Another Branding Opportunity

It is very important for your email to have a consistent look and feel. Emails are just another piece of your branding materials and should feel that way. Your subscriber may not recognize your email if it looks completely different from the print campaign or your website. Also, try to have a different look for each email format you send out within brand standards, so subscribers can separate the purpose of each email.

Email Formats

• Newsletters should be more about the information. Promotional content should be minimized. It should have the same frequency. A bi-weekly or monthly schedule would be best for this type of information.
• Promotional emails should have one or more related promotions and can be more frequent than newsletter. A daily deal email is a good example of a promotional email. Best practice here is have a snapshot of the promotion in the email and the rest of it on the website to drive traffic. Give just a little teaser content to spark interest and view the rest at your site where you can collect information from the user or ask them to do something else.
• An event invitation contains information about a specific event and would most likely require a couple of repeating emails in order to get the best response. Plus, the increased frequency will keep the event top of mind with your audience.
• Email announcements are when no response is required from the recipient. A few examples of these type of announcements would be greetings, thank you messages, press releases and order confirmations.

Ways to Collect Email Addresses

• Allow email sign-ups on every page of your website if possible.
• Collect email addresses in person.
• Ask people to sign up in your printed marketing materials.
  Include a form to fill out and send in. Place QR code on materials to direct someone right to the place to sign-up electronically.
• Include sign-up links in your email footers.
• Let your social networks do the promotion and sign-up for you.

Email marketing is still widely used and is recognized as a great communication vehicle for a company. It has a tremendous global reach and can be viewed on the go and at anytime once it is sent. It is a way to reach your potential clients just about anywhere these days. Not many of the other marketing tools available today can say the same.

To take advantage of this offer you need to sign a website design and development contract with Creatage until March 31, 2012.

We all know how important identity is for any business. It should convey what the business is and what it stands for. People tend to choose brands they are familiar with and trust. An identity piece may be the only chance you have to make a first impression.

A professional logo is the first step towards this strong identity. It should be unique and memorable and be the base of all other marketing materials. It is very important in the initial phase of logo development for the creative team to do a deep dive into your business, it’s goals and messaging. All marketing efforts must align with these.

The spokesperson also added that the agency is using the most modern website design and development techniques. Creatage is also helping small and medium sized businesses create website strategies, build high quality website designs and create mobile versions of a website. The agency creates a great user experience while creating brand awareness.

Creatage, a Milwaukee ad agency, specializing in all areas of marketing and advertising from branding and identity design to website design and development to social media management and search engine optimization. Agency has wide range of experience with truly diverse clients.

# # #

So, what is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving traffic to your website from search engines. So when someone types a word or a phrase into Google, Bing or other search engines you appear as high as possible in search results.

SEO Factors

To appear closer to the top for a certain keyword you need to consider to multiple factors. Here are just few of them:

• What is the quality of your content and is it unique?
• Is keyword selected for the page appearing in the title, headline and in the text of your page?
• Is there a keyword in the page URL?
• How many sites are linking back to you and how relevant are those sites to the topic of your page?
• Does the external link to your page have a keyword?
• What is authority of your site? How long has your site been up?

Unfortunately, search engines keep a tight secret on ALL the factors they are taking into consideration for rankings. So you can only make an educated guess and test your suggestion and see if it will work for you. On top of that, those factors are changing weekly. So search engine optimization is not a one-time job, you site should be constantly watched and optimized.

SEO Approach

Because every business is unique it requires a different approach and SEO strategy. Here are few of the many tactics that need to be taken into consideration to create a successful SEO strategy:

• Thorough analysis of the site to identify where SEO can be improved.
• Competitive research to see what keywords and techniques are being used by competitors.
• Researching of keywords that will work the best for your site
• Optimizing page structure to include results of the keyword research
• Copywriting to include selected keyword into the title, headline and copy of every page.
• Working on creating external links to you content.
• Gathering analytics data to see what works and what doesn’t.

If your web search engine optimization strategy is implemented correctly you will see improvement in the search results and increased traffic to your site.

Here are a few aspects we will take into consideration when designing a custom business card:

Material

We will identify the best stock (paper or sometimes other material) for your card and make recommendations on how to best communicate your branding with it.

Shape

We will create a custom or standard shape for your business cards, depending on the type of impact you are looking for. The possibilities of die-cut shapes and sizes are endless.

Finish

There are a number of finishes available from simple to complex. Using specialized finishing techniques like foiling, UV coating and folding you can add a little something extra to your card.

Quality

Poorly printed business cards can turn off potential clients. We will make sure your final cards are professional and we use the highest standards of quality as the base line for what we create and deliver to our clients.

We have a wide range of experience with truly diverse clients. Take a look at our portfolio to see some examples of our work. If you are interested in speaking directly to us about how we can service your particular needs, contact us here.

There are all sorts of formats that can be used for custom brochures. You can use a standard tri-fold, a larger folded 11 x 18 sheet format or something that is completely custom with a die-cut and perforations. Brochures are pieces that will stay with the customer so you want it to have impact and clearly convey what benefits your company can deliver on. Contact information has to be easily found so your customer knows exactly how to reach you. Offering multiple contact points is the best way to ensure the customer will contact you in the medium in which they feel comfortable.

Including custom brochures, we have a wide range of experience with truly diverse clients. Take a look at our portfolio to see some examples of our work. If you are interested in speaking directly to us about how we can service your particular needs, contact us here.

Other services we offer within branding and identity, that you might be interested in are: professional logo design, custom business card design, company letterhead design, custom brochures and promotional advertising items.

We have a wide range of experience with truly diverse clients. Take a look at our portfolio to see some examples of our work. If you are interested in speaking directly to us about how we can service your particular needs, contact us here.

Beside professional logo design we offer other identity services like: custom business card design, company letterhead design, custom brochures and promotional advertising items.

We have a wide range of experience with truly diverse clients. Take a look at our portfolio to see some examples of our work. If you are interested in speaking directly to us about how we can service your particular needs or to begin the professional logo design process, contact us here.

We have a wide range of experience with truly diverse clients. Take a look at our portfolio to see some examples of our work. If you are interested in speaking directly to us about how we can service your particular needs, contact us here.

On to the Plan

You need to plan on how to make the strategy come to fruition. Often the four P’s are referred to as the elements to consider when you build a plan on how to reach a customer and get them interested in your product or service. They are usually defined as the following:

Product – What about your product is unique and can be presented to a customer as something they need

Pricing – What will your pricing structure be, will it match competitors, be lower or higher based on sales goals?

Place – How and where you are you going to be selling your product or service?

Promotion – How will you get to your potential customers?

On to the Tactics

Once you have identified the four p’s you can move onto the vehicles for your marketing efforts. The set of tactics you employ will be largely dependent on your audience. Who are they? Where are they? What is the best way to reach them? What buying influences do they have? These factors will choose the right path for the message and were to find your audience at the right time.

The Right Tactics for the Right Audience

Choosing the right tactics can sometimes be tricky and almost all of the time driven by budget and audience of course. Each tactic will be based on what will work best for the segment or part of an audience you are trying to reach with a specific goal in mind. Taking a close look at the audience will help you make the best decision on what will reach them when you want them. Below is a list of audience specific tactics to consider using in a marketing plan that can be cost effective and very targeted:

• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Banner Advertisements
• Direct Mail
• Website
• SEO
• Radio
• Print advertisements
• Television

When creating a solid marketing plan you should consider everything that you can do to convince a potential customer or existing one for that matter that your service or product can benefit them Secondly, pick the correct channel to make sure your message is heard by the people you want at the right time.

Part of the Bigger Picture

Letterhead is one piece of branding puzzle. Once a logo, design look and feel and font are chosen the creation of a letterhead can begin. While not all companies have a logo, they may have a type treatment or just a font that should be included in place of the logo because it is part of the brand. All elements of your brand should be consistent and hang together throughout the different vehicles. The letterhead design should be locked down and included in your company’s brand guidelines to make sure it always looks the same way. The letterhead design can be repurposed to support layouts for internal forms and billing documents.

Printing Considerations

There are printing considerations that need to be accounted for if you choose to have physical letterhead for communications through traditional mail.

• Is your letterhead going to be printed in color or black and white?
• Printing on a personal printer or at a professional printer
• Printer margins will be different for different printers
• Professional printers can print designs that go to the edge of the paper, so a bleed has to be set-up to accommodate this and then the sheet will be trimmed down to size

Some companies have chosen to make all their communication efforts electronic, which is becoming more the trend these days. It makes communications faster and more affordable. Programs like Word allow you to embed your graphic elements in the header and footer space, leaving the center open to format and align the content how ever you would like. This makes it very easy for small business owners to develop their own identity communications on the fly.

As simple as a letterhead can seem, it can say many things about your brand. In the end it should communicate two things, your brand and the content on it.