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Blog posts tagged relationship

Choose brand consistency for 2010

February 01, 2010 by Sara Brown

The best way to increase profitability through your investment in design and marketing is for you to be consistent. There’s nothing worse for your bottom line than your image chopping and changing. The trouble is the damage from inconsistency is so subtle that many business owners are blissfully unaware of the negative effects on their target audiences. Brand irregularity includes conscious and subconscious confusion, distrust and irritation and can result in customers going elsewhere.  

Here are our top five tips for achieving brand consistency:
  1. Firstly, invest in a quality well designed logo (and if your budget can accommodate it, some simple brand guidelines). This should then form the basis for every piece of marketing material that follows.
  2. Following on from here ensure your marketing material looks like it belongs to the same family! If there is no clear link between your business card, website and brochure for example, then your customers’ journey is disjointed and your message becomes unclear.
  3. The biggest and most obvious blunder is to randomly change colours from one piece of marketing communication to the next. Don’t do this! Decide on your brand colours which should be specifically chosen to communicate key messages and then stick to them.
  4. Select every aspect of your brand carefully. Understand that these brand characteristics all mean something and effect the people that experience your brand. These characteristics should include (but are not limited to) things like fonts, colours, logos, design elements and language style.
  5. The best way to achieve the above is to establish a long term working relationship with the right designer who can help build that unswerving, dependable and loved brand that will actually have a positive affect on your businesses profitability. 

This blog post by Sara Brown originally appeared at sarabrown.co.uk

 

Posted in Marketing strategy | Tagged service, relationship, journey, image, customer, Consistency, branding, appearance | 1 comment
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Professional networkers, Tweet your heart out

January 27, 2009 by Kate Horstead

To the business social networking virgin, Twitter can seem more than a bit baffling. People you have never heard of appear on the screen and sooner than you can decide which cheesy profile picture to upload, they are updating you every five minutes on their tea consumption and toilet usage.

However, there is more to this Twittering malarkey than meets the eye.

As Mark Sinclair of yourBusinessChannel explained to the BHP team in an insightful training session two weeks ago, Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for small firms such as ours. Select carefully who you will follow, and you will soon have a strong network of contacts with whom to exchange valuable information, professional or personal, and in doing so communicate your business’ message.

People are naturally interested in the human side of a business, especially where small businesses are concerned – and Twitter allows you to introduce yourself as a person first and foremost, and as a business person second. In a nutshell, Twitterland is a networking event without the awkwardness of deciding how to balance your canapé while shaking someone’s hand. And if someone is boring you half to death, you just stop following their updates – no stilted excuses necessary.

You can respond to other people’s ‘Tweets’ (to the Facebook user, this is the equivalent of a status update; to non-Facebook users, this is a short comment about what the person is doing or thinking at a certain time) simply by writing your own Tweet and placing an @ sign in front of their name before your comment. It takes patience to build this kind of relationship, but then isn’t that true of any relationship?

In Stephen Fry’s words, Twitter can be used to benefit from the ‘collective wisdom and insight’ of ‘fascinatingly good people’, although it can also be the sounding-board for many a banal observation. Fry told the BBC how he gained advice within seconds on how to deal with an unruly bat he found flying around his house, simply by adding the question as a Tweet on his Twitter profile.

So, persevere. Who knows when you might need a fellow Twitterer’s advice on something extraordinary, or when they might need yours?

Posted in PR | Tagged yourBusinessChannel, Twitter, Tweet, social networking, relationship, business | 7 comments
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