The 2011 Appletree Christmas Card Awards

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for! The 2011 Appletree Christmas Card Awards! I made a number of awards last year, for the best, worst, cleverest and most pointless Christmas card – click here to read that blog.

Now I’m delighted to announce the winners of the competition for Christmas 2011.

The winner of Best and Most Time Spent On It Christmas card goes to Hannah, a student at Reading University, who worked with us for a number of months last summer. She was a temporary Account Manager at Appletree, while we looked for a permanent member of staff. In her spare time, Hannah is a budding artist and she created a wonderful card especially for us. It was hand painted in oils, and shows a blue apple (from our Appletree logo) wearing a Santa hat. It’s beautiful and totally unique. I don’t know how long it took Hannah to paint (and I’m not suggesting that you should paint an individual card for every person or business to whom you want to send a card) but we were really touched by the thought and effort that Hannah put into the card. This card is so special that I’ll be keeping it and definitely offering
Hannah a summer job next year!

At the risk of upsetting a lot of people, I’d also like to award a mass prize to everyone who sent us an impersonal email ‘card’. We received a lot that had no personalisation on them. No ‘Dear Name’ and no mention of who it was from, apart from in the subject line. It’s very easy to find free email cards on the internet these days. One of the problems with this is that some other people might send the same card and it gets a bit boring to see the same card again and again. So the Sorry But I Deleted Your Email award goes to all those people who thought they’d save some money while missing out on a good relationship building opportunity.

The I’m Not Sure Why You Even Bothered award goes to the people who sent out a plain text email telling me that instead of sending cards, they were donating money to charity. When you don’t tell me how much you’re donating or where the money is going – and you don’t even bother to make the email interesting to read or look at – why bother? Am I supposed to be impressed by your charitable or environmental attitude? Next time, why not do something useful to your business like picking up the phone to say Hello and Merry Christmas to a few people?

On a much more positive note, I’d like to give the Creatively Branded Card award to Madeleine To at Blueberry Financial Services, for the card she had designed by her sister and printed by www.Moo.com. Madeleine uses a cute blueberry character as part of her marketing and branding and he appeared on her card too. It’s very unique and Moo.com provides a cost effective and reliable service.

Did you send Christmas cards? Do you think it’s worth it? Let me know if you an alternative marketing tactic that you use in December – you never know, you might win an award for it!

How do you create a consistent brand? Try Electric Hair!

What does having electric hair have to do with creating a consistent brand for your business?

Electric Hair was set up by Mark Woolley, whose aim is for the business to become known as the best hair dressing brand in the UK. With salons in London, Brighton and Reading, the Oxford salon was opened earlier this year. As with all the other salons, the building has been bought by the business, which means it can be done up in a similar way to the other salons. When you walk in, you recognise the slick, modern decor of the other salons.

The team at Oxford have been handpicked and is lead by Louise, who used to work at the Reading salon; she lives and breathes the essence of Electric. Under her guidance, her staff are welcoming – you get a drink on arrival and a consultation, to discuss what you need. Like Mark, Louise is keen to develop her staff and help them achieve their goals. Her goal was to run a salon and with Mark’s support, she’s now doing it. If any of her team wants the same, she’ll inspire them to get there.

Does it matter if your hair is washed the same way each time to go to the hairdresser? Maybe not to everyone, but it is nice to know what you’re going to get. With Electric you know that you’ll get a great haircut (that looks better for longer than your previous hairdresser managed!) You know that you won’t get silly ideas about hair styles that don’t suit you, or outrageous colours you don’t like. You know that you’ll be treated as an individual and given the time you need, with personal care and interest in you. You’ll get the same treatment if you walk into any of the salons.

Creating a consistent brand is not about putting your logo on everything. It’s much bigger than that. It’s about treating your customers the way they want to be treated and about always treating them the same way, so that they know what they will get from you, each time they have any contact with them.

What can you do to create a consistent brand and give your clients the best experience you can?

Web-attractiveness isn’t necessarily good design

Alice

Reading through the LinkedIn Groups a question grabbed my attention. It was a lady who was obsessed with setting up a series of fancy designed monetized blogs. As well as wavering on which kind of blogging platform to use, she was very concerned about the design, as well as keen to start making money.

Unfortunately the thing about monetized blogs is that they take some time before they start to yield decent results. They need to be attractive to readers in order to build up a suitable following that would respond to the advertising, and they need to be visited regularly before there will be enough readers tempted to click on.

And web-attractiveness doesn’t mean a fancy template, it means good, varied, consistent and practical content. Plenty of websites have spent a fortune on the design, only to be sorely lacking in the information they contain, especially if it is out of date. Large corporates waste money thinking that by redesigning their website it will enhance its performance, but most visitors don’t notice, only caring about the information they need and want. OK, cleverly designed buttons that encourage a mouse-click may be successful, but what about the stuff they lead on to?

What makes a website or blog successful is good content, coupled with excellent navigation that guides the visitor in the right direction. Visitors should enjoy their experience, be easily gratified by finding what they are looking for, benefit from the information gleaned and be suitably impressed to bookmark, subscribe and regularly return for more.

When a visitor lands on your website or blog, they immediately want to establish this is the right kind of website they are looking for, without stopping to admire the fancy graphics and beautiful colours. A good design enables readers to immediately find what they want, and doesn’t hinder or distract them from their purpose. The overall result should be readable, legible, uncluttered and easy to use.

And the content should also encourage a desire to return, react to the call to actions and succumb to the sign up forms. Although an excellently written book may be read many times, it can’t compare to a blog that is regularly updated with new content, satisfying both its human readers as well as the search engine robots, who play such a necessary part in promoting your content throughout the web.

The importance of good design

Alice

There is nothing more off-putting than going to a networking group, finding an interesting prospect, asking for their card and receiving something that is obviously from Alta Vista, when your initial concept was that they were a thoroughly professional outfit successfully doing business left, right and centre.

How you present yourself shouldn’t only be limited to the promotional pitch you give, the clothes you wear, your manner and the wonderful ideas you can provide. I remember at one particular networking group, a flashy dentist wearing a wonderful Italian suit gave me a thoroughly beautiful business card, and I was suitably impressed. I asked if she had any other literature, and she dug out a leaflet that was obviously hand-made, freshy gathered from her office printer, and badly laid out on sub-standard paper. Hmmm.

Using a professional graphic design company can make or break a business’s portrayal to the outside world. Only yesterday I noticed a good friend of mine had changed her business’s logo. Although the original was fun and easily comprehensible, it didn’t have that ‘edge’ that would set it apart as a successful and knowledgeable business, of which it was. It had been transformed into a much more modern, lively, stimulating and informative version. I also noticed that the graphic designers had taken the trouble to add in important elements for the client, resulting in a truly personal and appropriate promotional aid.

This is important if you want to progress with your business, as first impressions can make a big difference. Our electricity company wrote to us to say our electric meter needed to be updated, and they included the logo of the subcontractor doing the job on their letter. This logo was so obviously hand-made, we doubted the validity of the proposal, and rang up the electricity company to see if it wasn’t a hoax. I wonder if the bad quality of this logo also put off other customers, who might prevent the company in question from entering their premises, all because they didn’t put forward a professional appearance in their communcations.

So take a good look at how your company portrays itself via its logo and printed material. Taking the trouble to spend a bit extra to get a professional job done might make all the difference towards winning a proposal, influencing a client to do business, and creating a good impression at a networking event.

Watch out for our new website

Chantal

We’re building a brand new website for Appletree, so I thought I’d let you know how we’re doing it and how we do it for clients.

The first thing we did was to ask ourselves lots of questions about how we want our new site to look. We looked other websites that we really like and worked out what we like about them. Our own blog is one site that we like, especially the line of bright apples at the top. While there’s a lot on the page, it’s all balanced, unlike our existing website which has lots of white space at the top and sections that don’t flow together. The apples and our logo don’t go together very well.

We also talked about the structure of our new website – what pages we’re going to include and all the elements we want to show on the home page. These include a sign up form for Scribbles, our email newsletter and sections were we can promote our new products and services. This new site is going to be very dynamic with lots going on and lots of news and fresh resources being added.

Alice took all the notes we made and worked her magic on the first draft of the design – here’s how it looked.

It’s great start – cleaner and more modern that our existing site. However, I’d like the colours of the new site to match the row of apples because they’re much brighter. No more pale green background, please Alice!

We also thought the new home page was a bit busy, so we’re taking the background boxes off the section titles in the columns and changing the text from white to bright green. Below is the next version. Much better!

What do you think of our proposed new website?

Why boring adverts don’t work

Alice

Advertising is having a difficult time at the moment, as there is a ‘rumour’ going about that it doesn’t work. Well, that is true if your advert is rubbish, and believe me, there are plenty of rubbish adverts out there!

Chantal gave me one to comment on yesterday, which was particularly bad. For starters it was jam-packed full of words in a tiny font. Why do companies have the urge to stuff practically everything in to the ads that they think is important? After all, that’s what websites are for, and your advert should direct interested parties to a well-written landing page that is relevant to that particular advert.

Adverts should concentrate on a specific area of your business that you think your customers need or want the most. Do some research to find out what the biggest problem your clients have, and then tailor one of your solutions so it is ‘ad-worthy’, and base your ad-copy around that. The idea is to relate to your customers’ pain by empathising with them, provide a solution to attract their attention, and incentivise them take action to go to your landing webpage and make contact to find out more.

If you’re worried about not promoting the rest of the things your company does, that doesn’t matter. Once you’ve got the customer across your threshhold, both virtually or physically, then you can practice your sales patter to direct their attention to what else you have to offer.

As well as the tiny boring text within this advert, there were these unpromising aspects:

• a particularly uninspiring headline – why not pose a question or statement that is attractive to a potential customers based around their problem?
• unrelenting large blocks of writing – alleviate this by breaking the text up with bullet points for more emphasis; it can also aid those that quickly scan adverts as it highlights the most important elements.
• don’t conform with a picture of a smiling lady, that is so passé it almost has the opposite effect it is intended for; that concept went out with the last century – good layout is better than inappropriate imagery.
• stuffing a tiny unnoticeable version of your logo at the bottom – the position good, but make it larger and combine it with an equally large URL of your landing page with the incentivised call to action; giving your customers something to do as well as read all your advert will ensure a much larger response rate.

Don’t use WordArt in your PowerPoint presentations

Chantal

Quite a few years ago, when people discovered PowerPoint and how useful it was for creating presentations, there was a trend for throwing as much into a presentation as possible. In went the bullet points that whizzed in from left and right. In went the images that spiralled round until they settled in the right place. And in went the WordArt – a way of emphasising a key word and phrases by giving them colour, stretching them sideways and making them 3D. Funky stuff!

But WordArt actually makes it harder to read the words you want to emphasise because it’s too easy to stretch and distort them. It’s too simple to put them into colours that don’t tie in with the rest of your presentation.

If it’s hard to read on a computer screen, just think how difficult it will be for someone seeing it on a projector screen from the back of the room.

When Microsoft launched Office 2007 they came up with some clever new features that mean we don’t have to rely on the old stuff anymore; and they sensibly relegated WordArt to a tiny button that’s quite hard to find.

So the next time you’re putting together a PowerPoint presentation, leave out the WordArt. If you need highlight key messages, just put them in big, bold letters on a slide all on their own. If you need colour and graphics, think about using your own logo and branding to bring your slides to life.

Much better, isn’t it?

Does a brand need a logo?

Alice

The instantaneous reaction to the word ‘brand’ cultures up a logo, a symbol which is recognisable for that company. It is an image or shape that becomes memorable (as long as there is sufficient awareness) and resonates with its customer base to stimulate recognition and acts as its identification.

But logos aren’t always symbols, quite a lot are comprised of words, usually the name of the company. This collection of letters, combined with the font and colour used, become the symbolic recognition point, and in some cases the font and colour themselves are protected, as for the BBC and Oxfam respectively.

And then there is the absence of a logo, when the verbal rendition of the name is relied upon to conjure up recognition of the brand. Remember a brand is also a promise of excellent customer service and quality of product, so the mere mention of a brand’s name should result in immediate expectation from that particular target market. To go a step further, blind people can’t recognise symbols, so they have to rely on reputation and referrals to make their decisions.

Another example of brands without logos could be celebrities. They depend on their appearance and performance to command appropriate recognition, so supposedly their faces or whatever they do becomes their brand. In this case it is their relationship with their customers that needs to be cultivated in order to perpetuate their brand.

And finally search engines don’t depend on logos to promote and elevate a company’s brand, as spiders cannot read images. They rely solely on carefully optimised words within whatever digital medium the business uses to bring themselves to their customers’ attention.

It’s not good to make your website flashy

Alice

I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked how to optimise a website’s homepage that consisted purely of Flash. Flash is a programme that provides animation with images and graphics for websites, and you probably have come across many examples (I did the other day with a digital marketing firm) where you are greeted with a little ‘show’ of moving graphics that are supposedly meant to be impressive.

This particular website showed a graphic of a computer with a running newsroll describing in a totally unnecessarily cryptic message about how impressive their business was and why you should use their services. The other pages had graphics that moved if you moused over them, but were not immediately understandable with what they represented, and unless you bothered to use your mouse it was unlikely you would have an inclination to progress further.

Luckily someone else had already answered with the correct response to that LinkedIn question – don’t use Flash! – so I was able to confirm he was, in my opinion, quite right.

For starters, Flash, since it only uses images, is not picked up by the search engines. Internet spiders are programmed to only search for words, so will not be able to understand pictures unless they have a ‘alt tag’ attached to them which describes them, an attribute which is also useful for the deaf.

Therefore, since there weren’t any words on that index page that weren’t hidden within a graphic, it was unable to be optimised. OK, you could do the relevant keyword research and populate the meta tags appropriately, but if they were unable to correspond with words on the page associated with them, especially various H-tags, their impact would be severely impeded.

Another problem is that some Flash programmes take time to upload before they can run, which results in a variety of ‘wait’ messages while the process happens. Some websites provide ‘skip’ buttons, but if this is the case, why did they bother with Flash in the first place?

It is becoming a well known fact that the average time a new visitor spends on a website, before they decide whether it is the right one for them, is less than 3 seconds. If after a few seconds you are still waiting for the Flash presentation to start, you can guarantee the majority of visitors won’t bother waiting around.

And the whole point of a homepage of a website is to establish that this is the correct website for the visitor. Not only should they immediately recognise the subject or business type, but it should be made as easy as possible, with recognisable links or click buttons, to progress further into the site.

Not everybody has the inclination or time to waste fathoming out what to do next, it should be instantaneous! Websites are now mediums for finding facts and, more appropriately for Web2.0, interacting with the website’s owners, so the process should be inviting, encouraging, enthusiastic and obvious!

And that means being ‘Flashy’ with your website is, as well as being pretentious, sooo last century!

Using analogies to explain the technical bits

Alice

Quite a lot of what I do is technical. There was once a time when I didn’t understand what I do, so I had to learn, usually the long and hard way, how to do this technical stuff.

Most of the instructions used jargon, and were written for people who were already technical. It infruiated me that, coupled with American words that had no relation to me as a middle-aged British woman, I sometimes didn’t understand any of it. Like most untechnical people, I explained it in words I knew, which the technical people didn’t understand because it wasn’t on their level. I often came away none the wiser, and feeling very stupid for not using the same language or understanding the instructions to solve my problems.

Eventually I began to understand, and put the information to good use. This was done by trial and error, after much swearing, tearing my hair out, threatening to throw the computer out of the window and shouting at my poor family. Now I do my technical stuff without batting an eyelid, but this is because I have done it several times, and much of it has become second nature.

Now it is me that has to explain what I do to others who aren’t technical in a way that they can understand. This is very difficult if I am to avoid using the associated jargon that goes with these technicalities; just because I now understand it, I should realise how baffling it is for others that don’t – after all, I was once there myself! So I use analogies. I explain using everyday words to get my point across, and I also use them to reinforce a point in another way to get my listeners to understand.

For example, I was explaining what FTP is to Dianne, my colleague here at Appletree, and how I use it with websites. I also tried to explain how I redesign Wordpress blogs for clients, which involves changing their appearance to suit their corporate styles. For Dianne it would normally be uncomprehensible, so I wanted to simplify things so she could understand.

I use FTP as a wardrobe, in which you store clothes. The various elements of a website are like the clothes you put in the wardrobe. Each kind of clothing has a different function, whether to cover certain parts of your body, or to keep you warm in the winter or dry on a rainy day.

Some of these clothes can be altered: change of colour, different buttons, lower neckline, etc, so their appearance can change for the better (this is changing the CSS: cascading style sheets). Some clothes benefit from added accessories, like jewellery or a silk cravat, that can be added to enhance the outfit (this is adding in plugins and other applications). Some clothes require different hangers or mothballs to protect them from harm (security against spam or hackers). Some clothes can be acquired easily from your local shopping centre or have to be ordered in from a catalogue (WordPress installation via Fantasico or via creating MySQL and editing the configuration files in WordPress).

Oops, lots of jargon there! But Dianne was quite satisfied with that explanation, which was my main objective. Now I can refer to FTP, etc, without sensing Dianne wincing from her corner and feeling left out of the proceedings.