Team Tips

A dedicated fan base is a cornerstone of effective marketing, serving as brand ambassadors and organic promoters. Engaged fans not only amplify a brand’s reach through word-of-mouth, social sharing, and candid reviews but also foster a sense of community and loyalty. Their genuine enthusiasm creates authentic connections with potential customers, enhancing credibility.

When adding links to your website that go to a third-party site, make sure that it opens in a new window or tab. In WordPress, there is typically a checkbox option to enable this. That way, when a visitor is done referencing the external site and close that window or tab, your site is still there, making it less likely that they will leave.

Creating customer profiles is a critical step in creating a successful marketing strategy. By knowing your audience’s demographics, preferences, and behaviors, you can tailor your messaging to their needs and interests. This targeted approach enhances engagement, builds connections, and drives brand loyalty. (In the long run, it’ll help you maximize every marketing dollar you spend.)

Use styles and formats that lend to a reader-friendly experience. Short paragraphs and sentences often improve the reading experience. Font type and size are important, too.

By offering sales or discounts and marketing them, you can attract customers that would potentially not buy your products or services otherwise. Promotions can also encourage people to pay closer attention to your business to see when another sale may happen.

While you may have a lot to say, most people aren’t going to take the time to read the three paragraphs you wrote on your post. When posting on social media try to keep your post to a few sentences that provide the most essential information. If people want to learn more they can click on your profile or go to your website.

Are there things you think your audience would benefit from learning? You can teach them! Some of the most engaged with content is often educational. This could be something such as a simple how-to or step-by-step process on how to do tasks or projects within in your industry.

Good use and sizing of headlines, subheadings, body text, callouts provide anchor points for the reader, helping them find the information they want, giving the eye a place to rest and breaking up subjects and thoughts so that text becomes more inviting rather than an overwhelming wall of words.

Before beginning a project, it’s important to know what image and design file types will be needed. JPGs and PNGs are considered raster file types, which means they are made up of pixels and do not scale up very well. PNGs support transparency, and JPGs do not. SVG, Ai (Adobe Illustrator) and EPS are vector files, which means they can scale infinitely.

For print projects, an image should be around 300 ppi (pixels per inch) at the size it’s intended to be used. A 24 x 36 inch poster, for example, the JPG should be 300 ppi at 24 x 36 inches. An image pulled from a website will almost never meet these requirements. For best results, high-resolution images should come directly from the photographer, purchased from a stock website, or be downloaded from a corporate brand resource portal.

Understanding the unique benefits of your product or service is critical because it defines what sets you apart from the competition. A well-defined value proposition clarifies the problem you solve, builds trust, fosters loyalty, and creates a compelling reason why customers should select your brand.

Even if you do business across the whole country, engaging with your local community can help create a positive brand image. Participating in or sponsoring local events also helps create content that can be used on digital platforms.

Similar to designing consistent imagery, providing consistent messaging is vital to developing and maintaining a brand image. There’s likely a reason people will resonate with your brand, discover what that is, and create content that aligns with it.

The graphic on your newest ad might look cool, but if it isn’t clear what your business is and what’s being marketed, then it loses meaning. Ensure anybody seeing your ad can quickly figure out who you are and what you do.

We know, we know … It’s the hobgoblin of little minds.  But it is also a way to build your brand beyond your name and logo. Design standards applied harmoniously across your website, social media, business cards, signage, and elsewhere can bring your visibility and awareness to a level that get recognition before anyone reads a word or discerns your logo.

Your browser — whether on your computer or mobile device — stores a copy of websites you have visited in order to load them more quickly the next time you visit. This is called “cache” (said like ‘cash’). This means that when you or your developer make changes, you may need to clear your cache in order for the updates to display correctly.

Avoid unnecessary words and complex language when you can. The fewer words you can use to deliver your message, the better.

We’re not talking about a simple gallery of images but a slide show at the top of the page with different messaging and different links. User studies consistently show that they are ineffective, and that if it gets clicked it is only the first slide. Users don’t like content they don’t control and tend to view a slideshow as an ad-like object and scroll right past it. The effective approach is to take those slides and stack them down the page as separate panels.

If you want to reach a certain audience, one of the easiest ways to do so is through the use of hashtags. For instance, if you’re an architecture firm, using the hashtag #architecture in your posts will allow people so see your post if they search for that hashtag.

In order to build a large following, you will likely need to engage with other accounts.  This means both following accounts that may or may not follow you, but also liking and commenting on other’s posts. The more you engage with others, the more you will be seen.

If there are trends in your industry or in pop culture that you can leverage for engaging content, it can help you keep your marketing feeling fresh. The more relevant your business seems, the more likely people are to engage with it.

Using simple analytics can help determine what tactics are working and which ones aren’t. You can then adjust your marketing strategy based on the results.

Avoid accidentally marking legitimate website notifications as spam. Instead, check and update your spam filters or whitelist the website’s email address to ensure you receive important messages. Even when a spammer fills out your form do not mark the notification as spam.

An effective, user-friendly website may be the best marketing tool a business can have. Your marketing efforts only work if people want to stay on your website after they visit it, so having compelling content that can be easily digested is paramount.

By establishing strategic partnerships, you can tap into new customer bases, share resources, and leverage complementary expertise. Networking with other businesses also enhances your credibility, as associations with reputable entities can positively influence consumer perception. Linking your website to these partners online complimented by a backlink is also a useful SEO tool, increasing your visibility.

Collect emails that have been submitted to your website. Those emails likely belong to existing customers or people that had some form of interest in your business. Sending promotional emails or newsletters to them is a great way to market to your audience.

Using a writing voice that isn’t yours can make writing seem disingenuous. Depending on the topic, it’s important to be formal but not to the point that your writing lacks any personality.

In website terms, your domain is your unique address (e.g., yourwebsite.com). Choose a memorable domain name for easy access to your site. Keeping the login information to this account is important. Letting your payment lapse will take down your website and potentially your email as well.

Using internal and external links will help with SEO (search engine optimization), but linking to your sources of information also helps your writing seem more credible.

There can be times where adding an Instagram or Facebook feed to your site can be useful, but your social channels should be a tool to bring people to the website. If you are sending people away from your site to a social media, you stand a good chance of losing them.

Don’t overcomplicate your messaging with vocabulary that your audience may not know or understand. Your messaging should be understood by anyone in your audience.

Ensure your website is optimized for search engines, so that your business will show up on searches. Use relevant keywords, create compelling content, and use backlinks throughout your website.

This may seem obvious, but proofread anything you plan on posting and get a second opinion when possible. What you post will reflect your brand, and grammatical errors can negatively affect your image.

A good headline will help draw in potential readers. Think of headlines as the equivalent of a good logo or label. The better it is, the more likely someone will take the time to check it out.

Headings are excellent for organizing long-format writing, such as blog posts. They’re also a key component in SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines use headers to determine how relevant your content is, so make sure they are topical and feature keywords related to your topic.

You don’t need to market on every medium and platform to be effective. If you want to be efficient with your time and money, then pick the channels that your audience is most likely to use and stick to them.

People usually read something because they want to either learn or be entertained. You must provide content that readers will value, especially if you’re trying to draw in new audiences.

Stellaractive manages this for sites we host. Out of date plugins not only run the risk of no longer working as expected, but often pose a security risk. The opensource nature of WordPress means that it is more susceptible to being compromised that some other platforms, and outdated plugins are an open door for that risk.

Illustrator is intended for creating complex vector illustrations. Photoshop allows you to add photo realistic detail to your projects, and is more like painting than illustrator. InDesign is intended for multi-page layouts.

Whether you’re adding graphics or images, it’s essential to make every post look nice. Compelling imagery not only elevates branding, but also increases the chance someone will stop scrolling to look at your post and read what you have to say.

A typeface is the core design of a type family. A font is a variation of that typeface and when they are all put together, they become a family. Often, type families go way beyond bold and italic and offer variations in weight, such as light and extrabold or different widths, such as condensed and wide. Sometimes the “bold” button in a program like MS Word, fakes the weight change, instead of using the actual bold font. So, compare them to see which looks best.

A social media following won’t be built from a single post. Some social media platforms require you to be active a couple times a day to maximize the potential of your account. If you don’t know how often you should be posting on a certain platform, look at how often top performers in your industry are posting.

Often the most engaging content is the most entertaining content. If you are wondering what your audience is entertained by, ask yourself what you find most entertaining about your industry. You can also make posts about fun things that occur in your office or place of work.

It’s used across many industries. If you haven’t heard it before, it stands for: Keep It Simple Stupid. Ultimately, your website is a tool to inform customers and get them to place an order, pick up the phone, or fill out the form. Anything that gets in the way of those things is probably not needed.

There are times when these tools are effective. Many times they simply make it harder for visitors to see content. Most times scrolling is going to be faster and easier than clicking. FAQ’s are a prime example of common use that is usually good, or when you have a large collection of filterable content in categories. They should be for organizing unruly collections of content, not as a ‘fun’ design element.

You wouldn’t try to send something that’s too big for its box, so don’t make the same mistake when posting on social media. If you are posting an image, always try to make sure it’s the right dimensions for the social media platform you’re posting to. A simple Google search will tell you what dimensions an image should be and there is plenty of free image editing software that can help you make it the right size.

Although ‘white space’ will often be white, it really refers to leaving enough room between visual elements and ensuring that you are giving each element enough room to breathe. Related to creating a visual hierarchy, with white space we are leaving enough room that each element, whether a photo, graphic, headline or video, can be read, understood and appreciated.

Your domain will contact you through your email, not through the mail. If you receive a postcard asking you to renew your domain, it is probably a scam. Always be careful with access to your domain as it is central to your website and email remaining in service.

Incorporating visual elements, such as images or infographics, with your writing can effectively increase engagement, break up long posts, or help explain your topic.

Making the choices simple and few is important. While there may be hundreds of pages on your site, the paradox of too much choice is that you can confuse and irritate the visitor with too many options. If there are hundreds of pages or products to sort through, let’s find logical categories to sort them into so that visitors can be funneled to the correct location.

To be efficient, should spend your effort and money where your customers live. If your product or service is a lifestyle product aimed at 20 and 30-somethings, then Instagram is a likely bet. Have a B2B service that needs to speak to industry insiders? LinkedIn is where its at.

If you want your posts to be seen people that are most likely to be your customers, you need to know where they are engaging with content. User demographics can differ greatly from one social media platform to another, so it’s best to put most of your efforts into the platforms that are being used by your target audience.

An important part of online branding is showing your brand. Many people likely won’t know what your business does or makes you special without you showing off a little. If you have a good or service that your confident people will love, create content that explains what makes it so great.