Tag Archives: Branding

Publishing Confusion – Part Four – Social Media

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Social Media.

Most of you know how to use the basics…or do you? I thought I was good with Facebook, when one day a course in our local region we found a tutorial on how to use Facebook for business. It blew what we thought we knew right open. OUCH. Luckily there was no re-learning, there was extra learning.

In the last twelve months, many of our Social Media websites have updated. Things have moved, changed or disappeared. Even we’ve had issues finding various items. Sometimes the frustration creeps in and takes over. The better you can use Social Media, the better you can MARKET your business and grow your AUTHOR BRAND. With saying that, we need to give you a few ways to make more out of a post and images.

We’ve always been taught that images get more people looking at your posts. However, what sort of image do you need to use? Have you ever looked on Facebook to see which type of images get the most likes and shares? Why do they get so much attention. Why do people stop scrolling and read? 

Next time you find something you like and read, think about what you notice first. Is it the writing? Which part? A title? A font? Large fonts? The mission into marketing is endless trying to find out what will work for us and our books. RESEARCH…yep that word again. Weird how it keeps cropping up.

Advert for Shattered Badge, Shattered Trust by Sandra Brewster.

We’re going to make a Facebook Post. It was a new release for one of our clients. The novel is called ‘SHATTERED BADGE SHATTERED TRUST’ by Sandra Brewster. It is available on AMAZON. To the left  of the screen is the book cover. For those who are sight impaired the image shows a police badge which has been broke into pieces the the book title across the middle. At the top of the cover is the Authors name. The background is a greenish blur of a crime scene.

First things first is to make a 3D cover so it looks like a book rather than a flat image. This will make it stand out better and hopefully grab a readers interest. It is obviously a story which involves a character who is a cop. Though what is the relevance about the Shattered Trust? Who’s Trust was destroyed and why? Maybe a bit of the synopsis will tell us what’s going on. Can we add it to the Facebook Post? 

This depends on what type of Marketing you are looking at doing. Who are you aiming your ADVERT at? Are you doing a PAID ADVERT or a post in a group? Will you make a TEASER for the story or a POSTER. On that note…if you can’t use photoshop, GIMP, Krita or similar graphic apps then please use CANVA. It’s FREE and easy to use, even for those who think they aren’t good with technology.

CANVA – AUTHOR INTRODUCTION IDEA

In the first PNG image you have all the different areas, all giving you different information. Obviously this is a small image of what the poster would be if it were printed out. Looking at it digitally and asking a few friends, I see what they like and don’t like. The BOOK BLURB is to pale and needs to be BOLD FONT. The eBook app in the image above the authors profile image needs to be put in (can’t do this on CANVA FREE). I don’t like is the BOOK LINK.. it looks to big and untidy. We may make it smaller or use a QR Code.

We have made some adjustments on this second image. The book cover has been placed into the eBook app on the image. In the next image we have put the BOOK BLURB in bold to show what it looks like.

The main issue with the poster is having to use two different apps to make the poster. We started in CANVA and played around, asking for opinions… Now we need to put all of this together. This same poster only needs the book cover adding to the eBook reader along with the QR Code and then it is finished. For now we’ve left the book link in though made it smaller and bold.

My next question is: What do you think? Is it good? Are there any changes? What do you get from reading the poster? Would it make you look up the author and read her books?

Please let me know in comments.

NOTE: The image is to complex to put in ALT TEXT. 

 

 

Psychology and Business

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I decided it was time for some training and to learn to be more business savvy and find out how things work. Here in New Zealand, we’re lucky to have some FREE Training for Businesses in the Digital Market. I joined up and started watching the videos. The first one was on BRANDING.
 
BRANDING
 
It’s about who you are, what you wish to portray to others, what you do, how you do it and the story behind everything. With saying this… It’s time to introduce myself.
 
I’m a small business owner who went the wrong way into business. I started a company with little knowledge or thought about what I was doing. I made mistakes, which I’ll call my ‘learning curve’ and gained me some knowledge I needed to move forward. Though I have a legal company, I treated it more like a hobby business. I’d no idea how to grow my clientele list because marketing wasn’t a top priority. Not that I knew how to market my business.

Six years on…
 
It’s time to learn and grow. As mentioned above, the first step is BRANDING. The video I watched mentioned psychology of colour and typography. It mentioned how LOGOs are developed to grab attention of customers. Below is my original LOGO, which was designed by Lauren Waters. The design is based on an old family street light, which is still standing outside the building in Woolwich, London, over 200 years later. To me, it showed strength and character.
 
I used black and white (certainly no psychology here). The idea was to use this LOGO on colour background, however, BRANDING is about using the same LOGO consistently. Something I did to a degree, though it also had changes over the years. 
 
Yesterday, I looked up the Psychology of Colour and Typography suggested by the video. Lots of information, and the reading started. I enjoyed reading what Richard Larson had written. It showed you what the different types of FONTs meant, along with the different meanings of COLOURS many of these used by big business. Below is a list of both along with the website so you can read and understand the concepts of this type of psychology.
 
Read this blog post by Richard Larson to understand the concepts behind what graphic designers do to create your LOGO. It’s an eyeopener.
 

Psychology of Colour in Fonts and Content Branding

 
FONTS AND THEIR MEANINGS
  • Serif fonts are associated with authority, tradition, respect, and grandeur.
    • Popular Serif Fonts: Times New Roman, Bodini, Georgia, Garamond, and Baskerville.
  • Sans Serif fonts are associated with being clean, modern, objective, stable, and universal.
    • Popular Sans Serif Fonts: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, Century Gothic, and Calibri.
  • Slab Serif fonts are associated with bold, strong, modern, solid, and funky.
    • Popular Slab Serif Fonts: Rockwell, Courier, Museo, Clarendon, and Bevan.
  • Script fonts are associated with being feminine, elegant, friendly, intriguing, and creative.
    • Popular Script Fonts: Lobster, Zapfino, Pacifico, Lucida, and Brush Script.
  • Modern fonts are associated with exclusivity, fashionable, stylish, sharp, and intelligent.
    • Popular Modern Fonts: Infinity, Eurostyle, Majoram, Matchbook, and Politica.
 
COLOURS AND THEIR MEANINGS
 
  • Blue: Trust and Security, Calmness, Peace & Honesty, often used by banks
  • Green: Associated with wealth, Easiest color for the eyes to process, often used to represent health and wellbeing
  • Yellow: Optimistic & Youthful, Fun, Humour, Lightness, Intellect, Logic and Creativity
  • Orange: Stimulates Creativity & Productivity, Creates a Call for Attention
  • Red: Creates urgency, vitality & stamina, energy
  • Pink: Romantic & Feminine, Often Aimed at Girls or Women
  • Purple: Soothe & Calm, Intuition & Imagination

What is your business? What is your story? How can psychology help you grow your business?

Discussion is open, and comments are welcome.

 

How to Tell a Compelling Brand Story by Clifford Chi

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Brand Storytelling is a new Marketing idea which has taken off.  Since many of us are Authors and Publishers we should have some great stories to tell… and below, they show you what you need to do.  For those authors who do Outlines…this should be a breeze. Start reading and click the link at the bottom for more information.

You can also download their ebook about brand storytelling from their website. 🙂

Have a wonderful day

Claire Plaisted

Last year, a buzzword ripped through the content marketing space that most marketers were surprisingly thrilled about and eager to implement. Shockingly, it didn’t start with “virtual” or end with “intelligence”. Instead, it was what attracted most marketers to the industry in the first place — “storytelling”.

Content marketing’s steady adoption of storytelling is an exciting new opportunity for content creators. The human brain is wired to respond to well-crafted narrative — neuroscience proves that storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention, bake information into their memories, and forge close, personal bonds. Your audience is programmed to crave and seek out great stories — that’ll never change.

However, since we’ve spent the majority of our careers optimizing content for algorithms, it can be challenging to flex a creative muscle that’s slowly withered away from inactivity and, in turn, move people emotionally and sear your brand into their memories.

So, to help you strengthen that creative muscle and write compelling stories again, we’ve created a guide about the fundamentals of brand story structure and provided examples of three small-to-medium sized businesses who have leveraged their brand story to resonate with huge audiences, despite their comparatively small size.

What is a brand story?

A brand story recounts the series of events that sparked your company’s inception and expresses how that narrative still drives your mission today. Just like your favorite books and movies’ characters, if you can craft a compelling brand story, your audience will remember who you are, develop empathy for you, and, ultimately, care about you.

When HubSpot first started, we noticed traditional, interruptive marketing didn’t appeal to consumers anymore. Due to the digital age, people were in complete control of the information they consumed — and they were sick and tired of receiving direct mail, email blasts, and cold calls. People wanted to be helped, so we started creating educational content that aided people in solving their marketing problems.

Today, we’ve built a passionate community of inbound marketers, expanded our inbound marketing approach to the sales and customer service industries, and strengthened the inbound movement more than ever before.

This our brand story — a simple, digestible narrative that explains why HubSpot began, and how this reason still serves as our purpose today.

How to Write a Brand Story

1. Highlight your story’s conflict.

Check out the following story. Does it resonate with you?

A girl wearing a red-hooded cloak is strolling through the woods to give her sick grandma some much-needed food and TLC. She passes by a wolf on the way. They exchange a slightly awkward soft smile-nod combination that random colleagues usually greet each other with as they pass in the hallway. She makes it to her grandma’s house without a scratch. They eat lunch and play a game of Clue together. Grandma wins by deducing that Colonel Mustard killed Mr. Boddy in the Billiard Room with the candlestick — what a shocker! The End.

So … what’d you think? Did this story keep you on the edge of your seat? Or does it feel … off? For some reason, it doesn’t work, right? That’s because there’s no conflict. Despite the intense game of Clue at the end, there’s nothing at stake. There’s no tension. The wolf didn’t try to eat the girl. He didn’t even go to Grandma’s house. He barely acknowledged Little Red Riding Hood.

At their core, stories are about overcoming adversity. So if there’s no conflict presented, there’s no drama or emotional journey that people can relate to. And if your story has no drama or emotional journey, it won’t hold anyone’s attention — let alone resonate with and inspire them.

Unfortunately, in the business world, brands are horrified to reveal any adversity or conflict they’ve faced. They believe that spinning a rosy, blemish-free story about how their company only experiences hockey stick growth will convince people that they’re the industry’s best-in-class solution. Any adversity or conflict during their company’s history will expose their imperfections, deterring potential customers from buying their product.

But, in reality, this is a huge misconception. Nothing’s perfect. Everything, including companies (especially companies), has flaws. Plus, people don’t relate to perfection. They relate to the emotional journey of experiencing adversity, struggling through it, and, ultimately, overcoming it. Because, in a nutshell, that’s the story of life.

Conflict is key to telling compelling stories. So be transparent about the adversity your company has faced, and own it. The more honest you are about your shortcomings, the more people will respect you and relate to your brand.

2. Don’t forget about your story’s status quo and resolution.

Read More Here

Who do you Market?

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After an interesting discussion with a local bookstore owner, I started to wonder a bit more about MARKETING.  Who or what are we MARKETING.  The books we write or our author names.  Think about it for a moment.  Big business sell their product because the consumer likes their name. It attracts attention. Next they do mouth-watering  adverts to entice you inside.

MacDonald’s anyone?  Golden Arches, Ronald McDonald…We all know this business with their huge logo which is totally in your face.  KFC, Nestle etc. You name it and they all have huge signs grabbing your attention prior to trying to show you how good they are and yep we know some aren’t good at all…Though looking at the second stage of marketing, – what they sell and how they sell it.

SELL YOUR NAME AS AN AUTHOR

How can we sell our author names to the public. How do we grow our reach, get out names out there showing how good our books are?

One way I help authors is by doing a SPOTLIGHT AUTHOR each month in my FREE Magazine. The Indie Publishing News goes worldwide, though still needs more contributions and a bigger reach to be totally effective like the bigger magazines out there – National Geographic, which is an amazing magazine.  Each author gets a cover page with their names on, along with about five – six pages filled with an interview, recipe, reviews etc.

                 

As an author, it is a different matter.  It is up to me to sell my name unless I employ someone to do this for me. We all know this would be a tad expensive for most Indie Authors. So what can I do?  I don’t have a logo (except for my business).  What was suggested was having my author name bigger on my book covers like many top-selling authors do through traditional publishing houses.  LEE CHILD, JAMES PATTERSON...both do this. You see their name before you see the title of the book they are selling.  The story is secondary in many ways. It is the name which pulls you in.

SO WHY DON’T WE DO THE SAME?

I asked one author friend and she said it made a person look big-headed as if they are the bees knees. Isn’t that what we want though? To be thought to be the best so we can sell our work to the consumer? Shouldn’t this be part of a strategy from the start? Making a big splash with our name, after all it is what represents us the most.

BOOK COVERS

So which one appeals to you? Which one would you focus on if you were going to buy the story to read?  You can see the process which we went through. The light purple one was made by the bookstore owner to show me what he meant about MARKETING your name. If you were the author – which one would you use, remembering you are MARKETING your name and then your story.

           

                              

PLEASE COMMENT AND LET ME KNOW – THANKS

FEATURE IMAGE IS FROM A POST I REBLOGGED –

I THOUGHT IT FIT NICELY WITH THE CONTENTS OF THIS POST

THANK YOU TO THE ARTIST WHO PUT IT TOGETHER.

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