Clients, you need to spend time thinking about — and identifying — your business brand.

Without a brand, your business simply looks and feels like every other related business out there. And looking just like everyone else probably means you don’t stand out in any significant way. A brand helps your potential customer find you.

During the “discovery” phase of working together, your designer will need to understand your brand personality. This understanding will ultimately drive the creation of your logo, marketing materials, and website. “Brand personality” represents the visual look of your materials — colors, fonts, layout, amount of white space, stock photo choices, graphic style, etc. — and includes the tone of the words on the page (your content).

If you haven’t done so before, you’ll want to establish your brand personality.

Is your business rustic, stylish, playful, accomplished, earthy, elegant, eclectic, upscale, charming, honest, youthful, simple…or something else?

Every business owner or marketing director needs to be able to define their company’s brand. Once you’ve done so, all marketing efforts should reflect that defined brand for consistency and brand-building.

CMH prides itself on offering high-quality, independent healthcare options in a small-town, rural setting—a place where the natural environment is a big reason people choose to live and work in Cloquet. Their brand always keeps it “real,” and never feels corporate or impersonal.

Use the links/resources below to help identify your brand personality. Spend some time brainstorming with your partners or staff while you work through these exercises. Whether the exercises focus on words, archetypes or a style spectrum, they’ll all help you communicate your product or business.

Print these out, make your own notes, and share with your designer.  You’ll want to be able to articulate your brand when you talk about your new marketing project with any designer. And you’ll always want to create future marketing pieces that reflect and fit into your brand’s style.

Spend 30 minutes and hone your brand with these fun exercises:

• If your company were a couch…or, which couch feels most like your company?
  Take the couch test from designer Karen Barranco.
• Uncover your Brand Personality Quiz.
• Every brand needs a personality. Take the brand quiz and discover your archetype.

If you answered yes, then you need a good brochure.

Clients who have begun their marketing efforts by producing an effective brochure are in a much better position to market their business via other strategies, especially developing a website. Creating a compelling brochure requires creativity, organization, time, and vision.

Maybe you need several brochures, each to tell the story of an individual product or service. Often, we have created a family of brochures for clients — with a consistent look and feel so they all work together.

If you’re ready to get started, here are simple guidelines to help you create a better brochure:

1. Be as clear and concise as possible.

Most people don’t have time to actually read a brochure—even if they’ve asked for it—so make the information “skimmable” using bullets and lists with compelling headlines. Don’t write long, dense paragraphs of information; they’re difficult to read and impossible to skim.

2. Focus on benefits, not facts.

Don’t go into the details of your business. Customers care only about what affects them directly, so highlight the benefits (what they’ll get) of working with you or what you sell.

3. Don’t use dates in your text.

Dates will quickly make your brochure obsolete. Instead of saying “For 25 years…” cite a specific year: “Since 1985, we’ve….”

4. Let your company’s personality shine through.

You are what distinguishes you from your competition…this is a very important concept. Don’t try to be like everyone else selling the same service/product. If you’re a small company or work from home, focus on benefits like offering quick turn-around, a lack of bureaucracy, easy accessibility, etc. If your company is made up of young, hip 20-somethings, focus on the energy and enthusiasm they bring to the workplace. On the other hand, if you own a family business that’s been producing the same product for generations, focus on the stability and craftsmanship inherent in a successful business that’s been around a long time.

5. Use familiar words.

Describe what you do in clear and concise language — and make it brief. Don’t use jargon, formal words or stilted language.

6. Take your time.

Crafting a brochure takes time and requires attention to detail. Show your draft to others and get their feedback. Is your brochure telling the story you want to tell?

Of course, there are other things to consider when you put together your brochure — and for more ideas, see my post on The five Ws of compelling brochures.

An effective brochure is a thing of beauty. And a real challenge to put together. But if you take the time to get it right, you’ll have useful messaging, images, and marketing that will make it much easier to tackle other marketing strategies like a website or email marketing.

The brochure pictured with this article was done for Yoga North studio. They offer teacher training sessions that begin every 6 months and have different dates and costs from session to session, but they needed a brochure that would live “forever,” since it is simply too expensive and too much work to update and print a brochure every time they need to promote a new training date. My solution was to create a benefits-oriented brochure without specific class dates or pricing, and pair the brochure with an inexpensive bookmark that includes all details about their current season pricing, class dates, and admission information.

These bookmarks are inserted into the brochures and are used in all kinds of creative ways, cost just pennies, and make it easy to change out information when new course sessions are offered. Plus they’re really fun to hand out!

Are you a thought leader? Are you an expert in your field? Do you have a perspective on your particular expertise that is unique? Do you have information you’d like to share with others?

Maybe you simply have stories or insights you’d like to share — whether recipes, special techniques, artistic images, or musings on various subjects. Maybe you’re a poet and want to share your poetry to a wider audience.

More and more, we’re being told that “content is king” in digital marketing. That having more content on your website is much better than having less.

Keven Kelleher brings a wealth of experience to his role as FTO trainer. He’s passionate about staying on top of trends in educational approaches as well as the challenges facing law enforcement agencies, university security departments, and private security firms. He keeps FTO professionals informed about important trends in his blog, “News from the Field.”

Including a blog function on your site is an easy way to beef up your online content and useful for positioning yourself as an expert in what you know or do.

If you’re a personal injury lawyer, you could provide stories about cases where you’ve had success, or helped potential clients understand typical outcomes with common auto injuries. If you’re a B2B consultant, you might provide professional and helpful tips for your typical client. If you’ve been published or regularly give presentations, you could provide your published articles or recent Powerpoint presentations online. There are many ways to provide fresh content on your website, whether for purely business reasons or for your creative writing pleasure.

If you want to create updated and fresh content on your website, you’ll want a blog.

If having current content is important, then you might consider including a blog on your new site. You’ll need to commit to writing something roughly once a month, have basic writing and grammar skills, and be willing to learn some simple WordPress login and posting skills (or be willing to pay for someone else to write and post your content).

A stagnant blog is not a “blog”—it’s just another page on your website. If you want a blog on your new site, make sure you really want to write regularly, or hire someone who will write fresh content for you.

But let me give you fair warning: there is nothing more unprofessional than starting a blog and two or three years later, having no additional content added to that blog. Without fresh ideas there is no reason for a reader to return. Outdated content has the opposite effect of positioning you as an expert or thought leader — it dings your credibility. So don’t let your blog sit untouched. Make sure you really want to write regularly — or hire someone who will write for you — if you want this function on your website.

Some people have a ton of fun with blogging, and some feel overwhelmed at the mere thought of having to write anything. Know where you fall on that spectrum.

Then tell your designer if you want this function included on your new website. If you do, brainstorm with your designer and staff and get a feel for what kind of content you might write. Remember, you want to provide information that will position yourself favorably to your potential customers and that will enhance your overall website content.

Helpful resources if you decide to blog regularly on your website:

If you’ve decided to write a blog, you won’t have to pay attention to the information about hosts and servers, blog design, or even the technicalities of setting up a blog in the following links (this will be taken care of by your website developer). Instead, focus on the idea of blogging with these links and start developing what your customers want to read about:

15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog, from Becoming Minimalist, a lifestyle blogger

How to Turn One Content Idea into a Fascinating Four-Part Series, online resources from Copyblogger

A Guide on How To Create a Guide That’ll Drive You 361,494 Visitors, and other tips and ideas for “expert” how-to blogging at Quicksprout

It’s easy to spot when a website is not mobile friendly: you open the website using your phone or tablet and much of the site, navigation, images or information is unreadable without excessive scrolling. The first glance at a website like this gives you very little to react to…and probably means you leave the site pronto.

People now spend a lot of time using mobile media to view websites.

Mobile digital media time in the US is now at 51% compared to desktop at 42% (sometimes referred to as the biggest shift since the internet began). The implications of these numbers are clear: if you’re not able to reach your audience through mobile search or display, and you’re not providing a satisfactory mobile experience, you will miss out compared to competitors who are.

Have you ever tried to view a non-responsive website on your mobile phone? You’ll quickly be frustrated…and likely leave the site altogether.

And in case you weren’t convinced you needed a responsive website, Google recently announced algorithm updates that will have a “significant impact” on mobile search results worldwide for mobile searchers. This update improves rankings for sites that provide a mobile-friendly experience to searchers on mobile devices, and, by association, demotes sites that do not. This means that if you’re new site is responsive, it’ll pop up on the search page higher than your competitor who doesn’t have a responsive site.

Unless there is some very compelling reason not to, I always choose a responsive design for my clients when building your site in WordPress.

If working with a designer, make sure you request that your new site be responsive.

Test your existing website in smartphone and tablet emulators on mobiletest.me and see how readable your home page is.

The illustration above, “Content is like water,” demonstrates the idea behind responsive design and was created by web and UX designer Stéphanie Walter.

I love a good postcard.

I often recommend using postcards for marketing. With all of us scrambling to learn and master social media marketing, it might be the perfect time to consider this old-fashioned marketing method. Maybe it’s because I enjoy touching and handling my mail, or maybe it’s because I’m over 30 and remember days when all marketing wasn’t digital, but I love postcards as an advertising medium.

Here are 6 random reasons to consider a postcard campaign the next time your business needs to communicate:

1. Postcards have an advantage over all other forms of direct mail: as soon as postcards are in the hands of their intended recipients, they begin their advertising. The message, offer, or call to action doesn’t have to be unwrapped, opened, clicked, or turned on.
2. Postcards are affordable. Because of their size, they’re inexpensive to write, design and print. Especially with today’s high quality digital printing, you can create full color cards without spending much on printing. Mail them at bulk postage rates or, if mailing a smaller quantity like 50 or 100, keep them at the USPS postcard size for postage savings.
3. You can produce a postcard campaign quickly. Reach your customers immediately after a trade show, contact them when new products are available, update them when new services are available…You won’t have to waste weeks or months of production time to get your message delivered.
4. Postcards are simple. In our over-busy and over-stimulated world, a postcard doesn’t need a huge commitment of time by a customer, and this can increase response rates. Make them colorful, keep the message clear, and they’ll be read.
5. You can target your audience easily and inexpensively. Develop different messages for different demographics by using different ink colors, trying different languages, mixing up your offers, and only mailing to certain zip codes. The possibilities are endless.
6. Create a campaign inexpensively and easily. Engage your potential customers with a regular postcard mailing — you can feature products, services, testimonials, special offers. With a strong visual and snappy writing, one template will serve for a long time and reinforce your business message.

Need a little postcard inspiration? Click on over to these pages for postcard ideas:

• Moo.com “printfinity” postcards
• The Createry postcard campaign
• Fine art photography postcards

I often tell my clients that your website home page should function like a magazine cover: it should reflect the content contained inside using color, style, and compelling words; it should showcase your company’s “brand personality” and provide the big picture of what you offer; and it should include key details/benefits/features of your products/services. Keep reading, and I’ll explain these how you can define these elements for your own site.

Doesn’t a great magazine cover compel you to open up, look inside, and want to read the magazine?

• A magazine cover often features one strong visual or photo.
• A magazine cover also alludes to other important “stories” inside, using smaller photos and subheads.
• And a magazine cover instantly lets you know whether you want to continue reading more…or not.

You need to have an effective home page if you want people to stay on your site.

If you’ve put together your home page correctly — like a good magazine cover — the viewer stays, clicks further inside your site, and ultimately finds what they’re looking for whether it’s you, your services, or your products. But if you’ve failed to tell the story with your “cover,” (or the viewer can’t find what they came looking for) they click on to other “covers” and that’s the end of your story. You’ve lost the visitor.

Of course there are great home pages that don’t use this magazine cover treatment, but this concept usually works well for me — plus my clients get it. I’ll spend a lot of time thinking and talking about your home page when creating a new website. Once we get all the home elements established, it’s usually easy to roll out the rest of the site.

What information should I include on my home page?

Below is a list of questions and ideas for sketching out your home page content — both for big picture brand “personality” and smaller, key details. We’ll break down this equation:

Presence + Personality + Visitors + Competitors = Your perfect home page solution

Presence. How would you describe your business/organization to an interested reporter? What are you known for? What do you want to be known for in 2-5 years? What is your “elevator speech?” (and make it a brilliant one, not a blah blah blah one).

Personality. What is the voice of your site — first person, third person, sassy, serious, playful, funny, professional, opinionated? Is it a blog with frequently updated content or a more traditional website? Obviously, the personality of your business should be reflected consistently in all you do whether it’s your website, logo, advertisement or Facebook page.

Visitors. Who is your audience? Who do you want to attract to your site? What are the 5 most common keywords or search terms that a potential visitor might use to arrive at your website? What are the 3-5 most important things you want a visitor to see/learn when they arrive at your site? Where are the first three clicks you want that visitor to make after they arrive?

Competitors. What are your competitors doing on their home pages? What jumped out at you when you landed there? And what effect did it have on you: did you click further into the site or did you leave, and why?

Answer the questions above, make a list to share with your website designer/developer, and you’ll be off to a great start on your new site.

You’ll want to learn the Who, What, Why, Where & When of compelling brochures.

The Five W’s uses a “left brain” approach to communication (left brain = verbal, analytical, logical). While we often think of writing and design as a “right brain” function (right brain = visual, intuitive, creative), the best communication comes out of combining both approaches.

For many years I designed brochures with the goal of selling tickets to the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra concert seasons. These were complex pieces mailed before the season started that needed to include concert descriptions, musician photos, subscriber benefits, and a user-friendly order form, among other things. Hopefully, they would ultimately engage the reader enough to buy concert tickets. Early on in the process of creating a season brochure, the marketing director and I would spend a great deal of time answering the questions below to come up with the best brochure solution for our mission.

All brochures, whether complex or simple, benefit by a discussion directed at answering these questions:

1. WHO will be your audience?

• What are their common denominators (age/sex/income/interests/etc.)
• What benefits would they derive
• Do they already know anything about the product/service
• Is the reader likely to be a “skimmer”

2. WHAT format would be best?

• Size and proportion of the finished piece
• Number of pages or folds needed
• Photos vs. illustrations (with or without captions)
• How many photos would be appropriate
• Will it be a self-mailer (label/indicia/return address). If so, what size best fits current postal requirements or realizes economical postage rates?

3. WHY do you need a brochure?

• To make a sale, build awareness or introduce a product
• To assist salespersons in their presentations
• To introduce the product before a sales call
• As a leave-behind to reinforce the presentation

4. WHERE will it be used?

• Direct mail (mass market or target market)
• Passed out at trade shows, expos, meetings, etc.
• As a product package insert
• Enclosed with other materials as part of a sales campaign
• As a sales tool for sales personnel

5. WHEN will it be used?

• To support an ad campaign
• As part of a larger marketing effort
• During a personal sales call
• Around special dates, seasons or holidays

I’ll ask you questions like this when we start your brochure project. Then I’ll work with my right brain, focusing my creativity on your project’s purpose and target audience.

So to create a successful brochure, you start with the left brain and I’ll finish with the right brain. Together, we’ll make it look good and tell the best story.

In reality, your website content will be a big challenge to pull together.

You’ll need home page text, professionally written bios, product descriptions, services offered, calls to action, blog posts or feature articles, compelling messages, etc.—and you’ll need it written well.

Your website is your online branch office, your 24/7 service center, and it needs to be the very best salesperson you’ve ever had.

Have you spent time yet at your computer sketching out your site outline (page names) in a Word document? Have you drafted some sample page text? If not, and you’re ready to start on your new website project, you need to start now.

One of the things that stalls (or even derails) a new website project most easily is when the client doesn’t make content a priority.

Before starting your website design, I’ll need your content.

Even if I sketch out or design the home page based on our discussions, or know the page names that will be used in your main navigation area, or have images from you to use on the site, your new website still needs actual page text.

Words inspire design! And when content is delivered first, a web project is more likely to launch on schedule. (The most common delay I experience for getting a new website live is lack of page content provided by clients.) We may completely map out your site and even start the design, but the project will go nowhere without descriptive text written for each page.

Start by outlining the pages you’ll want on your site.

At the very least you’ll probably need the following pages:

• Home page—the entry point to your website where it’s essential to grab your visitor and inspire them to stay on your site by clicking further. Help them learn more about you and what you offer and make sure viewers know they are in the right place. The Hibu blog has a great schematic that helps you understand what your web visitors should see when they land on your home page. Make sure you include these elements on your home page. Click over and read about home pages in detail on How to develop an effective home page on your website.
• About page—where you share your uniqueness with the world. What makes you different? Why are your services the best? What inspired you to create your widget? The content on this page should really be more about engaging the potential customer than about you. Confused? Read 3 Core Reasons Why the “About Us” Page Matters on the Psychotactics.com blog.
• Services page—lists what you do, who you work with, and how a visitor can engage with your services. Rather than including a laundry list of everything you could do, focus on your specialty, your niche. What services do customers most commonly come to you to solve…what problems do you best solve…and what do you most love to do?
• Work/Portfolio page—examples of what you do in either a descriptive or visual format. It also might include rave reviews or testimonials to your great work.
• Contact page—A viewer is interested in you; how can they most easily get in touch? If you’re not around a phone much, then use your email address for business. And if you’re never at a computer, list your phone number instead. If you offer free consultations to potential customers, remind people here and describe this service. You could provide links to your professional Facebook page,  your LinkedIn profile, or a Flickr gallery of product images and viewers can learn more about you. Be as thorough as possible on this page and make it easy for potential clients/customers to reach out and connect with you.

There might be dozens of pages you’ll potentially want on your site. Do you want to write and update a blog or news articles regularly? Do you want a gallery of photos?

Do your thinking early and sketch out what these pages might be for your designer. Then, get busy writing them.

You’ll want to write your text with a clear set of goals.

Writing for websites calls for a special kind of writing: clear, concise headlines followed by targeted, shorter paragraphs. You’ll want the reader to be able to skim the page and find the answers they’re looking for without having to spend too much time on the page. In other words, if visitors immediately see they’ll find answers on your website, they’ll stay there. If you make them work too hard, they’ll leave and look somewhere else.

Make sure you consider these points when writing your content:

• Who’s visiting this site?
• What does she want to know?
• What does he want to do?
• How do I want to make this user feel?
• How would I carry on a face-to-face conversation with him?

And if this is all too overwhelming and you aren’t able to generate website content yourself, I can suggest a great writer for the job.

If writing every word on your new website is a daunting task—one that might even prevent you from developing a site altogether—consider hiring writing and/or editing help. Good website writing is a great investment. When done you’ll have great headlines, a useful tagline, a killer professional bio, and effective descriptions of your products and services that can sell. It’ll be easy to transfer web text to a new brochure, your business’ Facebook posts, LinkedIn descriptions, and all other professional promotional venues. Writer Gail Trowbridge shares an office with me and is available to transform your rough or specific ideas into effective, targeted web text.

We usually work on websites together, integrating the writing and the design, and vice versa, to create a site that tells your story.

Your website is only as good as your written content. And the world doesn’t need any more slick and shiny-looking websites that fail to deliver on good content.

By developing a “content first” approach, you won’t underestimate how much time and effort it will take you to prepare good website content…and you won’t stall your new site.

We’ve all seen them, right? For us females who spend more time inside bathroom stalls with the doors shut, we can’t miss seeing these kinds of messages.

In my case, I designed the restroom posters for the marketing director at a regional hospital. The posters were her idea and a really good one, in my opinion.

Here’s how it worked: I designed very large posters that slip inside economical, sturdy poster frames (the frames pretty much fill up the width of the stall door.) The posters were printed locally and inexpensively; we printed a few of each poster topic. Every now and then we’ll change out the older posters for new topics.

In an organization as big as a hospital, it’s easy to forget that you can, and should, market directly to your own employees.

With hundreds or even thousands of employees, not only should employees be aware of what their organization has to offer, they frequently are consumers of the hospital’s healthcare services, as well. And if the hospital is doing its job well, their employees should be the best spokespeople for what they have to offer.

So the marketing director’s idea of advertising, via bathroom stalls, to the hospital’s employees (as well as visitors) makes a lot of sense.

There aren’t many places left in our over-busy, multi-tasking society where you can find a captive audience with undivided viewing attention. But you’ll find them in a public bathroom.

As mentioned on the American Restroom Association web page (who knew?), “toilets don’t have remote controls.”

And you know exactly who you’re reaching.

“With media becoming more fragmented, advertisers are looking for a more targeted way to reach their customers,” says Jim Arabanos, president of AJ Indoor Advertising Inc., of the growing market. “If you look at a specific restaurant or bar, you know the age and income demographics that go there. Indoor advertising is a vehicle that can be targeted right down to the pinhead. You know exactly who you’re reaching.”

In advertising, no venue is sacred or off limits any more.

Whether you see this as a good or bad trend, advertising messages are found everywhere; this trend shows no sign of diminishing. We have product placement in movies and in tv shows, ads on bus/subway exteriors, on park benches, on our Google home pages…and in our private bathroom moments.

Except it didn’t work this way. Most advertisers weren’t using them properly and therefore weren’t experiencing success. To reap benefits from integrating QR codes into your advertising, keep reading.

QR stands for “quick response” code.

QR codes are two-dimensional barcodes which can quickly and easily be scanned by most smart phones. They’re free to create and easy to use. They can perform all kinds of useful functions when scanned, from directing you to a web page, to dialing a phone, to hosting an image.

Businesses rarely take full advantage of the QR code’s graphic placement in their message.

Just plunking your QR code into your ad is wasting a potentially valuable marketing message. Let’s take a moment to learn from the Flor product catalog — and take advantage of two strategies used here to boost your QR code marketing effectiveness.

1. Include your web link in small print underneath the QR code.

Remember, not everyone uses a Smartphone yet…or wants to pull it out and snap your code at the moment they’re reading your ad. Why waste your message? In the Flor example circled in pink, Flor has included their web address just below their QR code. You should do that, too.

2. Use a call to action next to the QR code.

Give viewers a headline or some kind of message that provides a reason to use the QR code or visit their website. Entice me, invite me or make me feel like I simply must check out what you’re offering. Flor uses an orange burst with the text “see what makes Flor different.” They also include the text “Keep the inspiration coming” above the QR code (which links people to their catalog subscription page). This approach is so much more interesting and inviting than using a “naked” QR code.

3.  If needed, shorten your web page address.

There’s a trick for shortening those long URLs so that you actually can include them below your QR code in tiny type. Many of us are stuck with a very long string of characters and numbers on our page URLs — and they are too long for practical use in small advertising spaces.

Shorten your long website page address into a very compact one with these free services:

• Try http://tinyurl.com/. This one is just like the name says: turns your long URL into a tiny URL.
• Or try https://bitly.com (“shorten, share and track your links”).

In the FLOR page sample, Flor shortened their QR code page address from http://www.flor.com/catalogrequest/index/catalogsubscribe?utm_source=catalog&utm_medium=%28none%29catalog&utm_content=catalogrequest&utm_campaign=fall2011qr&rcode=catalog to http://good.gl/nMBgr. The shortened URL is easy to write down or type into a browser.

4. Make your QR code large.

If the code is a central feature of your business card design, rather than squashed into a corner, viewers will have no choice but to scan the code (assuming they have a Smartphone).

5. Be creative and thoughtful.

Have your code take viewers to a clever video introducing yourself or your services, to a web page to win tickets to your next event, or to a specific product you’re selling via ad or brochure. This last idea can be really useful for nonprofit organizations seeking donations — have the code take donors directly to the secure web page for entering credit card data.

6. Optimize your website for mobile devices and set up Google analytics to track your QR code web traffic.

Remember that wherever your code leads, it has to be easy to look at on a Smartphone, and therefore should link to a responsive website.

QR codes  are a mark of our connectivity and digital culture. Make them more effective by treating them as part of the advertising message.

Useful QR code links

• QR code generator
• 10 way to use QR codes for better conversion rates
• How NOT to use a QR code; a case study
• Put your QR code on a MOO business card