Your response to my post on Blogstomp got me thinking that I should share more resources that will make your blogging and business journeys more fun. And so I am delighted to share Design Seeds with you. Have you found her on Pinterest or via her website already? Isn’t she fabulous?
I look at that image above with it’s fresh, Spring greens and I just feel energised and happy. It’s a primal, subconscious thing but green just speaks to me in a really powerful way.
Design Seeds is the brainchild of colour consultant Jessica Colaluca and she combines stunning images with inspirational colour palettes that I find utterly addictive. With the tagline For All Who Love Color, she had me hooked straightaway!
When we think of branding as being all about how nice your website looks and how many people comment on your business cards it can be difficult to get a handle on the power of your brand. After all, as long as it’s smart, what does it really matter? Well I think it matters a lot if you want to make doing business easy.
Focus matters more than smart
A very good friend of mine (shall we call her Jane?) bought a business eighteen months ago and since then has worked like a trojan with her business partner to grow the sales. Whilst my friend comes from a recruitment background as has no knowledge of the industry, her business partner worked in the business for ten years before they purchased the company, so they certainly know a thing or two between them.
But despite this knowledge and my Jane’s discipline at the selling, business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s incredibly tough for them.
Now branding is no magic wand for a failing business, but when you’re working as hard as Jane is, it’s something that will really make a difference. I look at their website and whilst it may be smart, it’s boring. More than that, it’s confusing and they’re missing opportunities. Jane and I were talking last week and she said “I know we need a new website” but the thing is, if they just create a new website they’re not really fixing the problem.
The real challenge
Before they race out and have a new (smart) website developed, they need to ask themselves: how do we create a brand that is irresistible to our most profitable customers?
Experience tells me that if there’s one thing we all dread doing, it’s writing copy. And whether that’s a few words for the back of a flyer or a fully blown website, it really seems to startle a lot of you. When clients ask me how long it’ll take them to build their website, I always give them an estimate with the caveat that the biggest thing that will hold up the build is them supplying the copy.
So when Maja Pawinska Sims came and spoke at the Horsley Network on Monday night on Ten Steps to Sparkling Marketing Copy I knew I just had to share her steps with you. Speaking as someone who is writing copy for a new Flourish website right now I promise you they are incredibly useful! What I love most about Maja’s approach, is that she is doing for words what we do with imagery. She’s writing to build a brand voice, just as we build a brand image.
Maja’s Ten Steps to Writing Sparkling Marketing Copy
1. Values
Before you even try and put pen to paper, I would recommend you establish your core values. If you’re running your own business, your personal values and your business values are likely to overlap. Values are attributes that you hold dear in your life, from integrity and service to innovation or creativity. With many of my copywriting clients, I start off by doing this classic coaching exercise (just email me onmajapawinskasims@gmail.com for a free copy of this exercise). Once you’ve identified your top five or six values, they are a really useful benchmark when you’re producing written materials, to check that what you are communicating is in tune with what your business is really about at its heart. When you run your business – and talk about your business – in a way that is consistent with your values, you have what is called an authentic business. Authentic businesses tend to be successful because they are a genuine extension of who you are, your skills, and what you care about.
2. Brand Personality, Tone and Style
Add another layer of insight by defining your brand personality. You could work with some more coaching questions, such as:
What do you want to be known for?
What differentiates you, and your business, and makes you stand out from everyone else with a similar background, experiences and offer?
Imagine you are 80 years old. What would you want people to say about you and your professional achievements? What would you like your legacy to be? What would you like clients and employees who have worked with you over the years to say about you?
Then think about the voice of your business. Are you formal or informal; professional, friendly? Do you want to be seen as small and personal, or more corporate? This will inform what’s called the tone and style of the language you use in your written materials.
Ta da! The brand, spanking new website for the Branding Masterclass is now live, and with the next class less than four weeks away, I wanted to share the design with you.
I’m not one to hang about (as my team will testify) and so when I made the decision to launch our first masterclass back in late November 2011 I knew we had our work cut out preparing the “classroom” (aka the blog), the brand, a promo video, writing the content and the sales copy as well as all the back end admin it takes to run a course. We did a LOT in that two-ish months and fitting in a stand alone website was always going to be impossible. But I did want to pull one together for the next class.
Both James and Stuart have worked incredibly hard to pull this together before Easter, and I want to say a very big and public thank you to both of them (and Caroline) for making sure the site was ready. I know it wasn’t easy, especially with your current workload, but it is very much appreciated.
The Designs
The designs are very much rooted in the brand identity James created back in January for my masterclass classroom. I wanted everything to feel clean, easy to read and welcoming but also with some substance. This isn’t airy fairy stuff, despite the prolific use of flowery pictures! There’s real, commercial meat behind what I’m writing about, even if much of it is delivered in a light and easy to understand way. And so I love James’ use of type, colour and white space.
Have you discovered Blogstomp yet? If you’re a blogger and you blog photographs then you need this, like, yesterday. It’s AMAZING.
Before we go any further, I’m not an affiliate, I’m not trying to make any money out of you. I have been using the app for a couple of weeks now and it has completely revolutionised how I blog images. And I am evangelical about it. That’s it! So this is not about generating any affiliate revenue, I just want to save you time.
Time saving and pixel perfect
One of the things that stops many of us blogging is a lack of time. For some of us, it’s also that quest for perfection. All these things get in the way of you showcasing your lovely work with the world.
I have been told off on numerous occasions by Matt Pereira complaining that my photo montages aren’t pixel perfect. Now I don’t know about you but I have better things to do with my time than nudge things a mm to the left or right. Yes, I absolutely expect it of my designers when they’re creating client work. But my blog is my notebook and if everything was pixel perfect I honestly wouldn’t have time to get done half the stuff I get done (but that’s another story for another day…).
I’m really excited to share the new Branding Masterclass video with you. We recorded it last Friday and I spent much of Wednesday editing it all together, with James working frantically behind the scenes to put together the fab stills with all the lovely student testimonials.
I never thought I’d say this, but I really enjoyed creating this video, and I think that was mostly down to the team that worked on the project. James, one of our Graphic Designers, worked on the visuals, and I just love how they look. Remember the video from before Christmas? We hadn’t formalised the brand identity back then, and I just love the fresh, clean look James has given the testimonials. Dani, our Account Exec was a real trooper. She did the recording as well as charging round styling the “set” (aka a corner of my kitchen!) with me and cheering me on! And Adrian Kirk, who you’ll meet next week properly, who helped me get a bit more of my sparkle onto the camera.
I wouldn’t say that I struggle to speak in public (what am I saying? Those of you that know me well know that I love it!) but I’ve never been one for am-dram. I was never in any plays at school and I have zero to none experience of performing on camera. So even though I felt pretty happy with the original masterclass video, I hope you can see a difference in this one?
Adrian was amazing at getting me relaxed, helping me focus on my message and get more of “me” across on camera. I know I have some way to go, and I’m not quite ready to be a TV presenter yet (ha ha!) but I think he achieved great things in just a few short hours. I’ll definitely be working with him when we produce our next video for Flourish.
We had a really inspiring vision board meeting this morning with Pablo Blue, who will soon be selling beautiful English home ware online.
Pablo is their dog (cockapoo), and the story of their little family member will appear on their website soon but it was time for me to get my watercolours out again.
I wanted to experiment with shape and form and hopefully I can create a distinctive silhouette that will do justice to a fluffy cockapoo (which I don’t think will be an easy task!)
I will keep you updated with the progress over the next couple of weeks and I wish you all a Happy Easter!
I’m really excited about this Five Minutes to Focus project, because it requires some very big thinking. Something I think many of us don’t give ourselves enough time for in our businesses. We get so sucked into the day to day that we forget to lift our heads up and think about where we’re headed.
Now you can make this as complex or as simple as you like. On a very simple level, what’s the big idea? Where do you want to be this time next year, or in five years? What’s your ridiculously, audaciously, overambitious goal? I was talking to my husband about my plans for the business last night and he (thankfully) was incredibly excited and supportive of them, which is fortunate, because as I say, this is about being overambitious. It’s about setting yourself a goal that really makes you strive.
And remember, the whole point of five minutes to focus is that you give yourself that, just five minutes to really focus. But the process becomes really powerful when you allow your subconscious mind to do some thinking: so allow yourself a week or so to mull this over. I’m excited to hear where you get to!
If you want to make this a little more complex/ powerful, think about what inspires you about your business. Think about what you love doing, what plays to your strengths, and what you’d prefer to be doing less or none of.
People connect to people’s passions and I am sure you’ll agree that Matt has done a brilliant job of capturing Fiona’s energy and enthusiasm for the class. As a keen photographer, I personally love the shallow depth of field as it gives the shot a whimsical feel, although the set up of the scenes gives a nod to the hard work ahead.
Whilst the Masterclass is beautifully designed and bursting with motivation I can guarantee you there is nothing whimsical about it and you will most definitely come out at the end of the journey with sheer drive and determination to better your brand.
We hope to film more videos in the near future so watch this space.
We have some really exciting projects in the studio right now, and one that I’d like to share with you is the very beginnings of a rebrand for Love Interiors.
Jo Love is a highly successful interior designer who works mostly in high end residential and commercial practice. Her firm is based in Cobham, Surrey and works mostly in London and the South East, as Jo herself says “although we recently completed an eco house in Cornwall, a private residence in the Bahamas and a boutique hotel on the South Coast. “. How lovely is that?
Jo’s current website and brand identity betray the directional nature of their work and the success of her business and we’re thrilled to be creating a brand identity that reflects that.
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