How to Find Your Brand’s Voice

Posted on May 26, 2022

man and woman collaborating in office

What do some of your favorite brands communicate to you? What personality do you associate with them? Did you even realize they have personalities? This is their voice, and finding yours is an important part of your strategy.

What is Brand Voice?

Your voice is the distinct personality of your brand. If it was a person, how would it dress? How would it speak, and what other quirks would it have?

This personality, once created, will carry across all forms of communications from blogs to newsletters, website copy, emails, and social media. 

Voice and tone are two sides of the same coin: Voice is what your brand itself says to your customers, and tone is how you communicate that message. 

Finding Your Voice

This means defining your buyers personas. Once you do that, it’s relatively easy to “talk” in a way that resonates with them. Is your product or service geared towards Gen Z, for instance, or is it focused on B2B? Is it a small business, or an enterprise? If you’re addressing a young audience, you may want to keep your voice relaxed and “hip.” B2B, on the other hand, may require content that is more authoritative or geared to C-suite audiences.

You may find that your tone changes across audiences. How you present your brand when you launch a new product or service will be different from how you address the media or communicate with someone regarding a customer complaint. Messaging should be consistent, yet with a flexible tone to suit different situations.

Take a look at some of your current content. How does your audience engage with your posts, communications, and website? Once you see what your target audience identifies and engages with, you can begin to build your brand’s personality.

Lastly, truly define your voice. What three words do you think best represent you now? This should be a team exercise; break out the whiteboard and have fun with it.

Staying True to Your Voice

Now that you’ve found your it, it’s important to stay consistent. If you have several people on your team touching each piece of content, this may be harder than you think. Documentation will help you maintain brand standards. This should include:

Your business’ mission and values statement: The tone of your mission statement should be reflected in your voice.

Consistent terminology: Every product or service should remain consistent with its name and description, regardless of what platform you’re using to promote it.

Personality: Fun, clever, and irreverent, or authoritative and strictly professional? Once you choose your brand’s personality, be sure to document it so everyone connected with content and website creation stays consistent.

Routine Audits

You’ll need to reevaluate your brand’s voice to make sure that your chosen strategy is working for you, and that your team is working to represent it consistently. You may find that you need to tweak your ideas before finding one that works for your business.

We take branding seriously. We know how important your voice is, and we’ll not only help you find it, but we’ll also help you maintain it. Ready to put our experienced teams to work for you? Contact us now.

How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Brand and Logo

Posted on March 17, 2022

person designing logo on laptop

The first thing your customers or clients will see on your website is your logo, and when it comes to creating it, every decision you make counts. After all, this is the face of your brand and it needs to represent your company’s services, style, and core values. How can a simple concept do all that? It all starts with choosing the right colors.

Establish Your Brand Identity

Understanding your brand’s personality, goals, and target audience is the first step to choosing your colors. Are you a fun-loving teen-focused company, or catering to a more serious crowd of CEOs? What’s the nature of your product and service? What are a few upfront things you want customers to understand about your business?

Color Science is a Real Thing

Certain colors bring certain companies to mind. Why is that? Creative design and careful color selection make these logos and brands memorable. There’s nothing accidental about color choices. 

Color science, or chromatics, is the study of the psychological effects colors have on viewers. It’s accepted that green, for instance, indicates healing and nature and reds invoke more passionate feelings such as love or anger. Blue triggers feelings of calmness and loyalty, while yellow feels happy and cheerful.

Think of some of your favorite logos; what’s the color science telling you about the brands?

Use the Color Wheel to Find Pleasing Combinations

If you’ve ever cringed at colors that clash, you already subconsciously understand the color wheel. There are several ways to use different colors for contrast and harmony, and ways to use variations of the same color palette to keep your logo simple and clean. 

Simplicity is Usually Better

Try to stick with a few key color concepts. Remember, your brand colors will be seen across all platforms, from web pages to social media and print. Will your choices look as good in a large-scale application, like a t-shirt or billboard, as they do on your business cards? WIll the logo lose effectiveness if it’s printed in black and white?

Black and White for Elegance and Simplicity

In a world full of splashy colors competing for center stage, maybe black and white is the answer for you. This minimalistic combination can mean many things to your customers, including authority, practicality, and sophistication. Where colors require specific settings to maintain consistency, choosing black and white for logos and brand colors make them easy to replicate for any platform.

Research the Competition

The intent behind choosing colors for your brands and logos is to stand out from the competition. You may find that many environmentally-conscious companies choose greens, for instance. You can opt for a different color direction, like a palette of blues, to stand out from the crowd in your industry.

Got questions? Let’s connect and talk about it!

Best Social Media Platform for Businesses 2022

Posted on February 17, 2022

social media icons

You know the basic social media platforms, those Old Reliables that we’ve been a part of for years. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok are the dominators in the social media world. So how do you know if you’re using the most appropriate platform to reach your target audiences?

The top social media platforms for businesses in 2022 are:

  1. Facebook
  2. Instagram
  3. LinkedIn
  4. Twitter
  5. Snapchat
  6. YouTube
  7. TikTok

Why Use Social Media at All?

A brief reminder. For marketing success in 2022, social media isn’t an option. It’s a necessity. It builds brand awareness, gives your business a human touch, increases traffic to your website, and increases engagement for your business. Not just random engagement, though; targeted engagement that converts your audience into leads and leads into conversions. Social media is a fantastic way to track customer data, keep an eye on your competition, and gauge how the public views your business.

Define Your Target Audience

Because different social media platforms attract different users, you need to understand who your target audience is. Some things to keep in mind:

Is your perfect customer male, female, or either? Yes, men do purchase beauty products, but your ideal focus for this market is women.

What’s the age of your ideal customer? If you’re selling hip-hop albums, chances are you’re not selling it to Grandma Joan who lives next door and loves Kenny G.

Other interests: Outdoor enthusiasts will be first to buy your hiking equipment, but your ideal customer may also like fishing and camping.

Income and education: Nothing is more frustrating to a middle-class worker than seeing ads, for yacht sales, million-dollar vacations, and limousine rentals. Make sure you consider income and education levels when defining your audience.

Define Your Goals for Posting on Social Media 

First, what’s the nature of your business? Are you looking to connect with potential clients to promote services, or e-commerce customers to purchase physical goods? What’s your company culture and how will it reflect in your posts? What platforms are your competitors using, and how can you leverage this knowledge? What kind of content (written or video, for instance) do you want to post most often?

Understanding what you hope to achieve from your social media presence is an important step when choosing the right platform.

And now it’s time to look at the best social media platforms for businesses, who uses them, and which are best for you.

Social Media Platforms for Businesses

Now that you’ve defined your target audience and goals, you can begin to choose the best social platform for your business.

Facebook

Facebook sees an edge in female interaction over males and remains popular for users between the ages of 18 and 65. It appeals to people with the widest ranges of income and education, and is a great place to build business relationships, show a human side of the business, and connect with potential customers. 

Instagram

Video has taken center stage on Instagram, as have stories involving social causes and concerns. Instagram is working to expand its purchase platform, Instagram Shops, and make it easier to connect buyers with the products they want. The platform is most popular for users between the ages of 18 and 29. The average users’ income is slightly higher than Facebook and has more women users than men.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a larger appeal for men, and definitely has users with a larger income than Instagram, with over half of users reporting incomes of over $75k. It’s a preferred platform for professionals and B2B communications and appeals to a wide range of age groups, primarily from 18-64. 

Twitter

Twitter, surprisingly, has a slightly larger male following than females and is preferred by a younger audience with its biggest age group 18 to 29. 

Snapchat

Snapchat has the highest audience of 18-29-year-olds, with income levels spread pretty evenly across the board. Women have a slight edge over men when it comes to using this platform.

YouTube

YouTube is becoming a significant contender in the social media world. Users are evenly split between men and women, it appeals to all ages from 18-64, and it boasts a wide range of income levels for its users. If you haven’t considered YouTube for your business, it may be time.

TikTok

Dominating the 18-29-year-old market in short, bite-sized pieces, TikTok is seeing a steady growth in popularity. It holds a slight edge for female users, but the income levels are very evenly split across the platform’s users.

ArachnidWorks Can Help You Decide

We confess we’re kind of obsessed with social media. We can help you choose the best platforms for your business. Got questions? Let’s connect and talk about it!

Top 7 Things to Avoid When Sending Email Newsletters

Posted on January 11, 2022

email newsletter on laptop

Sure, you may have worked for days on your newsletter content, and it looks great, doesn’t it? The truth is, a newsletter is only an effective marketing tool if it’s opened. How do you avoid “trash,” “unread,” or even worse, “reported as spam?”

Here are some of the top things to avoid:

 

1. Making Your Newsletters too Generic

Your newsletter is your chance to appeal to not just any audience, but your audience. A great way to do this is by list segmentation, the process of creating smaller, more targeted email lists for special news and events. Once you do this, you can create the content that each segment will want to read rather than generic content that doesn’t focus on any targets at all.

2. Accidentally Triggering Spam Alerts

On a personal level, you know the words that make you delete emails unopened, or report them as spam. These words include “free,” “promotional,” and “buy now.” To make things even more complicated, Gmail has a tab that specifically filters messages containing certain trigger words into a “Promotions” tab. It’s a pretty sure bet that your Gmail readers rarely, if ever, open this tab. You can bypass these disastrous results by avoiding the common spam trigger words and encouraging your readers to whitelist your email to keep it out of spam or promotional folders.

3. Ignoring The Wonders of Modern Technology

It’s estimated that over half of all users access email through their smartphones. If you haven’t designed your emails with these users in mind, they won’t engage with your content. Designing emails for mobile devices includes formatting to fit screens, compressing images, and using shorter, more pointed subject lines.

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What Are Twitter Super Follows & How to Use Them

Posted on September 17, 2021

In February of 2021, Twitter announced it would be unveiling Super Follows, a way for users to monetize their content by offering perks and additional content on the wildly popular social media platform. What are Twitter Super Follows, how do they work, and how can you generate passive income from them?

What are Twitter Super Follows?

Twitter Super Follows allow users to share exclusive, subscriber-only content to their followers. The feature lets users interact directly with their subscribers, sharing an extra layer of content designed to boost revenue, engage followers, share deeper thoughts and ideas, and ultimately, drive traffic to websites, products, and services. 

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How to Get the Testimonials You Need to Drive Your Business Forward

Posted on July 23, 2021

halfway opened laptop

Did you know that testimonials can increase conversion rates by 34% and can generate over 60% more revenue? In fact, many people refuse to purchase an item or service without reading positive reviews and testimonials.

If you haven’t considered the importance of adding testimonials to your website, you’re missing out on a fantastic opportunity to grow and retain your customer base. 

Unfortunately, those glowing testimonials will seldom come to you without a little encouragement. Read on for tips and tricks to get the testimonials you need to drive your business forward.

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8 Great Reasons Why You Should Hire a Marketing Agency

Posted on August 4, 2017


If you are running your own business, you certainly have plenty on your plate each day. It never seems as if there are enough hours to get everything done, no matter how focused you are when you sit down at your desk. In order to reach your goals, the only viable option is to look for help.

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How To Get Client Testimonials for My Business?

Posted on June 10, 2016

Receiving a testimonial from a client is a great way to get social/visible proof from your clients/customers in order to build trust with your prospects. Many often ask, “how can I get client testimonials?”.

We’re glad you asked! Here are some points to consider in order to improve the quality and quantity of client testimonials you receive for your business.

Client Testimonials Build Social Proof

Ask yourself how many times you have researched feedback on a company before purchasing a product or service from them. We’ve all done it, right? The third party feedback you seek acts as a level of “social proof” or validation of the business.

Collecting Testimonials from Clients

When you collect testimonials, don’t just get a few sentences and be satisfied with that. Include the full name of the customer, along with location, title, and pictures (wherever possible). This enhances the credibility of the review.

What Makes a Great Testimonial?

The best reviews have a clear understanding of what the situation was before and how it has improved (after) – in easily understood and measurable terms.

So, what are some quick and easy tips to actually get a customer/client to provide a review? Try asking them these questions:

What was the problem they were experiencing before they hired you?
What did they find as a result of your product or service?
What was the best thing about it?
Had they previously tried another company to solve their issue? If so, who/what?
What are three main benefits that they have experienced as a result of working with you?
Would they recommend you to someone else – and if so, why?
Are there any other final remarks they would like to add?

Believe it or not, but testimonials and reviews are one of the most important factors users consider when choosing a business. Your rating is also one of the first things users see when searching for your business. These guidelines should help you with the quality and quantity of your testimonials – so get out there and get to it!

Advertising Trends in 2016 Infographic

Posted on January 13, 2016

What are the top trends to look for in the advertising industry in 2016? We’re glad you asked! This great infographic features four of the digital trends to be on the lookout for. For instance, digital ad spends are set to take over TV ad budgets. Currently at 35% of all digital spending, mobile is set to be the fastest growing marketing segment.

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