In March 2014, the Baymard Institute, a web research company based in the UK, reported that 67.91% of online shopping carts are abandoned. An abandonment means that a customer has visited a website, browsed around, added one or more products to their cart and then left without completing their purchase. A month later in April 2014, Econsultancy stated that global retailers are losing $3 trillion (USD) in sales every year from abandoned carts.



Clearly, reducing the number of abandoned carts would lead to higher store revenue — the goal of every online retailer. The question then becomes how can we, as designers and developers, help convert these “warm leads” into paying customers for our clients?

Before Cart Abandonment

Let’s begin by looking at recognized improvements we can make to an online store to reduce the number of “before cart” abandonments. These improvements focus on changes that aid the customer’s experience prior to reaching the cart and checkout process, and they include the following:

• Show images of products.
  This reinforces what the customer is buying, especially on the cart page.
• Display security logos and compliance information.
  This can allay fears related to credit-card and payment security.
• Display contact details.
  Showing offline contact details (including a phone number and mailing address) in addition to an email address adds credibility to the website.
• Make editing the cart easier.
  Make it as simple as possible for customers to change their order prior to checking out.
• Offer alternative payment methods.
  Let people check out with their preferred method of payment (such as PayPal and American Express, in addition to Visa and MasterCard).
• Offer support.
  Providing a telephone number and/or online chat functionality on the website and, in particular, on the checkout page will give shoppers confidence and ease any concerns they might have.
• Don’t require registration.
  This one resonates with me personally. I often click away from websites that require lengthy registration forms to be filled out. By allowing customers to “just” check out, friction is reduced.
• Offer free shipping.
  While merchants might include shipping costs in the price, “free shipping” is nevertheless an added enticement to buy.
• Be transparent about shipping costs and time.
  Larger than expected shipping costs and unpublished lead times will add unexpected costs and frustration.
• Show testimonials.
  Showcasing reviews from happy customers will alleviate concerns any people might have about your service.
• Offer price guarantees and refunds.
  Offering a price guarantee gives shoppers the confidence that they have found the best deal. Additionally, a clear refund policy will add peace of mind.
• Optimize for mobile.
  Econsultancy reports that sales from mobile devices increased by 63% in 2013. This represents a real business case to move to a “responsive” approach.
• Display product information.
  Customers shouldn’t have to dig around a website to get the information they need. Complex navigation and/or a lack of product information make for a frustrating experience.

Unfortunately, even if you follow all of these recommendations, the reality is that customers will still abandon their carts — whether through frustration, bad design or any other reason they see fit.

After Cart Abandonment

The second approach is to look at things we can do once a cart has been abandoned. One tactic is to email the customer with a personalized message and a link to a pre-populated cart containing the items they had selected. This is known as an “abandoned cart email.”

The concept is pretty simple. At the right time, a customizable email is sent, complete with a personalized message and a link to the customer’s abandoned cart. Of course, this approach assumes that the customer has submitted their email address — effectively, they’ve done everything but paid. Abandoned cart emails represent one last attempt by the merchant to convince the buyer to check out.

In September 2013, Econsultancy outlined how an online cookie retailer recaptured 29% of its abandoned shopping carts via email. This is a huge figure and one we might naturally be skeptical of.

To get a more realistic perspective, I asked my colleagues at Shopify to share some of their data on this, and they kindly agreed. Shopify introduced “abandoned cart recovery” (ACR) in mid-September 2013 (just over a year ago at the time of writing). Here’s a summary of its effectiveness:

• In the 12 months since launching automatic ACR, $12.9 million have been recovered through ACR emails in Shopify.
• 4,085,592 emails were sent during this period, of which 147,021 carts were completed as a result. This represents a 3.6% recovery rate.
• Shop owners may choose to send an email 6 or 24 hours after abandonment. Between the two, 6-hour emails convert much better: a 4.1% recovery rate for 6 hours versus 3% for 24 hours.

It’s worth noting that the 3.6% recovery rate is from Shopify’s ACR emails. Many merchants use third-party apps instead of Shopify’s native feature. Given that Shopify is unable to collect data on these services, the number of emails sent and the percentage of recovered carts may well be higher.

Given the statistics, abandoned cart emails are clearly an important part of an online retailer’s marketing strategy. Luckily, most leading e-commerce platforms enable merchants to send custom emails, either in plain text or HTML. Knowing how to implement these notifications is a useful skill if you are designing for e-commerce, and they represent added value to your services.

Conclusion

While there are many tactics to persuade customers to buy, inevitably some people will get to the payment screen and decide not to continue. Any tactic that helps to seal the deal is certainly worth considering, and given the small amount of work involved in implementing an email to recover abandoned carts, it’s a great place to start. Designers and developers are in a powerful position to help their clients increase their revenue, and being armed with tactics such as the ones outlined in this article will hopefully enable them to offer a wider range of services.

In the last several years, we’ve seen a rapid shift in software and app interface design, from 3-D and skeuomorphic to flat and minimal. Although this trend has become nearly ubiquitous, let’s take a moment to consider how we got here and what influence it’s having on interface design as a whole.

What Happened?

So, how did the collective consciousness swing from a love of all things textured, beveled and drop-shadowed to a desire for flat colors and simple typography? Many factors have fuelled this transition, but here are a few that stand out.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

As a constantly connected culture, we deal with a nonstop flow of information, some of it important and relevant, most of it not. We are constantly evaluating, filtering and, of course, creating content, and it all gets pretty exhausting. In addition, much of our content consumption has moved to devices with small screens, thus exacerbating that feeling of overload. Becoming overwhelmed is all too easy, and a reduction of clutter in a user interface (UI) can create a little visual zen.

Free of clutter: Geckoboard‘s visualisations are designed to make key data easy to interpret at a glance.

SIMPLICITY IS GOLDEN

In a similar trend, a lot of disruptive Web apps and services are offering highly focused tools with extremely limited feature sets. Whereas traditional software developers tend to load their products with a glut of features to justify the high price tags, this shift towards focused micro-apps favors simplicity over feature set. Simpler apps mean simpler interfaces.

Beautiful and minimal: The Blue weather app by Oak.

CONTENT IS KING, AGAIN

As so often happens when new devices and technologies enter the market, we become fascinated by what they can do and how we can advance interactivity. This interface frenzy is usually followed by a return to a focus on content. Media consumption, whether of text, audio or video, is probably the activity we engage in most on our devices, and for that use case, we just want the interface to get out of the way.

TECHNOLOGICAL LITERACY

As smartphone and tablet adoption has rapidly penetrated all user demographics, concern about the obviousness of controls has reduced. Whereas we once feared that users might miss a button if it didn’t pop off the screen, we are now willing to explore subtler interactions. Windows 8 and Chrome for Android even support touch commands that start off screen, without any visual indicator.

Fitbit’s dashboard is a bright, bold, and easy approachable visual identity.

TECHNOLOGY’S INFLUENCE

Most software will be limited by the platform on which it runs. Screen dimensions and pixel density are the confining factors of hardware. A minimal interface demands a very limited design palette, which means that every element needs to sing. Typographic scale and font weight will largely determine both the aesthetics and usability of a flat design.

If your target devices can’t handle that level of nuance, you’re out of luck. As screen size and pixel density continue to increase on mobile devices, thinner and smaller type can be presented with better clarity. Of course, support for @font-face has also boosted the appeal of minimal typographic-focused designs.

Live sales monitoring with Wallmob: keeping track of the figures from any device that has a browser.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN

With the proliferation of connected devices of various dimensions, UIs have had to become more fluid, and the responsive design movement has responded. While responsive design does not call for a particular aesthetic, one could certainly argue that flat UIs lend themselves to it more easily than many other styles. The other advantage of minimal design is the reduction in page weight and loading time.

To the point and weightless: OnSite.

Best Practices

OK, enough with the theory. Let’s get down to some practical considerations. Creating an effective minimal design is surprisingly challenging. As you strip away common UI tricks (drop shadows, bevels, textures and the like), you quickly realize how important the few remaining elements become. While the following tips are mostly universally applicable, they are especially relevant to flat UIs.

As with any project, the first step is to ensure that your chosen style makes sense. Before diving into a flat design, make sure it aligns with your target users’ sensibilities and your target platform, devices and application type. Following a trend is pointless if it’s the wrong solution for your project.

Here are some ideas to keep in mind when aiming for simplicity:

• The Process you follow is pretty important, no matter what style you are adopting. 
• The Grid plays a crucial role in so much of interface design, and no exception here. 
• The Colors are obviously always a key component of visual design and with minimal interfaces, it is even more critical.
• The Typography is the hero when it comes to flat content-driven websites, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
• Intuitive Interaction in a flat UI is crucial and indicating that an element is interactive can be tricky. 

Wrapping Up

I don’t believe in hard and fast rules in design. Seeing designers so heavily invested in creating extremely clean and simple user interfaces is pretty awesome. Does exploring flat design mean using absolutely no gradients or shadows? Of course not. In fact, some of the most intriguing work I’ve seen recently balances flatness and dimension by presenting content intelligently while keeping the interaction intuitive.

In this highly connected, information-rich and feature-packed digital world we live in, minimal design’s widespread resurgence is refreshing to witness. It is by no means the right solution for everything (no style is), but when applied thoughtfully and appropriately, it makes for a highly usable and enjoyable digital experience.

The secret to successfully building a good website is similar to how the Wright brothers invented the first airplane.

Before the Wright brothers came along the common belief was that the way that you’d be able to get an airplane to fly was to create a large enough and strong enough engine that would be able to propel the plane to fly. And so most adventures focused most of the energy on building more powerful and stronger engines for the plane to get the plate actually take off. But with the Wright brothers did instead was they tried to come up with an airplane design that was as late as possible that was a sensually as close to a glider as they could make it so that all they would need was a very small and light engine and because the glider design was so efficient I would only require a small engine to propellant and posit to fly which as it turns out was the correct way to go about it and that was the reason that they were the first people to effect the airplane.

In many ways that’s the same story as to how many people try to generate traffic to their website.

One of the problems I see quite often is companies and businesses that spend money on Google Adwords, Facebook advertising, Yelp, SEO and other traffic generating mechanisms. They spent all of this money and time and effort getting traffic to their website and then they get upset or confused when they don’t generate that much business from their efforts.

What they might not realize is that the relationship between traffic and the design of the website is very similar to how the wright brothers invented the first airplane.

While many people focus on how do to get people to come to their site, they fail to realize is that the most important thing is having a website that converts. In this analogy your website is the airplane design and the engine is the traffic to your site.

If you do not have a well-designed, well-developed, clearly thought out website then all of that traffic is the same as having a really giant engine strapped to a skateboard.

So the first to successfully generating traffic to your business is creating a website that is well-designed, has a strong call to action that is proven to successfully convert traffic into leads and leads into customers.

Then once you’ve worked out the conversions on your site you can go ahead and pay for Google Adwords, Facebooks Ads, etc…

So the question to ask is, does your current website have liftoff? And if not, why not? It’s the single best thing you can do for your business’ success.

What is Website Design RFP?

A web design RFP is a request for proposal where you send a document to several website design firms for the purpose of them all competing and bidding for the chance to work with you. An RFP can range from being just a few pages to as many as 20 to even 100 pages, which depends on the scope and complexity of the project.

Who needs a Website Design RFP?

Not everybody needs to put together a website design RFP. Here is who a web design RFP is right for. If your project is in the $10,000 or above range and or you are looking to work with a large agency, then your best bet might be to use an RFP. RFPs are a more formal instrument and because of this they are more suited for corporate or government type websites.

Who doesn’t need a Website Design RFP?

If on the other hand you have a budget under $10,000, or your company culture is more relaxed and easy-going, you may not actually need an RFP to choose the right design firm to work with. For most small to medium-size businesses, simply filling out the contact form on the website design company’s page and initiating a telephone call is all you need to do to get the ball rolling. During this phone call, the design firm can typically get a sense of your needs and then send you a proposal based on the needs and goals determined in your phone call.

What experience are you going for?

When it comes to submitting an RFP, the question you want to ask yourself is what is the experience I want to go for? Designing a new website is ultimately a creative process that involves discovery, intuition and outside the box thinking. Some RFPs can be so daunting and intimidating that they are more likely to be completed by more business oriented design firms rather than truly creative companies who might be put-off by the laborious effort of filling out a 10 page RFP.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that most people do not need to put together a formal RFP when initially contacting a web design firm. A one-page e-mail detailing your specific needs for the project is often the perfect amount of content to get the ball rolling. Also, one last thought: the best indicator for the quality of work that a firm does is in their portfolio. Beware of a great proposal from the firm that has a mediocre portfolio. At the end of the day, you’re looking to get any website and if the websites delivered previously by this firm aren’t great, the chances are that yours won’t be either

Major Topics to cover in your RFP

“I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.”

- Rudyard Kipling

With all of that being said, if you decide to move forward with your RFP below is a list of topics you might want to cover. Again, don’t go overboard, but be specific with exactly what it is you’re looking for in a new site, and exactly who you’re looking for in a firm.

• Who
• Who are you?
• What does your company do?
• Where are you located?
• How many people work at your company?
• Who are you looking for?
• A large agency?
• A local design firm?
• A single man shop?
• In the RFP, you may ask the firm to describe themselves and include the following:
• Company history
• Number of employees
• Employee bios
• List of references you can contact
• What
• What kind of site are you looking for?
• What is your budget for the project? (larger design firms typically don’t take you seriously if you don’t have a budget in place)
• What type of design?
• Show examples of other sites with the design you have in mind
• What functional requirements do you have?
• CMS – Do you need a Content Management System?
• Will the site require a backend database?
• Will the site require payment processing?
• Are there other features you need? Reference other websites to describe the function you have in mind
• What features do you want to include?
• Responsive Design
• Search Engine Optimization
• Home Slideshow
• Contact Form
• FAQs
• Email Signup
• Gallery
• Video Integration
• Custom Map Integration
• Blog
• Social Media Integration
• Payment Processing
• When
• When will you need to receive questions from designer by?
• When will you need the proposal submitted?
• When will the project commence?
• When is your anticipated launch date?
• How
• How many pages will the site be? (very important for the designer to be able to clearly define the scope of the project)
• How many page templates will the site have? (a page template is a group of pages with the same design and layout, but with different content)
• How many people from your organization will be involved?
• How many rounds of revision will you need for the project?
• Why
• Why are you having the site designed or redesigned now?

Logistics

If you’re wondering what format you should use for the RFP, a simple Microsoft Word doc will suffice. Some people use Google Docs or a PDF, which are both fine too.

Conclusion

So there you have it, everything you need to put together a web design RFP. I’ve attached some sample RFPs that you might find helpful, just click just click the link below to view.

A lot of businesses provide very similar products and services. How do you identify one provider from another? The answer is branding. Branding of products and services is what differentiates a business or even its website from those of its competitors. This may sound elementary but often companies neglect to understand the importance of branding and identity. A brand is the representation of products or services, their characteristics including customer experiences and the values associated with them. When people use a product or service, they remember their experiences whether it be good or bad and these experiences are what get associated with that product or service. This association is what is helped by way of branding.

For this product or service representation as branding to work, it is imperative that websites feature how companies see themselves, what their end customers think about their company, and how companies want future clients to perceive them.

Branding is not Just About Having a Good Looking Logo

A company logo or a product logo is just the tip of the iceberg in branding and identity. Other facets of a well-designed brand experience and brand website include quality imagery, relevant and up to date content, ease of use, consistent colors, relatable emotion and character, consistency, and a memorable user experience.

Quality Imagery – The majority of website visitors are extremely visually focused and nothing can catch their attention better than a well-placed and relevant image of the product or service offered by a website. Quality, relevant and fresh imagery is what helps people associate emotions with brands.

Relevant and Up-to-date Content – Website viewers initially look to find out what a website is all about and if it can answer any of their wants or needs. By providing clear, relevant, and updated content, the proverbial phrase: “beating around the bush” can be avoided.

Ease of Use – It is very irritating to get lost inside a website and not know where to go or what to do next. Clear, familiar, and intuitive navigation makes it easier to promote a product or service or to hopefully close a sale.

Consistent Colors – Color is not just aesthetics, it also serves to trigger subconscious associations and emotions. Blue for example symbolizes trust; green for health, nature or environment; and red for energy and enthusiasm among others.

Relatable Emotion and Character – A website’s character and personality have to be in line with what the company stands for. If a company is all about trust and security then site viewers must be able to relate to this when going through the company’s website.

Consistency –  Setting a consistent look and feel throughout a website and its pages in terms of typography, colors, visuals, and layout not only helps to make a brand memorable but also makes web pages load faster

Memorable User Experience – Website viewers now use a bevy of platforms and devices to browse websites. Mobile compatible websites leave a positive impression on site visitors.

Conclusion 

Branding in web design is so much more than a company’s logo and tag line on a website. Branding is a well thought out strategy to help people associate a product or service with a value – to increase brand equity through a well-designed website. Brand equity adds value to a company’s product or service and thereby allows them to charge more compared to competitors; gain higher market shares; get higher positions on browser search results; or become a leader in their specific niches.

A Brand is MORE than a Name or a Logo 

A Brand is EVERYTHING, and everything is a Brand.

A Brand is your STRATEGY for EXPERIENCE.

So what to do? 

Brand is no longer what the ad agency says about your product or service but what customers say, share and experience about your company. That means how your retail staff interact with customers or how your marketing team creates conversations at your events is more important than what's said in an advertising campaign. This is the reality of the sharing economy today. Experience is only real when shared and if customers aren't sharing your brand, you might as well be invisible. 

Here is a branding manifesto for today's sharing economy:

1. Engage your Audience through Visuals
   65% of online audience are visual learners.
2. Keep your Tone Friendly
   73% of customers stick with a brand because of friendly customer service.
3. Colours Bring Life
   Colours increase Brand Recognition by upto 80%.
4. Flaunt the Typeface
   For the past 50 years, Helvetica has dominated design.
5. Whitespace Sells
   Whitespace increases the perception of information by 20%.
6. Establish your Brand's Voice
   45% of a brands image can be attributed to Who Says It and How It Says It.
7. Invite Trust
   54% of people don't trust brands.
8. Be the Market Leader
   Top brands outperform the stock market by 120%.
9. Focus on Content Strategy
   49% of brands do not have a documented content strategy.
10. Personalisation is the Key
    74% of online consumers expect a brand's web content to be personalised.

Okay but what do customers what out of a brand? 

Eighty percent of companies think their brands have superior experiences. Unfortunately, only eight percent of their customers agree. It’s time for brands to tackle the experience gap – the gap between how consumers want to experience brands, and what brands are actually doing.  It’s not just a marketing imperative; it’s a business imperative. 

Here are the best brand experience principles:

1. Invite participation.
   Great brand experiences are design-driven: simple, accessible, easy and inviting to the participant.
2. Build around users.
   Brand experience learned it from the web: people want their experiences to be relevant and feel customized to their needs. Even delivered at scale, experiences should “fit” the user.
3. Make it shareable.
   Experience sparks recommendation; experiences should be designed to tap into technology as well as our primal human desire to share.
4. Create community.
   Beyond fueling recommendations and referrals, experiences should be designed to connect people around brands—to leverage the few to inspire the many.
5. Make it useful.
   It should go without saying: any experience should add value to people’s lives.

And here are the top trends that people term as "great brand experiences":

1. Honesty and transparency are valued
   “The sales staff were knowledgeable and helpful [in] understanding my needs and aspirations. They were also prepared to provide better prices and throw in extras. A great and pleasant experience.”
   
2. “[The] benefits of the product are exaggerated 
3. during purchase, but claim settlement is complicated 
4. and slow… We [had a] very bad experience and 
5. will hardly choose this company again.”
6. Individual treatment and respect are expected
   “One dealer in particular inquired more about my personal needs to help look for what I really needed. He showed me the features and benefits of each car. Asked if overall price or monthly payment was more important. Took me for a test drive and also told me I could return it no questions asked in 30 days”
   “When they put your name and number into a computer system and you have a different person calling you back every day for weeks, it’s rude and completely impersonal” 
7. “Above and beyond” experiences are remembered (so are their opposites)
   “She sent me a thank you card mentioning something I had said while I was there. She actually listened.”
   “I was in the showroom looking at the vehicles and no one would approach me. So as I walked past a desk I took down the phone number. Then I called the number to get [the salesperson’s] attention... You should have seen his face when I waved to him.”

Finally, here are steps to better the brand experience:

1. Map the overall brand experience.
   Assess all the touchpoints that add up to brand experience to understand gaps, white spaces and areas for improvement. From a customer journey perspective, this is an invaluable step toward “plugging the holes” at which people defect or get distracted.
2. Improve existing experiences.
   Do the work of elevating existing experiences, with particular attention on drivers with the highest levels of impact, like customer-facing staff, partners and other people that represent the brand.
3. Invent and innovate.
   With so few truly differentiated experiences, brands have a huge opportunity to stand out and be special. Look at the tremendously low current performance scores for the extra, discretionary experiences brands create—and take advantage of that white space.

Branding is Dead. Long Live Brand Experience.

Wait... What???

Welcome to the sharing economy...

…a world where everything 
 gets shared

…everywhere

all the time… 

Today, 
 every conversation 

…every moment

…every story

…creates an experience

…which becomes your brand

So what works Today? Branding? Brand Experience?

Branding is…

…Tell ‘em you’re cool

…Tell ‘em in a BIG way

…Keep telling ‘em

…but Branding doesn’t work 
 like it did 30 years ago

Branding is dead…

Long live… Brand Experience

Brand Experience is…

…customer storytelling

…stuff worth talking about

…creating value

…creating events

…creating memories

…joining the dots

…reconnecting communities

…asking “what’s broken”?

…fixing pain points

…taking risks

…creating touchpoints online

…and touchpoints offline

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

which means… 

your brand is what people say about you and…

you can’t always be in the room…

they will soon forget what your brand said but they’ll always remember how you made them FEEL

FROM BRANDING TO BRAND EXPERIENCE

Traditional marketing was a Branding based approach: positioning, awareness, campaigns. 

In the 21st century, marketers need to focus on Brand Experience 

FROM OUTSIDE TO INSIDE
 

Branding use to start outside the company: agencies celebrities, campaigns. 

Today however, Brand Experience starts inside with the intersection of your people, culture and metrics.

Welcome to TODAY!

Content is king.
It’s the king of SEO, and it’s the king of every great website, blog, infographic, Twitter account, and Facebook page out there. Excellent content drives traffic to your site. It’s as simple as that. No image, blog post, video, or anything else that has ever gone viral has contained content that is anything less than excellent – be it excellently funny, excellently informative, excellently shocking, excellently entertaining, or excellently silly, they have all had one thing in common: excellence.

So, what makes excellent content?
Well, it depends on the medium, but in this post I am going to be focussing on written content and blog posts in particular. I like to think that I know a thing or two about how to craft together some excellent content for my worldwide audience. I didn’t learn the best practices of the craft overnight, but through years and years of hard work and writing literally hundreds and hundreds of blogs on all manner of subjects.

And so now you can take advantage of my experience as I detail for you some of the very best tips for crafting excellent content that I have picked up along the way, which will hopefully help to make your journey towards excellence a lot shorter than mine was – if only someone had been so kind when I started out.

1. Make It Positive

Positive content is infinitely more shareable than negative content. This may actually seem counter-intuitive – if you read the news, then you may think that negativity was a necessity. But marketing content doesn't work like that. People like to read and to share positive posts from businesses’ websites. Indeed, finding the perfect tone for your content is essential for it to be enjoyed by your following, and for them to feel that other people in their networks might enjoy it too.

So, what is the right tone for your blog?
Well, it’s all about finding the right balance between formality and informality. You, of course, want your content to be useful and informative for your readers, but ideally it should also be entertaining to a certain degree as well. In a sense, the perfect tone for your blog will probably reflect the tone and the style of your favourite teachers at school. Do you remember them? They somehow made what might otherwise have been some very dry information come alive, didn’t they. You may well even remember some of the things that they taught you even now. They did this by inserting a sense of fun and enjoyment into their content, and that’s exactly what you should be doing, too, no matter how serious or informative your post may be. Which brings me onto my next point.

2. Make It Practical

Aside from being positive, excellent content is almost invariably practical for the user to some degree. This of course makes sense when you think about it, and perhaps goes some way to distinguishing why the news we read seem to make its success out of being negative, whilst blogging is all about positivity. The news are simply there to spread the word of current events and affairs, whereas a blog post should have real, useable value for the reader.

Quite often you will find that posts will take the form of this one, where some practical and actionable tips are being offered for those that discover them. Indeed, this clean and clear simple style can be a great place for you to start out when getting to grips with crafting some excellent content for your blog. Think about your audience in relation to your product or service – what sort of thing do you think that they all have in common? Can you come up with a list of some great tips that might be useful to them all?

What’s so great about this is that your readers will have something of genuine worth that they can take away with them after they’ve finished reading your post. They can apply it in their work or lives, will see some great results in return, and will remember you and your blog for it.

3. Evoke Emotions

If you can hit on an emotion in the reader then you’re onto a serious winner, and the chances of your content going viral significantly increase. High arousal emotions are the best ones to target, and in fact sometimes the odd negative emotion can actually be of benefit here if used well. So, what are the high arousal emotions and how do you tailor your content to target them?

• Awe: If you can inspire awe in your readership, then they won’t be able to resist hitting that share button or leaving a comment or reply. Awe can be inspired by of a story, a real event, or even from an impressive list of tips or links.
• Surprise/Shock: Try and find something to write about that goes against people’s expectations in a manner that surprises or even shocks them, and they’ll just have to read on. Find new ways of doing things, new ways of thinking about things, challenge assumptions in your writing and prove those notions wrong – indeed this last point leads me onto to a negative emotion that inspires engagement…
• Anger: If you manage to mount a serious challenge against some common assumptions, then you’re almost certain to tick a few people off, and what you’ll find is that they’ll start tweeting about you, sharing your post on Facebook, leaving lots of comments and perhaps even a few blog posts will be written in reply. This of course is great for generating traffic to your website, but you must of course be careful with it. Don’t just be contrary for the sake of it. Remember, you must still be writing positively even if you are inspiring a negative emotion, and you of course must still be practical. So, inspiring anger works, and there’s nothing wrong with igniting a healthy debate about something, but don’t make yourself unpopular, and always check your facts before challenging established conventions.

Some Final Thoughts and Tips

Creating excellent content is a matter of practice and experience, but hopefully the tips I have provided for you above should save you some time when trying to find the right path that will work for you. Experiment a little, find what sort of posts arouse the most engagement from your following, take note, and recreate those sorts of posts again.

When it comes to formatting your posts, it also pays to follow a few conventions of style. Firstly, give your post a very ‘clickable’ title, something short that shows the reader instantly that what you’ve written has value for them. And then, once you’ve done that, do the same with your subheadings. You want to format your posts so that the content is easily scannable for readers, so lots of subheadings, lots of paragraph breaks, and a few bullet points are always good as well.

Finally, when you sign off on your post, make sure that the last thing that you do is ask for your readers to take some sort of action.

Ever seen a sales page for a major marketing training course? Did you notice the dozens of testimonials? There’s a reason the guru used up all that valuable space on their sales page: Testimonials are a marketer’s secret weapon.  There’s a mountain of marketing studies to back this up, but I’ll stick to just three of the choicest examples.

Example #1 from the B2B market
The B2B Content Marketing Report’s 2013 Survey, found customer testimonials to have the highest effectiveness of ANY other content marketing tactic. And that’s not according to just a few members – 89% of those polled said testimonials were effective. Even podcasts, considered to be THE sleeper content marketing tactic, got a mere 23% of marketers saying they were effective.

Example #2 from the B2C market
Nielsen’s Global AdView Pulse report found the rate of trust among consumers also puts testimonials at the top of trusted information, second only to “Recommendations from people I know”.

Example #3 Testimonials are a very close second to a personal recommendation
Search Engine Land found 72% of the consumers they surveyed said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 52% said positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.

With stats like that, I know you’re eager to find out how to get some testimonials for yourself. But before we delve into how to get testimonials, here are few tips for what separates great testimonials from so-so ones.

10 essential elements of a great testimonial

1. It’s from a real person. 99.9% of you don’t need to be told this, but just in case one of you was tempted to write a fake testimonial, because you heard on some forum it was okay, let me remind you: It’s not okay.
2. It’s not perfect. The person giving the testimonial doesn’t have to sound like an advertisement or look like a model. They don’t have to say things that perfectly align with your marketing strategy. Your production values don’t have to be Hollywood material. Keep it real to keep it believable.
3. It’s specific. A 200% improvement sounds like it could be marketing hype. A 187% improvement has clearly been measured.
4. It’s authentic. Don’t force people to give testimonials. Don’t make them read a script, or do anything they wouldn’t naturally do.
5. It’s comparative. While you shouldn’t force people to say things, you can give them some helpful guidelines. Asking them to describe what their experience of something was like before and after using your product is a good way to frame a testimonial. For example, “Before I used Sparkle Car Wash, I had to wash my car once a week during bug season. Now, I only have to wash my car about every six weeks.”
6. It hasn’t been edited. This leans on the point about not sounding like an advertisement, and not forcing people to say things they wouldn’t naturally say.
7. It’s been given with permission. What’s the single best way to take a customer who used to love your brand and turn them into someone who will never trust it again? It would be to use their words without their permission.
8. It describes benefits, not features. It’s nice for someone to say “I loved the 500 horsepower engine.” It’s better when they say, “Now I can pass whomever I want on big hills.” To honor the rule of not putting words in people’s mouths, you might have to give them another “framing question” for their testimonial, like “what’s your favorite thing about the Mustang GT Fastback?”
9. Get video testimonials when you can. A study of how to use testimonials to boost conversion rates had four segments – page A with no testimonials, page B with a text (written) testimonial, then page C with no testimonial and page D with a video testimonial. Adding a testimonial lifted response in both cases, but the videos blew the text away… by nearly ten-fold.
10. Place the testimonial near a part of the checkout process where people tend to bail. Even the best testimonials won’t help you much if they’re hidden away for no one to see. So don’t do that – put your testimonials out on all the places where people need them most. For ecommerce sites, this is the order form, or possibly the product pages. For B2B sites, it might be on the contact page or on a form for a project brief. For both types of companies, it couldn’t hurt to sprinkle a few testimonials on your home page, or in the navigation column of your blog.

How to get great testimonials

Now that you know what you’re aiming for, here’s how to get it:

1. Get the timing right. This applies to any testimonial, but with video testimonials, when you ask is especially important.
   
   I saw one marketing expert get video testimonials from people immediately after they had seen a presentation by her. Many of the people coming out of the talk were energized, excited and just basically blow away by what they had learned. More than half the people that were asked to give a testimonial did. They just stepped away from the flood of traffic, got under a decent light and a stable background, and were recorded for 5-20 seconds while they described their impression of the marketer.
   
   The timing was key – the marketer would not have gotten anywhere near the enthusiasm or willingness to give those testimonials if she had asked the next day, or even a few hours later.
   
   Key takeaway: When asking for video testimonials, ask at the right moment. If you can get the moment right, less-than-perfect production value won’t matter.
    
2. Use the Reviews tab in Facebook
   You’ll need a Facebook page set up as a local business to apply this tip, but if you are set up that way, this a great way to add a reviews feature to your Facebook presence in a snap. Facebook’s instructions for how to do this are easy to follow.
   
   
    
3. Have a plan in place for when you get the glowing email from a client or customer
   Just as the best time to ask for a video testimonial is when your client or customer is thrilled, the best time to ask permission to use someone’s words is when they’ve just sent them. The next time you get a glowing email from someone, have a reply ready that asks if you can use their words on your website (or elsewhere).
   
   Something like this might work:
   

   “Claire,
   Thanks so much for those kind words! Would you be open to letting us quote you on our website? I could identify you as the AOK Marketing Manager, or just identify you as Claire S. from Somerset New Jersey.”

   
   Giving people a choice in how they are identified often makes them more likely to say yes. If they seem even a little uncomfortable, and they have a website, offer to link to their website. Often the incentive of a link is enough “pay” to get people on board.
   
   If that first script doesn’t work, try this: “I would really like to share your success with my other clients. Would that be okay?”
    
4. Make the most of LinkedIn LinkedIn offers an endorsements feature for people you’re connected to. If you’ve gotten any endorsements on your profile or your company page, you could potentially use those endorsements on your website or other materials. Again, it’s always nice to ask permission first, so get an email out to people who’ve endorsed you… before they see themselves quoted on your business card.
    
5. Make it easy Contact forms are ready-made tools to collect testimonials with. You can add a separate page for people to submit testimonials to, of course, but so long as your contact form has a field that’s long enough for 3-4 sentences of type, it can serve double duty. Perhaps a call to action added to your navigation column might increase testimonials, too. It never hurts to ask.
    
6. Hold a Facebook contest These can be for video testimonials, essays, or just quotes. The benefits of contests are that you can easily frame how you want your testimonials to be delivered.
   
   The drawback is that you are, in a sense, paying people to leave a testimonial. There is a little bit of inauthenticity to contest testimonials. However, I’m including the technique here because it is widely used for getting testimonials, and it certainly does work.
   
   What do you think? Is holding a contest a bad way to get testimonials? Are there other way to get testimonials that I missed?

Appearances can be deceiving, but numbers don’t lie! 

Carefully selected visual content can add real value to your brand’s sales and marketing process. Research validates that out, and not your traditional type either. Experts who study brain scans correlated with tracking eye movements indicate these patterns can speak volumes about consumer preferences.

Part physiology and part art, the reasons for this reality are varied. What it means is that no matter where you market your products or services, from tiny gadgets to in-person events to subscription packages, visuals should be at the core of how you plan your communications strategy.

Consider this as your opportunity to take an honest look your brand’s image and touch it up for a public appearance. After all, when was the last time you headed to a business meeting or into the office without taking a look at the person staring back at you?

We’ll explore a few principles driven by statistics that help us understand why visuals are such a big deal for sales and content marketing.

Photos and videos appeal to our brains

Let’s get technical for a moment and acknowledge the fact that we’re built to process visual cues far better than text-based ones. Quoting from a Nieman Reports interview with Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University:

“Processing print isn’t something the human brain was built for. The printed word is a human artifact. It’s very convenient and it’s worked very well for us for 5,000 years, but it’s an invention of human beings. By contrast Mother Nature has built into our brain our ability to see the visual world and interpret it. Even the spoken language is much more a given biologically than reading written language.”

That reality means photos, videos and related tech gadgets play well with human audiences overall—not just humans in a specific demographic.

Another good example is this somewhat dated yet valuable Unbounce.com roundup of research pointing to the power of the human face in images to generate empathy and improve conversion rates among viewers. The roundup identifies one successful example of such a pairing in Wistia, a video hosting and marketing firm— mouse over any of these photos to watch a series of still frames strung together to spotlight zany dancing and even a disappearing head.

Fun visuals can indeed generate powerful engagement.

Social media helps prepare buyers to purchase

No duh, you say? Social media may seem an obvious delivery platform for visual-driven sales, and for good reason: Data bear out those assumptions.

For example:

• 93 percent of Pinterest users use the platform to plan purchases [Shopify]
• 
Ad recall, brand awareness and purchase consideration experience lift within the first second of a Facebook video ad playing [Facebook]
• 
Consumers view native ads such as those on social media 52 percent more than banner ads [Right Mix Technologies]


Sites such as Social Media Impact explain how you can capitalize on Pinterest visuals and visuals on other platforms to drive sales. Even developers can tap Pinterest for a buck as Bloomberg reports via InternetRetailer.com.

Visuals boost pre-sales credibility

Content marketers can support their sales by emphasizing credibility through visuals. Consider Stanford Web Credibility Research, which has compiled a list of the 10 most critical factors affecting perceived credibility of websites.

No. 6 on the list should catch your eye. That’s the line item noting the value of a professional-looking presentation.

“We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone,” the researchers note. “When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.”

Be sure to check out MediaPost report on home-buying and consumer spending points out. If your brand happens to produce sports apparel, what athletics trends might impact your next marketing campaign? How might you generate revenue based on activity in similar-but-different industries?

In similar fashion, a small shift on the visual marketing front can unleash a tidal wave of engagement and, ideally, consumer spending. A major component of the infographic and other visual media is to grab viewers’ attention so you have more time to build your case, GetResponse.com points out on its blog.

Journey into the frenetic online world, the 500 million-tweets-per-day fray and snag eyeballs with photos and video.

And don’t forget to love a little. It might just boost your sales close to 13,600 percent.

 When it comes to visual content, your customers expect something very different compared to just a few years ago. It is now supercharged by mobiles and visual social media networks.

It used to be OK to have a static website gallery, post text to your social channels, and use corporate photos and videos online. Now, readers depend on visuals to figure out whether your content is worth their time.

Expectations of consumers have changed too. They no longer have time to click through to an image or link to see what your content is about. They make split-second decisions based on the visual content provided.

So whether your content is being consumed within social channels or on your website, visual content remains a powerful tool – but only if done correctly.

In short, the rules of visual content have changed.

Why should you use visual content?

Just take a quick look at these 3 snack size facts about the visually wired human.
In a visual content format :)

Below are new rules of visual content marketing. Break them and you risk losing your customers.

1. The law of the recent

When we go online, most of the content we consume is from today, or at best yesterday.

Content from last week is practically unreachable unless you’re looking for something specific. And content from last year has become history so ancient, it might as well be obsolete.

Skeptical? Test it.

Go to your favourite social network. Open it up and take a look at your home feed. Can you find a post from last week in the first 25 updates?

Notice something else? The only way you can tell how recent a post is, is by the time stamp on them. Posts from today will either have the time they were published visible or tell you how long ago the post was made. E.g. an hour ago, five hours ago, yesterday.

In order for your content to be relevant, it has to be recent. The best way to do that is by time stamping your content or featuring topical events.
Honda has created a social hub on their website where they curate and display recent customer content.

2. The law of authenticity

People are more likely to trust a referral from a friend or relative than a company.

In fact, research has shown Millennials are even more likely to trust a complete stranger than a company. It’s why user-generated content is considered far more compelling than any content a brand produces.

Photos and videos from your customers tell the real story of your brand and are far more effective.
NZone is an extreme sport (skydiving) company. Customers who share personal pictures of their experience increase authenticity and can instil trust for anyone considering making a purchase.

3. The law of credibility

The law of credibility states that your customers must be willing to stand by your brand by publicly aligning themselves with it.

In layman terms, if your customers are posting images and sharing their experiences, they should be linking back to you or tagging you in their social media updates.

Think about it. What would you trust more? An image or video shared by a company showing how happy and satisfied their clients are? Or the same thing shared by one of their customers?

Dole is an international brand which markets and distributes fruit including pineapples, bananas and paw paws. They often get their customers to share content from events or at home consuming the product.

4.  The law of relevance

Visual content needs to be presented in context. It has to be relevant, informative and well organized.

So if you’re selling a product online, you need to provide corresponding visual content for it. Make sure you place relevant content in the right place.

For example if you are selling  particular line of clothing not only do you need to place photos of that on the right web pages, you also need to place the correct user-generated photos on the right webpage, which in this case may involve your customers with those clothes in a real life situation.

Superette is an on-line retailer. They take care of this law by linking customer photos to their products.

5. The law of the caption

A picture may be worth a thousand words but a caption or headline can often bring it further to life.

There’s no denying that we process visual content faster than text-based content. But a simple caption is often required to tell a visual story more effectively.

A caption also helps you communicate your brand’s identity. For example if your brand focuses on making things easy and fun for your customers, then the caption can be humorous.

The Press, a daily newspaper, ran a photo competition and asked their readers to submit their best backyard cricket photos for a World Cup promotion. One user submitted the image below with a caption that made a photo infinitely more interesting.

6. The law of social

Your customers expect to be able to interact with your visual content – whether it’s on your social channels or on your website.

Make it easy for them by providing them opportunities to comment on your content, share them easily on their preferred social networks, and even email the content to their friends if they want to.

The law of social doesn’t end here though. Your customers also expect you to acknowledge their efforts. If they’ve left a comment, reply to it. If they’ve shared on social media, thank them for it. Find a way to make it worth their while and they’ll continue giving your visual content the same attention.

Interislander – a ferry service ran a photo contest that asked their customers to share their favourite Interislander memory on their website or Instagram and tag them.

Needless to say, the competition was a huge hit!

7. The law of personality 

For too long brands have been bland and boring. Think stock photos.

Thankfully, the recent developments in visual content make it easy to bring a brand to life.

The right visuals, including photos, videos, infographics, and e-books can add depth to your brand story and reinforce your culture.

One of the easiest ways to do so is to give your customers a “behind the scenes” look. Show them what goes into making or marketing your brand, post pictures from office events, maybe even how you brainstorm.

The more your customers know about the culture of your company, the more your brand’s personality will shine through.

The Queensland Opera does this brilliantly. From pictures of their costume designs, rehearsals, and makeup – they keep their fans and followers engaged.

8. The law of consistency

Apart from engaging customers, the role of visual content is to reinforce your brand. For that to happen, your content needs to have consistency.

This isn’t strictly a new law, but it’s worth reinforcing. We’re not referring to publishing visual content consistently. It’s more about elements in your visuals that tell your target market that the visual is from your company – even if you’re not linked or tagged in it.

You can do this by using the same:

• Fonts and colours as your website
• Images in your company’s social media accounts and profile page headers
• Design element like a background, banner, or logo.

Customers should be able to recognize the content is from your brand at a glance.

All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, have their photos naturally branded. Whether their visuals are from their own team or from fans, they all include the All Blacks in one form or another.

9. The law of resilience

Content never sleeps and neither does your online presence.

Visual content is not a campaign that ends in a few days or weeks. It’s not a one-off thing. It’s an on-going strategy.

Make creating, publishing, and maintaining visual content a key part of your marketing strategy.

Jucy, one of tourism’s top content marketers, has created an on-going visual content, much of which is from their customers.

10. The law of quality

With cell phone cameras getting better and better by the day, customers have learned to take great photos and videos themselves.

And with the numerous filters available through Instagram and others, it’s possible to source high quality content from your customers.

The good news is, you can use that content and combine it with your own in-house efforts to help with your marketing activities.

Dilmah, a renowned tea company, encourages its tea drinkers to share their best photos with them for a chance to win awesome prizes like a 10-day trip to New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

A photo submitted by one of Dilmah fans. Source: Dilmah Tea in the City Photo Competition

Visual content – a vital part of your content marketing strategy.

There’s no denying it. Visual content is a vital part of any marketing strategy.

The days of the old website photo gallery are far behind us. When done right, visual content can drive traffic to your site, increase page views, lower bounce rate, and convert website traffic into sales.

Use these new laws of visual content to up your marketing game and grow your business. Ignore them and you risk becoming obsolete.

How do your current visuals compare against these new laws? Are they giving you the results you want? Or are you struggling to create visuals that would interest your customers?

Follow these tips to help you create clear, concise, lively writing that captures your e-mail readers' attention.

E-mail marketers use many strategies to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns, but one area often overlooked is what fills the page--the copy you write.

Whether you're a seasoned writer or a novice, it's always important to strengthen your editorial skills and make sure your e-mail marketing communications contain valuable information. Good copy helps your readers understand your offer--and how to respond. The following copywriting tips are ones that pros know well. Keeping these "commandments" in front of you when you write will help you create compelling copy that engages your readers, conveys your business message and creates effective calls for action.

Commandment #1: Know your audience. 

Who is this e-mail going to? Picture the average person on your list. Give them a name, even. Think about what their day is like. Think about what's important to them. What are they passionate about? How old are they? What products or services have they purchased from you in the past and why? The more you know about the audience you're writing for, the more targeted and relevant your copy will be.

Commandment #2: Determine your value proposition. 

Know the answers to these questions: Why should your customer buy your product or service? What's in it for them? Why is your product better than the one down the street? What are your key differentiators?

Commandment #3: Find a unique selling proposition. 

The more your offer stands out from the competition, the better your chances of getting a response. Rosser Reeves, author of Reality in Advertising, defines the unique selling proposition as a promotion that offers "something that competitors do not, or will not, offer." He also says, "The proposition must be strong enough to pull new customers to the product."

Commandment #4: Establish an objective. 

What's the purpose of this e-mail? What action are you trying to get the reader to take? You need to be clear on this before you start writing. If the answer isn't clear to you, it certainly won't be clear to your reader.

Commandment #5: Use a compelling subject line. 

The subject line is what gets your e-mail opened, so don't write something quickly just before sending. You have to convince your readers that they really need to open your e-mail. The best word you can use to get the reader's attention is you. The word you says that the message is about them. Other great words for subject lines (and headlines) include new, exciting, exclusive and introducing. Also, try to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less, including spaces.

Commandment #6: Write a great headline. 

If the subject line gets your reader to open the e-mail, then the headline gets them to read further. Consider using some of the buzzwords mentioned in commandment #5 in the headline so it'll grab readers with an obvious "What's in it for me?" message. Here's a question to ask yourself: What if my customers only read the headline? Will they know enough about you and what you offer?

Tip: Write five to 10 different subject lines and five to 10 different headlines to see what works best. Also, you may find that it's easier to write a subject line and headline after you've written the body copy.

Commandment #7: Avoid weasel words. 

When writing headlines, subheads and body copy, don't use words that avoid a direct command, aka weasel words. These include may, maybe, hope, wish, try, but, could, perhaps and strive. Instead, use words like will and can to describe what your product or service will or can do for your reader.

Commandment #8: Don't use passive voice--write in the present tense. 

Passive voice weakens your message. It's best to avoid it. Here are a few examples to help you see the difference:

"Our company was chosen to receive an award" vs. "Our company received an award."
"We have had 15 new products arrive" vs. "Fifteen new products arrived."
"Ten new designs were created" vs. "We created 10 new designs."

Commandment #9: Include a customer quote. 

Do you have a great customer quote that you can include in your e-mail? A brief and convincing quote can add credibility to your campaign. The more real you can make the person to your readers, the better. Including their name, what city or state they live in and even a photo, if it fits your campaign, is a great way to communicate the value of your service.

Commandment #10: Keep your copy clean and concise. 

After you write your first round of copy, read it out loud. Also, have someone else read it to see if they understand the message and the call to action. As you edit, cut unnecessary words and consolidate ideas. See if you can get your text down to 30 to 50 percent of what you started with. Also, include bullet points and possibly subtitles to make it easy to read-and, more important, easy to scan--as most readers scan a page before deciding whether or not to read all the details.

Great copywriting is within your reach. Keeping these tips in mind when you write will greatly improve your copy, making it easier for readers to understand and respond to your e-mail campaign. Good, thoughtful writing will ultimately improve your success as an e-mail marketer.

Defining Your Brand: The First Step In Your Marketing Strategy to Build a Local and a Global Brand

Truly defining your business is a critical first step in developing your marketing plan. Through a continuing series of stories, we've been examining how to build a compelling brand experience that will drive customer loyalty -- highlighting the principles of big brand marketing so that small business owners can replicate those kinds of successes. But before you can start building your brand's experience for customers, you need to take some fundamental first steps to define the kind of brand you want to be.

To guide our marketing plan, we need a very well-crafted statement of the type of business we are in, the type of customers we serve and how we serve them. We have to define what we stand for and the types of products and services that our customers can expect from us. This truly is the first step in the branding process.

At first glance, defining your brand may seem easy, but it takes some soul searching, decision making and data gathering.

Take, for example, someone going into business as a lawyer. It's pretty easy to define that brand -- a person who practices law, right? But to build a brand around his practice, a lawyer needs to determine specifically what kind of law he focuses on and what kind of client he is targeting before any marketing can begin. That means thinking through what regions of the world, categories of law, style of service and other offerings he brings to the table.

When defining your brand, put as much clarity as possible into how the brand and business is described, so that you can build a specific brand experience to match it. Here are three key steps to help you get there:

1. Make an inventory of your skills. List out what you are especially good at and what you want your customers to think of when your brand comes to mind. Your unique set of skills will form the basis of your brand definition.
2. What are your customers' needs? From your list of skills, identify those that your customers particularly need. Think through the kinds of things you do that your customers will come to you for. You should define your brand based on your ability to fulfill such demands.
3. Focus on what differentiates. It's important for your brand to be different than other similar options available to customers. Of course your brand experience will ultimately differentiate you, but being unique starts with deciding what attributes set you apart from others. Your goal is to be different and better than your competition.

Let's revisit our lawyer example. A well-defined lawyer wouldn't just say he "practices law." He would be much more definitive and specific about his focus if he wants customers to see his business as a brand. So instead of calling himself a "practicing lawyer," he may define his brand as a "compassionate attorney specializing in family law in the state of California, servicing women who need help getting through the tough times in their lives."

Notice the clarity in the brand definition?

While it's important to be as specific as possible, you also want to be careful not to box your business in with a tightly constrained brand definition. For example, if a hair salon only defined itself as providing "women's short haircuts," it would close itself off from business that could come from customers seeking other hair styles, salon services like coloring or straightening and other demographics like children or men.

If it makes sense to be super specific because you have identified a strong niche market, just be sure to do this consciously. I've seen many salons that specialize in just curly hair or blowouts. If the business is large enough, those could be very well-defined, successful brands. Just be careful not to define the brand too strictly, which would close out future business-building activities.

The trick is to balance specificity, focus and differentiation with the ability to expand. When defining your brand, make sure to describe the type of business in a way that allows for growth over time.

Strategies to Build a Global Brand

Building a global brand requires more than just launching a website that's accessible from almost anywhere in the world.

From language missteps to misunderstanding cultural norms, veteran branding expert Barbara E. Kahn has seen it all when it comes to the missteps of launching a brand across borders. Here, she shares five tips to help entrepreneurs avoid the pitfalls.

1. Understand customer behavior. 

Just because consumers have certain buying preferences or habits in one culture, doesn't mean that such preferences are universal. "It's astonishing how many retailers haven't made it because they haven't studied how consumers shop," she says.

For example, Walmart's mistake in choosing locations in China that were near industrial parks when consumers were used to shopping closer to home instead of near work.

2. Position yourself properly. 

Good brand positioning includes truly understanding your competition and then looking at your competitive advantage. Who are the providers of similar products and services that you sell in this country? They may not be the same providers as in your country.

For example, if you sell athletic clothing, look at where people are buying their athletic clothing. It could be from specialty stores, online retailers, or sporting goods stores. If you have a high-end brand and you're going into a market where the preferred buying location is discount retailers, it may take a different strategy from the one you use in your country. 

You need to understand how people shop and how your brand will fit into that mix.

3. Know how your brand translates.

A clever brand or product name in one language may translate into an embarrassing misstep in another. For example, the French cheese brand Kiri changed its name to Kibi in Iran because the former name means “rotten” or “rank” in Farsi -- not exactly the association you want for cheese.

In addition to ensuring that your brand translates well into other languages, consider which colors are favored in various markets. In the U.S., blues and greens are favored, while reds and yellows are frequently used in some Latin American countries and may be appealing and familiar to audience members from those areas.

4. Think broadly. 

Since your company may need to expand into offering new products based on regional market demands, it's important that your company name be broad enough to accommodate those changes.

For example, Boston Chicken changed its name to Boston Market because it had expanded into other foods,. If your company name is Brian's Computers for example, consider whether that will be limiting in other markets if you also sell peripherals and services, she says.

5. Find good partners. 

Work with your attorney to protect your intellectual property overseas, filing the appropriate trademark and patent protections in the U.S. and elsewhere, if applicable. Find trade representatives who come recommended from colleagues or state or federal trade offices, since they're more likely to be reputable.

If you decide to license your product or service name to a manufacturer or provider overseas, exercise tight controls to make sure that the provider is reputable and won't misuse or misappropriate your name and will adhere to your quality control standards. When you put your brand name on a product or service, you want a consistent experience so that every time, people have it, they understand the values of the brand.