The #1 Potential Barrier To Success

It can be long or short, but don’t skip the creative brief. Explain the background and needs of your project with a simply worded creative brief. Include research if you have it, or explain what research you expect the creative team to do. If your creative brief will be verbal, then alert your team that they may want to record the conversation. Some simple points to cover before the project starts:

• Company background, audiences, the near-term goals of the business, and the competitive landscape
• Why this project is important to the business, and what would happen if the project is not completed in a timely manner
• What the end user should feel and do if the project is completed in an ideal way

Communication Styles – What’s Yours?

Once you’ve hired a creative, let them know how you prefer to communicate. Whether by text, email, phone, in person or skype, choose what works for you, and let them know your preferences.

Welcome Them To The Team

Working side by side with a large team can be an exciting change of pace for creative folks, especially for outsourced creative talent who may be used to working without daily supervision. Introducing new creatives to key people in your organization can help foster a sense of teamwork that can pay off in the long run if their motivational fuel runs low.

Connect On Social Networks

Personal recommendations on LinkedIn are one of the best ways to show appreciation to members of your creative team. But everyone knows that you can’t recommend someone without first looking them up and requesting to connect. Once you are comfortable that you have made the right choice in hiring, connect personally with your creatives on LinkedIn and other social networks to provide an added incentive to perform professionally and to do great work.

High Energy Helps

New ideas flow best when energy levels are high. If you or team members are losing focus during a long meeting, consider splitting up your meetings or calls so you don’t try to cover too much in a single session.

A Change of Scenery

Have you been holding meetings in the same conference room or meeting space for a while? To stimulate their creative juices, introduce your creative team to new environments by holding meetings occasionally at a satellite office, a different conference room, or by touring a new company installation or construction groundbreaking.

If Things Get Off Track

Resolving problems such as a missed deadline, or receiving creative work that just doesn’t work, can be uncomfortable to say the least. If a milestone is missed send a timely reminder and request a follow up. And if the creative solutions are off target or just plain ugly, then give your team a chance to resolve it by providing you with new or revised ideas. Let them know that you are focused on the end result, and want to avoid similar problems on future projects. And if they have concerns along the way, encourage them to take them to the top before any hard feelings develop.

Discuss Budgets at the Beginning, Middle and End

Great creatives are not often great accountants, and tend to want to focus on innovative ideas instead of the intricacies of complex project budgets. Both managers and creatives should have a clear understanding of what the effort will cost, right up front and in writing. Budget ranges, project phases, hourly costs, or inclusive fixed fee arrangements are all fine, as long as both managers and creative staff are on the same page and keep the budget discussions open as the project progresses. If budgets are tight consider providing some examples of the quality level that is expected, so that your creative team doesn’t try to invent everything from scratch. If you take the time to explain how important the budget is to your project, you can tap their creativity in coming up with innovative ways to change things around to be more cost effective while still meeting your goal.

Design: Training Your Website Review Team

Who do you turn to for design advice? While there are many many tools available to perform testing and analysis, sometimes the data raises more question than it answers. So if you make many of your design and marketing decisions “from your gut”, then welcome to the club! I encourage everyone to go with their gut first and foremost. But for your most important marketing or website changes, it’s comforting to be able to share it with your family and friends pre-launch, asking for their suggestions. Any feedback is good feedback, right? Wrong! In order to squeeze the most actionable business insights from their comments, you’ll want to carefully select a review team and give them a framework to provide helpful comments:

• Explain the characteristics of your target audience, and ask them to act the part of that demographic.
• Try to get them to consider every question you ask from the perspective of the target audience.
• Simple questions, such as “which do you think would persuade my audience best, version A or B?” are more easily measured than open-ended ones.

Lucky you if a professional website designer is among your closest friends, to give you a professional perspective. But the very best reviewer is an actual client or someone who closely fits the demographic of your audience. Regardless of who you choose for your team, the extra time that it takes to train them will pay off when they start giving you more usable feedback.

Fine Tune: Your Content Strategy

It’s easy to see how your site is ranking for your highest priority keywords by taking a quick look at your Google Webmaster Tools “Traffic / Search Queries” tab. If your target terms aren’t showing up here try checking your rank using a rank tracking tool. Now that you know what Google considers you relevant for, and where you rank, create content with a short list of target keywords in mind. To improve your ranking for your target terms, include them in prominent areas of your site. But don’t force the keywords in — just keep adding content. And ask yourself before posting:

• does the content help inform and educate?
• does it make sense to the intended audience?
• is it high quality, creative and entertaining?
• does it contain the target terms?

Search engines may change the way they rank sites over time, but consistently posting high quality content will never go out of style.

Analytics: Link Up Your Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics continues to add features to help website managers to better understand and improve their sites. Many of the more advanced views now require your Google Webmaster Tools account to be linked up in Google Analytics. Not sure if you’re accounts are linked up? Try viewing Traffic Sources / Search Engine Optimization and you may see a message saying “This report requires Webmaster Tools to be enabled” with a button that says “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing”. Clicking the setup button and linking the correct Google Webmaster Tools profile now allows search term impressions and clicks to be viewed right in your Google Analytics dashboard. Even if you don’t plan to look at your Google Analytics right away, take this step now.

Research: Never Stop Spying On Your Competitors

Just like having a target keyword list in critical in judging your search-engine success, creating and updating a competitor “watch list” can help you with tactical decisions and allocation of marketing budgets. The same type of ongoing analysis that you perform on your own site can easily be performed occasionally on your competitors or other best-in-class companies, to see where they lag behind your offering, where they are improving, and where they meet or exceed your efforts. Google Alerts is a decent place to start with monitoring competitors and your own brand mentions. Alexa.com and Compete.com both offer free comparison data, just plug in your site then a few example sites and see approximately where you rank for traffic. Charts and data from Compete and Alexa are often inaccurate, at least with their free offerings, so use it for general research purposes only.

Monitoring: Your Site’s Health

Help Google stay up to date on changes to your content structure by occasionally checking your Google Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics for “Crawl Errors”. If you see any 404 Page Not Found errors, a 301 Redirect can be added to redirect traffic from the old URL to a similar page on your current site.

Keep up with other site performance tips over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Evolution Design has developed hundreds of logos for clients of all sizes and across a variety of industries. Whether the need is a logo design for a start-up business or a re-branding for a large organization, our creative logo designs provide a memorable first impression. Thorough research and exploration of a variety of styles and themes leads to a brand identity that will stand out in your marketplace, appeal to your constituencies, and complement your organization’s web design. Once the logo design is approved, we create a extensive library of art files so that the logo design can be used consistently by other vendors. Evolution Design can create a matching corporate identity design to include business card design, electronic letterhead, and other internal forms and documents, as well as custom web design and matching print collateral. Contact us today to schedule a complimentary brand analysis.