Creative Ideas & Branding Tips for your Business

In a tough and competitive market, your startup simply cannot exist for a long time unless customers trust your company. Branding is all about building the trust for your products or services among your target audience. Creating a unique brand that stands out requires you to have creative branding ideas and tips that are special so here’s a list that will set your business apart from the established brands. 

  • Discover your archetype

Psychologist Carl Jung has defined the concept of archetype as defining your brand on recognizable characters from popular fables, folklore, and novels. The world’s most popular brands have used and applied Jungian psychology as a brand strategy to make it easy for their target audience to remember their brand. Creating a notable archetype for your brand can help you create a compelling and immersive story around your brand identity.

  • Make your logo personal and enticing

Your business logo is the face of your company in your target market. Logo is a part of your building exercise and if it is merely a casual drawing, all your branding efforts will go in vain. Not only should your business logo be top-notch but also omnipresent! Don’t be afraid to use your logo absolutely everywhere. The only way to sell a product or service in greater volumes is if your brand has a logo that can be recognized by everyone.

  • Establish your social media positioning and strategy

Social media presence is important for startups and small businesses. Social media sites such as Facebool, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest offer startups a wide range of opportunities to tap into a large pool of potential customers. By creating a social media page, you can have a marketing channel free of charge! Small budgets and fully customized campaigns on social media platforms can help build brand awareness steadily.

  • Curate a personalized concept and content

Customers embrace brands that make them feel important and valued for their unique personalities. When dealing with hundreds of thousands of customers, you need to be creative with your concept and content personalization. Creating a personalized experience for your audience is the key to unlocking more engagement, lead, sales, and trust. Content personalization isn’t just a smart marketing strategy but an emerging norm. Personalization goes hand in hand with social media as with any platform where you’re offering your content. It starts with making sure of optimized images for Facebook before sharing it on Twitter, ensuring the right sizing, and even altering the content when needed.

  • Connect with brand influencers

Among brand influencers, there are those that create content relating to one specific industry. For example, Youtubers and Tiktokers who review cosmetics and make-up products. Selecting the right influencers to approach promoting your brand is also very crucial. It allows you to reverse engineer and offer a piece of content that will be an appealing bargaining chip to them. Try to get creative with locating and connecting with individual influencers and team up so you can get more exposure to a huge number of people and potential new customers. 

  • Start blogging about your business

One of the best branding ideas is to blog about your business as your blogs will project you as an authority in your business and industry. Make sure that your content solves the problems related to the products or services your industry sells. Give an updated and supported information to your readers so that they will find your blogs useful. An example of a best practice is to make sure that your blog design can accommodate a good mix of text and visuals such as images, videos, and infographics whenever required. An interesting and engaging content will attract more potential customers and this will immediately build and gain business trust.

  • Embrace online and email marketing and banner ads

Most businesses usually neglect the significance of a good email campaign or a banner ad. Professional email designs with the proper paragraph payout and images can be used to deliver all the relevant information straight to people’s inboxes. This goes the same with flooding the web with your banner ads that must stand out for its unique use of colors, images, text, call to action buttons, and other features. Another great reason why taking your outreach to online marketing platforms is because of keyword search. You can easily find keywords dedicated to your niche market which can help you build content with more effectiveness, efficiency, and success. Another thing to note is that the variety of your graphic designs such as logos, brochures, business cards, and websites are all important to branding.

  • Pay attention to your packaging

Packaging design for product-based businesses must be the center of attention and a memorable piece of your graphic design work as this is the first thing that will draw the attention of potential customers. If there is a mismatch in the packaging design and concept of the products you make, customers will automatically lose interest. A wrongfully done packaging discourages people from buying the product solely because of a poor presentation. Do not treat your packaging and label lightly as this will massively affect your established branding presence. 

 

As a generally good rule of thumb for life as it is, not just business and brands – authenticity and consistency will get you where you deserve to be. When your brand has consistent imagery, design, messaging and values, it facilitates effective communication. Consistency is what helps your audience choose you over all others. Align your creative branding ideas with your values, your own person, and with who you really want to be. Do what you do best. Adapting to your customers is good but consistency and authenticity gets recognized. Contact us today to learn more.

 


About the Author

JanineJanine is a Social Media Manager based in the Philippines who aspires to consistently develop her skills with content creations by focusing on the important elements of graphic designing and keeping up with current social media design trends. As a writer, words come naturally to her in forms of metaphors and idioms which strikes as a great wordplay with each blurb, blog, or caption.

Web Development

All About Web Development

Web development is the leg work that happens behind the scenes to make the magic, that is your website, come into fruition. It involves the development and maintenance of websites to keep them up and running in tip top shape. Scroll down to learn about the key things that you need to know in web development.

 

How Web Development Works

Web development is the building and maintenance of websites; the work that happens behind the scenes to make a website look great, work fast, and perform well with a seamless user experience. It involves collaborating with a team that helps to coordinate the client’s needs into the end product. The client could be a tech company, an organization, or a government. The work could involve front-end, back-end, or full-stack web development. In this modern world of tech, when everything is online, every business must have a website to showcase their work and promote their business.

 

What are 3 types of web developments?

Web development is an all-encompassing term that describes how websites are made and being run to maintain its functionality. However, web development can be further classified into three types. These are: 

 

Front end developer

Front-end developers are responsible for a website’s look and feel. They should have a creative mind, and should be well-aware of the latest design trends.

Back end Developers

A back-end developer creates and maintains the web server, application and the database which allows the front end of the website to operate.

Full stack developers

Full stack developers should be knowledgeable enough to work on both the front end tech and the back end tech. They have an understanding of how the web works at each and every level.

 

What are the important things in a website?

There are a couple of different things that you should take note of when developing a website. First, to be able to gain interest from your customers, the colors, typography and the overall design should be unique. Your website should tell what you do at a glance. If this does not do it, then your design is ineffective and may need some adjustments to be not just appealing, but informative as well. Besides the look of the website, you must also ensure that the content is well written and easy to understand for those who wish to browse through it and know what your website and the products and services that you offer is all about. Your website should contain your contact information on every page as well, to easily remind your customers and clientele on how to reach you at a moment’s notice. Another important thing that you should consider is your domain name. The domain of your website should be short and easy to memorize for better customer recall. You should also be sure that there aren’t any broken links present on your website. If you accept payments then your website should be secure and users’ payment info should be safe. Lastly, your website should also be responsive, as many people use their smartphones to access the web.

 

What makes a successful website?

It all begins from photoshop web design until its conversion into a fully functional html website. A pixel perfect website is quite indeed extraordinary. However, we believe that a website that is functioning and displaying well across different platforms and devices is much more important, as your website visitor will have the opportunity to explore and find interesting services or products in your website, which can turn into leads and become your potential customer.

 

Why is it important to have a user friendly website?

These days, a strong Internet presence and a user-friendly website will give you and your customers an effortless and pleasant experience. With the help of SEO and a user-friendly website, your website will get good rankings with Google and for sure, you will  be able to attract a lot of possible clients.

 

How To Find A Good Company for Web Development?

In choosing the right company for you for web development,  you first need to determine what kind of website you want to make. After this, you can then start looking for web development companies that can service your field of business or cater towards your area of expertise. Second, consider factors for all the costs! Third, consider the development time frame. Lastly, find a web development company that offers support for any changes that you want to make on your website. Trust us, this is important. 

Contact us today to learn more.

People around a wooden desk, examining papers with graphs and pie charts.

Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Digital marketing is by no means a field that’s easy to master. For many, the sheer amount of different terms that relate to it can be demotivating and discouraging. Still, it’s an imperative in this highly digitized, highly competitive marketing landscape. Of course, having a website is vital, but it does not suffice for an optimized online presence. As such, let us devote this article to exploring a justifiably famous practice; conversion rate optimization.

Defining conversions and conversion rates

Initially, let us define our terms. Conversion rate optimization is quite a complex topic to explore, even at a cursory glance, without some solid definitions.

Conversions, in brief, refer to desired actions that visitors take on your website or marketing material. They don’t strictly refer to completed purchases specifically, although they are lucrative, coveted conversions. Instead, conversions may include any action that benefits your business or pushes visitors further into your sales funnel, such as:

  • Filling out a contact form
  • Subscribing to a newsletter
  • Signing up for a trial
  • Downloading free resources
  • Clicking on a link or engaging with media content
  • Adding an item to a cart

In turn, conversion rates refer to the percentage of visitors who convert – using the above definition. This is why conversion rates are so significant and why conversion rate optimization holds so much merit. It provides an alternative to increasing traffic to drive sales; it focuses on interaction quality instead of quantity.

Calculating conversion rates

To further demonstrate this benefit, let us briefly delve into how one calculates conversion rates. The formula is fairly simple:

(Leads ÷ visitors) x 100 = conversion rate %

So, as an example, suppose your website has an average of 10,000 visitors. Of them, 250 convert. In that case, your conversion rate would be (250 ÷ 10,000) x 100, or 2.5%.

To increase conversions, then, you would have two options:

  1. Increase your visitors, or
  2. Increase your leads.

While increasing visitors is, of course, a worthy goal, it often costs too much to be the primary focus. That is what conversion rate optimization offers; a focus on increasing leads instead of visitors, with a lesser cost.

Website conversion rate optimization practices

Having highlighted the concept of conversion rate optimization, let us delve into exact practices that aid it. However, since this article is only meant to familiarize with the subject, we will only touch on the basics for simplicity and text economy.

#1 Website speed optimization

The very first contact a visitor has with your website is, in a sense, not even on your website itself. Rather, it’s on the loading screen before it.

It’s no secret that loading speeds can massively impact bounce rates, in turn affecting conversion rates. Google’s own research stresses this very clearly:

 

A graph that explains how page load speeds correlate with bounce rates.

Source: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2018/07/23/googles-speed-update-now-applies-for-all-users-how-does-it-affect-you/ (https://www.searchenginewatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Image-2.png)

As such, the very first conversion rate optimization practice many marketers will discuss is website loading optimization. Practices that can help achieve faster loading speeds include the following:

Image compression

While high-resolution images offer excellent visual quality, they also come in a considerable size. Typically, keeping image sizes under 100kB is a safe initial compromise – given that one’s tools don’t sacrifice too much quality.

HTTP request reduction

Similarly, a high volume of HTTP requests can visibly slow down a website. The most frequent practice to address this is HTTP compression; consolidating many smaller files into a single larger file. Other solutions may include using CSS sprites where possible and simply reducing page images on content-heavier pages.

Caching

Finally, caching pages allows visitors to receive static pages more quickly than waiting for dynamically generated ones. Fortunately, many caching tools exist today and can facilitate this practice.

 

#2 Design improvements

Once visitors have made it to your website, their next impression hinges on your design. Indeed, design affects readability, visual satisfaction, and perceptions of value. To say that good design is important for conversions is an understatement; it’s what frames your identity and proposition.

Among many design improvements, those that most strongly inform conversion rate optimization are arguably the following:

  • Readability; is content properly formatted and scannable?
  • Clutter; are secondary visual elements drawing attention away from valuable portions and CTAs?
  • Mobile-friendliness; is your design concise enough to facilitate easy mobile navigation?
  • Above-the-fold; are cornerstone content and valuable CTAs placed above the fold for quick access?
  • Aesthetics; do your aesthetics properly communicate your brand’s image and inspire confidence?

These and other web design fundamentals can significantly impact conversion rates.

#3 Copy refinements

On a slightly different front, copy itself plays a key role in conversions. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rightly holds that “quality is king”, and the reason for this is self-evident. Your copy needs to offer value to your audiences and resonate with them, or they will resist converting.

Copy refinements typically overlap with SEO since SEO itself seeks to increase search engine visibility and enhance engagement. As such, many of its best practices also see use in the context of conversion rate optimization. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of content creation, so it typically offers plenty of room for error. Copywriters may chase highly competitive keywords, overlooking long-tail keywords that may offer a better return on investment (ROI). Conversely, they may build content around keywords that do offer value but don’t necessarily resonate with their intended audience.

Keyword placement and keyword density

Similarly, awkward keyword placement and forced keyword density can both drive visitors away simply because such content appears inauthentic. Thus, a very simple improvement is to naturally spread keywords apart and keep density proportional to content length. Roughly one keyword for every 250 words of text is a safe rule of thumb.

Style and tone

Finally, on the subject of resonating with audiences, a highly subjective improvement lies in tone and style. Some marketers will argue that a strict, professional tone is always preferable. Others will insist that approachable, modern tones are demonstrably superior. The truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle; different tones work for different audiences. For better or worse, however, only precise audience analytics will help reveal the optimal choice in this regard.

#4 Calls to Action (CTAs)

Finally, the penultimate factor of conversions lies, of course, in CTAs themselves. CTA buttons are your direct, literal call to action, and thus they need to be impeccable.

CTA refinements are likely too many to list thoroughly. As an initial exploration, however, you may pay attention to the following:

Ensure visibility and readability

As highlighted above, CTAs need to be clearly visible and highly readable to serve their purpose. Among the most common mistakes with CTAs is, in fact, not making them appear clickable enough. As such, you should ensure your CTA placement attracts the eye, with no visual clutter to obscure it. Similarly, your CTAs’ colors, fonts, and other elements should absolutely ensure readability to help entice clicks. Visual clarity is half the proverbial battle in this regard.

Highlight value

Similarly, CTAs will best attract audiences if they can offer demonstrable value. In this regard, consider simply highlighting that a free resource is, in fact, free. “Download your copy” does not clarify a lack of price, while “download your free copy” does. Similarly, transactional CTAs can simply promote their product in terms of value; highlight what you offer to incite conversions.

Incite urgency

Finally, CTAs can incite urgency where appropriate to increase perceived value. This simple psychological tactic yields tremendous results, as Sleeknote’s findings on popups demonstrate. They specifically found that popups with countdown timers were 113% more effective than ones without. The exact same psychological principle applies to CTAs; consider simple nudges like “buy now” or disclaimers like “while supplies last”. The reason why they’ve remained marketing staples for ages is, indeed, because they incite urgency – and doing so yields results.

The process of conversion rate optimization

Finally, having explored the basics of conversion rate optimization, let us highlight the overall process. Here, each step will consider your business’s unique position and needs and each campaign’s exact goals.

  • Audience research; use analytics tools and other means of acquiring audience insights – to enhance conversion rates, you must deeply understand your audience.
  • Optimization; with said insights in hand, proceed to optimize your website, landing pages, and marketing copy accordingly.
  • A/B testing; before committing to changes, conduct extensive A/B testing to ensure your strategies and optimizations yield tangible results.
  • Measurement; having finalized your optimizations, measure your efforts’ success in solid, specific key performance indicators (KPIs).
  • Monitoring and readjusting; finally, continue to monitor your efforts and readjust over time as needed.

This is, of course, a rudimentary overview of the conversion rate optimization process. However, the steps will remain largely the same in all cases and simply expand in depth according to your needs.

 

 

Conclusion

To summarize, conversion rate optimization seeks to increase conversions by improving touchpoints with potential customers. Instead of focusing on increasing traffic, it focuses on increasing the likelihood that existing audiences take desirable actions and convert. While there are many ways to do so, it typically begins with website optimizations, design improvements, and copy and CTA refinements.

 


About the author

Nadia Spencer

Nadia Spencer is a web designer and copywriter. She has over 12 years of experience in the digital marketing industry, having collaborated with multiple local businesses and SMBs throughout her career.