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.

Beechdown Health Club

Large outdoor banners can be a really effective way to advertise to plenty of potential customers as they travel past. This new banner sign for beechdown Health Club is to promote their summer activities aimed at the whole family.

They wanted an energetic and family-orientated photograph to inject some life into their message and Create Design Studio were able to help them source just the right picture for their needs.

Get started with a banner to promote your business, we can help. 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.

EBS (Elvetham Business Solutions) provide services for Performance Improvement and Interim Assignments for businesses. Their specialities include: change management, working capital management and business analysis and improvement.

The website has a refreshed colour scheme and plenty of space for EBS to detail their services to their visitors. To visit the EBS website please click here.

After the last post on brochures it seemed appropriate to share a few of our most recent brochure designs from Create Design Studio.

Vivid Living sell complete furnishing solutions. Their brochure was designed to be a high quality glossy catalogue featuring professional photographs of their furniture as well as show home projects that they have designed.

GDS supply equipment and software solutions for geotechnical testing. Their brochure was designed to inform their customers about the full range of their software modules at a major exhibition.

First Chapter supply bespoke independent financial advice to their clients and wanted a brochure to explain their service ‘Your Plan for Life’.

Basingstoke Business Club needed a small brochure to explain how their breakfast networking club operates for potential new members and this A5 brochure gives them plenty of space for text and pictures from previous meetings.

If you would like to discuss your own brochure project please call Create Design Studio on 01962 737989.

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.

Thanks to @primarybs on Twitter for the idea for this blogpost.

When you start using social networking sites it’s a good idea to link up the things you post so that the various groups of people who follow you all receive the same information, and you spread your news as far as possible.

Status updates
You can set up Facebook to automatically update your Twitter status using a third party applications, there are different ones available (try searching Facebook or look through the help pages). If you don’t want to use third party apps then simply copy and paste your Tweet into your Facebook status update window on the home page when you log-in.

Blog to Twitter to Facebook
When you write a blogpost browse the specific page on your blog to find the specific web link for your article. (Click the title and it will usually be displayed in  your browser on it’s own page with the link in the address bar of the browser.) Post this link using Twitter to promote your blog. If the link is long try using a shortening service like www.Tinyurl.com or www.bit.ly so it fits the Twitter character limit. You can also post your links on your Facebook page using your wall or on your Facebook Fan page wall. Once you have updated your status or fan page the news will appear on the home page of all the people you are friends with or who are fans of your page.

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. (If you would like some code to do this please contact Create Design Studio on 01962 737989.)

Share your photos using Facebook photo galleries and Twitter
When you create a Facebook photo gallery you can share the gallery, even with those who don’t use Facebook. Click on the ‘Edit photos’ link when in your photo page and at the bottom of the page you will see a link that you can paste into Twitter, or use on your blog, to share your gallery with your followers. This is great for photos of your office, your products or to show photos from events you have attended.

Ecademy to Twitter
Parts of your Ecademy profile can be posted on Twitter, use the button next to the ‘likes’ link at the top of your profile page to give the Ecademy website permission to acess your Twitter account. If you don’t want to formally link the accounts together you can simply post the weblink  to your Ecademy profile page using your Twitter account.

Don’t forget to promote your social networking by conventional means
Use your email signature to promote your Twitter profile and your Facebook page by adding links to them. Your can also mention your presence on your business card, letterhead, promotional leaflets and on your invoices.

Create Design Studio: 01962 737989