LOGO MATTERS!

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About half of all businesses fail within their first few years. One source of failure that is commonly cited by experts is sloppy or ineffective marketing. If your marketing materials do not stand out from those of your competitors, your sales will suffer.

The initial lack of customers and cash flow often causes new small business owners to put off designing a logo and marketing materials professionally “until they get a few clients” or “until they get started.” Unfortunately, designing their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses instead of having them professionally created will make getting those initial clients more difficult and may result in a business that will not succeed.

When you start a business, you need to create the quickest possible route to business success. A logo helps to create this by contributing to your business’s visibility and credibility, two factors that will help your business grow and achieve success.

Many entrepreneurs choose to design their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses. It’s easy enough these days to design a business card at the local office supply store or online. Word processing software will also allow you to experiment with typefaces and layout. But if you do not have a good sense of what you are doing, you could cause more problems than you solve. Here are reasons why it’s not a good idea to put off a professionally designed logo and corresponding collateral materials:

Your business will appear unstable: Starting with one look then switching a few months later to a different logo and then perhaps a year later doing it again creates confusion for clients. Is it the same business? Did the store change owners? It can also give the appearance of a business that can’t make up its mind.
Your business will look amateurish: Using materials that are not professionally designed makes your business look unprofessional and might indicate that you cannot perform to or meet the standards required. Read more on Branding a Startup.
You will look unpolished: Not having a professional “look and feel” can make it appear as though your business does not matter to you. Customers may get the impression that you do not care about the way your business presents itself, which might indicate that you would not care about the quality of your work or the way that your work reflects upon their business.
You will look unfocused: Unprofessional, uncoordinated marketing materials can make your business look jumbled or confused. If you have a business card with one look and feel and a website with another, it can cause an identity crisis for a small business. Too many different designs might cause potential clients to think they are looking at two different businesses. It’s best to tie everything together from the start.

So while putting off your logo development may seem like a prudent idea from a cash-flow point of view, it could result in your business never getting off the ground. It can also lead to your business folding when it would otherwise succeed.

If you think that you can’t afford to design a logo when starting your business, consider the outcome. How can you afford not to?

Feb 22, 2011 / Blog

FACEBOOK PAGE-NECESSARY OR NOT?

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Regardless of what your business engages in, either a service or product, it’s a great idea to have an established Facebook fan page. It all starts with how YOU network through Facebook. Why is having a Facebook fan page important? I’d say at this point, you should really focus more on a Facebook fan page than a Twitter account. Facebook is the largest social network in the world! As the internet becomes more social and Facebook becomes the largest portal on the web, you want your business to have a presence.

I have seen just about every small to large business owners have a fan page online, from local pest control companies to very large online retailers pushing product and branding through Facebook fan pages. The trick, or strategy I should say is establishing a base to then let your fans do the work for you. I think and believe the main reason and objective for a Facebook fan page is to have much better engagement with consumers and in a way, become a more transparent company. In this day in age in media, social media plays a huge role. Companies nationwide and even world-wide are putting more and more resources into the web and the social web(Facebook Ads, etc.)

A Facebook page can create lots of credibility not only with your existing customers but with new customers who are really looking and thinking about why they should trust your company and if its safe to do an online transaction (if you’re an e-retailer.) Let’s not forget, YES, e-commerce grows year after year (except 2009 I believe it was stable) but as e-commerce grows, so does online fraud (identity theft online) and users are becoming more and more weary of this issue. It’s very important and something you have to work on daily to make each visitor feel it is safe to purchase from your website. These portals, such as Facebook and Twitter allow for this because they know once you “screw” them, if ever, they can go right to those portals and announce it to the world.

Once your Facebook page has taken off, it can literally be one of your top resources for traffic and sales. The key to your facebook page taking off is LETTING YOUR FANS AND FRIENDS DO THE WORK FOR YOUAND BEING ACTIVE ON A DAILY BASIS promoting sales, specials, news, and whatever you can do to engage the user and keep brand awareness on a daily basis.

For SEO reasons, your Facebook Fan Page can be a big factor in the SERPs as you can rank really well for your company name (besides your website) for reputation management reasons. Make sure you have a vanity URL to go along with your facebook fan page, i.e. facebook.com/companyname. This can play a big role if you’re trying to push a site out of ranking for any particular reason as this one page can rank really well with Facebooks authority with Google.

Feb 22, 2011 / Blog

Facebook Fan Page Design

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Regardless of what your business engages in, either a service or product, it’s a great idea to have an established Facebook fan page. It all starts with how YOU network through Facebook. Why is having a Facebook fan page important? I’d say at this point, you should really focus more on a Facebook fan page than a Twitter account. Facebook is the largest social network in the world! As the internet becomes more social and Facebook becomes the largest portal on the web, you want your business to have a presence.

Mlwdesign specializes in designing a customized page for you and teaching you how to best utilize the page and get fans.