002 – STTFM – Visual Branding

 

Hey, and welcome to episode #2 of the Just Ask Kim – Simple Tech Tips for Marketing Podcast.

 

I’ll be your host, Kimberly Castleberry as we cover a variety of social marketing technology topics in this podcast.

 

In today’s episode, we’re going to take a look at your business brand, and evaluate whether it’s possibly time for a visual brand refresh. We’ll take a look at things such as taglines, and whether yours is serving you at this time. And we’ll also cover some social sites that may need to be adapted in graphics soon, to ensure consistency due to site changes on those platforms available today.

 

Now, today’s episode is being recorded on January 1, 2012, and we’re starting out the new year. And if you’re like other people, you may have spent the last couple weeks kind of stewing over where your business is, kind of looking how things have progressed, maybe looking into your niche, maybe looking at your positioning, possibly looking at just where you are overall with your business. The end of the year can be a very powerful factor that can really cause us to be very introspective and to really do a lot of year-end review, and that’s a very healthy process. It can be a very frustrating process of course, but it’s a very healthy process for taking a “big picture look” at your business.

 

Now assuming you’ve done that, we’re going to move on forward from that and I’m going to assume that you’ve reviewed where you’re at and you’ve reviewed where you want to go this coming year. And what you need to do now, is to take a look at your website, and take a look at the web properties associated with your website, such as your Facebook page, and decide whether they are all still 100% consistent with where your brand is, where your niche is, and whether they present the right tone, the right quality of visual branding, and really, really have your niche very, very nailed down.

 

And, so, one of the places that the best point to start at with that is by going to your website. And here on your website, you’ll want to take a look at whether your graphics are the quality you want them to be. Whether your picture is branding strongly, whether it carries the right emotions, and whether it’s really a good picture that conveys what you want it to. And whether the topic headline, whether the primary headline on the site really conveys what it should.

 

Now one other thing you’ll want to pay some attention to is the little sub headline that’s often with your title. Now depending on how the title of your site is structured, you may or may not have a subject, a little secondary headline that is known as a tagline. If your blog title conveys everything that it can, then you may not need a tagline. But in many cases, sites are using a tagline today to really convey a little more about what it is that they do and a little short blurb. And so we’re going to take a look at that because that can help you hit a particular target that a lot of people don’t even know need to be hit.

 

And what I mean by that is that when traffic hits your site, and when a new person that’s never seen you before comes to the front page of your website, or comes to an internal page on your site, you want them to be able to know within 10 seconds what your site is about. “10 seconds?” you might be saying. “Oh geez, isn’t that what our ‘about’ page is for? Isn’t that what all the about document and all the additional stuff about us is for?” Well it is, but those are for extended stuff. Those are for when people are ready to learn a little more.

 

People visit websites the same way that people channel surf. That is to say, that when somebody sitting down with a remote control and they’re clicking on the button and they’re clicking and they’re clicking until they find something that’s approximately right that catches their eye. And, it isn’t going to be just your graphics that are going to catch somebody’s eye; it is things like the tagline and the primary subject line and primary post titles that are really going to have to grab someone in the first 10 seconds to get someone to stick and stay on your page. They really need this information immediately in order to quickly know they are on the right channel and that now they need to look into the site a little further, that it may be the channel they’re looking for.

 

Now for me personally, I tend to evaluate where my brand is in terms of about an every 6th month overall evaluation. I look at my metrics on a 90 day scope but at least every other I tend to look at where I’m at in terms of niche performance. Now sometimes, this is because how I’m presenting my niche to the community and how I’m presenting my niche to the readers needs to be adjusted so that it’s really representing what I do. And other times, I need to look at this because perhaps I’m straying a little off course, perhaps I’m moving a direction and I need to come back to really focus, and I need to be sure I’m check rained in to really focusing on my niche. And this can go both directions. You don’t want to be too strict in any way, because what you’ll find is sometimes you will naturally shift your niche and that’s a good thing. And that is really working for you and that’s you growing as a marketer and you expanding in that direction and you discovering what fits you better. And when you discover at an evaluation point that that’s what happened, you need to adjust your branding to ensure that it represents what you represent now. Now, the opposite of that of course is when you strayed off track and your niche branding is correct, but you’ve strayed off. So that’s when you need to check rain your content and bring your content back into alignment.

 

Now, like I said, I tend to look at this on about a 6 month picture and for me personally this year I will be adapting my branding and you’ve seen that with this podcast in particular with the simple tech tips for marketing. That’s more the direction I’ll be going with my tagline and things like that; I’m still adapting around that concept, moving away from my current tagline because it really isn’t fitting with what I represent out here on the market. It’s not that it isn’t what I do but it’s not painting a clear enough picture. Something you want to be careful about with taglines is not to get to fluffy. You want to be sure that they really represent what somebody at their gut level is looking for and generally if something is a little too fluffy or a little to foo foo you’re really not going to get there. You want to be really straight shooting, you want to be really to the point and you want to be something that really grabs somebody’s attention and that’s really clear. There is no need to beat around the bush with what your marketing is and what you’re branding represents and what you can do for people. So keep that tagline real concise and really spend some time on it because it can be one of the make or break factors that really go into whether somebody recognizes that your site is where they want to be within those first 10 seconds.

 

Now the next part of looking at the site is really to make sure whether that same brand carries throughout the site. And by that I mean that the entire above the fold view, and that’s everything that’s shows in the browser when they first land without scrolling, represent your branding. But you may have your front page blog that is different in terms of how much shows, or what shows, and when they’re on a particular post. So be sure also that this branding is accurate and strong on the particular post. And that can be a number of factors including widgets that can be additional things in your sidebar, it can be what’s in the navigation bar, it can be do you have a different navigation bar and different categories and things. Make sure everything really at every point portrays the brand as strong as possible and as best as possible so that people realize where they’ve landed even if they don’t land on the home page. And that will help you have the best brand cohesion over all. And that will grab people’s attention. They’ll have caught the attention by the sight, they’ll have stopped and read the post, if the post struck on they will generally get something like a footer author box, an author box on the post that tells them just a little blurt more about you, and again, if that strikes them, and they want to learn a little more about the site, that’s generally when people move to the all-important ‘about’ page. And your ‘about’ page will often be the most trafficked pages on your blog so you want to be sure you pay it a lot of due diligence and a lot of attention. Really be sure that you answer the question that’s in it of what’s in it for them as the reader. The ‘about’ page is not just about bragging on yourself and bragging on your credentials, although those things may be important relative to your niche, but that you are conveying what is important about the site and why they will want to become a subscriber and a reader. Also choose to make a called action to optin or subscribe there depending on how you’re structuring your site.

 

Today’s product feature is aweber. Aweber is the leading marketing software and a marketing service available for you to assist you in your online endeavors whether you have an online based business entirely or an offline based business. When your communicating with your customers and creating a backend follow up, you’re going to want to utilize a strong provider of newsletter services, both from an auto responder side enabling you to do consistent follow up relative to the length of time they’ve been a subscriber to you as well as sending out new newsletters and new current information to this community, as well as enabling you to extend your brand directly into somebody’s mailbox.

 

Now today we’ve been talking about visual branding, we’ve been talking about the power of really making sure that your brand carries all the way through your marketing. And Aweber gives you a vast collection of tools in order to do this. Everything from a built in popup tool to a Facebook opt in, to build in list services, to the ability to do the html based really pretty newsletters, that a lot of individuals really like. It even comes with time tested and proven templates. Now there’s not the need to contract out having to have a custom web template custom made for you. You can take one of their stocked templates which have been well tested and do a little conversion and add your own graphics in and your set to go with a template you know is going to perform well in a variety of browsers. Aweber is a leader in the industry, particularly in the terms of internet marketing deliverability. Not all companies are really open to companies that are participating in internet marketing and affiliate marketing and you’ll find that in fact we can feel a little unwelcome under certain providers. And what you want is a company that not only welcomes us with open arms but also has really strong deliverability. And deliverability is the token of success here and relates to the percentage of messages that are sent from their server that end up in the inbox rather than the spam folder. Aweber is going to create a strong deliverability that is going to help get your messages into the inbox rather than into the spam folder of the people that receive it. That is the big difference between them and other second rate providers. You’re really going to like the tools that aweber provides and if you haven’t had a chance to check them out, be sure that you do: http://justaskkim.com/aweber will take you to the page where you can sign up for a $1 trial for 30 days. Go in there and kick the tires, look around, and I know you’re going to absolutely love aweber so be sure to check them out.

 

From there we’re moving on to looking at graphics. And graphics are becoming a more and more key element as we move forward. This is not only true from the reader’s standpoint but this is also now true from an SEO standpoint in terms of the most recent panda updates. Google is now paying very strong attention to sites that are well branded, to sites that carry a very professional look, and sites that have the look and feel of professional quality in both content and reader experience. If you want to take that into evaluation, consider if you would go in town and you would buy any major magazine. And you’d be reading in there and they’d say check out additional articles on our website. And you bounce out to their website and before the page would load you would have some expectations of what a professional, well-financed, well maintained website is going to look like. You’re going to have some expectations when you land on that page of the quality that it’s going to portray instantly. Within those 10 seconds you’re instantly going to know that you’re on a high quality site.

 

Now, flip over. Does your site portray the same aspects? Not necessarily the same layout as a magazine site, or not necessarily the same layout of the niche that you were thinking about the magazine in, but do you have the same professional feel? Is the same brand there, the same attention to detail? The little elements that make something professional, are they there? These improve the reader experience and increase the time on site. These improve how long somebody is going to stay on your site and continue reading and really the trust aspect. And really those trust aspects are elements that go into the new panda scoring. I know that’s a little strange to try to explain, but these days Google is really favoring sites that feel trustworthy. And if you’re in attraction marketing that’s something you want to try to do anyways. That’s exactly in alignment with where you’re going and something you should really be paying attention to. Now up till very recently though, it was very easy to skirt around that and not as much focus from SEO was coming from that.

 

Now it really has the advantage though of very much favoring those who pay attention to this as it not only improves SEO but it improves reader experience. It’s definitely something that’s worth your time and attention to look into, look into high quality themes, look into strong graphic branding art, look into having a designer-developer do some customization for you so that your site is very unique and professional and that your art work stands out and that you do not look like a carbon copy of everybody else that’s out here. You don’t want to be forgettable; you want to have some distinguishing factor and have your site a little different than the rest so that you stick in somebody’s mind. Majority of your visitors are going to be visual learners; they are going to be people who their key modality for taking in the world is going to be visual. Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t have people that are auditory and kinesthetic, but a lot of site readers, and again particularly coming back to reading, here’s the visual element, these are individuals that their preferred experience in the world is from a visual standpoint. And if you are not meeting their needs in terms of visual elements and their need in terms of a visual hunger, a well branded site, nice graphics, easy font to read, not that gray on white stuff, none of that little bitty print, none of those walls-of-text, you want to make it as easy to read as possible. When you meet all these elements, you are making experience on your site much easier and you make it easier for them to consume their content and there is less friction, less resistance, and there is less challenge for them to intake your content and spend time with you and get to know you. You don’t have these elements that are off putting to them to really pay attention to your site branding overall.

 

And once you’ve got that figured out, once you’ve figured out what you’re doing with your home base, and that is your website or your blog, then you want to pay attention to making sure that your social media sites have corresponding, related, graphically similar branding. Most people take header graphics, take optin graphics, take things like that, and just slightly modify them to fit the constraints of the other social sites. For example, Twitter backgrounds, YouTube backgrounds, for Facebook we now have timeline covers, we have sidebar banners on pages and we have the Facebook custom landing tab opt in forms and generally a small header graphic there. By making all of this congruent, by making all the artwork tied together, people get the sense of unity, the sense of professionalism. When you go to Coca-Cola’s website, Coco-Cola is very distinct with red and white there and their branding is consistent when you go to their Facebook page, even on their custom Facebook applications. You will notice that all the branding art is even the same fonts, the same stylization, the same impact and feeling. You always feel as if you’re still with the same flow and company and that it was all designed at once and it is actually all really true. It may not have all been designed at the same time, but it was definitely designed taking each element into consideration, and that’s what you want to do here.

 

Now, being the start of the year, having reevaluated your business, this is a great time to look at your branding art and to be sure that’s where you want to be. It also happens to be a unusually great time for you to be doing this on social media sites because several of the major platforms have just made changes to their requirements and to the available space. Even if you don’t want to change what your branding represents, you probably need to recalibrate these sites. By that I mean, the new Twitter.com, which is being called the new Twitter, has had some formatting changes and people need to adjust the size of their backgrounds there. YouTube has had a layout change and anybody that is a channel partner needs to adjust their backgrounds there. Facebook, while pages didn’t get adapted, profiles did, and we’re needing to set up the timeline cover in order to present our brands there. With three major pieces of visual branding on the table, it really is time to look at redoing all of these at once, looking at having a unified experience and having everything done preferably by one artist who’s skilled enough to do them all so that they all carry the same impact and same appearance and styling and stuff like that so you really have a consistent brand all the way across the board.

 

Now one little tech tip I’ll give you is that perhaps when you’re working with a web designer or your working with somebody that’s doing your art for you, one thing that you may not know is that you need a file called a .psd file. This is a Photoshop design file. Also, when we get our visual graphics and branding back from a designer we get the .png or the .jpeg back and those are the “flats”, those are the ones we’re going to use. Without the .psd file we are not able to replicate the graphics and we will be forced to go back to the same exact designer later, or to try to recreate it all from scratch and have to do a lot of guesswork. When you get that .psd file, you don’t really need to know what it’s about or what it means or what it does, but you do need to make sure that you get it. So sometimes with your graphics designers, depending on who you’re dealing with, you may have to pay a little more but generally speaking it’s not a whole lot more. It’s going to save you a lot of time and headache overall as your brand grows. Having access to that .psd file is a really big piece of insurance for you in terms of being in control of your brand and not being tied to one designer later, should anything go south, or should the designer vanish out here as many tend to do. You always want to be in control of your brand management and having that file can mean a lot to you down the road. It can save you a lot of money down the road so when you’re ordering these graphic packages make sure that your getting your .psd files because they are really going to help your out going forward.

 

Alright, we’ve taken a look today at a number of things. We’ve taken a look at taglines and we’ve taken a look at your visual branding and your site flow and structure in terms of presenting your visual branding and social sites.

 

Now if you haven’t had a chance to actually evaluate where your niche is and whether it represents where you want to be today. The next couple of weeks is definitely a time to prepare and really focus on that and to be sure that your site is where you want it to be and that it’s representing you in the best light. And that your brand is representing you in the truest way you are offering to the market and where your passions lie and what you bring to your reader. That is something that understanding that piece of underlies your brand as a whole and is really very critical. And you want to be sure that is right before you focus on your graphical elements and before you focus on the branding elements. Your brand is like a house. When you get the bones of the house right the house itself can be redecorated, remodeled, you can take the siding on and off, but as long as the bones of the house is right your branding is going to be strong overall and overtime no matter what color you paint it. That is something you want to be sure your brand has.

 

So, be sure that you pay attention to that, that you be sure that your niche is really spot on and that people are able to instantly identify what your site is about, what your brand represents within that first 10 seconds. That is definitely the key to getting readers not to leave your site but to stick around and maybe even read more than one post or decide that’s the site they need to subscribe to because that’s it the answers what they’re looking for. Pay attention to the strong focus as well and it really portrays what your offer rather than speaking in more of fluff terms and we don’t necessarily want to be out here with a stereotypical soundbites because they sound like everyone else. You want to be real strong and clear about what you represent and just make sure your real clear about who you are and what you represent in the market. That is going to help you draw people to you that need what your offer because that’s what you’re looking for. You need people that need what you’re offering and people that are looking for you. When you get really clear with your branding and you get really clear about how you’re representing it and making sure the people can instantly identify that it’s going to be so much easier for those people not only to find you but to know that they found you. That’s really key!

 

Alright, I hope that this overview of visual branding helps you get a better idea of ways that you can encompass it in your brand and helps you evaluate your site in terms of whether you’re really getting the performance you want our of your site and maybe perhaps things like taglines or even categories or other elements that are instantly displayed on your site when somebody lands there. Be sure that they are painting the right picture for the visitor so that you’re helping the visitor know that they have landed where they need to be.

 

Alright I hope your enjoyed this episode of the Just Ask Kim Simple Tech Tips for Marketing podcast. If you enjoyed this, I hope that you’ll join me over at http://justaskkim.com/subscribe and subscribe to my newsletter to help you stay up to date in all the topics of social marketing and internet marketing today, and as well as join me on the major social platforms such as http://facebook.com/askkim or at http://twitter.com/askkim. I look forward to connecting with you there. Alright you take care and I will catch you in the next episode

 

 

Thanks for listening!

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