From the Create Design Studio Email Newsletter, for more great articles like this one sign up on our homepage (in the left column).

Create Design Studio have direct experience of the process of rebranding and we thought if you were considering rebranding your business we could pass on what we learned from doing it.

Reasons to rebrand
Your image may be tired, out of date or it may not reflect what you do anymore. If the sector you work in has gradually changed over the years, or your company pursues different work to that of the past and your existing branding no longer matchs your industry sector.

You may wish to actively change the direction of the business away from past activities and have decided to break completely with the old company image.

The right name for you
Often business names are based on the name of the person or people who started the company or a spin on what the company does or produces. It is helpful to name your company so that when it is mentioned to someone who has never come across you before, they are able to make an accurate guess at your area of business just from your company’s name. This will also help you online with search engine optimisation.

Once you have your short list of possible new names you will need to check which domain names are available, if you are an incorporated body you will also need to check with Companies House to see that no other company is using the name in your industry sector.

There is no particular form that you need to complete to change your company’s name, however on the Companies House website there are templates for the resolution that your directors or shareholders need to vote on in order to change your company’s name.

What will need to be redesigned?

Here is a checklist of all the things that you may have had branded with your existing company logo: (If you can think of some more please get in touch and I’ll add them!)

• Business cards
• Stationery
• Website and blog
• E-newsletter
• Brochures
• Flyers
• Adverts
• Packaging
• Company or Promotional notepads and pens
• Uniforms
• Signs
• Name Badges
• Exhibition banner
• Folders
• Vehicle graphics

The costs involved
You need to consider many costs. The obvious ones are reprinting of your stationery, business cards and brochure. Your adverts will need to be updated as well as the company website and blog, and your email newsletter may need to have the banner graphics updated. Don’t forget things like your invoice paper, if it is branded with your logo, your pull-up banner, folders and badges for meetings and exhibitions and freebies like notepads and post-it notes. The other thing to watch out for is rebranding company vehicles, especially if you have lots of them. The cost of rebranding to a one-person company may be limited to website and stationery changes but to a larger firm the costs will be proportionately larger – and need to be carefully planned to avoid overlap of the two brands as much as possible.

The benefits
After you have completed your rebranding exercise you have the perfect opportunity to contact all your customers, more than once, to let them know. Contact with customers for a positive reason, not purely to push sales is always good. Customers will be receptive to pure information, without pushy sales messages to get past, and are likely to be more receptive to any brochure you send with your notification letter.

Take the opportunity to email your customers some time after you send the first notification, direct them to the revised website or blog and draw their attention to new features or offers. And offer them all your e-newsletter with it’s new branding so you can contact them regularly with news about your company.

Organisation
The rebranding process takes time and effort, attention focuses in the early stages of thinking up new names and deciding what items need to be rebranded first and the others that can wait. A budget for the cost of the process is also a good idea, find out the costs of anything that needs to be printed or re-made and factor them into the cost of the whole process. Don’t forget that meetings and the decision making process all take up time, time in which you might normally be doing business, so add that to the costs as well.

If you can, get a calendar or wall-chart and try to plan the dates when you will make major changes. Working backwards from the date of the planned rebranding can be useful to allow you to forecast days when you will need to brief the printer, the web designer or programmer and when you may need to order anything else involved.

The calendar of events will also help you to plan when you will need to make payments to suppliers and when you may need to schedule meetings on the rebranding process – helping you to track costs.

Technical bits
When you have a graphic designer to help with logos and stationery redesign it can be helpful to have a set of design guidelines drawn up at the same time so that anything produced in the future, in any medium, can be made up using the same colours, typefaces and generally match the spirit of what you already have. Although these guidelines will cost you for set-up, they should save you money in future by speeding up the design times of anything else you have done later.

If your rebranding has changes your email address and website address you may need to adjust the settings on your PC, and your mobile devices, to collect mail from your new address. It’s worth testing this thoroughly before the big switchover, you don’t want to miss business because the email isn’t getting through. (If you need advice on this contact David Woodroofe who can help you with the technical set up of websites and email.)

Using your rebranded items
As soon as you have a calendar of rebranding activities and your new stationery comes in, start to distribute them on the allotted days when you go networking or have meetings to spread the word about the rebranding. Send out your new stationery and brochures to all your clients and take this golden opportunity to re-connect with them and hopefully kick-start some new orders.

Create Design Studio offer a complete branding report service for £499 and we can design a whole new corporate identity for your business to give your company a fresh start, logo design concepts begin at £480, so call David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 today to get started on your new brand identity.

Links:
Create Design Studio Graphic Design Services
Our Logo Gallery Page on Facebook
Your business is unique, let everyone know why!

As markets contract businesses need to maximise their promotional activities and make every promotional pound count.

Strategies for updating your website
Our advice to website owners is to carry out modest updates and additions on a regular basis rather than major annual updates and overhauls. This is because search engines, such as Google, love fresh and updated content and making modest monthly changes to your website will heighten their interest. Regular updates will also encourage visitors to return as well.

But don’t fall into the trap of updating for the sake of it.

Making your updates more effective
Whatever content you add or update on your website, it must be of interest to your customers and relate to the problems and issues they face. Unless you are a market leader, it is unlikely web surfers will be particularly interested in you or your business. What will be of interest to them are helpful tips, free advice and solutions to solve their problems, make their life easier or businesses more profitable.

Write about THEM not YOU!

Spread the cost
The little and often strategy can also help your wallet by spreading the cost over 12 months, rather than having to budget for a large bill.

What are your options for updating your website yourself?
If your site does NOT have a Content Management System (CMS)? An alternative solution to adding a CMS to your website is adding a WordPress Blog, for maximum benefit the Blog should be hosted as part of your website under your domain name.

The cost for us to install a WordPress Blog and integrate it into a typical website, following its design and style, is £595 ex vat. (for more information on our blog services see our website.)

Software to help you with updating your website
If a Blog does not appeal, you can buy a web editing software package. We recommend Adobe Contribute CS4, it isn’t expensive and you can buy it directly from the Adobe website. It is very simple to set-up and use, it will allow you to update and create new web pages, including photos, PDFs and media files. When you hit the publish button it will also upload any new photos and PDFs etc to your site.

We provide full support for Contribute and can assist with setting up the software, as well the provision of templates for creating new pages. In our experience it takes no longer than half an hour to teach someone how to update their website using Contribute.

For those site owners who don’t have the time or don’t feel confident about doing the updates themselves, we offer fixed priced packages that are paid for on a monthly basis by standing order.

Call David at Create Design Studio on 01962 737989 for more information.

Useful links:
Making your website work harder for your business
Create Design Studio Website Design and Build Services

Your website is available to customers 24/7 and it can do more than simply provide a place for people to look up your phone number, address and prices. With planning your website can influence customer perception of your company, differentiate you from the competition, encourage new customers to call you and it allows existing customers to keep in touch by creating a ‘club’ atmosphere to keep customers coming back to you.

How the design of your site affects customer perception
If your website looks as though no thought went into the design, then the impression your customers will have is that your company does not care about its image. Good design improves customer perception of your company and shows you care about your image, your company and hence your customers. It also makes it easy for your visitors to navigate website pages and access information. Look at the website from the perspective of your customer, the site visitor, don’t add bells and whistles unless they help visitors to find what they are looking for and enhance their perception of your company. Sound effects, music and animated graphics that loop endlessly can distract from your content and may annoy site visitors, prompting them to go elsewhere.

Keeping in touch with customers
When did you last update your website? If it was ages ago then not only could your site drop down the search engine rankings but also your customers may assume that you have disappeared and will be less likely to re-visit your site. Updates tell visitors you are in-demand and give customers the perception that you are good at what you do. Tell them about the great projects you are involved in, about your new services and introduce them to new staff members.

If you would like your website to be easier to update and you want to be able to do the job yourself call Create Design Studio and ask about turning your website into a WordPress Blog, it will allow you to update your site whenever you want to. We can teach you how to use the free software in around 30 minutes. Moving your existing site to a WordPress template can usually be completed in less than a week, what are you waiting for? Call 01962 737989 and ask David about WordPress today.

In short we think that building customer confidence in your ability is made easier when you demonstrate your ability by writing about what you do and publishing it for free online using a blog.

What is a blog?
A blog is a collection of web pages that can easily be updated without the need to seek help from a web designer, programmer or use any special software.

Most blog software is free to download and easy to use and once you start writing, unlike on a normal web page, your readership can publish comments on the blog making it a truly interactive communication tool.

Why blogging will benefit your business
There are two answers, firstly it is a no cost option to keeping your website up to date. Secondly Google and the like love fresh content and a regularly updated blog, published as part of your website, will keep Google coming back for more and improve your rankings.

Your blog can also become a stream of links that you can promote using Twitter and a Facebook page for your organisation, spreading your words further than your website and blog can manage alone.

A blog will help show potential customers your abilities
Use the informative, relaxed style, of a blog to give your company a more personal and friendly online voice, than may be appropriate on your website. Build trust as you provide relevant news and views on issues that matter in your industry. You may also find your blog acts as a magnet to draw in new readers who then move on to your company website.

If you want to create an online information resource centre for your company a blog is the perfect tool
Some large companies also use blogs to encourage their employees to share information and expertise with one-another to build a shared knowledge resource. The software used for blogging also doubles as a content management system that allows you to give customers the most up-to-date information on your website.

A blog can help with the SEO of your website
Finally, using blog postings to update your website will cost you nothing (unlike using a web designer) and will boost your search engine rankings as websites that are updated regularly are ranked higher than those that aren’t.

Do you want a unique blog template that compliments your business branding?
We have installed blogs and designed bespoke templates for many of our customers. We can get your blog up and running in just a few days and we are happy to show you how to begin, as well as upload photographs, video clips and create links to other websites.

Do you want to know how to integrate your blog with your main web pages, your Twitter account, Facebook page and any other networking websites you use? We have the answers. Call Create Design Studio today on 01962 737989 to get started.

It’s been about a year since Create Design Studio signed up to Facebook and you’ll find Managing Director David Woodroofe has a profile on Facebook if you’d like to link up with him there. We built our own ‘fan’ page for Create Design studio mainly to keep in touch with our clients who use Facebook but also as a way to spread the news about our networking activities and projects.

Create Design Studio's Facebook Gallery Page

There is one part of Facebook that has really impressed us and that is the photo gallery feature. We use it to display the design work we create for the web, for print and our collection of corporate logo designs. It is usually used for personal photos but could just as easily be used for product photos if you sell your goods online or for pictures of your office, networking activities and pictures from trade shows or exhibitions.

It is possible to ‘tag’ these images so you can pinpoint who is in them. In this way you can link the images to a Facebook profile.

The photo gallery can also be shared with people who don’t use Facebook by copying the link from the bottom of the ‘Edit Photos’ page on Facebook. Here is the link to our web gallery on facebook. This can then be shared on Twitter, on your Blog or emailed to a contact who is interested in what you do.

Set up your own Facebook ‘Fan’ page, we can help you get started. Call David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 today.

Marketing your business is easier when you can point to something that makes your offer unique. This is usually referred to as your USP or unique selling point but I find it easier to think about it as the personality of your business. After all, every personality is unique.

Passion
What is the passion that lies behind your business? Can you remember what it was that got you into your industry? Are you stuck in the day-to-day running of your business and have you lost sight of what it is that motivated you to begin with?

If you can remember what got you into your business, rediscover your motivation and put it into words you have in a nutshell described your passion for your business. Getting that across to your customers in your marketing makes a big difference in inspiring confidence in your ability and motivation.

Unique
What is it that your business does that is unique? It might not be what you do but rather the way you do it that is important to your customers. Think through some of the most recent or most successful projects you have completed for customers and try to identify what you did for them that they would have difficulty finding elsewhere.

Once you can see the unique service that you give to your customers you can use it to define your offer in your marketing materials. Don’t keep it a secret, tell your customers what is unique about your service offer to them.

Customers
What are your customers like? Can you spot any trends that are common between them all? Perhaps they are mostly local, or mostly small companies, or mostly freelancers, or perhaps they are all from the same industry sector.

Once you know what kind of customers you work for it is easier to work out why they choose to buy from you. You might be their nearest supplier and the most convenient, or you might specialise is products or services that are relevant to their industry. Once you know why customers come to you it’s possible to target your marketing materials to the right area or the right companies in an industry sector. You can also identify possible new customers to approach.

Image
What do your customers think of your business as it is at the moment? Ask them for their impressions of your business, your products or services and your staff. All feedback is valuable and can help to enlighten reasons that your business does well in some cases but not others.

Consider the feedback you get and work out if there are changes you can make to improve things. Your marketing can then highlight these changes and improvements to your customers.

Have a plan
Put all your discoveries so far into your marketing plan and use the plan to work out what your budgets are and how best to spend them. You should be able to plan what you are going to say and who you are trying to reach now you have thought about your passion, uniqueness and your customers. This knowledge makes planning easier.

Create Design Studio can help your business move forward by reviewing your marketing activities. For £249 we will evaluate your current activities and provide you with lots of new ideas for complementary marketing and promotional activities.

Call David Woodroofe for more information on the Create Design Studio Marketing Review Service on 01962 737989.

Tools, kiosks and software to make handling baggage easier are all provided by Baggage Solutions. We helped them by designing a website to showcase their products to their website visitors.

The sophisticated red and grey colour scheme follows the company logo and branding. Images help to locate their services clearly in the airports, airlines and travel industry sector. To visit the website please click here.

Originally published in the Create Design Studio Newsletter.

Developing your brand is about creating a relationship with your customers based on their perception of your organisation. Start not with what you sell but with those who buy and find the appealing values that your organisation shares with them to give it a personality they can relate to.

Successful branding helps to make sales easier because trust has been created between customer and organisation. Creating this kind of successful brand doesn’t happen overnight but it can be supported by making your organisation accessible to customers on the web.

Starting your own business blog
A blog is a type of online diary, often used by businesses to publish articles about issues and events relevant to their industry that will be of interest to their customers and their peers. It can be hosted separately from your main website or the free blogging software can be installed on your web-server to integrate your website and your blog. Some smaller companies or freelance workers only have a blog as the software is versatile and can be used in a similar way to a traditional website with pages for services, products and contact information. You can update your blog as often as you like and as soon as you hit the ‘Publish’ button your articles are live on the web and can be indexed by search engines.

Promoting your blog with Twitter
Blog-posts can be effectively promoted through the use of the social networking site Twitter where users write their current status in messages of 140 characters or less. These messages can contain hyperlinks that direct readers to your blog post, your website or to any other online resource you want to promote.

Your Twitter status can also be linked so it updates your Facebook status and your status on the Ecademy business networking site, meaning you only have to write updates once and all the people who ‘follow’ you will be informed. If you are trying to spread the word about a new product or service it is obvious that linking your updates this way could provide an effective and lowcost way to promote them online.

These websites can also prove useful in other ways. By posting questions to those in your network others can respond quickly with personal recommendations and links to information resources. Also, social networking can enable you to keep in touch with friends and business contacts you may not often be able to meet up with in-person due to geography or lack of time.

Social networking has received coverage in the mainstream media and on the BBC news website an article by Claire Prentice explains how small firms are harnessing social networking for their marketing. As many small firms cannot afford to spend large sums on advertising they have turned to the social networking websites to reach a global audience with a minimal cost. Promoting special offers, new services and even to fill cancelled appointments at the last minute, updates on Twitter or Facebook build trust between customers and your organisation because customers know the information comes from you.

Social networking sites invite your customers to enter into dialogue with your company and the feedback you receive can be used to improve your services. However, your organisation also becomes open to criticism. Approach criticism as a chance to improve your service and potentially win back customers and even this aspect of social networking for business use can have a positive outcome.

If you are a newcomer to social networking online, here are some tips on how to begin:

Online social networking site twitter.com, uses short messages to help you stay in touch with other twitter users and www.facebook.com is a full social networking site that allows you to upload photos, update your status and instant message other friends online at the same time as you.

Business networking sites include www.ecademy.com which is a large site with users from all over the world with clubs and regional networking groups you can join. You may also like to look at www.linkedin.com for opportunities to network with other professionals.

If you’d like to start your own blog visit: wordpress.com or www.blogger.com. Try reading a few blogs to see the breadth of writing that exists on the web. You can search Google for blogs or you can visit a blog search engines like technorati.com which has a list of 100 top blogs to browse. Also try mashable.com for blogs about the world of social media online and a series of articles on ‘How to’ that should help if you are having problems using the sites mentioned in this article.

Create Design Studio can help those of you who would like to start using social networking online but don’t know where to begin. We can set it all up with you, design your Twitter page, show you how to use the sites or even look after your account and update your pages on your behalf.

Call Create Design Studio’s Managing Director David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 to arrange a no-obligation meeting.

If you decide to take the plunge look up Create Design Studio on Twitter: @david_woodroofe and @charlotte_lamb.

A brochure can be a great way of giving your customers and contacts a complete introduction to your company, it’s services or products and a way of keeping your contact details at their fingertips. However, unlike a website once your brochure is printed you can’t make changes to the details contained in it, so it pays to be organised when you are putting your new brochure together.

Here are a few tips from Create Design Studio on planning your brochure:

1. Think about the style and mood your brochure should aim to convey to the person reading it. It should reflect the personality and brand of your company and fit in visually with the other marketing materials you hand out. Perhaps the brochure is destined to sit on your customers coffee tables, or on their desk, each of these places will require a different style.

2. What do you want to include in your brochure? Your contact details, your services or products, information on your location or staff, an introduction to your organisation? Make a list of every idea you have and then work out how they can be fitted together to form the whole document. You can always edit out any ideas that don’t work.

3. Make a paper mock-up of the brochure. Use folded A4 copy paper to make a miniature mock-up of the entire brochure by writing the page title on each page and draw in a box for each page that requires a photograph. This will help you work out how many pages you need to have quoted by your printer and if you need to edit out pages or find extra content to fill spare ones.

4. Write the text and source your photographs. If writing isn’t a job you relish consider finding a copywriter to write the text on your behalf. A professional copywriter can give your brochure sparkling copy that customers will enjoy reading and in a major marketing investment like a brochure this can be invaluable.

Photographs for your brochure should look professional and if you can’t take them yourself consider either getting in a photographer or choosing some stock photography that can be used in the brochure.

If you sell products and your brochure is also a catalogue then it is important to have clear photographs of your products so that customers can see exactly what they are buying. Consider also the scale of the products you sell, can customers tell what size the item is from the photo?

5. Work with a designer to get the brochure laid out and typeset. You should get together to discuss your ideas and ask for a sample layout for the cover and the content pages to make sure you like the design before having the rest of the pages designed. A good designer will be able to give you ideas that you may not have considered for the brochure. They should also make each page easy to read and arrange the text and images so they are simple for your customers to understand. Collect up all of the text and photography and provide it to your designer on a CD or a USB stick so they have all of your brochure content to place in their designs.

Create Design Studio have plenty of experience helping organisations to plan their brochure. We can design the pages and arrange the printing of your new brochure. Call David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 to talk about your brochure.

It is now taken for granted that an organisation will have a web presence of some kind. Even if this is simply a single web page with information and contact details, however, your website can do more than act as a virtual business-card. Because it is available 24/7, and increasingly on the move via smart-phones, your website could be seen by potential customers day or night and in almost any place around the world. Your website can act as an salesman for your products or services at any time and in any place.

Researching your customers can help you to work out what your website should look like and what information or functions it should have. When you understand what your customers want and need to give them confidence in your organisation it will help your website planning. Once you design and plan your website to fulfil their needs and to suit the way they want to buy the chances of them making personal contact or making a purchase are increased.

Identifying who your customers is important because once you know who they are and what they will be looking for on your website it becomes easier to:

• write the text on each page with them in mind,
• organise the pages so they can find what they need,
• include e-commerce or other website functions that they find useful.

Consider your products or services from the perspective of your customers, what do they need to know before they can buy from you? This can be difficult to put your finger on so try asking some of your existing customers why they buy from you. It’s an opportunity to find out why people buy from you that could really help your website plan. Identifying the benefit your particular products or service offers to your customers is the key to communicating that benefit to all the visitors to your website to increase sales.

It can also help to think about how your website visitors will access your website, are they likely to be at a desktop machine with plenty of time to browse your pictures and words, or are they likely to be using a smartphone with a small screen, possibly between meetings? If your customers are pushed for time they may not read all your text or appreciate scrolling through lots of images, although they may also know what they are looking for and will need specific navigation to specific pages to speed up the process. Customers at home may have more time to spend reading your pages and you can take this opportunity to include detailed specs and photographs.

If you have used the web to make purchases and to find information analyse what made you use the websites you chose to do business with. Where there useful features on the website you used? Perhaps there was a convenient way to pay. All of this research can be used to help plan your own website.

If you are selling products online it can is a good idea to make your site look as much like a shop as possible to help visitors know that you sell from the website. Include symbols to show what payment types you accept and make sure you have clear photographs and good descriptive text for each item. Make it obvious that this is a place to buy from.

Your customers need to understand how your website works, find it easy and convenient to use and it must suit their particular style of buying if they are to purchase from you rather than going to another website. That’s why it pays to understand your customer before you plan your website.

If you are planning an e-commerce website this topic is covered in-depth in the FREE Create Design Studio e-newsletter, sign up to receive it on our homepage.