Brands

Ask an amateur marketer about the key to success and you’ll get a wide variety of different answers. From eye-catching design to engaging headlines, both branding experts and direct marketers cite a variety of tools that create marketing success.

Ask an expert marketer, however, and you’ll only ever hear one response: trust.

From building confidence in your brand to encouraging people to buy your latest product, trust is the glue that binds the vast majority of marketing efforts together and produces real results.

Building trust is difficult, especially for a new business. People trust brands like Nike and Microsoft because they’ve known them for years. How can your small business, with its limited marketing budget, ever hope to compete?

Is design a major priority for your business? Many small businesses think of design as something that isn’t hugely important, largely due to the cost of hiring a designer full time or on retainer to manage their brand identity.

Without an in-house design department, it’s easy to let your small business’s brand and looks slip. From unsuitable fonts to kitsch color schemes, we’ve all seen a case of poor graphic design from a small business before, perhaps even frequently.

As a small business, your budget is understandably smaller than that of your larger, wealthier competitors. Because of this, the design elements that are most important to your business are different to those a Fortune 500 brand would pay attention to.

While hundreds of thousands of small businesses take part in trade shows each and every year, many achieve unimpressive results due to poorly designed booths that – despite looking professional – fail to stand out and attract attention.

From eye-catching color schemes to branding that sets your business apart, using the right combination of design elements is essential for trade show success. While some booths stand out and command attention, others fail to make an impact at all.

The right design and copy can make your next brochure a huge success, but what good is it if no one picks it up? Likewise, what good is a beautiful business card if none of your potential partners or customers have access to it?

One of the biggest problems businesses face in marketing is getting their message out there into the hands of their customers. In business development, a frequent issue is getting your business card into the hands of potential partners.

In this blog post, we’ll share five techniques that you can use to solve both issues and get your brochures, business cards and other corporate marketing items into the hands of your target customers, clients and partners.

Designing a logo is one of the toughest parts of creating an identity for your small business. In fact, it’s such a tough process that many large companies have spent a significant amount – often millions of dollars – on the task.

While you don’t need to spend millions of dollars to get a good logo, you do need to understand the basics of logo design. Even if you’re not personally designing your logo, knowing the fundamentals will help you get the best results.

In this blog post, we’ll cover five fundamental principles of logo design that you can use to make your company’s logo stand out more, properly define your brand, show off your best qualities and project the values you want to project.