Building your small business is no easy feat. Creating your brand and a logo that speaks to who you are as well as to your ideal clients can be the most daunting task of them all. In order to stand above the competitiion, you need to appeal to your client based but also maintain a level of cohesiveness. When a picture pops up on someone's newsfeed, you want them to say "Oh, I know that look - that's <insert your business name here>!"
So what is a Style Branding Guide? A Style Branding Guide is "a collection of the core items used to represent your brand across any and all touch points." It can be delivered in different formats like a one-page document, a multi-page reference guide with specifications, or an online reference like Frontify. Branding Guides have a consistent look and feel through their aesthetic appeal, but also their messaging and more. A Style Branding Guide can help provide consistency across your brand. For instance, if you're having a photographer take brand photos of you, a guide will help them get the visual vibe in one glance - think branding colors, your boho/chic vibe, etc. If you're trying to pick out stock photos for your visuals, you can use your guide as a reference point to make sure the images you're choosing are on-brand. It also serves as a guide as you grow your brand to keep you from straying too far from your core elements. Core Elements to a Style Branding Guide:
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Not a photographer or camera pro? Using stock images can be such a timesaver and propel your branding and media appeal to professional level!
Best Ways to use Stock Photos: 1. Landing Pages/websites: It's really easy to pop a stock photo in the background of a landing page to make it more interesting than a solid background. 2. Blog post images: Sometimes there’s the perfect photo that matches your words and together they speak volumes. 3. Prints & mock-ups: stock images are great for creative designs for mugs, cards, prints, and more 4. Quote images: Everyone loves inspirational quotes using stock photos hleps to create motivational social media graphic. Adding a white overlay + the quote in your brand colors and fonts, plus your logo to the image to make it on-brand for your biz. Best stock photo recommnedations: Free:
Paid:
As we all begin to wrap it our 2017, we start to focus on 2018 and what the next year will mean for us. For a lot of us, Goal lists and planning is a major part of our business plans. Having a set goal makes things attainable in our minds. Also for a lot of us, we struggle with defining those goals. Sometimes, we've accomplished more the past year than we though possible. And really, how can you exceed goals you didn't know you had?!?
My advice?
We all have high standards for ourselves. It's ingrained in us to be our own worst critic. Goal Lists have always been my saving grace. For me, I need to put a checkbox next to something thats been accomplished to keep me focused on what's important in business and to also work harder for myself. Owning a small business, being your own boss and relying on yourself to provide for your family, is scary. Setting goals, accomplishing them, and growing makes those task less daunting and garners your self worth! Set it, work for it, own it! Investing in education to better yourself and your business is an investment I highly recommend everyone to participate in. There are so many conferences for Creatives that have evolved over the last few years. I personally am excited about a few of these and implore you to research each and make the investment. This is a top goal of mine for 2018! Conferences centered around Creatives and Entrepreneurs: FEBRUARY 2018
MARCH 2018
MAY 2018
SEPTEMBER 2018
DATES TBD
One of the most common questions that is posed on our Facebook Group is how to start a business in Louisiana and what type of business to register as. The Louisiana Secretary of State has a great resource called geauxBIZ that aims to direct and teach new small business owners how to become established in the state. geauxBIZ is your one-stop site for launching your new business in the state of Louisiana.
Once you create an account on geauxBIZ, you can:
Once you've established yourself with geauxBIZ, head on over to the Louisiana Small Business Development Center for more resources and local chapters in your area. Most Business Development Centers can even help you find retail space for rent as well as create a business plan and analysis of how your business will succeed in your particular location. www.southeastern.edu/admin/sbdc/Southeastern Louisiana University has a great Small Business Center aimed to help the Hammond area businesses succeed. I wanted to share with you my Top 5 Tools & Applications I've started using that have significantly helped in streamlining and time saving my day-to-day business operations.
So I want to know - what tools have you been coveting and willing to share with all of us Creatives?!? Umm, hello Zapier! Where have you been all my life?!
Creatives - if you have not been introducted to Zapier let me do that introduction now. Zapier is is a web automation app in which you can build Zaps that can automate parts of your business! For instance, anytime I generate a new Lead in my CRM (Dubsado), Zapier automates a new Card generation to my Trello account! HOLD THE FRONT DOOR! Yes, you heard me!! No more double entries!! I also have Zaps set up to send me text messages when a new appointment is booked or a payment has been made! Want to know the best part? Zapier is FREE!! Go check this app out to automate and ease up your workflow! (www.zapier.com) Hello Monday! Here is a friendly SEO tip:
When writing your blog, do not ignore the SEO Post Title or the SEO Post Description and most definitely do not leave the META KEYWORDS space BLANK when developing your web pages! By utilizing these, you are helping Google rank you higher in searches!! Use them to your advantage! Now go rock this week! ~Virginia Buckner One thing I've learned with running my own small business is that Goals are a necessity. Whether short or long term, setting a goal can help shape the success of your business. Having something to work towards as opposed to just pushing along blindly. But what happens when you don't acheive those goals and how do you move past it? Laura Pennington with BossBabe wrote this great article on what to do in that situation!
Read the article here. Just curious: If you don't advertise your business, what's the number one reason that keeps you from doing so? And if you do advertise, where do you spend your money? Print, online, or both?
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The Wedding creativesAll blog posts are pulled directly from our Facebook Group discussions. The topics are presented by Creatives for Creatives! Archives
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