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Trends in Marketing: Las Cruces and El Paso

Posted on January 5, 2009

Christine at ThinkLikeABride has just put her finger on some of the issues facing all of us as small business owners. Her article, called Personal Engagement Marketing (I found it on the Read More section of her site), hits close to home.

When I first started in this business the single best way to market yourself was through personal engagement with your customers. That meant one thing: Bridal Shows.
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We all loved bridal shows because we got to talk to the brides. We got to show our personality and our passion. In truth, it was about the only way to market. Oh there was the Yellow Pages and maybe one local magazine put out annually by the newspaper, but other than that there was little else.

That is exactly where Las Cruces and El Paso are right now. Christine’s talking about something that she saw 10 years ago, but in many respects, Las Cruces and El Paso are just now starting to embrace these trends. We have the “How to Wed in Las Cruces” guide, published every January by the Bulletin; we’re just starting to see some local wedding magazines, although as yet none of them are high-quality enough to mention by name, and none of them has a website to link to.

If today’s bride isn’t using her time to read periodicals or watch mindless TV what the heck is she doing with all those freed up hours? She is sitting in front of her broadband connection talking to friends all over the world in one window, shopping in another and looking for advice in a third. All while playing around in a graphics program working on her save the date cards.

So what you’re saying is that today’s bride is just like us? Let’s see… Facebook? Yeah, it’s open… Photoshop? Check. Twhirl, Mail, iCal? Check, check, check…. All while I’m writing a blog post? Bingo! Sounds like she works the same way I do.

Even with these advances in personal engagement online, in many respects, there’s just no substitute for meeting your brides face-to-face in as many ways as possible. Bridal shows are the best way we’ve found to get the attention of unplugged brides. We reinforce the time-tested methods with Facebook (check out our fan page), Twitter, and all the other high-tech communications solutions we use in our day-to-day lives, but we’re always available for some f2f time, especially with the unplugged bride.

What’s in a logo?

Posted on December 14, 2008

A logo is possibly the single most important part of marketing your business.

When you’re investigating starting your own business, you hear this repeated until it becomes a mantra: Business Name, Website (URL), Logo. I’ll address business name and URL later; this post is all about the logo. What the heck is so important about the logo? (All of this holds true whether you’re just starting out, or re-branding your business, so even if you have a logo already, read on.)

Why’s the logo such a big deal?

Your logo is the single most used, most visible part of your marketing – ideally, the logo alone should exemplify your business. This is true whether you run a catering business or mow lawns for a living, but it’s really true for photography. Why? Simply put, as photographers, our product is all about appearances. The difference between a $5 photo and a $5,000 photo isn’t the paper it’s printed on or the ink used to print it. The difference is how it looks. Your logo has to project that appearance of your business: if your logo looks like it’s worth $5, people will be expecting to pay you $5, even if your photos are worth $5,000. This same concept carries through in all aspects of your business. If you’re running a high-end business, your photos, your logo, your packaging, your albums, framing, wedding show booth – they all have to project high-end, high-quality work. The connecting thread between all these diverse aspects of your business is your logo. It’s the stamp that holds it all together. Ross at Flosites sums it up: “A logo is your front appearance, if you hand [a client] a business card they’ll see the logo, if they go to your splash page they’ll see your logo, if they went to your blog or site, they’ll see your logo, even if you market in a magazine your logo will be there to be seen, or should be.”

So what is your logo? Well, it’s the thing you see at the top of this page – a small icon, text, or combination of the two, that exemplifies your business. But it’s a lot more then just that one item. To take an example: Screaming Light’s logo is 3 talavera tiles in different colors over the words screaming light studios. You can see it on any photo we post.

Keeping it all together

But wait a second – on the header for this page, we just used one tile! And, horrors, we even omitted the word “studios” from the text! Is that still our logo?

Sure it is – it still contains several of the elements from the “official” logo, it’s just been modified to fit into a different aspect ratio. For the flash header, we needed something square, and our normal logo is more horizontal – so we modified it. (We often mod our logo to fit a need – if you look here, you’ll see that the logo colors have been made a bit more Christmas-y for the watermark!)

Next, we’re going to touch on an idea closely tied to your logo – branding. For all great brands, the logo is at the heart of the branding, but it’s just the start of the overall look. Screaming Light has a ton of official paperwork, marketing collateral (postcards, flyers, business cards, etc.), and related junk that’s important to the studio’s business, but that isn’t a product we’re selling to the client. All of it has to look cohesive, and high-end. We maintain that cohesion and quality through the use of brand guidelines, and we built our brand guidelines around our logo.

Screaming Light has 4 official colors, and they’re all in the logo: turquoise, orange-brown, blue, and ivory. We also use black quite a bit. Because we’re such a small company, we often flex our guidelines to fit a need: it’s ok to show the text in black or ivory, for example. We use 2 official fonts: the logo is in Texas Hero, redrawn by hand in Illustrator, so we use that as a title font wherever possible. Body text is usually in Evo. (These guidelines were obviously relaxed for the website, mostly for the sake of readability.) We have a general look we aim for in all our designs. Roz usually describes it as Classy Southwest, or Elegant Southwest. We chose this look based on our location and our intended market (upscale clients in Las Cruces, NM and El Paso, TX, an area we often refer to as the last frontier or the wild west), and designed the logo to fit it. Then we designed everything else around the logo. The look evolves; right now we often use a semi-transparent ribbon of ivory, sometimes with solid borders, to back the logo. That will change as our business evolves, and as we design new pieces and need the logo to fit in different areas.

We have a central folder on the file server which serves as our branding guidelines: it holds the official logo vector files, a few text files detailing colors in CMYK, RGB, and hex, and copies of the official fonts we use. That way if we’re working on something remotely, or on a different computer than usual, we have these elements close at hand. We also use design templates wherever possible: we have a letterhead template set up, an invoice, a wedding contract, and a portrait contract, all pre-designed and ready to grab and customize as needed.

Designing a logo

So what’s important in a logo? First and foremost, it should reflect your business. If you run an antique furniture store, your logo probably shouldn’t look high-tech, for example.

Second, your logo (and your brand) should be attractive to your intended market. Screaming Light used to have a totally different look – our logo was a light bulb, and we used black, white, and gray for most everything, with maroon as the accent color. The overall look was very postmodern-minimalist. When we figured out that the look of our logo and our website conflicted heavily with our studio (which is stuccoed in orange, with heavy wood beams supporting the exposed wood ceiling) we decided that changing the logo would be cheaper than redesigning the studio. Since the redesign, we no longer have clients showing surprise when they first see the studio – it fits what they’ve been led to expect by the website and the logo.

Third, your logo should be unique and recognizable. Your studio name typed in a default font really is not a logo. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Purdue University. I was mortified when, during my 4th year there, Purdue changed its logo to this atrocity. I’m not sure what they’re trying to say, but I’m getting “I love serif fonts”. ) Highlighting the ampersand in your studio name, for example, probably isn’t the best logo either – that look might be nice, but it’s a bit overdone, and it probably doesn’t say anything about your business. For ideas, or just to see what’s being done, check out LogoPond or FaveUp.

Fourth, consider all the design elements. A round logo is not going to be easy to incorporate into other designs, for example. A long, thin logo, either horizontal or vertical, can pose its own set of problems (like the one that led to the use of an alternate logo on our website!) Your logo should be legible (assuming it contains text) or at the very least discernible. A font that doesn’t print well at less than 44pt is probably not the best choice for your logo – remember, this thing might be on a banner, but it’ll also have to look good on your business card (2 x 3-1/2 inches), your letterhead, your website, and a million other places. In the same vein, your logo might not always be printed photographically, or even in color! If you have an ad in the phone book, solid black is *much* cheaper than full-color. It’d be a shame if your logo required you to pay extra (usually a lot extra) for full-color. Do you want your logo embroidered on shirts? Custom embroidery machines have their own set of requirements; the Screaming Light logo isn’t optimized for this type of reproduction, a battle we’re currently fighting. What about hot-stamped on your packaging, embossed, or punched out? Your logo might someday have to be reproduced in any or all of these formats.

If you’re comfortable designing your own logo, go for it! Be sure you design in vector – your logo has to be able to scale up as large as required! Vector art also requires sharp lines, and will prevent you from using a drop shadow or unknowingly committing many of the thousand other sins of logo design. (If you don’t know what vector graphics are, don’t even try it – hire a professional!)

If you’re not comfortable designing your own logo, you can hire a professional designer locally, find one online, or even start a contest in which designers compete to design your logo! You can expect to pay from about $300 on up for a good logo design; for a small business, you shouldn’t have any problem finding a top-notch designer for under $1000. Some designers will also help you design marketing materials, business documents, and anything else you need as part of the deal; this is usually advertised as “branding” or “logo and branding”.

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