Maintaining A Professional Look For Your Brand
As a business owner, the image of your company should always be of high importance. Whether you believe it or not your potential clients pay attention to details when choosing where to spend their money. If your business looks unprofessional you could be missing out on countless opportunities and not even know it. Here are some tips to help avoid common pitfalls when it comes to your business image.
1. Keep your website updated and well maintained:
- Check often to see if your website is even up at all. You will be surprised to how many times I have seen a website owner not know their website has been down for weeks or even months due to security breaches or hosting issues.
- Make sure your company info such as address and phone number is up to date.
- Check for broken links.
- Keep up with your web domain and know when it needs to be renewed!!!
2. Use professional images on your website:
There is nothing that screams unprofessional like bad photos on your website. Hire a photographer!!! If a photographer is not in the budget, there are plenty of stock photo sites where you can find pictures related to your business until you can afford it. Also, resist the urge to stretch and distort to make images fit on your site. If they aren’t big enough don’t use them.
3. Use your website email:
When communicating with clients and networking it is so important to use an email with your website domain. If you are still using your Gmail or a Hotmail account you might not be taken seriously by others when it comes to your business. Most hosting companies give you either unlimited email accounts or at least a significant amount these days. All you have to do is plug in the provided email settings into any email client or smartphone and you are set. If you don’t have Outlook, there are other options such as Mozilla Thunderbird, “Mail” for Windows users, “Mail” for Mac users, or even the webmail tool within your web hosting provider.
4. Steer away from cheap business cards:
- A high-quality card can be a great conversation starter and also help you stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Choose a thick card stock like 16pt and up. - Use both sides of the card when getting them printed. Use all the real estate available on the card with your design.
- Do not overload your card with too much info. They should be able to see your logo, slogan, name/title, address, email, phone number, social info, and a few of your most important services. Again this should be spread out between both sides of your card.
- Use an online printer instead of a local printer. The majority of the time I will encourage you to support local business, but sometimes it does not make financial sense. Usually, an online printer can provide custom card options that most local printers cannot. If they do offer custom options then their price becomes out of reach, because it’s not a high demand item. Places likes GotPrint or MorningPrint offer a number of options that will provide you with eye-catching cards.
Following these tips will help you maintain the professional image you need to succeed in your marketplace!
