MBA1948 Guest Teacher – Jason Byer – How To Attract More Customers with a Strong Brand

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit it finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event. Celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA Show Business Strategies that actually work. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co founder back in 2014. And today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes, we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Jason Byer and he'll be teaching you how to attract more customers with a strong brand. Many of us underestimate how much your brand results in your sales. Your brand is what people trust. It's the reason why they trust you enough to sign up. This is what big companies spend millions upon millions of dollars a year on reinforcing their brand. Whether it's Gucci, Mercedes Benz, Uber or Under Armour. They want you to know you could trust them, that their product, their service is quality. That when you see a piece of marketing material from them or you head on over to their website, you automatically feel like this is a place that knows what it's doing. It commands authority. It commands respect. This doesn't happen by accident. And that's why we brought on Jason Beyer today to teach today's lesson. Because he's going to show you how to do some small things in your own company that can elevate your brand and your brand affinity. This of course result with more credibility, more authority and the ultimate goal, more customers. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

They put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill. So go to McDonald's and try it. Today.

Today'S guest teacher, Jason Byer, leads marketing and partnerships over@ crowdspring.com they've helped over 65,000 small businesses build their brand identity and is here to teach you some simple things that you can do to improve your brand identity and build that brand affinity we all want with our potential customers. So I'm going to hand it over to Jason now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, Jason.

Hello, I'm Jason Byer and I lead marketing and partnerships for crowdspring.com I'm really excited to talk about this lesson because a strong brand is often overlooked as a way to attract more customers, justify premium price points, and really build a more resilient business. It's the foundation of your business operations and your marketing. So first, what is a brand? A brand is the sum total of all of the experiences a person has with your company. This could be how your customer support team responds or the cleanliness of your physical location. A brand identity is what you and others can see. This includes your logo, advertising, and elements of your website. The important thing to remember is that every decision you make affects your brand. Think about the last time you were on hold with a company and you keep hearing the words, your time is really important to us. We'll be with you in just a moment. You're the most important part of our business. We appreciate your Service and after 10 or 15 minutes of hold time, you realize that their actions are not reflective of their brand. So think about this. When a person engages with your business for the first time, they don't know who you are. They don't know your products, they don't know your customers, they don't know your reputation, but they know you're trying to sell them something. Those are big hurdles to overcome. And a brand creates a set of consistent expectations. And if you can remove the uncertainty and fear around trying a new product or company, it will attract people to spend money because they know what they're going to get. So let's do this. Let's apply this to the real world. Let's discuss the elements of a website above the fold. Above the fold is a term for everything that loads on the website that you can see before you scroll. And there are a lot of brand elements in this little space that we can discuss. So when people are looking at this section above the fold, they're making a very quick judgment that will impact the rest of their visit. They're subconsciously deciding if they're going to do business with you at all and whether they think you're a premium or budget provider. So let's start at the top of the website. The logo is typically in the upper left hand corner. Now, a logo should be custom. It shouldn't be generic. It shouldn't be from a free logo generator that mashes up a couple generic elements together and calls it a logo. And there's a few reasons for this. Logos should be unique and interesting. They should be just for your business. They shouldn't be able to easily be swapped out for another company, another brand. When somebody sees this logo, they should remember you. They should think about your company, not just your industry that you serve, that this logo could serve for multiple different businesses within this industry. The logo should be versatile. And this is a problem where you see generic logos don't scale very well. You can't use them in smaller spaces like a social avatar or they look odd, it's difficult to see them. You need elements within that logo that can be taken away and the logo still stands. You've got a strong word mark, which is your company brand that stands stylized well and can stand on its own without the image that can go along with that logo. And they should be clean and easy to understand. A lot of times with generic logos, they make up for their generic elements by adding more elements to the logo. And you really want something that can be quickly and easily viewed by anybody very quickly throughout your marketing materials. So next up on this, you know, as you're thinking about your website or a company's website, above the fold, we covered the logo, now let's take a look at the. Think about the colors that show immediately. You've got multiple different areas where there's colors. Colors play a very important role in how we perceive your brand and our excitement to continue engaging down the page, that's really what above the fold is about. We're trying to build excitement, to learn more about the company, to engage a little bit more. And the colors play a very vital role in this. Now, the logo helps. Having a custom logo gives you a custom color palette that you can use throughout your site. And we want colors that provide contrast, we want colors that look well together. We want colors that match our industry and provide the. The trust, if that's part of our business. Right. If you're a financial advisor or bank trust is going to be very critical or stability or the price of your product, is it a premium product? Color plays a very important role in this. The other Thing that's going to stand out are the images that are used and they should support your brand, meaning they should reflect your customer demographic. Stock images do a very poor job of this because by their nature they are generic. They don't speak directly to your customers because they speak to a wide breadth of different groups. If you are a single person, business or shop, show yourself, smile and look at the camera and place that above the fold so people know exactly who they're dealing with. If you're a larger company, consider custom illustrations, ways to be able to show your brand and what you do for your customers visually and in a very custom way. Stock images show people that you don't care as much about your business or your brand because you, you think that just any image can represent what you do instead of being unique and custom. So the next element as we kind of journey through this above the fold section and talk about the what the brand means is the user should not have to scroll to see your main message or image. Many times this message or image is cut off halfway through and you have to scroll to engage more. And it shows a level of sloppiness that you're not keeping things clean and above the fold. So that I as a customer can see this very quickly and understand your message, then engage more. Right. We want to make sure that it's presented well and it's presented in a very clean way. So there's what's called hero text and hero is that main area of your site. It's above the fold and there's typically or there should be some text that communicates what you do, why somebody should trust you, and the result that the user should expect. This should be communicated very succinctly. There's an old saying in copywriting that if I had more time, I would have written less. It's difficult to write succinctly and to communicate why somebody should do business with you and what they should expect by doing business. One way to make this a little bit easier is you should be running a B tests for this messaging and see which is working better and continually test this messaging. Next up is the call to action. This is typically going to be below your main message towards the bottom of this above the fold section. The call to action is what you want somebody to do and it should take into consideration that the person has spent very little time up to this point on your site. So they probably should be directed to a shop page as opposed to a buy or a sign up for a free trial as opposed to a paid plan or schedule a call as opposed to scheduling a service call. We want to make sure that we are moving people throughout the rest of our site so they can learn more and this is a great place to do that. Now, the color of the CTA button, the call to action button should stand out and it shouldn't be a color that's used in many other places of the site. If you think about most businesses, their CTA colors are the same throughout their site and they're different from other elements. Lastly, there should be white space. Now, white space doesn't mean literally having white on the top of your page. It means you've got to give room for the elements of the page to breathe. You want to communicate succinctly. You don't want to have too many options, too many places you're trying to direct somebody. And where we see this fail many times is right up in the in the header. Too many areas where you're asking somebody to click through to learn more. Keep it succinct. Allow the elements to breathe so that people can see these and engage with them. So I'd encourage you to look at your favorite companies through this framework. Maybe Patagonia or Starbucks. See how they use colors, what images do they choose to feature, and how do they describe their product or service. Now keep in mind that the larger companies are well known and they might design their sites knowing that you already know who they are. So don't forget to look at smaller companies in your industry as well to see how they communicate and the images and the colors and what they choose to feature and how they describe their product or service. Then look at your own site and see the areas where you could improve your brand using this framework. If you'd like to learn more about branding for your business, we've got a very detailed guide@crowdspring.com blog brand identity or you can google crowdspring brand identity. If you have an established company but you're looking to refresh your logo or rebrand, we have a detailed guide@crowdspring.com blog how to rebrand. Or you can Google crowdspring how to rebrand. If you have a question for me, you can email jasonrowspring.com thanks so much and best of luck growing your business.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is? This won't last forever. So go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.

What a fantastic lesson by Jason Byer. This stuff works, guys. We recently went through a branding refresh at Webinar Ninja, our software company. We improved upon our logo. We kind of updated it because it's been a while. We refreshed our website design, and we basically made some changes that reflect our current offering, our current value, and also who we serve. We now serve different customers than we did when we first started seven years ago, so we wanted to make sure that we kept it up to date. One of the things that we learned in this process is how something as simple as having a custom logo, like Jason mentioned, something that's customized, that reflects your values, your brand, what you stand for, not something generic, really makes a difference. It actually increases conversions. It actually pulls people in. And your logo is a big deal because you put it on everything. It's not just on your website. It's on your marketing materials, it's on your ads, it's in your emails. It communicates something. So you want to really invest in making sure your logo is. It's not something you just slap together in five minutes. One of the things that we've established in our business is a branding kit. And anytime we do any kind of work, whether we're creating a new ad or creating some sort of material to promote a blog post on social media, the branding kit or the branding guideline is basically our playbook. It's our rulebook. We only use these colors. We only use these types of images. We only use this type of template. When we show people we have this type of vibe or this type of type of demographic, these are reflections of our values. So diversity is very important to us. So we make sure that our images are quite diverse. We also have a rule, do not look stock, meaning that our images can't look like they're stock images. They have to look natural. They look like real people with real expressions. And this guideline or this handbook that we have for our branding, it's not that long. It's about five or six pages. And it's just a great way to. To make sure we stay consistent. We do this not only internally, but we also give this to anybody who's going to be writing a blog post about us creating any kind of materials, writing a review, whatever it is. We want to make sure our branding is on point because we want the same kind of messaging that is being sent through our branding to be consistent whether we say it or somebody else says it. Well, there you have it guys. If you want to learn more from Jason from the team over at crowdspring, I highly recommend you Google two blog posts. Just Google crowdspring and Brand Identity. That's a great blog post. As well as how to rebrand. These are two great blog posts from crowdspring. Google them. You'll find them easily. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MA Show. Make sure you hit subscribe or Follow or whatever it says on your favorite podcast app to make sure you get the next episode automatically. Because you're not going to want to miss tomorrow's episode, which is all about exploring the question does free content, content marketing? Does this still work today and in 2022? Subscribe to get that episode automatically when it drops tomorrow. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You know that word association game? You should do the same with your favorite brand. You realize how easy it is to generate a feeling, a understanding, an identity from a brand. So if I just said brands like Nike, Lululemon, Lamborghini, hbo, what are the words that come to mind when you hear these brands? You can do this exercise with yourself and then ask the question, what words come to mind when I say your brand? When you actually think about your own brand, they should come as easily as they did in your first exercise where you're listing well known brands. Run this exercise with some of your customers. Run these exercises with people that know your business, like maybe people that are in your mastermind or your accountability and see what they say about your brand. This is how you know you have built a strong brand. There should be no hesitation. It should be easy for you to have words that come to mind when they think of your brand. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

They put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill, so go to McDonald's and try it today.