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Review Your Branding From A Seller’s Perspective

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By Mike Hambright

Branding: We either love it or we hate it.

As real estate investors, our brand and our message can be a deciding factor in whether a seller reaches out to us to potentially purchase their home. Before you ever speak to them, your brand speaks to them.

It’s important to think about how a seller sees your business. Think about your logo, your message, your website and any other marketing you’re putting out there. You have to stand out from the crowd.

Think about what you want your potential seller to know about you:

• Do you enjoy helping others who are in tough situations?

• Do you give any of your profits to charity?

• Are you locally based?

• Do you have a family?

• Do any of your family members work with you in the business?

• How long have you been in business?

• How easy is it to work with you?

• Are you able to assist with cleaning out the property?

• Is it OK if the property needs a lot of work?

Your branding should focus on the positive aspects of your business, with the seller in mind — not the money. They want to know that they can trust you.

On social media, anytime you post or share something on your business page, consider how it will be perceived by future sellers. This is a key reason many real estate investors have two brands or companies. One is for buying distressed properties, and the other is for selling those properties. When you think about it, your audience for both brands is drastically different, so it only makes sense to separate them.

For any marketing you do, ask yourself if your parents or grandparents would look at your mailer or other marketing piece and give you a call. Get their honest feedback. They’re usually part of your target market, and if there are areas of your marketing that turn them off, it’s important for you to know and to potentially make changes.

In addition to thinking of how your parents or grandparents would react, also consider reactions from those who have:

• Lived in their home for decades.

• Raised their kids in that home.

• Inherited the home from a family member.

• Struggled with health and finances and just can’t handle the upkeep of their home.

You can impact their lives for the better if you focus on the seller and solving their problems. When you build your branding around this (and it is true), a motivated seller will be more likely to reach out compared to a brand that’s not personal.

No matter what market you’re in, you need to stand out in a positive way. Having your brand and marketing showcase how you can help a seller out provides a positive first impression. If they reach out to you, continue providing value that is helpful to the seller. You might not get every deal, but helping as many people as you can will only yield positive results down the road.

Ask yourself now: Are your brand and your marketing showcasing your best features?

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Mike Hambright

Mike Hambright is a real estate investor, mentor and coach, and is the Founder of FlipNerd.com and the Investor Fuel Mastermind.

Sourced from Forbes

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Branding and Visual Identity for Energy Company

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Sourced from abdz

abduzeedo

Andstudio . shared a beautiful branding and visual design project for Ignitis, an international energy group, uniting over 20 companies and operating across the Baltics, Poland and Finland.  It turned to us for a brand identity that would stand the test of time and unite all of the company’s ventures under a cohesive brand.

Aiming to become the region’s main competence center for energy solutions, Ignitis needed its new brand to reflect its progressive agenda. For this, we created an identity system that consists of five building blocks, each representing a major business unit, with a foundational Holding symbol at the top. Put together, they form a human-like shape, embodying the company’s client-centric approach. Color coded modules visually highlight separate business units, which can be successfully used in classical and digital communication, both as a system as well as separate dynamic portals.

Branding and Visual Identity

Logotype

Our logotype represents a stylized human shape as a visual anchor. Shapes and colours express adaptability to customers needs and a consumer-centric approach. At the same time it aims to represent a spark – symbol of versatility and innovation.

Identity

To fully broadcast the message, the brand uses graphic element that supports the principles already established by the logo. The graphic components are embracing moments of both clear structure and visual impact, leading with a solid color palette, mixing headlines with color-blocked shapes and icons. The whole identity system is based on Ignitis’ expertise, trust, versatility and innovation.

Digital Identity System

Investing into a visual identity should have a return for years to come. That’s why we create identity systems that can be adapted to different formats and marketing materials or even extended to cover new business ventures or side projects when a brand expands.

Abduzeedo

I’m a Brazilian product designer based in Oakland, California currently working for Google as a Staff Designer. I am also the founder of Abduzeedo, an award-winning digital publication about design and a personal project that has become the source of inspiration for millions of designers and enthusiasts.

Sourced from abdz

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Nestle to appeal ban on ‘Incredible Burger’ branding in Europe

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Sourced from Reuters

(Reuters) – Nestle (NESN.S) said on Monday it would appeal a Dutch court’s ruling that prohibits the Swiss food giant from selling its plant-based burgers in Europe under the “Incredible Burger” name after a challenge from U.S.-based Impossible Foods.

Last week, the District Court in The Hague granted an injunction filed by Impossible Foods to prevent Nestle from marketing its burgers as “Incredible” after arguing that the signage bore a strong visual, phonetic and conceptual resemblance to the U.S. company’s EU trademark and could confuse consumers.

In its ruling, the court agreed that Nestle had infringed Impossible Foods’ trademarks and prohibited the KitKat-maker from using the “Incredible” name throughout Europe, giving it four weeks to withdraw its products from shelves or face 25,000 euros ($27,772.50) a day in fines.

“We are disappointed by this provisional ruling as it is our belief that anyone should be able to use descriptive terms such as ‘incredible’ that explain the qualities of a product. We will of course abide by this decision, but in parallel, we will file an appeal,” Nestle wrote in an email.

The company said it would now re-brand its plant-based burgers to “Sensational Burgers”, saying the new name evoked “the senses that are stimulated by our burger.”

The ruling comes at a time when Impossible Foods is working hard to enter into Europe.

In October, the company filed with the European Food Safety Authority to market soy leghemoglobin, a genetically modified ingredient, that is key in making its Impossible burgers bleed like their animal counterparts.

But the process for approval has taken long as the EU has a comprehensive and a strict legal regime on genetically modified food, with each product undergoing strict evaluation and safety assessment tests that usually take months.

Feature Image Credit: The “Incredibly Veggie” plant based vegetarian burger of Garden Gourmet is pictured during a media presentation at Nestle in Vevey, Switzerland. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Sourced from  Reuters

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Branding Is Storytelling

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By Marshall Bowden.

A great brand doesn’t start with a product.

It doesn’t start with a business plan.

Every big idea, every legendary brand, begins as a story. The story is sometimes deeply entwined with the personal story of the founder/owner, but the brand’s story is a distinctive story all in itself. If you don’t know the story, if you haven’t spent time thinking about it and working it into a narrative that explains what makes the heart of your business beat, then you really don’t understand your business at all.

Good marketing will bring people to your product or service, hopefully in sufficient numbers to keep the doors open. But marketing alone will not keep them coming back. It won’t create a bond between you and them.

Solid branding will. Branding animates your product, your company, your employees, and your clients or customers. When branding is strong and a company consistently focuses on the values that their story embodies, their products or services can become part of people’s lives. In the best cases, those companies can actually influence the culture of an entire business sector and beyond.

Author and social researcher Brene Brown says that “maybe stories are just data with a soul”. Businesses are driven by data, and the collection and analysis of ever-increasing amounts of data has become a huge part of any business. But without branding, without a compelling story, how do you even know what data is going to be most valuable to your business? How will you focus your marketing if you can’t articulate what’s important to your business?

How will you convey the soul of your brand? With a story that gathers the threads of core values, uniqueness, and style your brand will show that it understands both itself and its customers or clients.

Core values are important to your brand and they help drive your story. Core values are the DNA and foundation of your business. Other things about your business change with conditions and markets and data, but your core values do not. They dictate how you will conduct business and react to change, but they don’t keep you from evolving.

Core values are important to define and for those within the company to understand, but they are not always explicitly stated. Instead they are frequently demonstrated by the company’s product, service, innovation, etc. But the stories the company tells about itself — about its workers, about its way of doing business — help to define these values in the minds of clients and customers.

Some companies will have core values that customers are willing to pay higher prices to support. At other times their values will be simple and straightforward because their business is that way. For example, customers look to a bank to be dependable and keep their money safe, not to be especially innovative.

Key to the importance of core values is that customers and clients will look to see themselves reflected in the values of companies whose products they use. If customers see themselves as dependable providers for their families they will respond to products and services that reflect a belief in dependability and security.

Your unique selling proposition is something you want to identify within your brand. What differentiates your product or service from those that have gone before? Why is your business worthier of your customers’ money than your competitors?

According to this article by ConversionEngine’s Joe Putnam:

“A unique selling proposition is what your business stands for. It’s what sets your business apart from others because of what your business makes a stand about. Instead of attempting to be known for everything, businesses with a unique selling proposition stand for something specific, and it becomes what you’re known for.”

He goes on to say that companies and their brands need to decide what they are going to be known for. Being too general, trying to be good at everything, leaves a company without a competitive advantage in this area.

Put another way, a unique selling proposition defines your brand’s niche. In simple terms, when you decide to offer low prices, you will not offer other services that would raise prices. When you decide to offer the highest quality, you will not compete on price because that’s not possible based on your selling proposition niche.

If you are operating in a crowded market or have a product or service that is difficult to differentiate, your brand provides the key to the niche that you alone can occupy.

Your brand has a style. Identify it and align it with your story. The style can be visual, as in a logo, or a concept such as “relaxed” or “flexible”. It may be certain colors or a signature theme song, or a certain way of communicating.

Consider the visual and written style of the J. Peterman Company’s catalog. Their catalogs differed profoundly from others being printed in 1987. They used long copy that didn’t merely describe the article of clothing they were selling, it told a story about it. And instead of color photographs, the catalog utilized simple but artistic line drawings of the clothes.

J Peterman Company

J Peterman Company

Their original motto was “People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them.”

That’s a core value that directs the company’s story and expresses itself in the uniqueness and style of its products as well as its presentation. That is a brand.

The story is the central element in the J Peterman brand. The company’s website still uses drawings, now with color added, and photographs, which are necessary to sell products online.

Although the more florid descriptions have given way to a more practical product description online, the site contains a blog entitled ‘Peterman’s Eye” which covers all manner of topics under subjects like Americana, Curiosities, Adventure, and Travel.

So yes, they’ve evolved in their look and feel, but the story is the same.

Branding and marketing are ritualized forms of storytelling that form an epic saga about a company and their products or services. This constant need to continue telling the story is one reason that the need for so many content providers has evolved. Writers, content marketers, SEO specialists, social media marketers and influencers, and even customers all participate in the storytelling, compelled and guided by their understanding, both explicit and subconscious, of the brand’s core values, uniqueness, and style.

By Marshall Bowden

Sourced from UX Magazine

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Emotional Advertising Has Become the Cornerstone of Branding

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By Randall Huft.

As a nation, we came together for a few brief hours. We set aside our political, cultural, economic, and demographic differences, and although we were sharply divided over who we wanted to win, we applauded the process wholeheartedly. Together we laughed, we cried, we cheered, and we feared.

Of course, I am talking about the most recent Super Bowl. Not the game, but the commercials.

The Super Bowl’s commercials are anticipated as much as the game itself. The super-expensive, highly condensed stories are designed to evoke a strong emotional reaction, which is supposed to make viewers feel favorably about the brand being advertised, and ultimately, purchase those products.

But does a television commercial that makes people laugh or cry actually help a company sell more products? Let’s dive in and find out.

Emotional advertising aims to influence behaviors and evoke responses. According to a 2009 study titled “Emotions, Attitudes and Memorability Associated with TV Commercials,” as consumers are exposed to these messages their feelings about products or brands shift.

“Advertisers try to create positive attitudes by evoking a favorable or positive emotional state in the consumer,” according to the study’s authors. The researchers concluded consumers prefer advertisements that elicit a positive feeling such as love, joy, or nostalgia. They also found advertisements that evoke emotions are more likely to be recalled.

In an article in Fast Company titled “The Rise Of Sadvertising: Why Brands Are Determined To Make You Cry,” the author wrote marketers believe consumer decision-making is driven by the unconscious instead of logic, because “most of the business of life happens through our emotions,” and “a good cry” has become “an engine of social sharing.”

Ultimately, any advertisement will be judged on whether it motivates consumers to purchase the product being advertised. So why is appealing to the heart and not the head in advertising so effective?

It is interesting to note the word “motivation” and “emotion” share the same Latin root, movere, which means to move. By soliciting an emotional response, consumers are unconsciously moved toward taking action.

In other words, feeling, not thinking, is key to advertising success.

Advertising executive and author Douglas Van Praet believed we don’t think our way to logical solutions; we feel our way to reason. “Emotions, not words, are the universal language of humans,” he wrote

Van Praet had a hand in creating the “Darth Vader” commercial for Volkswagen, which elicited such a strong emotional response that it became among the most shared Super Bowl ads ever, amassing a staggering 56 million views on YouTube and earning a reported 6.8 billion impressions worldwide and more than $100 million in earned media.

Not coincidently, it helped VW achieve its best market share in thirty years.

In an article in Psychology Today, author Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D., wrote, “Most people believe the choices they make result from a rational analysis of available alternatives. In reality, however, emotions greatly influence and, in many cases, even determine our decisions.”

Furthermore, research indicates consumers’ emotional response to an ad has a far greater influence on their intent to buy a product than does the ad content—by a factor of three to one for television commercials and two to one for print ads. This “emotional branding” helps differentiate companies from their competitors and creates deep intrinsic relationships between brands and consumers.

The concept was summarized best by a fictional character. In the television program Mad Men, advertising executive Don Draper talked about how a product can create a deep bond with consumers by using one of the most powerful emotions: nostalgia. “It’s delicate, but potent,” he said. “In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again; to a place where we know we are loved.”

And love, after all, is the most powerful emotion of all.

Feature Image Credit: Image: Sandor Szuhoterin / Shutterstock.com

By Randall Huft.

Randall Huft is president and creative director at Innovation Agency, an advertising, branding, and public relations firm specializing in the cannabis industry. While working with blue-chip companies including AT&T, United Airlines, IBM, Walgreens, American Express, Toyota, and Disney, he discovered what works, what doesn’t, and how to gain market share.

Sourced from mg Magazine

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The Beginner’s Guide to Performing a Brand Audit

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By Nicholas Morpus

The world today moves at a breakneck pace, so what worked for your brand one day might not work the next. A brand audit will give you the insights that you need to stay on top of your market demands.

hen Toyota created Scion, their brand position was to sell these cheaper and smaller vehicles to younger buyers. However, after a couple years into the brand’s lifespan, Toyota realized that their Scion vehicles were more sought after by older buyers despite the intentions of their marketing plan.

This was the perfect example for the need of a brand audit. Building a brand is difficult and will require many revisions as you learn more about your target audience. Obviously, you don’t want to needlessly spend money when it isn’t producing the results you were hoping for.

That’s just marketing 101. That’s why a brand audit will give you the opportunity to realign your branding and marketing tactics to where they’re most needed.

Overview: What is a brand audit?

Simply put, a brand audit is an in-depth look into your business’s current market position and effectiveness when juxtaposed against the competition. It is an evaluation of your efforts in the eyes of your audience for the purposes of pointing out shortcomings, inconsistencies, and gaps in your market strategy.

Should your small business perform a brand audit?

Yes. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. Even if your business is experiencing tons of success, there is always room for improvement. In fact, when you’re succeeding is a fantastic time to perform a brand analysis in order to ensure that you’re not getting comfortable while potential competitors are addressing new market demands.

If that hasn’t convinced you, here are three key benefits of performing a brand audit:

1. Discover flaws in your brand

A thorough brand audit is likely to turn up all sorts of inconsistencies and issues in market targeting that are affecting your sales, website conversions, page views, or any other metric of success you’re currently tracking.

At worst, your branding might be way off the mark, and at best, you’re only dealing with minor perception issues. Either way, a brand audit will bring these problems to your attention.

2. Pave the way for improvement

Once you understand a problem, it is much easier to contemplate a solution. Brand audits give you the opportunity to fix the issues that are dragging down the perception of your brand and provide you with honest feedback on what your target audience is looking for.

3. Provide insights for future development

Brand audits not only highlight pain points in your brand perception but also open the door for new ideas and developments in your business efforts. Perhaps the brand assessment will inspire a new product, service, or idea based on the feedback you received from your target audience.

How to perform a brand audit

Now that you understand the invaluable benefits of this process, here’s a simple five-step brand audit checklist to help walk you through the process.

Step 1: Conduct an audience survey

Starting out, this is where you’ll probably have to invest some money into auditing your brand. While some of the steps in this list require you to make some best-guess efforts to narrow your branding focus, an audience survey is the perfect way to get a direct insight into the mind of your market.

In order to net the best results, it’s best to hire an outside company to conduct market research for you.

Tips for conducting an audience survey

There is nothing more valuable in business than understanding your audience. Without these insights, you are running into the market blind and will inevitably waste tons of money and time. Here are a few tips for conducting an audience survey that’ll benefit your brand targeting efforts.

  • Know your target market: Surveys are only useful if they’re conducted on your target audience. If you’re looking to sell a product to customers in the United States between the ages of 22 and 45, then it does you no good to include Australian teenagers in the data pool.
  • Aim for a large sample group: Surveys are only useful when the group is large enough to eliminate the wide swinging results of potential outliers. Make sure your survey sample size is large enough to provide meaningful results.

Step 2: Audit your analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool that you can use to understand your business website traffic once you know how to harness its full potential.

First off, your traffic analysis will give you an idea of which countries are most likely to visit your website, which sources are driving traffic to your website (Google searches, social media, etc.), and the quality of that traffic (are they converting?).

Tips for auditing your analytics

There are so many tips for using Google Analytics that I could write an entire guide on the subject. However, these are the two most important tips for getting the most out of your website marketing metrics while conducting a brand audit.

  • Take your bounce rate seriously: Sometimes it’s not your product or service but actually your website itself that’s causing the problem. Your bounce rate (the metric determined by those who visit your site and leave immediately) is affected by all kinds of factors. Make sure your page load times are quick, your landing pages are relevant, and your website content is compelling in order to combat high bounce rates.
  • The right market: Your website analytics will tell you where your traffic is coming from, including the geographic location of your traffic. If you’re seeing traffic spikes from countries you aren’t looking to market to, then there is obviously an issue you have to address. Traffic spikes are useless if it isn’t quality traffic from a source you hope to convert.

Step 3: Audit your social media

Not only is social media a godsend for small business marketing, it’s also treasure trove for consumer research. Performing a social media audit will give you an insight into not only your likes, shares, and referrals, but also audience insights such as age ranges and gender ratios.

This information will help you further narrow down where you should increase your efforts and where they are wasted.

If you’re interested in more information, you can read our detailed guide for auditing your social media accounts that’ll walk you through each step.

Tips for auditing your social media accounts

If this is your first time ever auditing your social media accounts, here are a few tips to help you smooth out the process.

  • Use an audit spreadsheet: Conducting a social media or brand audit isn’t a one-time deal, so it’s important to maintain a record of your progress. Here’s an audit spreadsheet template that’ll help you keep track of all of your social media marketing KPIs for comparisons during each regular audit session. This data will help you build out your future social media content calendar tailored to your audience insights.
  • Where to find the data: While it is possible to gather all of this information individually from each platform’s proprietary marketing analytics tools, for the sake of convenience, a social media management tool is perfect for tracking your metrics. In fact, some tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite are capable of gathering data that Facebook or Twitter don’t usually track.

Step 4: Evaluate your competition

If your business is dealing with any direct competitors and you see them succeeding where you’re falling behind, it’s time to evaluate what they’re doing differently. The great thing about competition is that it not only incentives you to improve, but also opens the door to new ideas that you would’ve never thought of otherwise.

Tips for evaluating your competition

While you can hire a professional market intelligence expert to evaluate your competition, it’s entirely possible to learn quite a lot through some research of your own. Here are a couple tips to get you started.

  • Find the comparative advantage: Evaluate how your competition markets to their audience, how they treat their customers, what services they provide, and how their website functions. Try to find what they’re better at and make improvements based on those advantages.
  • Check their SEO: There are lots of analysis tools out there, like Brightedge, SEMRush, and Ahrefs, that analyze your competition for organic keywords. Use one of these tools to assess the SEO of your competitor’s website to see what keywords they are targeting and how to maximize your website content based on their actions.

Step 5: Make adjustments to your brand

Now that you understand all of the issues plaguing your brand, be it audience targeting, website function, customer service, or any combination of shortcomings, it’s time to take those lessons and make improvements.

But once you’ve made these improvements, your work isn’t over. It’s important for you to monitor these changes and take note of any fluctuations in business, web traffic, and customer response.

Tips for making adjustments

This step isn’t as simple as making the changes to your brand and forgetting them. Here are a couple tips for making the most of your efforts.

  • Consider running your potential changes through focus groups: You started off this process with consumer input, and it’s best to end it the same way. A focus group is the perfect way to get feedback on your changes and make the final tweaks before implementing your brand shift.
  • A/B test every change: Once you’ve made the adjustments, it’s important to A/B test all of your core metrics to see if there are any improvements to your business, website traffic, etc.

The Blueprint will help you get your branding and marketing on track

Success in business doesn’t begin and end with a comprehensive brand audit. There’s lots more you’ll have to do to ensure your marketing efforts are reaching the right audience, and we at The Blueprint want to help you supercharge your business.

By Nicholas Morpus

Sourced from the blueprint

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Email Marketing Strategies To Strengthen Your Internal Communications

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By Christina Crawley.

More than ever, teams need to be able to rely on digital tools and strategies to work together. As remote and geographically dispersed teams increase, the benefits of in-person collaboration need to find their place within the digital realm. Various combinations of tools support this approach; however, smart use of internal email marketing is key to keeping employees focused and informed so that they can do their jobs effectively.

Email marketing generally focuses on external audiences. It aims to encourage individuals to click, engage or buy. Its approaches are, however, still very much relevant for internal teams, both large and small.

As you look to either strengthen or launch your internal email outreach to your digital teams, here are a number of trusted approaches that you’ll want to be sure to include.

1. Create (and stick to) a schedule.

Employees can more easily retain info that they both recognize and expect in their inboxes. A companywide or teamwide update email that comes in unexpectedly may leave individuals confused as to how they are supposed to respond or move forward. Consistent, expected email updates provide structure and a sense of routine that they can quickly apply to their work.

Some updates may be more relevant, appreciated or acted upon than others, but their consistent frequency will make them far more likely to be applied to teams’ everyday work. Consistency creates habit, which then becomes part of your employees’ working routines.

2. Apply formatting and branding.

While it may seem like internal audiences don’t need branding and formatting, a visually clear structure goes a long way in getting employees’ attention and engagement. Your staff’s inboxes are just as packed with incoming mail as your external audiences’ are. Visual cues and flags allow your internal teams to effectively understand and scan what you are sending their way.

Deliberate formatting, from familiar subject lines to consistent body topic blocks, allows staff to quickly scan what they’ve received and pick out what applies to them. For teams that are waiting for a certain piece of information, or are focused on other emergencies, this formatting allows them to quickly grab what they need and move on.

Branding allows your staff to immediately recognize and differentiate email communications, such as a new staff announcement versus a product launch. It makes it easier to know what attention is expected of them, and how it affects what they are doing.

Email templates that incorporate branding and formatting for different types of messages can help your messages stand out from regular, nonformatted internal emails.

3. Personalize your content.

Whether you are communicating to thousands of employees worldwide or a small team locally, being aware of your audience segments and what you need from them helps to avoid your emails being ignored. Create content that is relevant to those who receive it. Otherwise, it risks being seen as unimportant and ignored.

Personalization ranges from individual departments to specific roles. For example, the length and detail of your content may be short when providing a brief companywide update on an issue, compared to a small team update on the same issue that dives deeper and includes tasks and action items. Calls to action (CTAs) that you lay out may also differ from one group to another — for example, including buttons and/or links to take action outside of email versus requesting a direct reply or follow-up discussion.

4. Create engagement and interaction.

Generally speaking, we know that if people engage directly with something (in this case, email content), they are more likely to remember it over time. Creating an intriguing or playful interaction opportunity within an internal email is an easy way to achieve this. Examples include launching a feedback poll, asking a trivia question connected to the issue you’re communicating, encouraging engagement with the company’s social media or sharing a relevant video to break up the act of simply reading.

Interaction with your internal emails not only helps employees to better retain the information you’re sending, but it also brings them closer to one another and creates opportunities for further collaboration and support. This is especially valuable when they don’t have the opportunity to connect in person.

5. Don’t spam your internal teams.

When developing an email strategy that engages teams and encourages employees to pay attention and take action, there is a real concern that too many internal emails can have a negative effect on productivity. The general rule of thumb is to focus on content that pertains directly to employees’ roles. If your emails are relevant to their working day, then they will be received as valuable and worth the time to read or scan.

Emails unrelated to employees’ work run the risk of being nothing more than distractions, which may negatively affect employees’ output. This is not to say that you shouldn’t be sending emails about upcoming social events and personal news, but be aware that those should be done at a minimum and/or in a way that avoids distracting or pulling them away from their work.

Looking Ahead

Email is an asynchronous form of communication, so your teams are able to engage with your email outreach when it makes the most sense for their workloads and schedules. As you launch and update your internal email strategy, pay close attention to the engagement data, and make tweaks and changes as necessary. What works today may not next year. The key is to provide consistent content that is essential in supporting your team’s success and productivity.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Christina Crawley

Director of Marketing at Forum One, leading global marketing and outreach to the world’s most influential nonprofits and foundations.

Sourced from Forbes Billionaire

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How to Convert Someone to Your Cause in 5 Simple Steps

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By David Meltzer

Phillip Stutts discusses the branding and marketing lessons he’s learned from working in politics for the past two decades.

 

Phillip Stutts, founder of Go Big Media and Win Big Media and author of Fire Them Now, shares his thoughts on why the five-step process for branding a politician is the exact same as branding a person, product or service in any other industry. He also shares why customer data is so essential when putting together an impactful advertising campaign.

Stutts and The Playbook host David Meltzer chat about the importance of testing your advertisements before launching a campaign, why businesses should operate with a giving and abundant approach and why they believe in giving prospective clients a free assessment in order to get alignment.

By David Meltzer

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Branding is dead, CX design is king

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By Micah Bowers.

The days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.

One of the hardest things about design is keeping track of the terminology. There are many words to learn, and definitions frequently overlap. But don’t think for a moment that any two terms mean the exact same thing. Distinctions abound. Abbreviations matter.

So it is with user experience and customer experience design, or UX vs. CX. The two disciplines are so closely related, their differences so murky, that they are sometimes used interchangeably.

Originally, the UX umbrella was meant to cover every facet of an individual’s interplay with a company, but our distinctly digital age complicated things. UX is now associated with the quality of interactions between a user and a digital product, and CX design has come to encompass all the other encounters that a person has with a business.

All other encounters—the scope is enormous.

[Image: courtesy Toptal]

Today, UX designers typically focus on a series of goal-driven tasks and the overall quality of interactions; for instance, “How can we improve mobile navigation so people can find things more easily?”

To create cohesive experiences, UX designers must also be aware of the ways in which their work impacts existing features. “Does changing our navigation improve discoverability and speed up our purchasing process (or increase our conversion rates)?”

Zoom in with UX. Zoom out with CX. It’s a natural pairing.

But what about other design disciplines? How do they fit into the CX design equation? More specifically, what impact does brand design have on the customer experience? At the very least, it seems like brand designers ought to be aware of all the ways in which their clients interact with customers.

[Image: courtesy Toptal]

Avoid a myopic brand

Brand designers have an uncanny ability to pinpoint the attributes that make companies special.

  • What do they do best?
  • How are they different than the competition?
  • Why should anyone care?

With these insights in hand, brand designers unify the most essential truths into a promise between company and customer.

This promise, the brand promise, has few words but permeates every aspect of a company’s activities. It names a common goal and inspires everyone involved to move with a shared sense of mission.

[Image: courtesy Toptal]

But, a brand promise can be restrictive—especially when a brand designer doesn’t appreciate the full scope of a company’s touchpoints (aka any interaction that has the potential to change a customer’s feelings toward a business). For example, a design team lands a contract with a grocery chain and goes all-in on a strategy that makes digital interactions top priority. They define a compelling brand promise and outline a companywide mindset that emphasizes high-quality digital tools and content. Unfortunately, the team doesn’t give the same level of care to the grocer’s brick-and-mortar experience, and they fail to develop a plan to infuse in-store interactions with the updated brand sentiments. A crucial aspect of CX design and customer engagement has been ignored. With time, customers grow frustrated because the glossy rebrand they encounter online doesn’t translate to the real world. In-person interactions with the grocery chain didn’t become markedly worse, but they feel slow and dated in contrast to the lofty expectations set by the rebrand.

CX apathy causes irrelevant brand collateral

Visual identity design builds on brand design. A brand promise is the foundation, brand values are the frame, and the elements within a visual identity are the fixtures and finishing touches. They embody the most important aspects of the brand in visual form and serve as aesthetic benchmarks for a host of promotional collateral.

Chobani’s visual identity was designed so that the brand, despite being a household name, would be perceived as a small, humble craft company (like its early days). [Image: courtesy Toptal]

To create an effective visual identity, it’s crucial that a brand designer have big-picture knowledge of a company’s customer journey—all the ways customers interact with the company and perform tasks over time. Why is this so important? Designing promotional collateral for brand channels isn’t like creating a responsive interface for different screen sizes. It’s not enough to recycle and resize the same design elements over and over. Every channel has unique constraints and content demands. Time, scale, distance, environmental distractions, and user expectations are just a few factors that come into play. It’s not necessarily the brand designer’s job to create promotional collateral, but it is their job to design a visual identity that is adaptable to multiple scenarios. Let’s expand on our example from earlier—the brand team that goes all-in on digital.While building out the grocery chain’s visual identity, the brand team decides to outline a set of photography guidelines that will give the grocer a more intimate and human feel. The intentions of the team are good: They want to cultivate a more relatable web and social presence by showing happy people enjoying the grocer’s goods.But the human-centric photos don’t account for the chain’s past success promoting products out of home—where ads must be interpreted in the blink of an eye. When a new set of billboards, bus wraps, and kiosks are designed following the brand team’s guidelines, they are visually attractive, but the photos of smiling people don’t fully communicate the deals the grocer is offering. The ads fail to grab the attention of motorists and pedestrians, and the campaign fizzles.

Brand designer keys to omni-channel awareness

Brand channels are unique and evolving

Every channel that a company uses to communicate with customers has its own idiosyncrasies. What works on one channel isn’t guaranteed to work on another.

Some channels are structured for highly personalized interactions—others less so. One channel may be geared toward in-depth videos while another is known for short audio clips.

Channels aren’t static either. Features, popularity, and demographics are always in flux. Just when everyone thinks they have a handle on “where users are spending their time,” a new channel emerges and disrupts everything.

The paradigm can’t be controlled. Flexibility is paramount.

There’s no way to dominate every channel. Fit is crucial.

Consistency is the lifeblood of engagement

Engagement measures a customer’s feeling of relationship with a product or company. Feelings and relationships may be fickle, but they thrive on consistency.

The takeaway for brand designers? Consistency encompasses more than visual design decisions like logo placement and color use. Every touchpoint makes an impression. Every interaction impacts perception. No part of the customer’s journey is inconsequential or dismissible.

[Image: courtesy Toptal]

The customer experience is interconnected

Customer experience design is a web of interconnected interactions. Touchpoints don’t exist independently of one another. They’re all part of the same story, all linked to a brand’s core promise.

A purchasing experience on mobile doesn’t end. It extends into unboxing, setup, and regular use. It continues through ad campaigns and customer support. It endures on social media. Finally, it breathes new life with the choice to make, or not make, another purchase.

Click here for a larger version. [Image: courtesy Toptal]

CX strengthens brand relevance

Branding is dead? Hardly. It’s stronger than ever, but that doesn’t change the fact that a crummy interaction completely undermines even the most inspiring brand promise. Can brand designers control what happens at every touchpoint? No, but they can design brands that are disconnected from reality—brands that make big promises but don’t deliver when it counts. When such a disconnect exists, customers tend to look elsewhere.

Branding isn’t dead, but the days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.

Feature Image Credit: Toptal

By Micah Bowers.

Micah Bowers is a senior designer at Toptal. Follow him on LinkedIn and Dribbble. This article was originally published on the Toptal Design Blog.

Sourced from FastCompany

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