On a bright and early morning, people from local businesses across Birmingham joined us at The Bond in Digbeth for latest SL/CED seminar ‘How to build a brand and protect it’ on Thursday 12th September. Our SL/CED events are a series of marketing seminars designed to give marketing advice in small, easy-to-digest chunks. They also offer a great opportunity to meet and network with likeminded professionals. We’ve previously ran events on crisis communications, marketing messages, lead generation, social media and websites, but this time we wanted to focus on branding. In this seminar, we wanted to explore how entrepreneurs, startups and scaleup businesses can take their business, product or idea to the next level and build a brand. We were joined by Nick Palmer and Anne Long from patent and trade mark attorney firm, Forresters to discuss how to protect IP, from the brand assets including company name, logo design, to the tech you’ve or design you’ve created for your products or services. Digital Glue’s Creative Director, Ben King explored what defines a brand, why it’s important to build a brand, and what makes a good brand. Patent Attorney, Nick Palmer, provided insight on what defines a brand from a legal perspective and what you need to do before you create a brand, how to avoid disputes from competitors in the future, and the different ways you can protect that brand. If you couldn’t make the seminar, here are a few of our key takeaways: 1. A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product. A brand is a way for people to identify with your organisation – it’s that gut feeling people have about a product, service or organisation. A brand offers a variety of opportunities to influence a person’s feeling about the organisation itself. It has multiple touch points for customers to interact with and a brand will be established from how customers respond to those touch points. 2. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” Simon Sinek – The Golden Circle  A brand purpose is a way of telling your customers what tension you can resolve in their working or personal life. It’s the reason you do what you do, and why you do it. Having a clearly defined brand purpose is what will connect you to the people most important to you – your ideal customers. 3. Building a brand helps you generate more leads and make a bigger profit When done right, building a brand can help forge stronger relationships with customers and lead to repeat purchases. Building a brand helps you generate more leads for your business, it helps to get your name out there to your ideal customers. It can help you create a community of brand enthusiasts – think brand ambassadors and influencers. Having a third-party voice promoting your company is a very powerful tool for your business. Building a brand can also help justify a price premium.

Why your business needs animation Looking to promote your company in a creative way? Struggling to decide between placing an advert in a local paper, or thinking of adding a shouty pop up on your website? Don’t worry, we are here to help you decide: you should do none of the above. Instead, enter the digital era – your business should use animation. Animation is a medium that can really help you engage with your audience in a unique way. It can pull the heartstrings and even keep a catchy jingle in the back of your mind. For those who don’t have the budget to hire a film studio and production crew, animated content is an affordable option to add some exciting video content to your strategy. There are many reasons why you should use animation in your content marketing strategy, you can read more about it in our previous blog ‘Content marketing: 5 reasons why businesses should use animation’. Are you ready to commission animation for your business? To achieve the best results, your video should look good, communicate the right messages and target your ideal customers. In this blog we’ll share nine tips to creating a successful animated video. Tip 1 – Master the art of storytelling To connect with your audience, you will need to tell them a truly compelling story. Share your values, tell the story of your brand, and share a positive, heartwarming message. Rather than pushing the product directly, you should try to create an emotional connection with your audience and establish trust. Not only will you set the right tone for your company, you will leave an impression that will not easily be forgotten. A clear example of the importance of storytelling is the 2016 advertisement for Android: ‘Be Together, Not the Same’.  In this video, the product being sold (Android) is not referenced until the very end. The aim of the animation for this business is not to broadcast the product, but rather establish all it stands for. The message is very clear: Android believes in collaboration. They believe the world will be a better place when people come together. Does this work as a trust signal to their users? Absolutely, it establishes a firm emotional connection with their audience. The underlying tones of positivity and open mindedness will be connected to the brand as a result. Tip 2 – Know who your target audience is The animation for your business will not be successful if you do not know which audience you are targeting. Generic advertisements created for too wide an audience are quickly forgotten and will likely fail, so your first step will be to narrow down who you are creating the animation for. How old is your audience? What is likely to engage them? What music will they like? Once you know this, you will be able to tailor the elements in your animation to ensure they appeal to the people you have in mind. A good way

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what the consumers tell each other it is” Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit   Did you know that 90% of consumers will read an online review before contacting a business? In this digital age we live in, customers have more choice and more ways to share their opinions about those choices, than ever before. Reading reviews is now a key part of a customer’s decision-making process and reviews can highly influence what to buy and who to buy from. Trustpilot ran a study on over 1000 consumers and found that: 93% of people will read reviews before buying from an unfamiliar company 90% of online shoppers will not purchase from a company because of bad reputation 62% of consumers will run a search on a company they have not heard of before doing anything else   We all do it ourselves, if we want to make a purchase, particularly of something of great value, we will spend time looking through reviews to find out as much information as possible. Also, we’re all becoming savvier to fake reviews or paid advertising and we can all spot an independent review when we see one. Having a strong portfolio of case studies, reviews and testimonials is a great way to build trust and credibility in any industry but it’s particularly important in the professional services industry and here are just a few reasons why: Why are reviews important especially in professional services? The professional services industry involves many different occupations and specialisms but generally offer services that provide support in the form of advice through expertise of people. Whether you work in the legal, tax, HR, or consultancy field, your business is all about people and those people need to be able to demonstrate that they know what they are talking about. Even before the digital age, people would rely on word of mouth recommendations from friends and family, especially when it comes to the service industry. Not much has changed, except that reviews are readily available (good and bad) at the click of a button, from people all over the world. When it comes to professional services, people buy from people, so it’s really important to start building your reputation in order to encourage people to trust you. People are far more suspicious of what they are reading online, therefore getting a complete stranger to trust you enough to make an enquiry, request a quote or even pick up the phone to call you, is becoming increasingly more difficult. How can I start getting reviews? If you’re a new business or a small organisation, it can be a daunting task to start building up a portfolio of case studies and reviews. It’s especially difficult to compete with larger companies that have been established for a long time with hundreds or thousands of reviews. Just remember that when it comes to reviews, quality outweighs quantity, you can get hundreds of

Standing out in the crowded photography market can be a challenge. Flick through any photography magazine or scroll through a photography blog and you’ll be presented with an array of new brands on the block, as well as old favourites. We talk a lot with our clients in the photography industry about the importance of a solid reviews programme to get them seen by their target audiences. In fact, we talked a lot about it in our previous blog ‘Our guide to getting a successful reviews programme’, if you’re interested in reading more. But reviews alone are not enough. To truly stand out and showcase your expertise in the photography market, you sometimes have to step away from talking about just your product. If I’m not talking about my product, what should I talk about? This question is dependent on what your audience are interested in, but the common denominator is industry expertise. Brilliant product reviews will get you so far, but showcasing your industry expertise is crucial for building consumer trust and driving audience engagement. Consumers increasingly want to buy from brands that they can ‘get behind’; brands that align with their values and can offer them something more than ‘just’ a product. So, how do I showcase my expertise in the photography market? The first step is truly understanding your audience. Your first response to this is probably, “They’re photographers, obviously”. But to really engage with your audience, your understanding of them needs to go far deeper than this. You need to think about the following: What type of photographers are your audience? Are they amateurs or professionals? Do they specialise in any particular genre? What are their typical traits? What challenges do they have? What motivates them?   Through these questions, you can begin to build profiles of your typical customers. These profiles will then help you build key messages. What do you need to be saying to your target audience to engage them and ultimately, drive them to purchase? Once you’ve established your customer profiles and key messages, you can begin to create content, such as: 1. How-to content Through understanding your customers’ challenges, you can respond with a solution. Is there a common challenge your audience faces that your products solve? How-to content, in written or video format, is a great way to demonstrate what your product does and how it helps to an audience who may be considering purchasing it. You can house how-to content on your website, share it on social media, and even pitch it to photography publications which your target audience engage with. 2. Top tips and tricks Educating your target audience not only provides them with value, it demonstrates you know what you’re talking about. For example, if your audience consists of mainly semi-professional landscape photographers, you could share your top tips and tricks for getting the perfect shot in winter. Again, your content can be in written and video format on your website, and shared across social media and