4 Easy Ways to Tie Your Marketing Materials Together

To successfully brand your business, you should project an image of strength and stability. Customers need to trust that you can and will deliver on your promises. They have to feel comfortable with you.

Simply telling your customers you stand behind your products and services may not always be enough. When your marketing materials scream “amateur” it becomes difficult to convince prospects that you’re different from their serious about offering a quality service for them.

The cardinal rule to looking professional is to coordinate your promotional materials–from your business cards to your website and everything in between. If your marketing materials don’t match, potential customers may believe they’re looking at different companies. Here are four easy ways to tie your marketing materials together:

1. Create a clean and uncomplicated logo.
Your logo should be easy to remember, be resized without losing detail, and work in one color (such as in a fax or on a pen). The logo should be unique and meaningful and appear on all your marketing materials.

2. Make one color yours.
Choose a color–preferably one from your logo–and use it throughout your marketing materials. Color plays a huge role in memory recall.

3. Work with only one or two fonts.
Fonts, like colors and graphics, project different images.

4. Stay the course.
Just about the time you’re getting sick of your brand standards, your brand starts resonating with your customers. Don’t be tempted to introduce a new color or unusual font selection. Remind yourself that while consistency isn’t always fun, it’s the proven path to branding success.

Nowadays, your company’s actual size may not matter, but its perceived size does. And looking big will pay off big-time.

Establish a Strong Visual Image with Personal Branding

Good professional branding has to be dynamic, authentic and innovative. It has to be dynamic because the business environment is changing fast. It has to be authentic (your unique personal assets and soft skills) because it will make a difference and contribute to your company’s success. It has to be innovative because this is how you can contribute something unique compared to other professionals.

We invest a lot of time, effort and money into learning or upgrading our skills for the job or setting up our own businesses – why not invest some time and effort into ourselves? – making the most of what our natural image is.

  • Brand all letterhead, newsletters, email messages for a professional image – be unique in your efforts
  • Personal branding – establish a strong visual image – be aware of grooming and professional dress sense in your industry, walk tall, wear a nametag
  • Self image – be conscious of your habits (are there things you need to work on?), develop self-confidence and charm – smile!

Learn how to develop your professional image and present yourself in a way that is unique to your person.

Put Your Logo Everywhere

success_next_exitMarketing can do great things for your business. Good marketing strategies can get your business many new customers in the present and in the future. With the new year just around the corner, now is the time to use the season of rebirth to your advantage!
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Many businesses give away FREE gifts with company logos, numbers, website, and such. Instead of the usual, come up with something unique to give away for FREE, something that will stand out more than a pen would.

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Observe the marketing methods that are successful for your competitors, improve on them to suit your business, and incorporate these methods into your own marketing program.

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Advertise where nobody else in your industry advertises. That can eliminate the competition for your ad to get attention of customers.

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Do you put your company logo everywhere you could? There are many places that you can put your logo for FREE and that would be FREE advertising for your business. Put your logo on your car. Put your logo on all company stationery, including envelopes used for mail. Put your logo everywhere that you could!

Differentiate Yourself

girl_pursing_lipsYour brand identity communicates a promise from your company to your customer. Your brand identity consists of your logo, business card, letterhead, website and all other marketing and advertising collateral. When a customer looks at your brand identity, what do they see? What is their perception of your company?

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You may run your business from your dining room table, be a company of 1 or only work your business part time. Whatever the scenario, your brand identity is still important. When a client looks at your business card or your website, they should never be able to tell or even get the perception that you work from home. What should stand out for them is how professional, trustworthy and stable you look as a company.
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In business, perception is everything. There is no guarantee, a potential customer will meet you before looking at your business card or your website, so it is important to make sure your brand identity is strong enough to stand on its own, without you.
Be Remembered!! Stand Out!!

Do you have a marketing plan for 2010?

It seems early to be thinking of next year, but planning now will save headaches in the future. Companies often undervalue the impact of a marketing plan on their own people, who want to feel part of a team engaged in an exciting and complicated joint endeavor. People don’t always understand financial projections, but they can get excited about a well-written and well-thought-out marketing plan.

We all know that plans are imperfect things. How can you possibly know what’s going to happen 12 months or five years from now? Isn’t putting together a marketing plan an exercise in futility…a waste of time better spent meeting with customers or fine-tuning production? Possibly, but an inaccurate plan is far better than no plan at all. Without a marketing plan, you’ll wander the sea of advertising and promotion aimlessly, sometimes finding dry land but more often than not floundering in a vast ocean. Sea captains without a chart are rarely remembered for discovering anything but the ocean floor.

Digrafika is prepared to participate in a marketing plan for your company, any size and any budget, annually, simplifying your marketing, promotional, and passive income processes. Ideally, after writing marketing plans for a few years, you can sit back and review a series of them, year after year, and check the progress of your company.

Ask how your business can benefit from a professional design from Digrafika! Call 603-534-2040.

Source: The Small Business Encyclopedia and Knock-Out Marketing

What does Spot Color, Pantone and CMYK printing mean?

Clients frequently ask for a definition of Spot Color, PMS inks, and CMYK printing.

A spot color is a special premixed ink that is used in printing in addition to CMYK process inks, and requires its own plate on a printing press. Spot colors are used when only a few colors are necessary in a design and can accurately reproduce colors that are outside the gamut of process colors. They are not determined by altered color values or by color management, and follow a spot color matching system such as Pantone, Inc. Each spot color used will generate an additional spot color printing plate for a printing press, increasing printing costs. If you think your design may require more than four colors, consider printing the document using process colors (CMYK).

Pantone®, Pantone Matching System and PMS are Pantone, Inc’s standard trademarks for color standards, color data, color reproduction and color reproduction materials, and other color related products and services, meeting its specifications, control and quality requirements. Using Pantone colors will produce consistent color from more than one printer/supplier. Colors are normally referred to by a corresponding number on the Pantone palette.

CMYK stands for the ink colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, used in process color printing. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing full-color documents. When using the inks of these four basic colors, certain percentages of these colors can be added and subtracted to yield a variety of new colors. Combining 100% of all four colors together will yield black, while subtracting all the colors will yield white, or the color of the paper stock.

Small business first quarter marketing checklist

The beginning of a new calendar or fiscal year is a great time kickstart your marketing efforts. Be sure these items were completed in the first quarter.

1) Define your marketing focus and vision for your business.
2) Develop an marketing plan that incorporates strategies for advertising, marketing and public relations.
3) Define your target market.
4) Define your marketing objectives and strategies.
5) Develop a unique selling proposition, compelling message and valuable offer to your target market.
6) Develop a contact management system.
7) Implement a system to track your marketing efforts.
8) Use the power of referrals as part of your marketing efforts.
9) Seek advice from a marketing consultant and business coach.