6 Design Hacks to Improve Your Startup Logo Designs
A logo is the first thing one sees when interacting with a business. It is what makes a business recognizable and different from others. A logo has to be memorable, unique, and simple for people to remember. A logo should also be flexible enough to work on smaller and larger scales.
A good logo will also have the ability to stand out from the crowd.
It is not just an image. It can include colors, fonts of different sizes and shapes, graphic elements, etc. A good logo should have a timeless feel that will not date as quickly as other elements of branding (e.g., fonts).
When you invest in your branding, it will be easier for people to recognize your startup, so it will be easier to remember. When you’re easy to remember, people are more likely to trust your brand and opt to get your services or products than others they don’t know.
With that said, if you’re starting to develop your logo for your startup, here are a few design hacks that you’ll need to consider to ensure that the logo serves you well.
- Use Color Contrast to Make Your Logos Legit
A logo is a representation of a company’s brand. It should be memorable, and it should be able to convey the message of the company in an instant. Colors are one of the most powerful tools that can help you create a logo representing your message in the best possible way.
For a logo to be successful, it needs to have a certain level of color contrast. If the colors are too close together in the spectrum, then people will not be able to recognize them from each other, which can lead to confusion or misunderstanding.
If you have a well-designed logo that lacks the necessary contrast, your logo will not be able to communicate its message.
The use of color contrast is an essential part of making a logo look legit. If you have a well-designed logo that lacks the necessary contrast, your logo will not be able to communicate its message.
2. Use Shapes to Think Inside The Box
There is a lot of creativity that goes into logo design. After all, a logo is the face of your company. But some people don’t have the skills to design one for themselves. In that case, you should try using shapes and put your logos inside them as a classic design.
You can use shapes in different colors or patterns, and it will be easier for people to see your logo from afar too.
A good logo design should be simple, straightforward, and appropriate for the product or service it represents.
There are two main types of shapes used in logos: geometric and organic. Geometric shapes are typically more abstract with sharp edges, while organic shapes are more naturalistic with soft edges.
3. Choose The Right Font For Your Logo
Some of the best and most recognizable logos are just one letter. That’s why if you want the Best Logo Design for your brand, you have to be particular with the font you’re going to use.
Choosing the right font for your logo is vital because it can make or break your brand identity. The font you choose should be legible and recognizable in all sizes. There are many different fonts available to use as your logo’s typeface. But before you choose one, there are some things you need to consider:
- Readability
- Ease of use
- Cost
- How well it matches the design style
- The color scheme
Once you find a font you want, stick to it to be consistent. Also, ensure you don’t use different fonts for your logo.
4. Make It Look Versatile
A versatile logo will be more memorable for potential customers and recognizable to your target audience. A good logo should be simple, attractive, and customizable to look different on different backgrounds, in other applications, and across various media.
Of course, your logo shouldn’t be so versatile that it loses recognizability because of how often you change it. That’s why you should make a rulebook or guidelines of different ways you can modify the logo based on specific circumstances (like a dark or light background) so that you don’t lose the recognizability even when you present the logo in different visual cases.
5. Be literal with your logo
The best way to create a good logo is to be literal with it. A literal logo will have a clear meaning and be easy to understand by people who don’t know what the company does or how it operates.
For example, if the name of your startup is Green Dog Corporation, your logo should be a green dog. Easy as that.
It’s easy to recall the name of your business as well as the branding of your business because it’s consistent.
6. Highlight Certain Elements in The Logo
Highlighting some aspects of your logo can also make it easier for people to recognize what you do. If you can abbreviate your business name, you can highlight each word’s first letter.
For example, if you are designing a logo for an accounting firm, you may want to highlight the letter “A” in “Accountant” to make it stand out more prominently than other letters in the word.
The best logos are simple, memorable, and have a clear message. You should highlight certain elements in your logo to make sure that it communicates effectively with your audience.
Conclusion
These design hacks can help make it easier to ideate the best startup logo that fits your branding and business. If you still can’t figure out what exactly you need to make for your logo, consider applying these hacks to make it easier to get started.
What Is Engagement in Marketing and Its Benefits
Hey, I’m Michael Culp, a blog owner, and a Business Master's Student. Today, I’m going to teach you what engagement in marketing is and why it’s important.
What is Engagement?
According to the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), engagement is the manifestation of customer behavior towards a brand or company, which goes beyond the purchase, resulting in motivational drivers.
Scientific research shows that there are 3 types of engagement: active engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement.
● Active engagement is the effort and time spent interacting with a brand.
● Emotional engagement is the degree to which the users feel positive about the brand.
● Cognitive engagement is the degree to which the users think about the brand.
In simple words, engagement is the relationship and interaction between customers and brands. Engagement is always related to the customer taking an action. This action can be anything, such as a click, a comment, time on page, bounce rate, conversions…
A very common and effective strategy to increase engagement is content marketing and content promotion.
Now that you know what engagement is, let’s dive into the benefits.
1 - Builds Strong Emotional Connection
Building real relationships with customers is critical to success. It will improve your marketing, your sales, and your business overall. Emotionally connected customers will pay more attention to what you are doing and will follow your advice because you’re a trusted resource to them.
2 - Increase Repurchase Intention
Repurchase intention is the loyalty of a customer that is reflected in his intention to buy a product from the same brand repeatedly. It’s well known in marketing that it’s easy to sell to customers who already bought from you.
Usually, when businesses want to increase revenue, the first place they focus is on acquiring new customers. That’s not the best strategy, because new customers cost 5 times more to acquire.
3 - Increase Referrals
Engaged customers are loyal customers and they not only show their loyalty by purchasing several times, but by acting as brand advocates. As they had such a great experience with your business, they will happily spread the word about you.
The most likely person to know someone who also needs your products or service is your existing client. So, referrals are a very powerful way to gain new customers for your business. A referral is so powerful because the lead you get is not cold because you both know the client who made the connection.
Another cool way is to leverage other people’s audiences through affiliate marketing, where you partner up with a person who will promote your product or service to their audience in exchange for a commission. If you want to learn affiliate marketing, I recommend that you take a look at my review of John Crestani’s course.
4 - Increases Brand Authority
Brand authority is the trust a brand inspires among customers, by being an expert in a particular area of service. Engagement is a great way to increase perceived brand authority.
By being an authority you get a lot of advantages. It differentiates you from the competition, increases consumer trust, attracts the attention of influencers, accumulates natural backlinks, and improves conversion rate.
5 - Generates Golden Information About Your Target Market
In the digital marketing world, it’s very common to hear “you can’t be everything to everybody”. You are used to listening to people saying that your product or service should be designed for a specific target audience.
By increasing engagement with your market, you’ll gain key information to maximize time and resources, build new products, hit optimal price points, and hit purchase triggers.
6 - Enables Optimization
Business process optimization is crucial for your brand's lasting success and competitiveness and engagement allows you to see what type of content and what type of business activities generate the best actions from the customers.
The most obvious benefit of optimization is that it can improve your company's efficiency. Inefficiency results in wasted time and resources, which hinder your profits and increase stress. To achieve competitive advantage is very important to be efficient, and to be efficient you need to be always optimizing and improving.
7 - Increases The Organic Reach Of Your Brand
Organic reach is basically any form of marketing that is not paid. It’s the number of people who view your content without any paid distribution. The main benefit of organic reach is that you are getting more eyeballs on your brand without having to spend money.
Two great marketing platforms that will help you increase the organic reach of your brand are Groovefunnels and Clickfunnels.
Engagement increases the organic reach because engaged users tend to share a lot of their favorite brands' content on their social media, therefore, putting your content in front of a lot of new eyes. You also get more organic reach because good engagement rates will increase your channel's reach and relevance.
This will help you increase your brand awareness that’s crucial for business success. Brand awareness helps people understand, recall and become comfortable with your offers, which will increase sales.
CONCLUSION
In this article, you learned that engagement is the relationship and interaction between customers and brands and the main benefits are:
- Build strong emotional connections.
- Increase repurchase intention.
- Increase referrals.
- Increases brand authority.
- Generate golden information about your target market.
- Enables optimization.
- Increases the organic reach of your brand.
AUTHOR BIO
Michael Culp is a Business Master's Student and founder at ambitionyard.com. He is a business enthusiast and on his site, he teaches the best ways to make money online.
Why Modular Content Is an Established Practice in Digital Marketing?
As a digital marketer, you’re likely aware of the rising prominence of modular content. A growing number of leading pharmaceutical brands are incorporating this approach into their digital marketing strategies. This article defines modular content and discusses its benefits to marketers.
What Is Modular Content?
Modular content is the organization of text and images into small modules to publish across multiple channels and several media, such as social media, landing pages, or eDetailers. This approach promotes approved content reuse and decouples content units from layout and design. Demand for content blocks is becoming increasingly popular among marketers because it has several advantages over conventional content creation, management systems, and traditional workflows.
Modularity Helps Develop Compelling, Relevant Content
This approach lets pharmaceutical companies develop suitable content modules for local customers across channels and, as a result, these companies send useful and relevant messages that resonate with the target audience. Such compelling messages address your prospects' concerns, build trust among target customers, and improve their knowledge during the buying process.
The Modular Approach Reduces Errors and Builds Trust
When salespeople present inaccurate facts while pursuing a sale, they often lose the prospect’s trust because the inaccuracy comes across as deviousness. However, in reality, these errors and omissions are typically a result of the salesperson having outdated content. This approach breaks down essential content into small elements, stores them in a central repository, and updates them separately. Easy access to these up-to-date blocks of content minimizes errors, allowing medical representatives to build a stronger trust bond with HCPs.
Modular Content Strategy Improves the Frequency and Agility of Communication
According to the 2021 Buyer Preferences Study by Korn Ferry, only 43% of buyers ask sales reps for help when assessing their needs or potential solutions. Consequently, teams must respond efficiently. This approach enables them to do this by making it easy to quickly collect and assemble pre-approved content. As a result, they can have deep and useful conversations with customers or partners.
Digital Modular Content Improves Brand Integrity and Consistency
Despite their commitment to growing their pharmaceutical companies’ brands, digital marketers often fall prey to off-brand decisions during the content development process that erodes brand development efforts. This is common among marketing teams who violate established practices because they lack formal training in brand design. The modular content approach can help prevent this problem by separating design and content production. It automatically applies best practices guidelines to creating content and helps avoid off-brand executions.
Modular Content Marketing Minimizes In-House Design Costs
Local marketers often request their in-house design teams for one-off projects. Modular content systems minimize the complexity and frequency of these requests, lowering the labor budget. More importantly, this approach helps creative pharma leaders avoid getting caught up in the specifics of the local market. As a result, they can focus on content strategy and digital experiences for their business.
Use Modular Content to Connect with Your Audience Better and Grow A Stronger Brand
This approach can significantly improve your existing communication, boost content marketing campaigns, and grow your brand by streamlining the right content elements. Visit Viseven and learn how to use modular content in pharma and boost businesses’ processes.
Brand Strategy: How Good Brands Create Significant Differentiation
For any business, differentiating their brand from competitors is a key part of their business strategy. A company needs to provide their customers with features and benefits that the competitors don't have. The differentiation should be real, tangible and the best you can get in the market for your target audience. This article shares effective branding strategies that are applicable across different industries or business niches.
What is Brand Strategy?
Brand Strategy is about the brand's purpose and values. It's about what you stand for in the marketplace and how you can create meaningful differentiation from your competitors. It's about understanding who you are, why your customers buy from you and what makes you special.
A strong brand strategy helps guide your entire organization so that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals.
The best brands have a clear purpose: they know who they want to serve, why they want to serve them, and how they want to serve them. They also have a clear point of view (why do they exist?), a distinct identity (what do they look like?), a consistent message (what do they say?) and consistent behavior (how do they act?).
Once you've developed this clarity around your brand's purpose and values, the rest becomes easier: it guides everything from product development to marketing communications to packaging design — everything!
1. Create a Unique Culture
The most iconic brands in the world have built their success on creating a unique culture around their products or services. Apple has made its name by creating an innovative culture within its walls that inspires employees at all levels to think differently about what consumers want from technology.
Google has created a culture of innovation where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on side projects that may lead to new ideas for the company's products or services.
And Starbucks has created an employee training program that ensures baristas are knowledgeable about how to prepare specialty drinks and educate customers about what goes into making each drink.
2. Companies have emotions, too
Branding is about creating emotional connections with your audience.
People have emotions, and companies are no exception. Emotions are the key to creating a brand that resonates with your customers.
They have personalities and values that guide their decisions about how they conduct business with customers, employees and the world at large. They define themselves by what they stand for as much as what they make their customers want from them. Brands are defined by their emotional connection with consumers.
Companies don't want just any consumer; they want someone who's willing to buy their products regularly over time because he or she believes in the company's mission (or at least wants what it represents).
3. Stand for something
This is the most important point of all, and it’s the one that sets good brands apart from the rest. You can be big, you can be lean, you can be cheap – but if you don’t stand for something, then you won’t last.
It doesn’t matter if your brand is a person or a place or a product. People have to know what you stand for. They have to know what makes you different, what sets you apart from everyone else. They have to understand why they need you and not another company or person.
And they have to believe it. They have to believe that this is what they need and that they will get it from you (or them) better than anyone else could possibly provide it. If they don’t believe that – if they think there might be someone else who could do better – then no matter how well-known or well-established your brand is, it won’t be around for long because people will stop buying from it in favor of alternatives that are more likely to deliver what they want at a reasonable price point with minimal hassle and risk of disappointment or failure along the way.
4. Take risks
Brands that are willing to take risks are more likely to create significant differentiation.
This can be anything from launching a new product category, such as Nike's FuelBand fitness tracker, or putting together an advertising campaign that goes against the grain.
Take the example of Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign, which poked fun at the PC by showing how much easier Macs were to use than Windows machines. It was controversial, but it differentiated Apple from its competitors and made people take notice of the brand in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.
5. Share information freely
Sharing is caring, especially in business. If you provide useful content, people will be more likely to trust you and connect with your brand. This could be anything from blog posts about current industry trends to videos showing how your products are made. Be sure to use social media as well — Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for sharing news and updates with customers or potential customers.
Takeaway
Ultimately, the best brand strategy is one that focuses on creating significant differentiation between you and your competitors. This requires an understanding of what makes you unique in your industry, and how you can leverage that uniqueness to your advantage. Once you know your core strategy, communicating it through your marketing will become much easier.
Employer Branding Is the New Marketing Imperative
Nowadays, brands are looking to attract more customers and segment them into different groups. Businesses are more agile, resulting in a customer experience that tailors to the exact needs of the customer persona. Building an employee-targeted brand to attract and retain talent is top on any CEO’s agenda, and there is no group better suited to contribute to this initiative than marketers.
What is employer branding?
By definition, employer branding is the process of managing or influencing your reputation as an employer among job seekers, employees, and stakeholders. It takes into account all actions done to position your organization as an employer of choice. In layman’s terms, it’s what job seekers and employees really think of you and tell their friends and family about when you are not present.
Currently, people can go online and quickly find out what a company or workplace can offer them. They can quickly see how a brand communicates online, whether it encourages workers to give their best, and how it is perceived by the public. All of these factors add up to the overall employer branding.
4 strategies for building an employer brand that attracts and retains talent
Building a brand that attracts and retains talent is at the top of the list for many executives. Given most people’s inherent expertise in doing that, there is no group better suited to contribute to employer branding efforts than marketers. However, building a good brand takes more than just a solid content marketing strategy in place – it’s a matter of establishing the right mindset, skill set, authenticity, and culture. Accepting the role as an employer requires some responsibility – if you can achieve this, you can boost your chances of success.
- Building the right mindset
Marketers know that in order to win customers, they need to engage with that audience and win their hearts. To do that, a certain mindset needs to be established – instead of enticing and converting prospects, you should drive advocacy through enticing job candidates. Once you do that, you are on the right track toward improving your employer branding. The corporate treasure hunt game starts with a shared mindset, vision, and goals.
The role of an employer needs to be ready to accept new possibilities and take full responsibility for failure. If you learn to keep yourself motivated, set goals, and devote your attention to the present you are headed in the right direction.
- Building the right skill set
The set of daily tasks marketers has closely match the ones of good employers. The focus is set on finding the target market, seeing what works for them, understanding their motivations, finding the right media channels to trigger their attention, and delivering a compelling message to lure them. Even if you have to do a for that, try to begin somewhere and make everyone aware that skills are essential in the workplace.
As an employer, you should have a transferable skill set – and shift as new technological developments make their way through companies, business models, and industries. Jobs in the future won’t necessarily require a college degree. Instead, they will require transferable skill sets curated by employers.
- Boosting authenticity
Third in our list of ways you can grow your employer brand is by promoting brand transparency and authenticity. Brand authenticity is a very popular metric for businesses nowadays – it defines the way a consumer perceives a brand to be faithful to itself. In the age of social media, when consumers can instantly tell whether brands are who they say they are, authenticity and trust are important to acquiring and keeping customers.
Authentic branding will benefit you in many ways, helping you stay above the noise and allowing for stronger connections. It is also one of the best ways to stand out from your competitors and give people a reason to care. The goal is to create an authentic environment that produces a lasting brand relationship.
- Cultivating a culture
Last in our list of ways to build a brand that attracts and retains talent is culture. While it’s a buzzword among marketers, a proper culture is something that is essential in any workplace. All companies need to cultivate a passionate culture – if you are looking for the best ways to do that, you can consider competitive benefits and some employee appreciation perks. With a solid company culture in place, people will rush to get employed and will be very happy doing their jobs.
Final thoughts
The emerging new world post the COVID-19 pandemic puts employer branding in focus as one of the most critical investments a company can make. It is never too late to start investing in your branding – developing a unique brand as an employer will help you reach all your goals, increase your retention rate, boost your new hire quality, and improve your employee engagement levels.
How To Build A Strong First Impression For Your Brand
Wouldn’t it be ideal if you could manage the first impressions others have of you with each new interaction? Think about the power behind controlling how others think of you as an individual or as a business. Likewise, customers’ first impression of your brand can majorly affect the way they’ll purchase from you. Yet, creating an excellent first impression needs plenty of effort. You need to develop helpful content on your blog and social media. You need to build a personal brand. And you may even have to know about new alternatives for starting a business.
First Impressions Matter
While doing what’s needed in the upper funnel of customer acquisition can be achieved by having email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and other marketing channels, they can’t sufficiently handle how a particular persona views your brand the first time they see or hear about it. Reaching out to your brand the first time through direct traffic seldom occurs or is even hard to happen. Moreover, direct traffic also functions as the second point of contact, even in word-of-mouth marketing. Despite its influence, the promotion coming from the product evangelist has already generated what the audience will think of your brand the first time they interact with it.
Yet, the kind of brand handling needed can be offered by digital advertising as it can become a tool to interact with your personas before the interest stage in the purchasing cycle. And so, advertising provides a way for you to interact with them before they connect with your brand.
Tips for Building a Strong Brand Impression
Are you looking for ways to create that solid first impression for your brand? Here are our recommendations:
- Invest In Quality Website Design
Among various studies, Stanford researchers identify that most users judge a company’s credibility based on the design of its website. More notably, the same research has noticed that first impressions are design related. This means quality design is vital and having a person with design skills who’ll build some solid templates for your post-click landing pages is crucial.
An effective website design should achieve its role by conveying its specific message while engaging visitors at the same time. Various factors like colours, consistency, imagery, typography, simplicity, and functionality add to an ideal website design.
Moreover, a well-designed website can help create trust and allow visitors to take action. Creating an ideal user experience includes ensuring your website design is developed for usability (form and aesthetics) and ease of usage (functionality).
Overall, various services can offer web design services for you, like Melbourne web design services, if you want to enhance your brand’s website design.
- Leverage Reviews And Testimonials
An ideal step to attract new customers is online reviews. Potential customers may try your products and services if they see positive reviews. Likewise, there are various sites where consumers can leave their thoughts, such as broad customer review sites like Google Reviews, Yelp, and Facebook. There are also industry-specific customer review sites, such as Zomato, a restaurant and food-related review site; TripAdvisor, a travel-related review; and G2 Crowd, a site created for software reviews.
Here are some tips to ensure your reviews relay an excellent impression of your business:
- Implement quality control measures, so things are more likely to finish the first time correctly.
- Leverage customer loyalty programs as a source of reviews, referrals, and testimonials.
- Once you’ve finished a sale, request a review or testimonial from your customers.
- Educate your customer-facing employees in customer service, ensuring they address customers with empathy, courtesy, patience, and an honest desire to assist them.
- Follow up with customers instantly after a sale to know if there are any issues. If there are issues, do what’s possible to prevent negative reviews.
- Leverage Social Media
Using social media is another method people can first interact with your company and create that first impression. This can be through your social media marketing efforts or your business’s social media accounts. They may also notice your business through their social media feed or a third party's social account.
Here are some steps to leverage your social media marketing efforts, even when you’re not doing something:
- Use your brand logo to update your social profile photo
- Use your brand name as your social profile username or URL
- Prepare and schedule social updates on your brand
- Generate a custom background on Facebook and Twitter
- Post continually on your social media accounts
- Ensure your content is helpful to your audience
- Post interesting, humorous, or surprising facts and comments
- Respond to and connect with your followers one by one in addition to your general posts
- Utilize many high-quality images and videos to build your brand
Applying these tips and ensuring your social profiles are similar to your brand image will allow your audience to easily find you and get more acquainted with what you have to provide.
Wrapping Up
There are various ways to create a solid first impression for your brand. You can build a better web design which can be a source of judgment about your company’s credibility. You can make the most of reviews and testimonials to help potential customers to buy your products. Finally, you can leverage social media and market your brand there. Hopefully, this article helped you to know what to do to have that solid first impression of your brand.
5 Ways Gamification can Improve Your Call Center and Brand Marketing
Gamification is a powerful tool that can be used in a number of ways to improve your business and marketing. From increasing customer engagement to improving employee performance, gamification offers numerous benefits.
Here are some common ways businesses use gamification and what they can do for your call center or brand marketing:
1. Reward Employees
Gamification can be used to reward employees for achieving goals or performing well. This can be done by creating a virtual currency that employees earn by completing tasks, and then using it to purchase items such as company T-shirts or other merchandise.
You can also use it in an online game where employees compete against one another to win prizes. By offering rewards for good performance, gamification motivates call center workers to give their best effort at all times.
This is especially important if your call center is working in a high-stress situation. By rewarding employees with virtual currency, they will be more likely to stay focused and provide the best possible customer service.
2. Engage Customers
Gamification is also a great way to get customers to engage with your call center. If you are having trouble getting people to call in, gamification can help by creating an online game where customers earn points for completing certain tasks.
The more points they earn, the better chance they have of winning a prize. You can also use gamification as a way to get customers to provide feedback on your products or services. By offering players points for completing surveys and answering questions, you will be able to get valuable information about what people think about your company.
3. Benefit B2B Marketing
The benefits of B2B marketing are similar to those for B2C. You can use gamification in your marketing strategy to help increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and build relationships with buyers.
In fact, gamification is often used by B2B companies because it can be an effective way to get people excited about their products or services.
The key to B2B marketing is to help your customers understand how they can benefit from your business. By using gamification, you can create a fun and engaging environment that will keep people coming back for more. This helps them get excited about what you have to offer and may even encourage them to share their experience with others.
4. Improve Customer Retention
One of the biggest benefits of gamification is that it can help improve customer retention. By creating an engaging experience for your customers, you’ll make them want to come back for more. This can be especially helpful if you have a product or service that requires regular maintenance or upkeep.
For example, if you have a subscription-based service that requires regular payments, gamification can help keep customers coming back. This is because the experience will be more enjoyable for them and they won’t mind paying their monthly fee as much.
5. Influence Social Media Shares and Mentions
Finally, gamification can help you increase the number of social media shares and mentions your business receives. A lot of people like to share things that they find fun or entertaining, so if your gamified app is really fun to play with, then it’s likely that people will want to share it with their friends or followers.
This is especially true if you make it possible for users to share their scores on social media. The more people who play with your game, the more likely they are to share it with others, which can lead to increased traffic for your website and even more sales.
Takeaway
With more companies using gamification to enhance their sales and marketing, you need to get on board or risk being left behind. With a little effort on your part, you can start using gamification to increase sales and marketing results. You just need to make sure that you’re doing it right!
How To Safely Open Communication Channels To Inspire Your Next Marketing Campaign
You’ve just wrapped up a successful campaign. You’ve engaged with new customers, strengthen your brand image, and have seen a boost in sales — now what?
Marketing is a constantly evolving profession, and producing new, relevant content is hard. However, you can make it easier by using your reach and engagement to safely open communication channels to inspire your next marketing campaign.
This might involve encouraging internal communications to get a better idea of your business. Or, you might reach out to external stakeholders to learn more about what they want to see from your advertising and marketing material.
Internal Communications for Marketing
Most successful marketing campaigns start as conversations between colleagues. However, if you only ever listen to other folks in the marketing department, you may find yourself in an echo chamber.
Fortunately, advancements in remote software mean we are more technologically connected today than ever before. Video technology like WebEx and GoToMeeting makes it easy to touch base with finance before you sign off on a new campaign and chat tools like Slack ensure that all departments are on the same page when you reach out to different internal communications feedback.
Finance
Finance and marketing are often seen as completely separate departments within the business. Many marketing professionals only get in touch with finance to receive their budget. This is a major misstep, as your marketing materials are supposed to support the bottom line — without regularly getting in touch with the finance department, you are like a ship without a rudder.
Now, as a marketer, you don’t need (or want) access to every financial indicator that your business uses. Some indicators are highly sensitive, and sharing them may put business data at risk. However, being able to keep a near-constant tab on safe-to-share metrics like cost-per-sale and seasonality is crucial to ensure that your marketing spend is both profitable and relevant.
Of course, every business will have different financial metrics that you can use to track success. The key is to find the metrics that you can share safely and want to improve upon. You can use this data to create marketing campaigns that respond to the internal feedback you receive from your finance department.
Human Resources
Human resources (HR) and marketing professionals usually have a significant overlap of skills. Like marketers, HR professionals are adept at understanding people and the pressure they face. If you’ve been at a company long enough, there’s a good chance you are already fully aware of your HR department and the supportive services they offer.
But if you only reach out to HR when you have a problem, then you are missing a trick. HR understands your company's employees better than anyone else. That means they have a great insight into the people behind the product or service your company offers. As a marketer, you should use these insights to foreground your hard-working employees and create branded materials that highlight their achievements.
When working with HR, it’s important to maintain privacy and confidentiality at all times. HR usually handles sensitive material that could cause embarrassment or damages if an unauthorized person gained access to them. You can prevent this by password-protecting PDFs before you send them. This adds an extra layer of security and ensures that important documents aren’t opened by the wrong people.
Customer Service
Depending on the structure of your business, custom service may already be an integral part of your marketing campaigns. This makes sense, as customer service specialists have their ear to the ground and know customers better than anyone else in your business.
You can safely utilize customer services insights by requesting anonymous data that maintains the privacy of your customers while giving you key insights into customer behavior and values. When retrieving these insights, you must take data protection seriously.
A strong data protection policy can help you avoid most transgressions of privacy. Even if you think your communications network is secure, phishing scams and ransomware are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Without a preventative policy in place, you risk the privacy of your consumers and may be looking at a hefty lawsuit in the future.
External Communications for Marketing
Internal communications ensure that your next marketing campaign properly represents your business and supports the bottom line. But marketing also offers a line of communication between your business and external stakeholders like your consumers and the local community.
Consumers
Listening to consumers is an increasingly important part of marketing. Consumers today are more savvy and cynical when it comes to marketing campaigns, meaning that a hard sell is unlikely to be well received.
When reaching out to consumers via surveys, focus groups, or social media, try to identify a problem that you can solve for them. For example, if you sell espresso machines but your consumers frequently report that they don’t know how to make a cappuccino, then you should create marketing materials that teach them how to make the perfect cappuccino.
This kind of need-based advertising works because it gives something of value to the consumer. It’s a tried and tested model — just look at this Nike campaign that teaches consumers how to dye their own shoes — based on communication and feedback.
When looking for feedback from consumers, it’s important that you keep shared data as confidential as possible. Even qualitative data like that gathered from feedback can be sensitive and you need to proactively prevent lapses in confidentiality by balancing data-driven marketing with user privacy.
Community
As a marketer, you can help your business fulfill its corporate social responsibility (CSR) by opening lines of communication with your local community before your next campaign. This is particularly important if you are a major employer in your area, as big brands like Amazon have recently received flak for undermining the strength of the communities where they operate.
You can safely open lines of communication with your community by hosting in-person events. These in-person events are great for community buy-in and don’t require you to jump through data protection hoops. You can use these community events to learn more about your brand image in the local area and promote positive PR about the ways you support your community.
Conclusion
As a marketer, you have tons of data available to you to make more informed decisions. However, you cannot afford to overstep data-protection boundaries and must follow preventative privacy policies at all times. You can further secure your communications channels by using password-protected PDFs and collecting anonymous consumer data that cannot undermine user privacy.
How to Attract New Talent By Improving Your Business Website
In today's technological world, there’s no excuse for having an outdated, slow, and uninspiring website, especially as a business owner. The importance of a great site isn’t just essential from a client's perspective.
If you’re looking to grow your business internally or simply want to fill your vacancies with the best talent, your website is one of the first places they will look before applying. And these few minutes can determine whether or not they click send on their application.
Developing a great website that authentically reflects your business is a great place to start attracting talented candidates. Here’s all you need to know.
Why is a good website essential for attracting new employees?
A good website provides a window into your business. It allows job seekers to understand the most important features of your business such as your services or products, values, and work environment. All of which will determine whether someone thinks they’re a good fit and would enjoy working for you.
Online job board Monster explains job searching as a two-way mirror. While you as an employer may be checking out a candidate’s social profiles to learn more about them, on the other hand, they’ll be doing their own research — and it’s likely to start at your website. If your site doesn’t get people engaged then attracting new talent is less likely.
Furthermore, the world of recruitment has nearly flipped 180 degrees since COVID-19. Whereas employers used to have more options when selecting candidates from a pool, changing attitudes toward work, expectations, and in-demand roles give job seekers more power. If you're having difficulty filling the most in-demand positions, you may consider expanding your workforce internally (which can be a great option), but developing your website is a simple yet effective way of showcasing your company in a way that entices people to join. As a result, you will outperform your competitors in filling in-demand roles.
A good website offers the following recruitment benefits:
- Your business will be more attractive to highly skilled candidates.
- You have a better chance of employing people who are a great fit for your business.
- You’ll create a good first impression.
- A well-maintained website can boost SEO and help your job postings rank higher.
How to make your company website more attractive to potential candidates?
So, now that you understand the significance of a good business website, it's time to learn what you can do to make it more appealing to candidates. There is plenty you can do regardless of the size of your company. Most importantly, your website should be genuine, informative, and engaging.
Think about what you look for in new employers. Are you keen to learn more about the team? Are you interested in learning about their values? Most people will look at the same key areas so start with the core information and build out your site.
Share what it’s like to work there
Candidates will imagine themselves working at your company before applying for a position. Your website should give them an idea of what they can expect. Flexible working was the third most popular motivator for finding a new job in a 2022 McKinsey study of over 25,000 respondents, so if you offer to work from home or hybrid roles, publicise it!
Today's job seekers expect some degree of adaptability. Even better, if you're open to hiring internationally or already have international employees, let people know. Employer of record services like Remote make it simple for businesses to employ people worldwide, so if that’s a key part of your business, then make sure you’re open about it on your website. Adding a case study or getting quotes from your existing employees can provide great insight.
Invest in a functional and well-designed site
Consider this: you find a job listing that sounds ideal for you, but when you visit the company's website, it falls short of your expectations. The theme is outdated, unresponsive, and lacks excitement. A website that does not function properly does not give the impression of a professional business. Furthermore, if you don't care about the impression you're giving off, it may imply that you're overlooking other important areas that may affect your employees — a potential red flag.
Out-of-date websites can look suspicious, and nobody wants to work for a dodgy-looking employer! But you don’t have to spend large amounts of money to make your website look presentable and function well. Invest in web design services, get problems fixed as soon as they occur to avoid downtime (and prevent missed opportunities for converting potential candidates) and ensure that it’s easy to navigate.
Showcase your success
Updating your website regularly is very important to ensure that the information you’re sharing is relevant. One area where this can work very well is showcasing your success. If you are able to, why not share some incredible results that you’ve achieved for well-known clients? Or, talk about the awards or industry-related success that you’ve accomplished. Sharing your achievements can make your business extremely attractive for new talent.
Writing updates or blogs on your news page is a great way to archive your performance as a business, and it won’t go unnoticed. Better yet, if a potential new joiner spots one of their dream clients that you’ve done big things with, these will make them even more eager to be a part of your business.
Share your company values
Adding your company values to your website is a great way to attract new talent. It’s important that the people you hire align with your principles and standards equally. This can be an important factor in engaging new talent.
There are many benefits of sharing your values online. Most importantly, values are becoming increasingly important to job seekers, who, before applying for a position, will consider what an organization believes in rather than just what it does. Make sure your values are clearly displayed on your site, and you’ll have candidates who are a fantastic match.
Making sure your website accurately represents your company is critical to attracting new talent. If you follow our top tips, you will be able to attract a skilled workforce who will breathe new life into your company.
Top 10 Most Remarkable Logos in the World
We all are part of a global consumer society in which brands and companies compete for our attention at each turn. There are thousands upon thousands of products available today. To stand out, companies pay more attention their visual identity.
There are many companies with unique logos. Some even have special platforms where you can view the design history and see the history of most famous logos.
However, there are a few emblems that are well-known and almost impossible to match.
This article will focus on the ten most well-known logos worldwide. It will also explore the secrets to success in terms of color scheme and shape.
10. MasterCard
MasterCard's bold, minimalistic badge, one of the most recognizable payment systems on the planet, is based upon a strong combination of yellow, red, and yellow. Red represents courage, passion, joy, and determination. Yellow, on the other hand, is a sign for energy and progress. Here, the circular shapes signify unity.
9. Twitter
Twitter, one of today's youngest participants, made its logo instantly recognizable around the globe. The silhouette of a white bird perched on a blue roundel in a vibrant delightful shade symbolizes freedom of expression, communication, creativity, and communication.
8. Amazon
The company's logo and wide product range is displayed in the ecommerce platform's logo. The logo is a symbiotic representation of a smile, with an arrow pointing from A through Z.
7. YouTube
The white triangle with the pointed right hand corner is the logo YouTube. It's placed on a rectangle with softened corners.
6. Nike
The brand name is a tribute to the Greek goddess of victory. Caroline Davidson designed the iconic Swoosh logo in 1971. This minimalistic representation of strength, determination, and inspiration. Funny thing is that the logo that became one of the most famous in the world cost only 37 bucks.
5. Mercedes-Benz
The symbol for power over the earth, air, and sea is the three-pointed, star. This logo was first created in 1909 and modified in 1937. It has remained virtually unchanged up to today. Mercedes-Benz's logo stands for quality and luxury.
4. Google
Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders, designed the logo design. It has been changed only twice since 1999. The simple inscription uses all primary colors for its letters. Google enjoys playing with fonts. However, the color scheme has remained unchanged.
3. McDonald's
Jim Schindler designed the McDonald's "golden arch" logo. He remained with McDonald's for many decades. Six years after the introduction the original logo, two lines of arched lines form a chic yellow "M". The simple sans serif lettering was added to the design.
2. Coca-Cola
Frank Robinson, a friend and accountant by profession, created the Coca-Cola logotype. They never imagined that the badge would be so well-known and costly. But you never know.
1. Apple
Rob Janow created the first Apple logo design in 1976, with the striped apple. The logo went through slight modifications in 1998. It became the emblem that is widely known today. This symbol is a symbol of knowledge and reflects Adam and Eve's humanity concept of enlightenment -- perfection.