A well written and organized creative brief will ensure expectations are met, time will be saved, and ultimately guarantee the final product will be of the highest quality. Below we have gathered our top recommendations of important elements you should include in your creative brief to ensure your project’s success!

Related: How Does Design Fit Into Your Marketing Efforts?

1. Specifics About the Campaign/Project

 a) Brief description/summary

1. The description or summary of a creative brief outlines the strategy of the project. It sets the stage for the project and maps out the goals the creative team should aim to achieve in the design process.

b) Messaging angles/headlines 

1. It is important to lay out clear messaging guidelines for the project. This could be in the form of specific headlines and copy needed for a marketing campaign or general messaging angles the campaign should include. The more detailed the better.

c) Target audiences

1. Target audience includes age, gender, income, location, and other factors of the product or service’s customer. This information helps inform the style and direction of the campaign based on who we want to attract as the buyer persona. 

d) Date of campaign/timeline

1. Having a clear design process timeline is crucial in an effective creative brief. This will give all team members transparency into when they need certain deliverables turned in by. There should be set times for when the first draft is due, time for rounds of revisions and when the final deadline will be.

2. About the Business/Client

a) Who are they

1. One of the most important parts of the brief is the introductory context about the client and their business. Providing details and background information on the company helps the designer or creative team get a better understanding of the brand and how this specific project fits into their end goals. Things you may want to include are the services and products offered, their top selling products, their values and mission, their key differentiators or USPs, etc. Additionally, it’s always useful to include links to the company’s website, social profiles, previous creative, brand guidelines, or any other background material that will be useful before the designer begins their creative research phase. 

b) Top competitors

1. To uniquely position yourself in the market, it’s important to know who and what you’re up against. By knowing what the competition is doing, the creative team can better come up with new or different ideas, learn from failed projects, or improve upon a concept that was tested in another campaign. Even if it’s just a brief hit list, it’s extremely helpful for the designer to know who a few of the client’s top competitors are, what product or service the offer, how the client’s brand currently sets itself apart from them and/or what they have in common, any pertinent industry trends, as well as any specific, relevant campaigns they can reference. 

You can also take it a step further and include examples of designs you do and don’t like to add that additional contextual support. While the designer will do research of their own, these details can really help inform their creative direction and mitigate revisions between creative team and client. 

c) Their tone of voice

1. Ideally, you’ll be able to provide your creative professionals with a comprehensive brand guideline that includes all the details about voice, tone, and communicating on behalf of the brand, but in the creative brief it’s extremely helpful to give a truncated version of this. Think of it as a highlights reel that they can easily reference before diving into the design phase. 

The style, voice, and tone should be aligned across every touchpoint of the brand and will also depend on the project, its goals, and the end goal or action you want the customers to take. Are there certain positioning points you need to drive home? Key messages that need to be addressed? Specific words that need to be included (or excluded) in the marketing campaign? Add it to the brief. This helps inform the messaging and make sure it is consistent with your objectives. You’ll also want to provide any other factors or requirements that might affect the creative direction. For example, the medium for which you’re designing will play a factor. If it’s a white paper or case study, the designer will want to create something that matches the content; something that looks polished, professional, and instills trust in the brand. If it’s an email promoting a flash sale for an e-comm brand, the messaging should be lively, engaging, urgent, and inspire people to visit the website to purchase in a timely manner; likewise, the creative should match. As with any portion of the creative brief, the more context and information you can provide, the better the creative professionals will be able to do their job and make everyone happy. 

3. Creative Inspiration

a) Moodboards/Examples of other creatives for the designer to use as a guide 

1. Designs are inspired by other designs

2. Most design and creative work is inspired by work that has been done in the past, but simply referencing and recreating visuals that ‘look good’ will not cut it in the digital space that we live and work in today.

3. People crave novelty, which is what you will need to deliver if you intend on producing thumb-stopping creatives that convert at a high rate.

4. In order for these designs to convert, they not only have to look visually appealing and unique, but also must be informed by designs that have performed well in the past

5. This is where strategic moodboarding that is specifically tailored to the intention of the campaign or end goal of

6. Moodboarding/collecting examples should be a shared responsibility between the creative lead, the client, and other team members who are on the account and familiar with what’s performing well in the space

4. Necessary Assets 

a) Creative Specs

1. By the time you have reached this section of your creative brief, it is time to outline the specific requirements of the project. It’s not the most fun or sexy part of a brief, but extremely important nonetheless as these specifications serve as guard rails for your designer. 

2. Sizes & Dimensions

1. Different platforms require different asset sizes. This ranges from websites to social media, and everything in between. It is in your best interest to memorize each platform’s specs and best practices because you will be referencing them a lot.

3. Ideal Programs to Use

1. Photoshop – This is your 1-stop shop for just about any design. Easily the most versatile design program on the market, but typically reserved for photo manipulation. 

2. llustrator – Vectors, Icons, Illustration. Plain and simple. 

3. Adobe XD or Sketch – Easily some of the fastest growing design softwares available – and for good reason. These web design software also include a variety of helpful integrations and the ability to create live prototypes that have elevated your ability to present work to your team and clients.  

4. File size requirements

1. When designing for web, file size is extremely important for page load speed. Try sending a developer an image over 2MB and see if it gets approved. Additionally, in digital marketing, important advertising platforms such as Google Display Network require you to keep file sizes under 150kb so page speeds of the websites the ads are being served on are not affected. 

5. Number of variations needed

1. Design variations can have a lot of different meanings so it is important to keep these clear. You don’t want a designer workshopping multiple concepts when you’re looking for slight variations of the same design for A/B testing of digital ad creative or landing page headlines. 

The post How to Write the Perfect Creative Brief appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Link to the award:

https://www.csswinner.com/profile/power-digital-marketing/761

The post CSSWinner Recognizes Power Digital Marketing for 8 Nominations appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The post Awwwards Features Power Digital’s Website for The Black Dahlia appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The post Awwwards Features Power Digital’s Website for Locale Advisors appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

To my fellow designers, I understand your pain. We’ve all been there. Sitting in your ergonomic desk chair, blank stare on your face, looking up at the ceiling and having a borderline existential crisis as you contemplate on how to design the menu structure for an e-commerce site that sells fedoras in 2018. Yeah, it can be that bad at times. Finding inspiration for new ideas and interactions can be tough, especially when trying to create something from scratch. But inspiration can come from anywhere – just take a look around and you’ll be surprised at what unexpected source can spark your next idea. Whenever I’m in a creative rut, I try to dig my way out of it by taking inspiration from these unlikely mediums and see how I can incorporate them into my next landing page or website design:

Print Design

Although print and web design are quite different in some respects, there are also some parallels between the two as well. Believe it or not, before computers and technology came into existence, print design was the standard on how to lay out words and images for the consumption of content. The next time you sit in a restaurant, analyze the way their menu has been laid out and organized. While you’re waiting in line at the grocery store and reading the headlines of magazines displayed on the endcaps, observe the colors and fonts used on the cover. Walk down an aisle at your favorite book store (if you can find one nowadays) and figure out what book covers caught your attention and why. Some of the traditional design principles for things like typography or grid systems apply to both print and web design. So the next time you find yourself reading a magazine or book, think about how elements on each page have been laid out and whether or not it can be incorporated into your next site design.

Source: flipsnack

Source: Alfian Brand on Behance

Video Games

With the wide variety of video games out there, there’s also an equal amount for the type of websites you can find. From the toned down and easy to use to the most outrageously experimental. A key aspect to a player’s experience when playing a game is based on the game’s interface design. A game’s interface could be the difference maker from having an enjoyable time playing a game to being outright frustrated.

The next time you play your favorite video game, ask yourself a few questions: Is it easy for me to go in and start playing? Is it easy to find the information I’m looking for? Is there any wasted space on the screen? Are there any tedious steps or tasks that can be consolidated or eliminated? You may not even realize it while playing, but these are all questions that affect your impression of the game. And when it comes to web design, these are also the same questions when thinking about the user experience of your next design.

Source: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate via Attack of the Fanboy

Source: Skyrim via Game Designing

Source: Spiderman (PS4) via Heavy

Architecture

From the blocky and robust look of brutalism to the fluid shapes of structures designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, these same elemental features can be incorporated into modern web design. Hadid’s sleek designs emphasized organic shapes and abstract structures. Her buildings are well-known for their curved and futuristic exteriors. Any of Hadid’s renowned work are excellent sources of inspiration for any designer.

Source: Guangzhou Opera House by Zaha Hadid Architects

Source: Archinect / Pawel Biernacki

Source: Geisel Library / GQ / Erik Jepsen

Architects and engineers determine the overall functionality and aesthetic of a building. This is also something designers should take into consideration when a user is scrolling through a website; what look and feel are you trying to accomplish with your website’s design?

Closing Thoughts

Unfortunately, falling into a creative slump hits us more often than we’d like. We are often told to “think outside the box,” when trying to come up with new and innovative ideas. That cliché saying still stands true, but getting there can sometimes be the hard part. Don’t be afraid to take a look around your environment, you’re bound to draw up inspiration from some unlikely places.

The post Where to Get Web Design Inspiration from the Most Uncommon of Places appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Brutalism in a Nutshell

In short, brutalism can be depicted as the opposite of everything I mentioned above. It doesn’t abide by the best practices of modern web design standards – proper legibility, spacing, hierarchy, ease-of-use. Rather, it’s characterized by bold and in-your-face text, the inclusion of only necessary elements on a page, and rugged aesthetics. If traditional web design was Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, brutalism would be the last minute of Colossus by Idles at full volume.

The term brutalism is actually drawn from the French word for “raw,” and had its origins in Europe after Word War II. The brutalist genre was primarily associated with architecture at the time, as it was a way to rebuild cities inexpensively while using raw and unpolished resources and stripped-down designs. It was also a reactionary wave in design by a younger generation that went against the grain of the light and optimistic view of design in the 1930s and 1940s.

Source: Trellick Tower

Brutalism has now made its way to our computer screens and mobile devices, and it’s not going anywhere. Brutalist web designs consist of these same harsh, seemingly disorganized, and straightforward principles that make it such an intriguing genre that has garnered so much popularity in recent years.

Examples of Brutalism on the Web

Large, In-Your-Face Text

Source: anti

Source: Reputation Squad

Source: Elizaveta Shneyderman

Evident Contrast in Colors

Source: The Outline

Source: Yanis Markin

Only Links on the Page

Source: Travis Scott

Source: anti

Closing Thoughts

I do want to make it clear that I’m not opposing the contributions of brutalism to today’s web design. In fact, I find it relieving and refreshing that this genre of design has made its way to what I believe is becoming a cookie-cutter medium for designers. Sure, ease-of-use and a visual hierarchy are important to me and my particular line of work in creating the best product possible. However, there’s something to be said about the freedom and minimalistic values that brutalism provides.

There are some aspects of brutalist web design that can be adopted and translated into traditional, modern web design that you recognize today. Large text, minimal links, and stark layouts with bold colors are certainly elements that can added to a conversion-oriented website design. However, will I ever design a brutalist website in the near future? Likely not, but I can definitely say that brutalism has it’s influences in certain areas, and only time will tell if this trend will have a lasting effect on modern web design. But right now, I’m glad it’s here.

The post A Quick Look at Brutalism in Web Design appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

A big focus of ours when building a website is not only to design a beautiful frontend UX for our client’s customers or viewers, but also to create an experience in the backend that allows for that client to make edits and changes freely without a technical tether.

It’s our job to deliver something that has the flexibility, structure, and overall ability to be manipulated without breaking the experience or causing headaches in the process.

In this post I will walk through a few things we do with WordPress to ensure structure in the CMS is as easy as a cake walk:

Advanced Custom Fields

One of the most obvious and highest used plugins on the WordPress market is Advanced Custom Fields, or ACF. Almost every site we work with and build utilizes custom fields, and this plugin allows our strategies to come to life. It allows you to set up snippets of code that then take your input, then output them on the frontend. For example, let’s say you wanted to swap an image on your site. The input for this would be as easy as this:

This is a very rudimentary example, but to understand the basics of ACF is important in then seeing the bigger picture. We structure every page on the site this way, allowing our clients to edit their web pages as if they were editing a Word document or their facebook page.

Advanced Custom Fields is available for free here, or you can get the stellar Pro version here.

Flexible Content

The next strategy we use when designing our clients’ CMS experience is not a plugin, but an extension of ACF called Flexible Content.

What this means is that content can be put into what I refer to as buckets, or similar to a drag and drop experience (without all of the speed and usability issues you get from a theme).

Picture it this way: I have a block of content at the bottom of my page that I need to move to the top. I can then go into my CMS and edit my page, and drag that section above other sections. Then, let’s say I need to add a section for testimonials, but it’s not on the page. We would then go into our bucket of sections and pull out testimonials, and add it to the page:

This helps client build out pages to be different if they please. Common errors with other developers come from a stranglehold on page templates, where nothing can budge or change except the written word or images used.

You can find a tutorial on flexible content for ACF here.

Controlled Performance

My final suggestion for anyone looking to optimize their CMS experience in a new website build has to do with backend performance, updates, and overall upkeep of any WordPress site.

It is important to always update WordPress, plugins, and themes when you can as to not remain vulnerable and gain all the new features that come with any new updates.

One of the ways you can do this is to hire a developer on retainer, or simple set reminders for yourself to go in and update any plugins that need it, and look out for those hefty WordPress core updates:

Keep in mind that not every update will work well with your site, so it is recommended to perform updates in a staging environment to test them, or to create a backup of the site before triggering any auto updates.

WP Engine offers a very easy and safe environment for your site if you host with them, and creates daily backups that can be easily reverted to if your site reacts poorly to an update.

Wrapping Up

If you’re a developer or someone who is building a site for a client, I urge you greatly to use my methods above to make the experience as great as you can for your client. If you are someone who is currently in the middle of a site build for themselves, make sure you are getting the most out of your CMS in the long run, and look for the ability to manipulate and succeed on your own!

The post Creating Efficiencies for Clients in Their CMS appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

In today’s digital world, there seems to be an endless number of marketing tools available to help with all aspects of online marketing. Modern digital marketers need to be able to take advantage of the best of these tools to stay on top of current trends and ever-changing client needs. Marketing experts are expected to manage a wide range of online campaigns while monitoring numbers, staying on top of ROI, and keeping up with the latest developments.

Using the right digital marketing tools not only saves time, but it makes online marketing campaigns more affordable and effective.

Depending on your digital marketing background, you may already have some favorites or experience in working with some of the more common online marketing tools. But in case it’s been a while since you took a look at all the options out there, we’d like to share some of our favorite tools of the trade. This is our list of must-have digital marketing tools for 2018.

 Best Marketing Tools For SEO

With more than a billion websites live today, it’s hard to stand out from the competition. To be successful, you need to have a good idea, great content, and a powerful strategy for search engine optimization. Effective SEO will enable you to increase website traffic, get out information about your company and offerings to potential customers, and ultimately increase sales. Here are two of the top digital marketing tools for SEO.

Related: 6 Mobile SEO Tools to Help You Optimize Your Site

SEMrush

This wonderful all-in-one digital marketing tool is incredibly helpful. SEMrush lets you to easily create optimal online content while also getting a clear understanding of what your competitors are doing. This powerful tool enables you to follow the keywords your competitors are using, find trending content, and discover effective industry experts who know how to work the system to their benefit. With SEMrush, you can track your SEO ranking, brainstorm ideas for creating more website traffic, conduct a technical SEO audit, research the best keywords for ads and marketing campaigns, and identify new, trending keywords to incorporating into your online SEO strategy.

 Moz

Content marketers who need an influential SEO tool love Moz. It offers exclusive features like MozBar, which lets you quickly look at the keywords for any website, see new content they are creating, authenticate authorship, measure the efficiency of your own content, and check on-page SEO metrics – all in one user-friendly platform. You can also use Moz to check your business listing and research keywords with the exclusive Moz Keyword Explorer. And their brand-new Link Explorer is ideal for link analysis, link building, and competitive research to find backlinks and identify any potentially damaging links.

Related: How to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO

Best Marketing Tools For Content

Most online marketers today rely on powerful content marketing as a major part of their business strategy. But how do you decide what content to use and where? Luckily, there are effective tools out there to make your job easier.

 ClickFunnels

Almost any company today relies on a sales funnel to analyze their Internet presence and online marketing process. Your sales funnel follows the journey that website visitors take as they move towards becoming qualified leads. Qualified leads turn into sales, and the funnels your customers pass through during this process can be analyzed to increase your company’s bottom line. You can use ClickFunnels to create sales, membership, auto-webinar, and hangout funnels, for email integrations, and even for A/B testing. It offers a lot of options that make it a helpful tool for creating and analyzing the effectiveness of your online content.

This fabulous tool lets you use a simple drag-and-drop platform to create a conversion-focused sales funnel focused on your particular offerings in just minutes. The included templates for content make this process even easier, providing an easy way to create and modify online pages to fit your specific products and services. And these templates actually work, because they have been designed based on what has already been successful for other similar companies.

 Unbounce

In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone page on your site that is created to receive traffic from a particular marketing campaign. Landing pages are intended to get visitors to take a specific action such as filling out a form, making a purchase, registering for an account, or downloading information. Unbounce offers users a simple drag and drop editor and dynamic text replacement to easily create custom landing pages to match the particular messaging of any campaign.

This simple tool lets you build these pages quickly, with full creative control and no time-consuming back-end process. As an added bonus, their process helps you build better landing pages for a more positive user experience – which boosts your AdWords Quality Score, lowering your cost-per-click and getting you better placement for your ads. You can even test the effectiveness of your current landing pages to get immediate recommendations to improve your conversion rates.

Related: Essential Tools You Need for Each Stage of Content Marketing

BrightEdge

Most marketers know that the secret to high performing content is that it recognizes consumer’s needs and addresses those needs with specific, targeted information.

This customer-focused process for creating content means marketers have to choose the best, most high-demand topics, or search terms, and optimize their content to make it as visible as possible for the targeted market through search engine results pages, or SERPs.

BrightEdge Smart Content blends the best of search engine optimization with artificial intelligence and content marketing to create high-performing content. This content is self-adjusting, leading to better content discovery and higher visitor engagement. BrightEdge offers a single integrated solution for search intent discovery, optimized content creation, and performance measurement.

Best Marketing Tools For Social Media

Today, almost every brand has at least one online media presence, and most companies have several. Social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are the new places where business is conducted, consumer bases are created, products are advertised, and sales are made. This creates a lot of pressure for businesses to foster a strong, consistent, frequent media presence. Luckily, there are many marketing tools designed to enhance these social platforms and make social media marketing more intuitive – and more lucrative.

GAIN

With GAIN, you can easily manage multiple online accounts as it automates collaboration and approval workflow, notifying the right people, following your timeline, gathering client feedback, and moving the content approval process forward. With a low price that covers an unlimited number of social accounts, posts, and brands, you get unlimited approval rounds and unlimited storage for files, images, and videos. You can create new social accounts, plan and schedule content, solicit collaboration and approval, and edit your content through one easy-to-use app. With an Enterprise version also available, you’ll be impressed by how much this tool can simplify your social media management.

 AdParlor

Looking to leverage Facebook ads for your business? AdParlor is a full-service Facebook advertising solution. It offers digital media buying along with creative and audit services for companies of all sizes. You can increase your ROI for your ad spend by letting their experts handle all facets of your marketing campaign, from strategy and creation to reporting and optimization. A proven partner of the world’s most important media platforms, AdParlor specializes in the complex world of media buying with a unique approach to creative management that results in hundreds of thousands of static images and videos to best support your marketing strategy.

 Best Marketing Tools For Email

Email has become a huge part of everyday life. Most people receive hundreds of emails every day – whether for work, from friends and family, or from brands and companies they’ve done business with. Emails are a great way of getting a message to your target audience. In fact, email marketing is so effective that it remains one of the most popular marketing channels out there. Luckily, there are a number of helpful tools available help you with all phases of your email marketing campaigns.

Related: Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Deploy ASAP

 Mailchimp

Perhaps the most popular email marketing automation platform out there, MailChimp is easy to use and offers a host of advanced features including tracking opt-in sources and the ability to build and run Facebook and Instagram ads. MailChimp has hundreds of templates and features drag and drop blocks. With it, you can track subscribing behaviors with UTM codes and create fully automated email sequences for your sales funnels. It can also be used to track leads and paying customers, re-engage stale subscribers, personalize content with merge tags, and conduct A/B testing.

 Campaign Monitor

Another very popular email marketing tool, Campaign Monitor offers a simple to use, drag and drop email builder and segmenting tool so you can create various campaigns with different contacts. Using their email templates, you can customize all of your emails to fit your specific brand and message. The tool also offers you A/B testing to try out different email designs, subject lines, and even sender details in order to make your campaigns as effective as possible.

Best Marketing Tools For Creative Design

In today’s online world, having a visually appealing website is important. The task of graphic and web designers is to create sites that offer both attractive images and effective content.

Eye-catching visuals work hand-in-hand with fascinating content to convince users to stay on a website.

If you’re a newbie to graphic designing, these essential tools can help you add a professional look and feel to your site.

 Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop offers a host of automatic options that can add life to your images, making them look professional even if you are a novice. You can combine multiple images, crop images, remove unwanted elements, correct perspective, edit color, and much more. Video editing is smooth, and it even provides a clone stamp tool so that you can copy one area of an image to another, and a channel mixer to repair color. Photoshop works on both Windows and Mac systems, features sharing to sites including Facebook, Revel, Twitter, and Tumblr – and is considered to be one of the best graphic design software programs for beginners.

 Illustrator

If you want to create your own logos, icons, sketches, typography, or complicated artwork for videos or mobile apps, then Illustrator is the perfect tool. It lets you generate seamless artwork by drawing pixel-perfect shapes. Designing is fast and easy, and it comes with a number of plugins to help it make web pages shine. Two of its best features are the touch-type and free transform tools. An ideal graphic design software for intermediate users, it can also be used on both Windows and Mac computers via Creative Cloud.

Digital marketing today involves managing a variety of fields including SEO, content, social media, graphic design, and email. Using these online tools can make juggling all of these various marketing channels both easier – and far more effective.

The post 10 Must Have Marketing Tools in 2018 appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Content

Above all else, content is the most important aspect of your email. Your email design should cater to the message you are attempting to get across to your viewers.

Keep it simple. You’re most likely working with a 15 second attention span when you send an email, so the message needs to be very clear as soon as the email is opened.

The subject line should be designed to entice someone to click on your email amongst the clutter, but we recommend to steer clear of clickbait or #fakenews. You will lose attention and most likely trust if you push your subject lines too far.

Simplicity & Clarity

Some of the most effective emails stick to a single message and make it very clear from start to finish. Are you announcing a sale? Promoting a new release? Discussing important news? If so, then make that clear in your subject line, hero copy, and body content.

Not only do you want to make the message clear, but you also want to make it concise. Try to use your headlines, imagery, and layout to your advantage while cutting down on the amount of body copy. Large chunks of copy will likely reduce read rates and steer people away from actually taking the time to digest it all. Like we said before, attention spans aren’t the strongest attribute in people nowadays, so simplifying your content will play to your advantage and often save you time.

Headlines

Use headlines to break up content into smaller sections that are easy to digest in a short period of time. Use your headline as the main message and body content as a few supporting sentences to get your point across. This technique works really well when you have coinciding imagery as well.

Related: MailChimp vs. Constant Contact: Comparing the Options

Hero Message

You have a few options when it comes to your hero message. They can be straightforward and get the point across (often the safe route) or be witty and fun in order to entertain your reader enough to give you a nod of respect. It all depends on your brand and how you want to be perceived by your readers. However, it doesn’t hurt to let your hair down and have a little fun with your messaging every now and then.

The hero image is crucial for getting your message across in a matter of 2 seconds. Having an effective hero image and messaging can be the deciding factor of whether or not a user will stick around to view the remaining content.

CTAs & Buttons

CTAs are an easy win:

• Inspire action. Keep them short and clear so your readers aren’t confused. CTAs are usually a few words and can be as simple as “Buy Here” or “Sign Up”.
• Make them obvious. This can be done using your brand accent colors to stand out against a neutral text color, varying sizes based on importance, or positioning them throughout your design in ways that make them hard to miss.
• Don’t overuse them. If they are clear, readers will know where to look

Size

The industry standard for some time now has been 600px wide & open-ended on height (depending on your content and intention) for the sake of cross-ESP compatibility. Easy tools such as Litmus will show you how your design looks across different ESPs, but our advice would be to stick to the 600px width to be safe, and always staying under 650px if you need to extend beyond.

Layout

Prioritize your content and imagery from top to bottom. You want to aim for a layout that is designed for quick reading and easy digestion of information. Since you are most likely not trying to stuff an enormous amount of content into your email, front load the top half with your main message or goal, and use the lower half to include additional offers or information that are relevant and may spark additional interest to drive more avenues for click-throughs.

Using consistent alignment throughout the entire email is another best practice. If you do not have a lot of content consider center-alignment throughout. If you are on the more content-heavy side, left-aligning will make everything more legible.

Branding

Be sure to include your company logo in the header of all of your email templates. Regardless of how you are displaying the logo, having it visible from the moment that any email is opened creates immediate recognition. Obviously there is room for exceptions in specific cases, but you should definitely include the logo somewhere in all emails.

Color

You should choose a simple color palette that is reflective of your brand and won’t distract your viewers from the core message. The most practical use of color can be choosing a neutral color for your copy, and brand colors as an accent for things like Headers, CTAs, and icons.

Images

The use of photography throughout your design can be very effective in guiding a viewer’s eyes through the path of content. The use of brand imagery is key for recognition and convincing purposes, but the use of stock photography can be effective for the inexperience (and experienced) user. It is all too easy to find free professional photography through websites like Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and many others (Hint: Google “free stock photography”).

Background (Image): If you are looking to get creative with the overall look and feel of your email design, background images are a great way to catch the attention of your viewers, while not having to sacrifice the visibility of your content. This is key for desktop and mobile compatibility.

Background images have become really popular in 2017 as companies look to find ways to capture your attention in unique ways.

Fonts

Choose Email-Friendly Fonts. Yes, you heard that right, if you are designing templates outside of your campaign builder, be sure to double check that the fonts you use are compatible with most email service providers. If you’d like to use custom fonts, you can easily include all of your copy within your designs, save them as images, and implement into your templates. However, make sure you are strategic about this and test what does and does not work as you can run into visibility problems on mobile using this technique.

See a list of email friendly fonts here

Wrapping Up

Keep it simple, concise, and engaging!

The post The Basics of Email Design: What Every Marketer Needs to Know appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

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Your website still isn’t optimized for mobile devices.

With users gravitating toward their online devices more and more frequently than their desktop counterparts, it is clear that we are experiencing a mobile revolution. Only thing is, the revolution started years ago and some companies have yet to catch up. Here’s just a few of the things that are affected by an unresponsive website design:

• Your users: Landing on an unresponsive website on your phone nowadays is a bad user experience and a crime against humanity. No one wants to try to navigate a desktop-optimized site through the cropped aspect ratio of their phone.
• Your search rankings: It isn’t mandatory for a responsive website to rank on Google, but boy is it a pretty significant factor. In fact, Google ranks mobile-friendly websites higher than others. So, if you want people to find your website on SERPs, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly ASAP.
• Your business: Knowing that the digital world is moving towards mobile, the number of potential customers and leads that bounce from your website due to a lack of an optimized mobile interface is enough justification to go out and ensure your site is responsive.

Missing favicon.

The favicon, or the icon that sits next to the page title on your browser tab, can easily be an overlooked element for any website since it doesn’t actually exist in the website itself. However, the devil’s in the details, and having a website without a favicon included can make a website seem unprofessional.

Missing open graph image.

Similar to favicons, an Open Graph image is the image you see when a link is shared through social platforms. Here you can check out a thorough breakdown by Neil Patel of what open graph meta tags are. In short, Open Graph meta tags are metadata for your webpage and show up in search results and whenever they’re shared socially. The image tag however is an important one to note, as this will be what catches the eye for users who see your link on their feeds. Although this isn’t directly associated with your website, it can be configured manually through your CMS. In WordPress, for example, you can configure the Open Graph image through Yoast, an SEO plugin. If your site is shared socially and there’s no image shown, it can have the same impact as a missing favicon to cause a business or brand seem unprofessional.

Source: Neil Patel

Unoriginal content and imagery.

Cliché headlines and heavy use of stock imagery is everywhere around the web. Users are good at identifying stock images due to their cheesy looks and overexaggerated characteristics, and when they’re associated with your website it can have a negative effect on your brand and reflect it as being unoriginal. Don’t get me wrong, stock images have their place and can be a viable option for businesses that don’t have the time or resources to use original imagery. Just stay away from the bad ones, and ensure that the ones you do use help support the content on the page.

Use of illegible typography.

Serif fonts are best used in print design, but do have their place in certain applications for the web as well. Large headlines using serif fonts draw intrigue and decorative details to make text seem sophisticated. Sans serif fonts do best in digital design, as they translate well when rendering in pixels and are altogether just easy to read. But script fonts… they have their place, just not in web design. As with anything, I’m sure there’s some website out there that can best utilize a cursive or handwritten font. When it comes to web design and trying to gather conversions and engagement from users, why make it hard on them by having them decipher what a headline says when it’s written in cursive. Ease-of-use and legibility should be the mantra for your website or landing page, so try and stay away from script, handwritten, and highly-decorative typefaces.

Improper use of text spacing and length.

This is more common than you might think, and requires a bit of a closer look at times in order to identify whether your website is affected by it. To best demonstrate improper use of text, here are a few definitions and examples below from 4over4.

• Kerning: The space in between two characters. Proper kerning entails that it isn’t too tight that the characters are touching, and not too loose to the point where it makes the space in between each letter seem visually inconsistent with each other.

• Tracking: The space in between words and phrases. This is similar to kerning, but is in reference to the negative space within an entire word or phrase. Be sure to use this carefully, as too much tracking can expand a word or phrase too much, making it look rather awkward.

• Leading: The space in between multiple lines of text. The rule of thumb that I was taught was that it’s best to keep the leading (or line spacing in CSS) 3px (or 20%) larger than the font’s size. Leading that is too tight can cause a harder time with legibility, whereas leading that is too loose can just look awkward.

• It’s also important to keep the line length in mind, especially for large blocks of text. This requires some adjustments with all three aspects mentioned above, as well as the font size. The rule of thumb I was taught was that 10-12 words per line is the ideal range you want to stay in when configuring your line text. It’s not too short where users get annoyed by reading onto the next line over and over again. And it’s not too long to where they’re moving their heads left and right trying to read the content on the page instead of moving their eyes left and right.

Closing Thoughts

First impressions count, especially for your business’s website. It’s and extension of your brand and is a salesperson in and of itself. But when your site isn’t optimized for a great user experience, doesn’t function properly for mobile devices, or just doesn’t look good altogether, then what does that say about your company? Take some time to evaluate your website with the topics mentioned above. Hopefully with these six provide you with a solid start on how to best optimize your site to look and function as a modern, conversion-oriented website.

The post 6 Web Design Fails Still Happening in 2018 appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

The post What Is Responsive Design? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

We are living in a data-driven world and it is often hard to attribute the impact creative has on our campaigns because design is subjective and so many moving parts go into the making of a successful campaign. Well performing campaigns are a combination of data-backed decisions and creative thinking that are designed to not only reach your target audience, but also convince them to commit to your business. You can’t have one without the other.

Great design is what draws a customer’s eye; it helps make products and services more compelling, more enjoyable to use; and makes a product feel relevant in a landscape that is constantly changing.

So, it begs the question: How do you measure ROI of creative services?

It is important to be able to measure the ROI of creative for a variety of reasons:

• You need to provide clear evidence of the impact you’re making on the client’s revenue and investment
• Decision makers need to know the value of design in order to invest in it
• You can clearly outline business objectives & set expectations

How To Measure It

Analytics

A big advantage we have in the digital world when it comes to measuring ROI, is the multiple data points and tracking softwares we have at our disposal. The levels of sophistication our analytics possess allow marketers to perform deep dives, compare data, benchmark campaigns & metrics, and ultimately tell a story of where, when, and how important information such as revenue, traffic, repeat visitors/customers, ROAS, CPA, and conversion rates are determined.

You can set benchmarks within your analytics to track the duration and success of each campaign and break down what was done differently across each campaign. Your analytics can tell you one was successful in drawing an audience in but ultimately they wouldn’t convert, while the others did not have as much initial traffic but a higher conversion rate. This then allows you to blend those two into a campaign with a higher ROI.

In order to set yourself apart and make sure that creative is getting the recognition it deserves, you must:

• Be able to navigate and use your analytics to your advantage
• Be very clear on what the goals of each campaign are from the start
• Determine how each contributing factor is affecting your goal(s), and to what extent

Brand Recognition

Design has the ability to make a big impact on brand awareness and brand loyalty. Although design is only a part of your overall brand, it plays an integral part in delivering your message to potential customers. Brand perception and ultimately brand loyalty are directly affected by your design and messaging. Customers respond well and often trust what you are trying to sell if your brand, website, and campaigns are buttoned up and presented in a way that is attractive to them, but also reflect your core message.

It is much more cost effective to create repeat customers than it is to continuously create new customers. The more brand advocates you can create, the more revenue you can generate while hopefully cutting the costs of finding new customers through free word-of-mouth advertising.

Let’s use Apple as an example. The tech giant is often bashed by it’s competitors for having lower grade technology, yet they continue to dominate the market. How do they do this? They invested the time, energy, and brainpower in design, aesthetics, presentation, and UI to develop some of the strongest brand loyalty the modern world has ever seen.

A/B Testing

There are 2 very common ways to A/B test how creative is affecting marketing:

Website

Known as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), it is the art of testing how visitors interact with your web page. It tracks where they click, where they are scrolling, and how much time they spend on your page. There is sophisticated software that allow you to A/B test pages between audiences to see which performs better based on the design and messaging.

Simple changes in a pages design and UI can be the difference between thousands of dollars in revenue that your website would be missing out on.

Advertising

If you are like many successful online businesses, you are investing in paid advertising. Whether that is through paid platforms such as Google or utilizing the many facets of Paid Social Media advertising, you are aware of the time, cost, and benefits that these platforms present. It is here that creative has the biggest opportunity to measure ROI as it plays a very important role in getting your target audience to stop scrolling through their monotonous feed and actually click on your collateral. Essentially, It is up to your strategist to cook up creative ways to find the customers and your design to drive a user to click on your ads.

You can easily run the same campaign with the same targeting and budget, but test the messaging and creative to see which performs the best. The design and messaging of your ads are the most malleable and risk adverse factor that can affect the CPA and ROAS. You then continue to optimize, optimize, optimize as you collect more data.

“Data tells you who your audience is, what they want, and where they are. Creativity is how you reach them.”

There are other intrinsic metrics that should also be considered such as social media following, engagement, and revenue by channel. Social Media is quickly becoming the king/queen platform for brands to connect with their customers. Instagram profiles are turning into gold mines for ecommerce brands that invest in the look, feel, design, and message of their account. Your ability to interact with your customers on a social level, let alone evoke some sort of emotion when viewing your content, can influence not only your brand but your revenue as well.

Dollar Shave Club and MVMT Watches are great case studies of what you can achieve with a well thought-out and creative approach to social branding and selling.

Closing Thoughts

If you haven’t figured it out by now, proving the worth and specific ROI to clients, decision makers, and stakeholders is not going to be an easy task. It isn’t easy to convince data-driven individuals that creative is subjective and cannot always be boiled down to a data point. You just need to be creative in your approach and really dig into the data you have available. A small, but important piece of advice would be to educate stakeholders on the necessity of creative and its emotional appeal to customers for the long-term success of a business rather than short-term wins.

The increasing importance of social media and experience-based products means design is more important now than ever before. With creative thinking and thoughtful engagement with technology, meaningful ROI for your creative input is possible.

The post How to Measure the ROI of Your Creative Initiatives appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

This is a question that does not cease to get brought up time and time again when reviewing design concepts with peers, coworkers, and clients alike – and for valid reason. The idea is strange. Why should you waste empty space on a page when it can be utilized for something else, like moving up additional information that’s toward the bottom of a page, or using the additional space to promote more products and/or services. The reasons designers don’t cram any and all elements on a page as closely as possible is because:

1. Content needs to be easily digestible. You want the users visiting your site to be able to consume content or find what they need to without giving them any added frustration.
2. Most of the time, users are scanning your website. With the exception to blog posts and news articles in which users are intentionally reading large blocks of text, users scan through headings, subheadings, and images on pages to find what they’re looking for.

With all of the content on any given page (this is “positive space” – your text, images, videos, and what have you), it’s vital that designers critically think about the negative space (aka “white space” or “empty space” – basically all of the blank, unused space on a page), as well to break things up. In design, negative space is absolutely critical to achieving the two points mentioned above. But in order to truly understand why it’s necessary in good design, we need to first talk about the design principle negative space goes hand-in-hand with: proximity.

Design Principle of Proximity

Proximity is one of the five Gestalt principles in design. Without getting too far down the rabbit hole, the Gestalt Principles are the culminative work of psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka in the 1920s. In its simplest form in relation to these principles, proximity is the grouping of related elements which are brought together, while elements that are unrelated are placed further away. The idea is that humans have a cognitive tendency to presume that objects and elements that are close to one another are related to some capacity, and that we do this seemingly instantaneously before we realize it. This is best demonstrated by the diagram by Andy Rutledge shown below.

Taking this a step further, the diagram below exemplifies the principle of proximity to be overpowering when additional distinguishable features are thrown into the mix, such as color. Although the diagram on the right depicts both orange and black dots, human nature discerns two different groups based on their proximity, not their color.

Ultimately, how does the principle of proximity translate to web design? Well for one, by understanding this principle designers are then able to organize and put together designs for an optimal user experience. Grouping blocks of text together, or placing related captions next to an image – these are all simple variations of the proximity principle being put into play as you’re designing.

As web designers and those who work in user experience design, it’s important to have some applicable knowledge of how the human brain naturally makes decisions. By having a solid baseline understand of this can only make you a stronger designer as you’re able to make an optimal experience for your users. Now that you know about the design principle of proximity, let’s go back to our main topic, negative space, and the importance it plays in modern web design.

Negative Space Used the Right Way in Web Design

In web design, negative is a positive. As we’ve discussed already, negative space is necessary in allowing users to scan and digest content on a page as seamlessly as possible. So, it’s the designer’s responsibility to think about and utilize negative space as thoughtfully as they would with the positive space on a page. Here are a few tips on how to handle negative space in your next project:

Group related items together.

This has been mentioned multiple times already, but negative space can be utilized to break up elements on a page to bring related elements together, and different elements away from one another. There will be times when there is a lot of information on a page. Negative space can help break all of that information to be easier to digest.

Footers are typically a good representation of how proximity and negative space is utilized in web design. Here is the footer of Beats by Dre’s website. Each block of text is a grouping of related links. Sure, the titles above each block tell which category is which. But if you were to take away those titles above each block of text, the principle of proximity suggests that users’ cognitive tendencies would have them assume each block of text is grouped together for their similarities anyway.

Create visual hierarchy.

Understanding hierarchy is very important when it comes to designing the composition of a webpage. The visual hierarchy of a page simply refers to the order you intend users to notice elements on a page. In design, there are a number of different factors that go into creating visual hierarchy (such as color, scale, or shape, but the one we’re focusing on is proximity, and negative space can be used as a tool to help support that.

The hero section on Grammarly’s homepage does a good job of showcasing hierarchy by spacing elements on a page accordingly, as it’s an easy top-to-bottom breakdown of importance. First, you take in the heading and sub-heading to gather some context as to what Grammarly is. Next, you’re presented with a gif as to how Grammarly works. And finally, you’re presented with a conversion point for users to engage with.

Draw the user’s eye to a conversion point on the page.

This goes hand-in-hand with the previous two point I just made. But essentially, as you strategically think about the visual hierarchy on a page you ultimately want to get users to convert on a certain area or element on a page. Well, negative space can assist you in doing so by isolating whatever it is you want your users to convert on to make it much more noticeable than anything else on a page.

Google is the ultimate example of this, as the page is so bare-boned and only requires what’s necessary. Dead-center on the page is the search bar, the main conversion point of the page. All of the links in the top left and right of the page are all secondary, as negative space has been utilized as a tool to draw the user’s eyes and put most of the emphasis on the search bar on the page.

Closing Thoughts

When it comes down to it, negative space can the make or break element on page without actually being on the page. Negative space is a vital tool when it comes to good design, and should be approached with just as much meticulousness and thoughtfulness as any other element you wish to include on your next web design project.

The post Nothing <i>is</i> Something: Why Negative Space is Essential to Good Web Design appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

Work of Armin Hoffman

Work of Josef Müller Brockman

The idea of keeping things functional while being aesthetically pleasing is rooted in the Swiss Style of the 1950s. In short, the Swiss Style (aka International Style) was a style movement that had its origins in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, then was eventually catapulted to what we know Swiss design to be today in Switzerland throughout the 1950s. Some of the notable designers of this era included Josef Müller Brockman and Armin Hofmann, whose work epitomized the Swiss Style. Although a pretty straightforward concept, the Swiss Style consists of a few characteristics that act as the guidelines for its minimal and clean approach to design. Traditional Swiss concepts are defined by the following:

• “Form follows function.”
• Grid system
• Asymmetrical layouts
• Sans serif type
• Photography

“Form follows function.”

The Swiss Style is summed up by its mantra that “form follows function.” This means that the design aspect of a composition should be invisible, allowing the content to be the point of emphasis and that design should be used for easy content consumption. This idea is notably important when thinking about user experience and conversion rate optimization – the different paths you want your users to take on your website or landing page should be as easy and straightforward as possible for ease-of-use.

Source: Invision

A grid system as a foundational element.

The structural foundation for Swiss Style involves the utilization of a grid system in order to create visually-pleasing compositions. The grid acts as a means to provide order and proper structure for your design to confine elements on the page. By using the grid, you’re able to present text, images, videos, etc. in a way that creates visual hierarchy on page and emphasize key conversion points.

Source: Invision

Make no mistake that the grid system isn’t all that confining and limited for designers. It’s a tool that allows designers to be free while still maintaining a general structure in their design to create coherent and functional websites and landing pages.

Asymmetrical layouts.

Asymmetrical layouts are ones where the focal points, or areas of conversion, are off-centered with text that is aligned flush-left, ragged-right. The off-centered approach to the design of the layout is one of the characteristics that distinguishes Swiss design, as this creates visual intrigue in your compositions. Think of it as being similar to the Rule of Thirds in photography – subject matter that’s emphasized on the left or right side of a composition when it’s divided into three parts creates more visual appeal.

Source: Invision Studio

Use of sans serif typography.

Sans serif typography made its breakthrough in the Swiss Style, as its purpose was very objective in nature – the omission of serifs on the font allow for easier legibility when read. The clean design of sans serif typography makes it altogether useful in modern web design, as there are no frills in the design of the typefaces and allows the content to truly shine.

Source: Lunar Gravity

Use of photography over illustrations.

Illustrations have become more and more popular in web design in recent years, as they are a way to portray a company or brand in a lighter sense and show some personality. But when it comes to Swiss design, it is preferred that photography be used over illustration, because photography is an objective medium that portrays reality.

Photography is also a powerful element in conversion-oriented web design as well. Because it’s solely objective, what you see is essentially what you get when promoting a product or service on your website or landing page. The combination of stunning photography that can depict the key benefits of your product or service, along with the simple and straightforward use of sans serif typography is a staple in Swiss design and a mainstay in great web design.

Additionally, it is found that human faces used on your site can also help boost conversions. Research suggests that one of the key factors when making a purchase decision online is trust. Just like how television advertisements utilize client testimonials on how a particular product or service provided benefits to them, the same concept is applied to web design. Photos that include people in them subliminally lead to more conversions on a page.

Source: Invision

Closing Thoughts

Now that you know about these classic Swiss Style techniques and approaches to modern design, see how you can apply them to your next website or landing page project. There’s a lot to be said for movements like the Swiss Style that have stood the test of time, and when it comes to web design you can’t go wrong. At its core, Swiss design embraces the beauty in usability being put into the forefront of design where the aesthetics would take a backseat. So don’t be afraid to follow traditions when thinking about how you can optimize conversions and have an all-around better user experience.

The post 5 Swiss Style Principles Applicable to Conversion-Oriented Web Design appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

So why is successful branding important in your marketing strategy for attracting your target audience? Here, let’s test the theory by asking our most reliable friend: Google!

Hey Google! Branding is…

“…the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.”

“…the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice-versa.”

“…the encapsulation of a company’s mission statement, objectives, and corporate soul as expressed through the corporate voice and aesthetic.”

 What Does the Dictionary Say? Branding is…

“…the promoting of a product or service by identifying it with a particular brand.”

As you can see, there are so many different takes on the rather broad topic of “What does branding mean?” “Branding” today is so vague that no one can seem to agree on a set definition. A branding strategy is also vastly different than it was just a few years ago. An athlete no longer just plays their respective sport; an athlete is a brand himself, one with a strong brand identity at that!

For example, LeBron James isn’t just a basketball player, he’s the LeBron James brand. You know him mainly for his work on the court, but he’s also a businessman. He has a particular brand reputation that he needs to maintain. Call it the Michael Jordan effect.

Actually, that’s a fine example to start with. The Air Jordan “Jumpman” is one of the most recognizable logos in the world. You see the logo, and it will quickly bring a few things to mind: Michael Jordan, basketball, dunks, championships, sneakers. And then you think “oh, I should buy these sneaks so I can be like Mike!”

And that’s the Air Jordan successful brand going to work. You see the logo and are able to associate it with what it stands for and what the company behind it does. It drives you to make a purchase because of your brand familiarity. Maybe you even believe in the brand, or in this case, are a big fan of Jordan or LeBron. The point is all of those thoughts and feelings matter when it comes to your purchasing decisions because you have brand loyalty towards that company.

Of course, not everyone has as much brand recognition as Air Jordan. The question then becomes, how do you get there? What can you do to get people more familiar with your brand? What’s the difference between branding vs. marketing? How do you build brand recognition, trust, and bring in more sales? As you can probably assume, branding for marketing is key if you want to successfully reach your target audience and establish brand loyalty.

In a nutshell, this should be at the center of your marketing efforts, no matter your specific campaign. Your greater goal should always be to raise your company’s profile, gain consumer trust, and bring in more business. This is where other buzz terms like “brand awareness” and “brand strategy” come into play.

Related: The Importance of Branding for Your Marketing

Building A Brand

Increasing your brand awareness can involve a wide variety of tools and strategies, but the objective will always be to attract new customers while retaining your loyal customers. You will do this by giving them a product that aligns with what your brand story and promises. But how you do this involves your brand strategy.

Your brand strategy involves the how, what, where, when, and to whom you want to be communicating with and delivering your brand messages. If your branding strategy is effective, it should gain you an edge over your competition. Your brand is a promise that you make to your customer, telling them what to expect from your products and services.

It should differentiate you from your competition, and tell customers who you are and what you do. You form that brand perception through who you want to be, and how your customers will perceive you to be.

Brand perception is another buzzworthy term in the branding spectrum that is formed through your branding efforts. When forming your brand strategy, you should take into account what your customers perceive your brand name to mean and represent. The best way to mold your company’s reputation is through effective messaging and your brand experience.

Related: Branding vs. Marketing: What’s the difference?

Branding: The Basics

The first thing you’ll want to do as you build your brand is to get your target customers familiar with who you are and what you do. Familiarity is a big part of the decision-making process for consumers who are in a buying mode. This means that if a person is shopping and comparing two similar products, they are more likely to purchase the one from the brand they are familiar with, rather than take a risk on the one they haven’t heard of. Having a strong brand helps consumers choose your product over the competition.

Related: Branding Assets Every Company Should Have

The first way to establish your brand is to create a strong logo that consumers will easily be able to identify with your brand. Think of some other logos like the Jumpman that have become iconic. Coca-Cola comes to mind. The Nike swoosh. The McDonald’s golden arches. Any professional sports team. You see the logo, you know what it represents.

Think of how you could do that for your brand. How can you convey who you are and what you stand for through a logo? It can be agonizing, but it’s worth taking the time to get it right. Ideally, you will only do this once, so you never have to give up the work you’ve done and force people to get re-familiar with a new logo. Some minor tweaks may be fine, but once people identify with your logo; keep it basically the same.

Your visual identity will expand, but it all starts with your foundation: the logo. From there, your branding will incorporate your company colors that you’ve chosen for a more specific reason than they look cool. You will then formulate an overall look, including your website, packaging, and all promotional materials. These visuals will be a major point of entry for customers, so you’ll need your brand to be clearly identified right away.

Your logo and visuals are certainly important parts of your brand that should be given careful consideration, but your brand awareness will also be built through strong, concise messaging. You can even boost your brand appeal through advertising and communications, your in-store experience, your pricing, sponsorships and partnerships, charitable associations, in addition to your visual identity.

Successful branding also will help build your company’s reputation from within. You’ll be likely to buy from a brand you’re connected to, for example, if you know someone who works at a specific company – especially if they love working there. You’ll also feel more connected to a brand that promotes a culture that you aspire to be a part of, and perhaps you’d even want to work there yourself and join its world. This boost the brand’s reputation and atmosphere by creating a space and a feeling, not just a product.

All of your efforts combine to create a brand experience your customers will enjoy. If they like your logo, your website is easy to use, they get a good vibe when they’re in your store and they like what your brand stands for, they’ll turn into loyal customers in no time.

Though branding is complicated, it’s important to remember that you have ownership of your brand, so take control and plan the experiences that you would like your customers to have.

The post What Does Branding Mean? appeared first on Power Digital Marketing.

According to a study conducted by Stanford University, 46.1% of people said that a website’s design is the top criteria for determining whether a company is credible or not. In that same study, it was also found that 38% of people will from websites they deem are unattractive. What these two stats tell us is that, well, looks matter, especially when it comes to driving conversions on your website or landing page.

Gestalt Principles of Design

The Gestalt Principles refer to the culmination of work by 1920s psychologists Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer. These principles focus on the cognitive behaviors humans enact when trying to decipher and organize pieces of information by grouping certain items together. Five principles make up Gestalt psychology, and they consist of the following:

• Proximity: The grouping of related elements which are brought together, while elements that are unrelated are placed further away.

• Similarity: The automatic assumption of a relationship based on shared visual characteristics. This can be exemplified through the use of color, scale, or shape.

• Continuity: States that as the eye starts to follow a certain order or pattern, it will continue in that direction until it encounters another object.

• Closure: States that so long as there is enough context clues and essential information provided, the mind will automatically supply the missing pieces. This principle is best used with easily recognizable objects.

• Figure & Ground: This principle focuses on an object as well as its surrounding space to give the illusion of depth.

Gestalt Principle images sourced by How Design.

By understanding these principles and putting them into practice, you can leverage them to optimize your website and landing page designs for more conversions.

Hick’s Law

According to a Microsoft study, human beings now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish (8 seconds to be exact) – WATTBA. In the age of scrolling feeds of memes and internet videos with no substance (but at times are beyond the most hilarious pieces of content you’ve ever seen), digital marketers now have the added challenge of trying to capitalize on a very small window. When strategizing on how to keep users engaged with your landing page or website, it’s also important to get a good grasp on the importance of Hick’s Law.

Developed by psychologists William Hick and Ray Hyman, Hick’s Law states that “the more choices a person is presented with, the longer the person will take to reach a decision.” And now that you know the human race has the same attention span that lasts as much time you’d pop a donut in the microwave for, you want your users to take action as quickly as possible. It’s critical that you limit the number of paths you want users to take for your next web project. And this goes for multiple elements on a page, from the menu navigation to internal links. When it comes to conversions, you want to limit the bounce rate (when users leave your site without taking an action) as much as possible, and being cognizant of Hick’s Law is one of the best ways to ensure that.

Color Theory and Contrast

Color theory is as robust as it is straightforward. The use of colors can have a major impact on your website and can ultimately be the deciding factor between a conversion and a bounce. As it applies to web design and conversions, you basically want the conversion areas to stand out as much as possible on your webpage while still being easy on the eyes when you look at it. This is also where contrast, or the striking difference between colors, comes into play. Contrast is used in tandem with color theory to generate noticeability for the conversion points on your website or landing page.

The Kissmetrics infographic below is a great resource for designers and marketers alike who want to understand the nuances of using color for the web.

Rule of Thirds

You’ve probably heard of the “Rule of Thirds” as it’s mostly in reference to a photographic work or a film, but this can also be applied to web design as well to optimize conversions on your site. The Rule of Thirds suggest that if you visually divide your screen into thirds vertically and horizontally, you’re left with four intersecting points of interest that the mind naturally finds compelling.

Source: Digital Photography School

In web design, you can use this rule as a tool for placing the most important elements you intend users to convert on. This concept is particularly useful when designing the hero section of a landing page. The goal is to have either your call to action button or form placed on, or close to, these intersecting points to draw the most interest out of users.

Source: Lyft

Closing Thoughts

In the grand scheme of things, driving conversions is an ambiguous challenge. There can be a plethora of reasons as to why a page or site isn’t converting well, and an equal amount of other design principles out there in the ether that can address them. But by keeping these four basic design principles in your back pocket, you’re on the right track to getting your users to convert more on your website.

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It may be easy to keep a grasp on your company’s brand assets, but as you grow and expand your network of partners, you need to be ready to educate how and when to use them. After many years of working in a digital marketing agency, with fellow creatives, and a wide variety of clients we have had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of very buttoned up and prepared businesses as well as the opposite end of the spectrum in which we were scraping together the bare minimum and running with them as far as we could.

If you are a small business, this post will hopefully help start the conversation to begin creating said assets and/or spur the decision to begin collecting and fine-tuning what you already have. If you are a well-established business and do not have these things taken care of… Shame! Shame! Shame! In all seriousness, it’s never too late to get organized or to consider what your brand may be missing or lacking. It is crucial to understand the importance of branding in marketing. Your partners will seriously appreciate the extra effort. This will help reduce delays in production, ensure that your branding agency is producing work that meets your standard of quality, and provide a roadmap that will keep your partners producing a cohesive product that aligns with your brand.

Let’s review a checklist of both conceptual needs and physical and digital assets your company should consider putting together prior to hiring your next partner and/or marketing agency. Ideally, you should collect or produce as many of the below items as possible in organized folders and have them ready to hand over as soon as possible.

Where To Start

Brand Guidelines

Depending on your business, brand guidelines can range from a one-page sheet to entire books with extreme detail. For the most part, there’s no need for a brand guideline book. Putting a minor amount of thought into the psychology and overall direction of how you would like your brand to be portrayed when in the hands of a partner is more than enough. A big reason why a brand guideline handbook is necessary is so that you can have brand consistency and a unified, strong brand identity. Hopefully the people you vetted and hired to run your marketing channels are professionals and will know what should and should not be done.

In some cases, there are finer details and restrictions that must be adhered to and these are great as they clearly define the do’s and dont’s of your brand and will help avoid any confusion while working together.

Logo Files

Logos! Every business or company has logos available right? That’s a no-brainer! Wrong. Logo files might be the most obvious since they are your bat signal after all. However, there are times when we find ourselves scouring Google Images for a client’s logo only to find that the sole file available is a  200×100 JPEG found on page 2 of the results and we are left scratching our heads. If you couldn’t tell by now with the abrupt change in tone, this is very annoying, happens far too often, and delays production (*deep breaths*).

If you have an in-house team or hired professionals to develop your logo, there is a standard checklist of file types that every marketing team will be high-fiving each other over if they are available upon request.

• EPS – An .eps file is the ideal choice for your marketing team as it is not only a high-res vector format, but also a working design file that can be edited/manipulated as needed in Adobe Illustrator. If you have these, great! If not, consider reaching out to the people responsible for creating your logo as they should have sent them to you and/or consider hiring someone to create .eps files for your logo.
• PNG – A .png file is a raster file that will allow you to generate a version of your logo without a background. Thus, allowing you to place it over any type of color, surface, or texture as long as your brand guidelines permit.
• SVG – Similar to an .eps file generated by Adobe Illustrator, an .svg file is a high res, vector format that is compatible for both print and web.
• *JPEG – The only reason I have .jpeg on this list is because if you are working with a technically savvy marketing agency, their design personnel should be able to make this work IF it is a last resort and/or all that you have on hand. This will require a bit of extra time and most likely some finesse in some cases, but it can be done.

Imagery & Photography

In an ideal world, you will have invested the time and money into the development of imagery that is representative of your brand. If not, an outline or guide of stock photography can be very helpful to your marketing agency or internal team, but not something you should rely on as customers nowadays can sniff out stock photos and are often turned off by them. At the very least, you should have a mood board or list of example references available.

Oftentimes, illustrations or icons fall into this category as well. The two styles serve a common purpose and provide immense value in their own unique way. Having similar imagery, graphics and content is a great way to build brand consistency.

Tip: INVEST IN YOUR OWN PHOTOGRAPHY.

Font Files

Believe it or not, not all fonts are created equal (aka they aren’t all free).  If you are unaware of the fonts your business uses, a free Google Chrome widget FontFace Ninja allows you to pull the fonts being used on any web page. These will most likely be your brand’s fonts and will help you track them down for your agency. Luckily, the trend of choosing Google-friendly fonts has minimized the margin of error in a lot of these cases

Color Palette

Your brand’s color palette is not the biggest deal in the world to have solidified, because nine times out of ten a savvy digital marketing professional will be able to pull those colors from your website through a number of tactics. However, having a simple color palette handy is always helpful and cuts down the number of unnecessary steps. Ensuring you have a consistent color scheme is also important in developing a strong brand.

Examples of Past Work

Examples of past work will provide your marketing agency with a benchmark to avoid repeating as well as exceed in their own rite. This is a great opportunity to have an open discussion about the things you liked or disliked about previous work. It’s these brainstorming sessions between the people who know their business/brand the best.  Two brains will always be better than one in these cases.

Having examples of past work also helps the marketers you hire understand your brand identity and brand elements that you like to use. This helps them come up with a clear marketing strategy.

Final Thoughts

It goes without saying that it is our/your agency’s job to worry about these types of things as they may or may not be anywhere near your list of to-do’s. We get it, you’ve got a business to run. You should never hesitate to lean on your partners or marketing agency for help on these matters. We hope this list got you thinking about where you stand in terms of brand assets, how organized they are, how readily available you have them in one place, as well as what branding is and its importance.

If you ever are in the market for a company rebrand and/or development of any of the above brand assets, please do not hesitate to reach out to the team at Power Digital and we would be happy to get you in touch with the correct people to make that happen!

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