Branding is important to help differentiate your service business by:

• Delivering your message unmistakably
• Confirming your credibility
• Making an emotional connection with your prospects
• Motivating your prospects to turn into clients
• Creating loyalty

Here are some questions that will help you begin the branding process for your service business: (If you have problems answering them yourself, ask someone you trust for their answers – others often see things we take for granted.)

1. What personal traits or values make you who you are?
2. What are your natural strengths?
3. What are some of your important career and life experiences?
4. What is it about you that uniquely qualifies you to serve your clients?
5. In what areas do you have expertise?

Although these questions may seem simple, they are designed to help you go deep enough to discover what makes your service business unique.

Those “sacred cows” – the way you have always done things – may need to be sacrificed in order for your business to thrive.  Now is the time to challenge the traditional ways of doing business and think creatively about your business model. The way you conducted business in the past may no longer work for you now.

Tough economic times often bear witness to a number of paradigm shifts — breaking out of a familiar pattern in order to create a new one.  Too often, we get caught up in doing what is comfortable and what has worked in the past.

We do things based on rules that make sense at the time.  Then, with the passage of time, things change. The primary reasons for the rules may no longer exist, but we continue to follow them because the rules are already in place.

Ask yourself these thought-provoking questions:

• Can you provide your products or services at a lower cost without sacrificing quality?
• How price-sensitive are your customers?
• If you were starting your business today, how would you structure it to fit with current economic realities?
• What areas of your business are the most profitable?
• Are there any opportunities to expand upon a profitable product line or service, or eliminate those that are a drain on profits?
• Does your current customer base provide opportunities for growth?

To reinvigorate your business in today’s economic environment, consider making one change in your business that makes sense today.  Then continue to identify areas that no longer serve the best interests of your business or your bottom line.

To discover how the lead conversion process works in your business, you need to work with your staff to identify the stages of how prospects go to paying customers. Find out:

• Who in the company is involved in the conversion process
• The number of steps involved in the process
• Where the conversion process begins
• Who keeps the process moving
• Who closes the process
• Who tracks and reports on the process
• The cost for each step in the conversion process

Once you have those answers, you should analyse your process to find opportunities to shorten it wherever possible. Look for any redundancies in actions or staff that can be removed. The goal is to have a lean process that delivers the results you want.

Once you have a handle on your process and its costs, you should now look at ways you can reduce your cost per lead. Find out:

• The number of leads produced
• The cost of converting those leads to customers
• The amount of revenue each new customer brings in

Like any other business process, your marketing efforts need to be as efficient as possible while still delivering your desired results.

These methods are great for drawing attention in the physical world, but there are also simple methods to make your event an even greater success with the use of online tools, as outlined below.

1. Your web site. Is the event advertised on your home page with a link to a separate page on the site? If not this is a key way of drawing attention to your event with people who are already interested in your product or service. Implementing an online registration system is beneficial for committing people to attending your event. Get this set up early even if you don’t have a full list of acts or times etc, you can have a “send me more info” button.

2. Use Social media. The secret to this powerful tool is to get word of moth referrals. If you tell 5 people and they each tell 5 people who in turn tell 5 people after 8 steps you have told nearly 80,000 people! Make it easy by giving them the text and a pre-shortened link, using a service like tinyurl, to your event homepage or registration page that they can copy and paste to Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter users, add a hashtag (a # sign followed by a word or phrase, i.e. #homeshow2010) to brand individual tweets about your event. This lets Twitter users (and you) easily see who else is tweeting about the event. Keep tweeting whenever you have fresh news, a new act or special guest.

3. Use email. If you have an email list use it to send a series of emails prior to the event. The first email sent out in plenty of time could be a simple invitation sent, such as ‘8 weeks prior to the event’. Make it personal, keep it short and to the point but sell it to them “A great day out for the whole family” is a good example of this. You could ask them to pre register on your event homepage and give them an incentive, maybe “Free entry to our prize draw”.

Nearer the event, say the week before, send a follow up email. A new invitation for those who have not registered with an attention grabbing headline; “Only 2 days left” “10 seats left”. Also send a reminder to the people who have already registered. A helpful reminder that can boost attendance.

4. Partners. – Ask for links from suppliers and partners. Have you got caterers booked? Are you raising money for a charity? Ask them for an advert article or link on their web site, giving you exposure and awareness.

5. Blogs. These deserve a separate section away from other types of social media as you can search for blogs related to your industry, product or service and narrow your focus on people who would have an inherent interest in your event. See if you can get a link or advertising banner on the relevant blog, as this will be beneficial for both parties.

1. Use a design program. A program like Paint Shop Pro is a great starting point. It isn’t as complicated as some of the more professional level design software, but has all the tools needed to produce a great looking banner. Crucially, there are a lot of internet guides for it, both on YouTube and sites such as Grafx Design.

Many banner stand suppliers have great online design tools that are easy to use, but may not give as much flexibility as using a stand alone program.

2. Make sure you print in the correct area. Keep important information at eye level, and remember that there is a bleed (the area that isn’t printed on), area for banners. Check with your supplier on how big the bleed is, but for banner stands this usually is the bottom few inches. The lower half of the banner is a good place to put your call to action (see tip 7).

3. Use colour to your advantage. You want the colour to stand out but not be too garish. Rather than make the banner one whole colour, use a photo as a background and make the text a colour that is synonymous with your brand. If your logo is blue and white, then make your text that colour. This will strengthen brand awareness by linking the text to your brand’s reputation. Think of the Google logo for a great example of this.

4. Keep your message short. Most potential customers at trade shows and exhibitions will look at your banner but won’t read it, especially if there is a short story’s worth of text on it. Keep your message to your company name/logo, the name of the product you are promoting (if you are targeting one specific product or service), and your slogan if appropriate. There are other ways to attract people’s attention with design, which will be discussed in this guide.

5. Make sure your design isn’t cluttered. Continuing from the previous point, it is important not to have too many different aspects on your banner. A message, a logo and a call to action is all you need to construe all the relevant information. Have a look at the designs on our banner stands to get an idea of what works well.

6. A picture says 1000 words. Use a picture that would attract a passer-by’s interest and that fits in with your brand image and the product you are promoting. The picture could be of the product itself, but if not then use one that depicts a positive scene, which will elicit an appropriate response from the consumer. You can find lots of great free stock photos to use on Google.

7. Make use of call to action. After you have caught the attention with your banner, you need to entice them to take the next step. At an event the obvious statement to make is along the lines of ‘come talk to us for more information’. You can also include a phone number, e-mail address or website URL, in order to generate several possible avenues of connection long after the event finishes.

8. Design in the correct resolution. If you have no idea what resolution is, then the most important thing you need to know is that higher is better. When submitting your design to a company to print the usual rule is that the design resolution should be in proportion to the scale. So if your design is a 1:1 scale of the actual banner size it should be set to 100dpi, but if it is 1:4 then it should be set to 400dpi. Go here for more information on resolution.

9. Make it memorable. Using the above tips such as colour, message and adding a photo, you have the key ingredients to make a great looking banner. Remember that at an exhibition or trade show the majority of your competitors will be using one, so it is crucial to make your one stand out from the crowd. The use of a clever slogan, eye-catching picture or an offer that can’t be passed up could be effective in making sure that your banner sticks in people’s minds once they’ve left the event.

10. Increase your design knowledge. By reading this article, you are on your way to improving your banner design skills. The Internet is a goldmine of information; it’s just a case of filtering the useful from the useless. Here is a great site to get you started.

Hopefully you found some of these tips useful, check back here for updates on our banner design service and other guides.