Branding is more than just designs, it’s how you interact with your clients and how much effort you put into your services. From the logo on your business cards to the posts on your blog or Facebook page, it’s the image that you project to your clients. Why is that image important? It’s the first interaction a potential client has with your company. It’s about creating credibility and maintaining trust with your current and prospective clients.

To help illustrate these ideas, I developed the Branding PowerBand. It ties together the different aspects we should all consider when trying to establish a brand.

Your mechanic can tell you that your car’s powerband is the range at which it’s providing you the most power. Your Branding PowerBand is the range at which your company’s consistent and focused branding efforts are working the most effectively and powerfully for you. The ultimate goal is to create as much client trust in your company as possible. Gaining that trust benefits your company in every almost every aspect, from getting more sales to attractive higher quality employee talent.

The initial effort is creating your identity, which is your company’s message. It’s your company’s philosophy, knowing your product, your customers, and who you really are. In its simplest form your identity it is your logo, business cards and the message you associate with them. It has the steepest curve because often it’s the most difficult task when establishing your business. It is the foundation where the rest of your brand is built. You may know what you want to sell or what field you are in but do you know who you are as a business? Ask yourself, “What makes you better than anyone else? Are those fantastic qualities that you have, coming through in everything that represents you?”

The next range of the Branding PowerBand is your marketing and advertising designs. This includes your promotional material, product packaging, and ad campaigns.

After that is your web presence including your domain name, website, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and online advertisements.

From there you take your brand and continuously build upon it by creating relationships with people and solidifying your brand by being an expert in your field. This includes reaching out to people through e-mail newsletters, blogs and social media networks.

To really make your brand powerful you need to stand back and view all of these things as a whole. It’s about creating a consistent message that engenders trust with your current and new clients.

The designs representing you should be more than just using templates and clip art. If you wouldn’t accept anything but the highest level of quality for what you do for your clients, why should the image for your company be any different? Everything you do in your business is a reflection your quality of work. If you are not presenting yourself in the most meaningful and high quality way possible what does that say about your business?

Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if they may need to review their branding:

• Can you say that the clients you are getting regularly are your ideal clients? If not, you may have a branding issue and need to rethink your message to get the clients that you want.
• What does you or your products have that makes it better and different? If it doesn’t light up you and your client’s eyes you may need to review your branding.

All of us should be thinking about the bigger picture and long term plan. The Internet and social media has created a huge opportunity to create incredible brand equity by blogging about what you love and establishing your expertise. You don’t have to wait until you are successful to form your brand. Start thinking like a large brand at the beginning and you’ll be surprised at how ahead of the game you’ll be.

In the end, the services PowerBand Graphics provides are more than just designs. It’s a relationship that I want to create with people to help their businesses compete at a higher level. Anyone can have branding, but creating truly powerful branding means more than just a logo.

Real logo design should be done by a professional. There are a surprising number of things to take into account when creating a memorable corporate identity. It shouldn’t rely on recent trends or gimmicks, it should transcend those trends as much as possible to create a timelessness that will last as long as your company.

Quality is equally important as well. Logos should be easily reproducible and scale accurately. Logos should be original creations and not contain any images or fonts that infringe on copyright laws. They should be easily readable without any color initially and color chosen that specifically suits the project and company.

PowerBand Graphics will work with you to create an identity that is unique to you. We will do the appropriate research and keep you involved every step of the way. Cutting corners when it comes to your identity can lead to unfortunate situations. Clip art is often not legally trademark-able, using it not only lessens your distinctiveness but can open you up to lawsuits. Fonts should be legally procured and licensed as well. Letting a professional craft a brand with artwork that belongs solely to you is the only way to ensure problems don’t happen.

Here are some things we’ll help you consider when it comes to building a website:

Search Engine Leveraging and Marketing

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are the lifeblood to your online presence. You want to make sure that your website is built correctly in a way that is visible for search engines to index. Relevant, up to date content is a major key to this. You’ll also want to make sure your business appears in local search results. Whether it’s a simple informational website or a larger corporate setup utilizing blogs and databases it’s all about being found.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Once you’ve decided you want a new or redesigned website you can decide if a content management system is right for you. Not everyone needs one of these and they can add a layer of cost and complexity to your site. Are you often making changes to your website? Does your website contain a lot of pages? Have you had to pay someone to make simple changes to your site? If you answered yes to any of those questions then a content management system might be right for you. We offer multiple user-friendly options that we can set you up with an option that is right for you.

Web Hosting, Domain Purchasing

Technical stuff like figuring out the best web hosting provider and how to purchase a domain can be a bit daunting. PowerBand Graphics can work with your current web host to update your site. Alternatively we also offer full service hosting and domain registration capabilities. We are here to take the headache out of web site creation.

Social Media Integration

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit and MySpace. You may have heard of some of these but do you know what each one does? Is it worth the hassle of working with these social media outlets? PowerBand Graphics can help you weigh the pros and cons of utilizing social media. It’s not about creating another outlet to shout deals to your customers, it’s about connecting with them and giving your customers another way to find out more about you to communicate directly with your business. We’ll help you integrate those services into your existing site or build them into a new one.

E-Commerce

Selling a product or some merchandise to boost your brand? We’ll help make the shopping experience as painless as possible. A complicated and painful online shopping experience can sour a customer to your brand for years. Make online shopping with your company enjoyable, easy and encouraging for your customers to come back.

From simple sites without a lot of bells and whistles to custom designs and easy-to-use content management systems, we can find the right fit for you. PowerBand Graphics can also help you use social networks to help leverage your online presence. Not web savvy? No problem, we can work with your current hosting providers or even handle the hosting for you. Feel free to contact us so we can help determine the best options for you.

To a lot of people, the term “email marketing” automatically conjures images of an email intent on one thing – selling. In actual fact, there are a number of types of email communications you can pitch to your clients, some of which are not directly sales related but can certainly contribute to their bottom line in other ways.

Quick Announcements

Often called postcard emails, these are simple, brief announcements your clients might want to make informing customers of a special offer, a popular new product or quick fire sale. These types of emails are typically restricted to a single call-to-action and should be easy for the recipient to scan in a few seconds. Here is a quick example of a quick announcement in action.

Email Newsletters

The primary purpose of an email newsletter is to build upon the relationship your client has with their own customers. Of course, this might (and should) indirectly result in an increase in sales, but the focus should be on providing relevant, useful content your subscribers might be interested in.

Often the content isn’t directly related to your products either. For example, an online grocer might send a monthly newsletter featuring a few recipes, a story on the benefits of organic produce and a column with exercising tips. To get the creative ideas flowing, here’s an example of a great looking email newsletter.

Catalog Emails

A catalog based email is fairly self explanatory, being an electronic version of a print brochure listing particular products, with the primary goal to encourage customers to purchase. We often see designers label catalog emails as newsletters, and admittedly the lines can get blurry sometimes.

Press Releases

If you have a list of media contacts that have given your client permission to contact them, email press releases can be a great way to attract news coverage. Of course, there are a number of services that can distribute your press releases to the media, but maintaining their own list of media contacts can be a great way for your client to send targeted, personalized press releases only to those contacts who will be interested.

One size does not fit all

When considering which types of email to send, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to take a one-size-fits-all approach. Some situations will be much more suited to email newsletters than one-off announcements, while the reverse might apply to others.

The best thing about email is that it’s so measurable. Try a newsletter for your client for a month or two and then look at the results. Mix up the the topics you cover to see which garners the most interest. Try a different layout for each issue. As long as you stick to the expectations you set for your client’s subscribers, use your creativity to find what works best.