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.

TekTanks is a company that specialises in the design and manufacture of plastic tanks suitable for boats and vehicles. Their range of tanks and fittings is expanding so they needed a website where their customers could find exactly what they want and use the website to buy it.

We designed a clean site with a clear menu system and simple page layout to make it as easy as possible to find just the right tank by it’s application. Each tank has a written specification about that particular model to help customers decide on their purchase. Customers can buy from the site knowing they have exactly the tank and fittings for their needs. The website also have a potential to expand whenever a new product needs to be added. To visit the TekTanks website please click here.

This fresh and classy website was designed for Lifestyle Manager Joan who can help you with all those everyday tasks that prevent you from doing what you really want to do.

We were able to get together with Joan and discuss the kind of style she wanted for her website and enable her to update it herself by putting the design into WordPress. Now Joan can blog to her website visitors about the kind of tasks she can help them with whenever it suits her. If you would like to visit the website please click here.

Our new printed newsletter “The Bulletin” is just about to be posted out to our customers. It has a mixture of articles about Create Design Studio, our projects and an article about using Social Networking to benefit your business.

The Create Design Studio Bulletin

If you would like to receive a copy of the newsletter please email us (studio@createdesignstudio.co.uk) with your address and we’ll mail you one too!

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.

Sign-up using our home page to receive your free copy of our information packed e-newsletter. This month Managing Director David Woodroofe guides you through planning your own e-commerce website and give you all the top tips from Create Design Studio about selling your products online.

This article was written for the Networking group MBG  for their February 2010 newsletter.

Typical Twitter Page

1. The Page Background
You can set the background design and colour of your page by clicking on the ‘Settings’ menu tab (at the top right of the page) and then click the ‘Design’ menu tab on the page that appears. You can also design your own background or take a photograph and place it on your profile background. The background could display your photo, your company logo and a description of what you do or what your organisation does. It could also display your contact information.

2. What’s Happening?
Type in your tweets using this box.

3. Main area
Here are all the tweets of the people you follow arranged with the most recent at the top of the page.

4. Main Menu
You can view and alter your profile using this menu as well as change your user name, and search for people you know.

5. Following/Followers
These two numbers show you how many people you are following and how many others are following you. To see a profile picture and a description of them just click on the words and a list will be displayed in the main window.

6. Lists
Using a list allows you to group together people who you follow on Twitter so that you can view only their tweets. For example all the people who write about the subject of motor racing are in a list and by clicking on the list name only their tweets appear in the main window. Other people can include you in their lists and you can view all lists you create or are included in by clicking the ‘Lists’ link.

7. Home
Clicking here will refresh the main screen and show you the latest tweets from those you follow.

8. @username
Click on this heading to see all the tweets where your user name is mentioned.

9. Direct messages
If you want to privately message someone then click here and your message will not appear on the main time line.

10. Favourites
If someone sends you a tweet that you’d like to save then click the little star icon on the left of the tweet text on the time line and it will be saved in your favourites, click this link to view them all.

11. Retweets
When you rebroadcast someone else’s tweet add an ‘RT’ to the front and include their user name with the ‘@’ symbol at the front. Any of your tweets that are rebroadcast will be displayed under this heading, as are those retweets you make and retweets made by people you follow.

12. Search
Type in a name or any other search term to find tweets that contain that term.

Linking up
The most popular use for Twitter comes about when it is combined with your website or blog. Whenever you write a
blog post or update your website or e-commerce store you can promote it to your twitter followers by including a web link in your tweet to encourage them to visit your blog or website.

Using web links
Long web links really eat into your character limit when making a tweet so use a specialist link shortening website to help you cram more into each tweet. (Try www.Tinyurl.com or www.bit.ly). These sites allow you to past in a long web link which it will then shorten for you. Simply copy and paste the shortened link into your tweet.

Automatic updates
Facebook and Linked-in can now be set up automatically to update from your Twitter status. Most social and business networking websites have a gadget that allows you to set this up. Once your Twitter account updates all your social or business networking profiles it means that you only have to type in your links and promotions once for them to be rebroadcast to all the people you have connections with, however they keep in touch with you.

There is also code that you can use to include a twitter feed on your website or blog. This code fetches and displays your tweets so that they can be seen by visitors to your website or blog without them needing to visit the Twitter site at all.

Facebook Fan Pages
These are an extension to the personal profile that you can build in Facebook and are useful for business because they
have space for galleries of photographs, useful for portfolios of work or to show pictures of your office and how to find it. There is also a place for your address and opening hours, customers can write on your wall with testimonials or you can place special offers, news stories and events on there to keep your ‘fans’ interested.

Create Design Studio have covered Facebook Fan Pages in this blogpost.

If you would like to use social networking sites to promote your organisation please call Create Design Studio on 01962 737989 and we can help you set up your website or blog and create profiles using social networking websites as well as guiding you on linking them together effectively.

There are three really important Meta Tags that will help get your website found by search engines: the Meta Page Title, Keywords and the Meta Description.

The Meta Page Title appears in the bar at the top of a browser window, in the case of Microsoft Explorer it is the text that appears immediately before the wording in the blue bar that says Microsoft Explorer. Most search engines place a lot of importance on this title when ranking web pages, so you should ensure that you have a unique title for each web page and that it contains your top search phrase for that page.

The Meta Description, is as it sounds, a description of what that particular web page is about. It is also the text that many search engines use to describe the web page in their search results. Again this is an important Tag that can help get the website found. Like the Title Tag most search engines do read these descriptions and place a lot of importance on them.

Meta Descriptions should also be written with real people in mind, as a well-written Meta Description can attract people to click on that site when faced with dozens of listings on a results page, even if it is listed towards the bottom of the page.

The Keyword Tag started life as the place to put all the phrases that you wanted your website to be found by, however many website owners found that they could out smart the search engines using them, most search engines no longer pay much attention to them. However some do use them and most will check to see if they have been included, so it is important to include them.

Keep in touch with your customers and promote your website at the same time
Any correspondence that you send from your organisation to a customer can also promote your website. Think about printing on your envelopes, having printed headed letter paper, printing your website address onto your invoices, comp slips, flyers and anything else you post out. Also have an email signature with your website address on it, these can be updated easily so you can always promote whatever you are doing online to any clients you communicate with via email. If you hand out any promotional items like pens, postcards or notepads then have these printed with your website address in addition to your logo.

Create Design Studio offer a range of new media marketing services, and we have years of experience designing and building websites and blogs, speak to our MD, David Woodroofe on 01962 737989.

A well thought-out website works hard acting as a salesman working 24/7 on your company’s behalf: always providing information, reassurance and your contact details to potential and existing customers who are looking for goods or services. Now that mobile devices are increasingly used for internet access your website could be guiding customers straight to your door.

A really effective website is updated regularly to remain at the top of it’s game. Without new information on products or services and company news it can slip down search engine rankings and customers may drift away from a site that always looks the same.

Take an objective look at your website: are there parts that could do with an overhaul? Make a list of things you could add to your website that could make it more effective as a sales tool for your business, always think from a customer’s point of view and try to imagine what they would be interested in. Why not survey your customers to find out what they would like to see on your website or take a look at the websites of your competitors to see what they do. Critically assess websites that you visit and work out what features you find useful that could equally be applied to your organisation’s website.

Making your website more effective means helping visitors to find you easily, stay longer once they arrive and more likely to initiate contact or leave their details with you. Once site visitors engage with your web site they are more likely to buy from you. These topics will all be covered in the next few weeks on this blog.

Personalised support to update and change your website is available from Create Design Studio if you would like to speak to us about your website please call 01962 737989.

E-mail newsletters have become popular because they give companies an opportunity to speak directly to their customers. Offers that appeal to recipients of the newsletter could encourage them to take the next step and make a purchase, or make a repeat purchase in the case of existing customers.

Send regular newsletters to customers that focus on articles of interest to them, rather than being purely about promotion of sales, because sales messages are a turn-off to readers. Newsletters get your name in front of receptive customers and provides your organisation with an opportunity to offer your customer articles, special offers and contact information. Once your newsletter is up and running it can be promoted as a great place to pick up special offers and information that will encourage interested customers to sign-up.

If you would like advice or help to set up an email newsletter for your organisation please call David Woodroofe of Create Design Studio on 01962 737989.