC. On Saturday afternoon, I will have the honor of taking the stage at the United Nations Headquarters to talk about something that is a core principle of our firm—design. I will be introducing basic design principles to the general user track. As a designer of over ten years, it’s become my passion to share my love of design with others and how they can understand even the beginning stages of design.

During this presentation, I’ll be talking about basic design elements, accessibility, layout, color theory, and typography. It was very hard to narrow things down, especially the typography portion. I’m looking forward to hopefully introducing a new word of design to the attendees or teaching someone something they may not have known before.

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Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to help many business owners and entrepreneurs launch their idea to the world. With each project being different in size and requirements, we’ve come to rely heavily on our discovery process in order to make sure that we deliver the most value to each of our clients.

Recently we had the opportunity to share a little bit of what goes on in our discovery process and how we use this information to set expectations and help our clients achieve their goals and dreams.

The discovery process can be as simple as a questionnaire or as involved as a series of interviews, workshops, reports, data research, and much more.

Curious to know what happens behind the scenes? Then check out our interview with The Creative Agency podcast as we share some of the things that go into our discovery process.

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This weekend we had the opportunity to attend the very first WordCamp Jacksonville. Angelica was part of a business panel focused on lessons learned and wisdom gained with several other Orlando WordPress business owners. She also gave a revised version of her WordCamp Atlanta talk focused on creating content strategies with WordPress. Content strategies, especially using branded content, are ways to set your site’s content for optimal SEO and to maximize its efficiency. If you attended the talk and are looking for the slides, you can find them at the link below:

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We had such a great time at WordCamp Atlanta. Angelica spoke on Content Strategies for WordPress. Below you can find her slides via Slideshare.

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One of our goals this year as a branding firm is to share more of our process and insights with our community. Recently, we had the opportunity to present a talk on personal and business branding at our local WordPress meetup group.

Branding is hard work and is often said to take close to 18 months to really get your brand going.

What’s important during this process is to not give up. What you invest into your brand will you be rewarded with.

It’s also important to be attune to the needs of your customer. During the talk we went through an activity together with the goal of understanding the tone and messaging side of branding and how to use that in reaching the desired target audience.

Sure, your idea or business service may be awesome and solve a need but if your audience can’t picture themselves using or making an emotional connection to it, then your efforts may be dead in the water when trying to reach them.

Be sure to check out the slides below and be sure to share them with someone that comes to mind that could use a little extra help in the area of branding!

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Project handoffs can get messy but they don’t have to be that way. Recently, we had the opportunity to do a presentation at WordCamp Miami where we covered the ins and outs of successful project handoffs and how to catch problem areas while improving the overall internal project satisfaction.

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We’ve found ourselves within a race to connect through inanimate objects in order to build stronger relationships with people. As businesses, we’ve been persuaded that we need to drown our audiences with content marketing campaigns in hope that our net will catch the most fish. In the attempt to “humanize the brand,” the focus shouldn’t be on how much content you can push out; but instead on quality content that will keep people coming back for more.

A study done by the Harvard Business Review revealed that the signal that a brand possesses and shares has very profound effects on whether or not a business generates more demand for its offerings. In the ever increasing marketplace of doing business with trustworthy brands, we no longer trust marketing messages. We’ve been trained to spot and avoid the marketing-based attempts at manipulation.

How do we communicate effectively with the ever increasing pressure of the public appetite for information while maintaining the focus on growth?

The key is to focus on relationships. 

Relationships are the core of what powers everyday transactions whether emotional or financial. Today, many of the connections we make are fickle and fail to create an exceptional customer experience. These connections fail to raise the standard just a little higher each day.

The opportunity to being a brand your customer needs starts with following through on your promises. By focusing more on your specific audience and less on trying to please everyone, you will be able to increase your brand’s appeal to the audience you should be reaching.  Following this approach allows for your customers to have something to connect with.

Effectively communicating allows your brand to become human on its own. This allows your business to thrive simply due to the decision of focusing on what truly matters.

Sometimes a helping hand can allow you to properly locate the area of difficulty that your brand may be experiencing. As a  branding firm, we have faced this issue as most businesses do. During some point in our lives, each and every one of us will struggle with the element of communication. The difference between those who overcome the brand communication paradox and those that don’t is this: one group takes action while the other procrastinates. Which group will your business be found in?

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