100% sustainable branding & creative

Acceler8 Creative Wins Two HBAGC Sammy Awards

On November 17, 2010, the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicagoland (HBAGC) held their annual awards ceremony. The Key Awards are given to the top residential builders in various categories from new homes to bathroom remodeling and everything in between. On the marketing side, the HBAGC recognizes excellence in marketing and advertising with the Sammy Awards.

Our long-standing, and fantastic client, Great Rooms Designers & Builders won ten Key Awards in eight categories – proving once again, they are one of the top, custom home design + build companies servicing the Chicago North Shore.

To keep the wins coming, their website, created by Acceler8 Creative, won a Sammy Award for Best Builder Website. This is a perfect example of how a website should grow and evolve to suit the needs of the brand and truly work as a sales and marketing tool. We initially had a single page when the company first started. The second generation which is the basis for the current site was developed in late 2008. We now have over 100 pages in the site, yet it still remains very approachable, and easy to read and navigate.

Great Rooms also won a second Sammy for Best Builder Newsletter, produced by Acceler8 Creative. The early stages of the newsletter were a collaborative effort with recognition going to Susan Fireside of Winter and Construction for work on the initial layout concept. And, copywriting provided by Christa Velbel of CopyContentCreativity. The objective of the newsletter was to give the recipients something worthwhile and informative, still reinforcing the Great Rooms brand, and avoid being just another promotional piece. Mission accomplished, and we set the bar even higher once again for the competition.

Special thanks to Craig Wolski, Susan Hamilton and everyone at Great Rooms for being so awesome to work with and entrusting Acceler8 Creative with their brand development and visual communications. We’re looking forward to an even better 2011!

benefits of investing in your brand

Without always being able to get a solid and immediate ROI measurement on brand-building initiatives, many companies often relinquish the importance of investing in their brands. It’s sometimes seen merely as an expense with no true correlation to the success of the company.

However, as we’ve discussed many times over, there are four key things a strong brand can to for your bottom line:

• Maintain customer loyalty
• Increase lead conversion
• Resist commoditization
• Command premium pricing

Maintain customer loyalty – reinforces your customers’ commitment to you, reassures them of their expectations in your products and services, and prevents them from buying elsewhere simply based on price. Also, makes selling additional products and services to them much easier.

Increase lead conversion – a strong brand that is known and trusted gives people confidence in becoming customers, and alleviates the need to “prove” yourself.

Resist commoditization – because of your unique brand promise and/or “value-add” to your products and services, they are “worth more” than just face value. Decisions to buy your products or services are base on more than just price.

Command premium pricing – people know “you get what you pay for” with strong brands. In other words, if customers trust your brand they will spend more for your products and services.

Pat LaPointe reiterates, defines and breaks down these four points further in a recent article entitled “Ten Specific Ways Brand Investments Pay Back”.

One of the most frequent questions I get about measuring marketing is: “How do we measure the impact of our investments in brand development on the bottom line?”

If you’re really looking for an answer, here goes. There are ten basic ways a stronger brand creates financial value:

1. It can attract more customers, either directly or through stronger word of mouth (WOM).
2. It can encourage customers to spend more with you, making them more receptive to other solutions you can offer, or just more likely to give you the first shot at meeting their needs.
3. It can influence the mix of products/services customers buy from you, since buyers normally hold strong brands in some degree of esteem, and respect the “advice” of the brand.
4. It can reduce customers’ price sensitivity, allowing you to earn more margin from every dollar they spend with you.
5. It can help you keep customers active longer, or at the very least, act as a “safety net” to give you time or opportunity to fix problems that arise along the way.
6. It can help you accelerate the customer’s buying process, reducing the probability that something happens to close the wallet before the spending happens.
7. It can help you attract and retain better talent at lower recruiting and retention costs, since people want to be associated with attractive brands.
8. It can reduce operating expenses by influencing supplier concessions from companies who want to be associated with top-tier brand partners.
9. It can attract more/better channel partners.
10. And if that’s not enough for your CFO, tell him or her how stronger brands can actually help lower your organization’s cost-of-capital borrowing costs, due to the lower risks of lending to a company with strong brands (all other things being equal). It’s not unlike how studies have consistently shown that taller people make more money than equally qualified people of average or lower height.

Most of the time, the business case for branding investments can be made in some combination of these ten elements. Of course, you’ll need some data (or at least some well-structured assumptions) to make the case credibly. But it can be done with even just a little data.

You’ll also need some idea of just when you expect to see these effects begin to occur, and what the early indicators of progress might be (e.g. shift in perceptions, website engagement, etc.). Setting up your marketing metrics to monitor these milestones becomes more crucial to the cause as your timeframe for payback gets longer.

Spending is still tough these days, but investing in yourself, your products and your services can mean the difference between bickering over price and getting a ROI back tenfold.

Brand initiatives can take many forms – strategy and messaging, visual communication, social networking, etc. – or a combination of any or all. Contact us today to help assess your brand’s strengths and weaknesses to develop a strategy that will make the most of a worthy investment.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

Distinction with a capital D

One of the purposes of building a brand is to give your company and/or products an identity, and stand out from the crowd. Differentiating yourself from the competition must be multi-dimensional to do it effectively. It entails defining your position in the marketplace, your brand promise, your voice and message, and your image. When done correctly, it strengthens your relationship with your customers, and secures your position among the competition.

Be big somewhere
Hopefully, you’re rolling out of bed each morning to do what you love. However, at the end of the day, we want to be successful and afford a good living. Part of that means staying ahead of the competition, but there can only be ONE number one. Some don’t want to be number one. They are comfortable following the leader with a “me too” approach to their branding efforts. An obvious downside to not being at the top is that they are left wrestling for crumbs and leftovers from the big dogs. And, inevitably battling over price with their customers.

Still, some wish they were number one, but can’t compete with their market leaders’ spending budgets. Have no fear. This is where brand strategy plays out the best. If you can’t be first in your category – create a new one. This allows you to become the innovator and “big fish” in your new-found pond. Not to mention, this gives you a slice of the pie to enjoy all to yourself.

Give ‘em what no one else can
If you don’t have any competitors, you’re one of the luck few – or you ARE the government. Inevitably, we have someone offering the same products or services as we do at the same or better price. So, why should a new customer choose you over your competitors? A strong and unique brand promise tells customers they get something valuable from you that none of your competitors can offer. Whatever this “value-add” is takes some creative  thinking and analysis. It’s usually intangible, but is highly beneficial to your customers and prospects in making their lives easier or better.

Tell a good story
Communicating the correct information about your company, products and services effectively to your prospects, customers and stakeholders through all channels of communication helps strengthen your brand and consistently defines who you are and what you offer. Although, information that is relevant to a product engineer ordering your widget is probably not going to resonate well with a potential investor, an effective messaging platform will allow you to capture the attention of either and lead them to take the appropriate action. This can put you far ahead of your competition who uses a “blanket message” approach throughout all their communication.

Another consideration is the tone and angle of your messaging. Is it appropriate for your audience? Is it more effective than your competitors? A company offering business consulting services to its clients will want to be more nurturing in tone than a company who makes diesel engines for industrial equipment. A leader and innovator in a particular industry may want to elevate themselves with a more solutions-centric angle to selling their products, rather than get mixed in with the competition selling products and battling over pricing.

No two strong brands are exactly alike
The most obvious form of distinction is your look or brand image. There’s a fine line between being so different that you’re customers don’t relate, and being too safe that you blend into the crowd. Your brand image should represent, support and enhance your story to complete your overall brand. In doing so, an effective brand image also creates impact with your customers and prospects – giving them an emotional connection or reaction. After all, people make decisions logically, and buy emotionally – it’s what FEELS right to them.

Putting it all together
Part strategy, part creativity – put the two together, and with due diligence you can build a strong brand that is distinct and perseveres over your competition. It will help you connect more effectively with your prospects and customers – shortening the sales cycle and helping you spend marketing dollars more efficiently.

Want to learn more? We’d love to talk to you about it, and figure out how to put the D in distinction for you.

For more information about brand-building and to see how we’ve helped our clients, visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

the 3 C’s of a strong brand

The attributes of a strong brand are CLARITY, DISTINCTION, TRUST and IMPACT. At least that’s how we define it at Acceler8 Creative. What do each of these really mean? What role do they play in the overall integrity of the brand?

I could go on all day about this, but to prevent your coffee from getting cold, I’ll delve into CLARITY for now. In my opinion, it can actually be dissected into three smaller segments – CLARITY, CONSISTENCY and COHERENCE.

CLARITY
Obviously the most important of the three C’s. It can be applied and viewed at a couple different levels – making it multi-dimensional to the effect of the overall brand. One meaning that defines what every brand strives to be is “freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity”. In this regard, CLARITY can be applicable both to the brand image as well as the promise. Does your brand image “look” different than the competition’s? Does the look personify your brand attributes and who you are? What can you promise your customers that no one else can?

The other definition of CLARITY – “clearness of the perception or understanding” – is more closely related to the voice of your brand and how effectively you tell your story. Are you reaching your audience(s) at the correct level of communication? And more importantly, do they understand? The messaging you’re using at the latest tradeshow to attract new customers is probably not going to have much relevance to your investors and stakeholders.

CONSISTENCY
It’s the key to pulling it all together for powerful communication. CONSISTENCY is defined as “the harmony and uniformity among the parts”. This can be applied to both the message and the look of your brand as well. Does your collateral look related – like it belongs together? If there are multiple product lines or families, what’s the common thread tying them together?

From a messaging standpoint, your audience(s) should be getting a consistent story that defines who you are, what you do, why they need you, and how they can take action. Though not every brand touch point will need all this information. Are you delivering the appropriate parts of your message to the right people?

COHERENCE
The definition of COHERENCE is “the logical interconnection of ideas”. This also is more closely related to the voice of your brand, and how well you tell your story. It can help define solutions rather than just products and services. It makes new or seemingly unrelated initiatives on-target and relevant to your brand. Do your story and initiatives lead back to a centralized brand promise or home base message?

At face value, this may see like a bunch of philosophical garble, but with some vision, strategy and creative talent, it melds together to form a brand that increases customer loyalty, shortens sales cycles, resists commoditization, and commands premium pricing. We can help you align the proper strategy and messaging, and along with creativity and intuition, infuse it all into the necessary channels of communication to give you the optimal impact on your audience(s) and customers. Contact us to help you implement the three C’s. (Or to get together for a coffee in case yours did get cold.)

For more information about brand-building and to see how we’ve helped our clients, visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

5 ways to improve your LinkedIn success

Perhaps you’ve been on LinkedIn® for awhile, or just recently set up an account. Now what? As with most things in life and business, you get out of it what you put into it. Hopefully, you have already done the things I’m mentioning below. However, if you haven’t done much with updating your information, or are not active in the LinkedIn community, your profile is getting a bit stale. Here are five things you can do to help grow your network and improve your visibility.

1. Change Your Professional Headline
As a default, LinkedIn uses your current position as your “professional headline”. That’s fine, but not really exciting in most cases. Be creative with this. Change it to something more descriptive of what you do or how you help people. It could even be a call-to-action. Along with this, personalize your profile URL. As a default, it’s just a series of numbers.

2. Add Your Company to the “Companies” Listing
Listing your company on LinkedIn helps with two things: 1. It’s another place people serach for products and services. 2. It helps your results with search engines and your online presence.

3. Use a Photo of Yourself for Your Profile Picture
This is “social media” after all. It’s supposed to be more personal. No one wants to network with a logo or graphic.

4. Integrate Your Other Social Media Sites
Through the use of apps and widgets, you have the ability to make your blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets, etc. stream to your LinkedIn profile and vice versa. This also saves time from having to post information to multiple sites.

5. Stay Active
Every time you change your status, edit or add to your profile, join a group, etc., you become visible to your network members’ updates. There are even apps and widgets you can integrate into your daily activities that, when used, update your status. Joining groups in your industry or in markets you want to sell to keep you updated on trends and buzz. Commenting and/or posting discussions help increase your visibility. At the least, make a point to update your status weekly.

These are just a few things specific to LinkedIn that can help you get more out of being a member of the online community. Contact us at Acceler8 Creative today to talk more about how you might improve your company’s promotion through social media.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Visit Greg’s LinkedIn profile.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

LinkedIn is a registered trademark of LinkedIn Corporation.

does your brand have a title?

Visual communication is often what people think of for telling their story and communicating their brand attributes to their audience. Let’s step back and look at some key positions within a company that are potentially, highly-effective and important, yet often overlooked for communicating a brand.

If you’re at all familiar with our branding philosophy, you already know that a brand is built on clarity, distinction, trust and impact. When you boil it down, your brand is the relationship you have with your customers. Therefore, communicating consistently through all channels of communication is of utmost importance. This means everyone who comes in contact with your brand should receive the APPROPRIATE impression and message – this can differ in order to communicate effectively to a specific audience. We’ll take a look at how a few commonly overlooked positions within a company can be great assets to your brand.

Director of First Impressions
Through technology and convenience, automated phone systems have been put in place. Due to economic hardships, staff has been down-sized. Yet the role of receptionist remains necessary. A customer or prospect has to come in contact with SOMEONE at your company initially – whether it’s over the phone or in person. Is that person representing your brand correctly?

Think about it. Does the person (or people) handling reception have the necessary information about your brand to deliver it correctly? Is their personality and demeanor representative of your brand attributes as well? If you’re selling energy drinks, you wouldn’t want your receptionist to be better suited to play a patient in an anti-depressant commercial. Attitude, tonality, posture, hospitality, etc. all come into play when a person comes through your front door or calls the front desk.

I’m not trying to say who should be hired for your receptionist position. My point is that the person in this role can be a huge asset to your brand as a first impression if you leverage it properly and arm them with the appropriate and adequate information and messaging.

Liaison to External Resources
How many different people come in the back door of your company for shipping and deliveries? From the overnight shipping person to suppliers and venders, stop to count them in a day’s or week’s time. Inevitably, those people are interacting with other people and companies who might need your products and services. Is the mailroom staff capable of communicating your brand attributes to your suppliers and vendors?

Often times, the mailroom staff has a personal connection with the people they interact with regularly – in essence, a relationship. A brand is the relationship you have with your customers and prospects. So, by informing your mailroom staff with the appropriate information about your brand, products and services, you’re helping them to extend your brand to your suppliers and vendors. Potentially, helping keep you top-of-mind with them should an opportunity arise.

Department of Internal Morale
Whether your HR department consists of one person or an entire staff, it should be looked upon as your brand amplifier. Communication, attitude, delivery, etc. are all funneled through the HR department to the rest of the company.

It seems all to often, HR is left on their own to communicate to employees. Internal communication might be at the mercy of someone who is deemed the expert in Microsoft Word, OR it’s left on the back burner of the in-house marketing department behind client work. But how do the materials and correspondence look compared to your external communication? I’m not saying HR should be producing four-color, glossy brochures, but if it’s not upholding the brand standards, there is a breakdown in the consistency. What example does that send to employees about the overall brand of your company? This is where our favorite saying, “a brand is built from the top down, and the inside out” comes into play. If brand communication is not delivered consistently and at an appropriate level of sophistication from the decision-makers and brand champions throughout the organization, chances are your brand message and image is being compromised as it reaches the outside world.

How tech-savvy is your company? Is communication delivered via an intranet? Are you using that intranet to it’s full potential? Smaller companies don’t necessarily need an intranet, that’s true. It’s just as easy to communicate at the lunch table or across the hall. However, for companies of a larger size and/or with multiple offices, an intranet can play a huge role for internal brand and morale building – not to mention efficiency and consistency for internal communications.

CBO (Chief Brand Officer)
As a company owner, president, department head or brand champion, part of effective leadership is rallying the troops around initiatives and the brand itself. By arming them with the proper information, messages and consistency, they too, can become brand champions to their respective external points of contact. Sometimes we are too close to see potential opportunities within our own organization. Step out of your shoes, take an outsider’s perspective at your company, and try to identify some new brand-related titles for members of your team. When your staff is on-brand, the communication to external touchpoints should come fluently and naturally – making it genuine and more effective.

The underlying point to this is to provide yet another cost-effective way to increase brand awareness for your organization. Through our years of expertise, Acceler8 Creative can help you find new, efficient and effective ways to tell your story and communicate your brand to your customers and prospects.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

is print dead?

In talking to a few prospects recently, I came to realized how much lower of a priority brochures and print collateral had become as part of  companies’ marketing communications arsenals.

Back in the day, there was no internet as we know it. It was first invented in the late 1960′s as a means for the government to maintain communication in the event of a nuclear strike. (Contrary to what has been claimed, Al Gore DID NOT invent the internet.) The internet did not start to gain functionality as we know it today until the late 1980′s. It probably wasn’t until the mid 1990′s that more companies started developing their first generation websites.

When I was starting out in the biz, there was no email as a common form of communication. No companies had websites. They relied on brochures and print collateral to convey their message and brand image. Print quality, the paper used, coating and varnishing techniques, all added another dimension to a company’s image and aesthetic.

Once the internet and websites started to become more efficient and effective marketing tools, print collateral was destined to become more of a secondary, “must have” form of marketing communications. Pair that with decreased budgets and more elaborate desktop publishing tools – the glorious, well-designed, exquisitely-printed corporate communications had one foot in the grave.

Even just three or four years ago, on any given day, I could say we did about 50% print and 50% web projects. Now, aside from identities (business cards, letterhead, folders, etc.), we’re probably only doing about 25% print material – possibly less. Is this a bad thing? There are two sides of the coin.

Maybe it’s not a bad thing
Consider the cost-savings. For example (and only an example), let’s say it costs $15,000 to design and print 5,000 16-page corporate brochures. Granted, one sale from those brochures might pay for themselves, but what you see is what you get. There’s no updating or changing without reprinting. Not unless the piece had been designed as part of an adaptable collateral package. Without handing these brochures out at a tradeshow, how long will it take to go through them? If your contacting 5,000 new prospects in a quarter or six month period, more power to you. That brings us to the topic of distribution.

It’s much easier to have a brochure designed, but have it exist only as a PDF on your website or distribute through email. (Not to mention the little extra nod for improving search results.) You also need to consider the cost of postage. Even at a bulk rate, which is unlikely, you’re probably looking at close to a dollar a piece – and that’s being optimistic. So, of that $15,000 price tag, you might eliminate $5,000 or so by not printing, and additional hundreds of dollars in postage savings.

So in the example, that’s still $10,000 to produce a corporate brochure?! The fact that desktop publishing software has become so robust and more user-friendly does not make a person using it capable of good design. The software is merely a tool – with creative talent and vision being the key to success. Good communication and design is often replaced by varying degrees of software knowledge and execution. I like to use the analogy that just because a person owns a pneumatic nail gun doesn’t make them capable of building a house.

When you’re talking about a corporate brochure or even an annual report, consider the necessity for high-level vision, concept and messaging. How will that be conveyed and executed properly with the appropriate hierarchy of information? Oftentimes, the importance and value of this vision and expertise is overlooked for the sake of speed and cost. As a colleague so eloquently put it recently, “That 99¢ burger might get you through in a pinch, but at some point, you’re going to need a real meal.”

Maybe it is a bad thing
Think about the last time you were handed someone’s business card, and you couldn’t help but say, “Wow, that’s really nice!” What made you stop and say that? It probably wasn’t just the design. It was the weight of the paper, an emboss, maybe it was even printed using letterpress. Whatever it was, it transcended the norm. It was a small, yet impactful “experience”. Now, imagine the impression a prospect or customer might have when “experiencing” a well-designed and executed, quality-printed brochure from your company. It would be a visual and tactile lasting impression of your brand. Chances are your competition has cut corners with their print collateral making it pale in comparison to  yours.

The internet is very two-dimensional. You’re at the mercy of each individual viewer’s browser capabilities, monitor color calibration, image quality, etc. Because of this, I think the standard of visual quality that people are willing to accept has diminished. With a quality-designed and printed piece, you’re assured it will look AND feel the same for all viewers, as well as raise the bar for your competition.

So, will print eventually die?
I think not. There will always be a need for print collateral. In fact, I’d love to see a rebirth. The brand-savvy companies realize the advantages, and use them to leverage themselves above the competition. With our roots in print, and our expertise with integrated branding campaigns, Acceler8 Creative can help you develop impactful and versatile print collateral packages to convey your story and make a lasting impression with your audience. Contact us today.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

Acceler8 Creative takes Die-Mate Corp’s logo up a notch

Die-Mate Corporation manufactures industrial semiconductor hardware, metal stampings, impact and extruded copper, aluminum and industrial coining metal, high-speed steels, nickel-based super alloys, and titanium-based super alloys for various OEM markets.

Having evolved from being a small manufacturer of stamping and small parts serving the Chicago-area, Die-Mate Corporation is now a global company serving customers in Canada, Mexico and China. Die-Mate chose to use Acceler8 Creative to refreshen up their 40-year old logo, and to help their brand image become more representative of the company they are today.

The new logo still maintains the essence of the original, but is enhanced with its stamped, metallic look – indicative of the copper and other metals used for their parts manufacturing. The multi-level dimensionality represents the depth of their capabilities and reinforces the company’s strength in their market as a global entity.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

building an effective and successful website

In a recent conversation regarding “SEO” performed by an outside resource for a client, we realized how far in the wrong direction website development has come.

There is no doubt that a website is the most versatile and cost-effective INVESTMENT a company can make, and most people realize there’s more to just having a website – it needs to get you found among search engines. For this reason, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become big business.

What happened to the expertise of creating a website the right way – the smart way, so the extra expense of SEO is not a necessity? The market is overrun with designers and programmers alike who are continuously trying to undercut the next guy to build the next website cheaper and faster. Pair that with the quagmire (I’ve been waiting to use that word in my blog.) of unqualified, bandwagon-jumping, snake-oil-selling “SEO specialists” out there. The result is a lot of sites that might look good, but now require the extra expense of a true SEO service to get the them ranked well in searches, AND in some cases undo a big mess from the unexperienced creators i.e. designers and programmers.

I’ll admit, there are probably hundreds of companies and people out there who do what we do here at Acceler8. However, often times, we come across a prospect who says they “just spent a ton of money on their website”, but for what? It might have been designed to look cool, but wasn’t built to search well. (Kind of like having a collectable car that never leaves your garage. You can look at it, and you can show it to people, but no one else will ever know it’s there.)

We’ve also encountered prospects who will say they are using a paid SEO service for five or eight search terms, and they’re “showing up on the first page of Google” when you type in those words. However, in reality, they aren’t necessarily relevant to search terms their target audience is using. What good does that do?

I don’t mean to rant. I’m just trying to set the stage. All too often, a creative individual or design studio will be hired to do a website, but will not have the knowledge, ability or foresight to make sure it’s designed, written and built to deliver the results the client needs.

Here at Acceler8, we make it our obligation and due-diligence to not only communicate each client’s brand image and voice clearly, consistently, and with focus and distinction, but also to be sure the website’s content is relevant to keywords their audiences are using when searching on the internet. We pair that with programming best practices to make the site as search-engine-friendly as possible.

In this day and age of instant gratification, people get frustrated when a website they’ve worked hard on goes live and they don’t see results. The reality is that it takes time. Everyday Google spiders are crawling the internet for new sites and updated content. With so much information out there, it can take 3-4 weeks for a new site to be crawled by Google – and that’s just the home page. It could be weeks or months for the rest of the site to be indexed.

This is also why it’s important to regularly update your website. With monthly maintenance, we can tweak and revise the content to help improve keyword search results. Also, by keeping fresh content coming, Google indexes the site more frequently.

So, why is it important to be on the first page of Google? What makes SEO effective?

I recently talked with Linda Strunk – senior solutions specialist, at ThomasNet, for some insight on consumer behaviors, what an effective SEO program should do, and what sets ThomasNet apart.

ThomasNet.com is the leading industrial destination containing every conceivable industrial product or service. ThomasNet helps thousands of industrial and medical supply businesses (manufacturers, distributors, and service companies) improve their websites to penetrate new markets, attract new customers, improve efficiency, and ultimately increase revenues. Although the industrial market has been the company’s focus, their platforms are just as effective for other markets, especially for companies selling products. ThomasNet has spent millions of dollars on the research and development for their solutions platforms based on studies conducted on consumer internet usage and buying behaviors.

GN: It’s obvious that the yellow pages and their “online advertising” is an expensive and ineffective way to spend advertising and marketing dollars. What makes a company’s website their most effective marketing tool?
LS: Right. At a recent SEO conference, Google noted that unless you are a hotel or travel site, only 8% of search engine users will use pay-per-click or sponsored advertising. Having a well-ranked website is important for a few reasons. Over 80% of all buying decisions begin on the internet. And nearly 40% of keyword searches on Google are 3-7 words. Also, search engine users – on average of over 75% – don’t look past the first page of results.

GN: Based on those statistics there’s no doubt getting found on the first page is important. That doesn’t directly relate to sales though. What can increase a company’s conversion rate or get people to take buying actions?
LS: Through studies at an independent research firm, they have learned where a viewer’s eye typically travels on web pages. It’s those areas that need to incorporate action items to drive people to buy. By using this method, it’s not uncommon for my clients to see over a 90% increase in buying actions – sometimes in as little as three months.

GN: What makes ThomasNet’s solutions so effective?
LS: We offer a technology-driven platform that optimizes all of a company’s product content. In essence, making all the technical specs, part numbers, descriptions, services, etc. search engine optimized. We like to call it “spider food”. The pages are then designed to make the content easily readable with action items properly placed. So far, over 2,700 clients have taken advantage of our platform.

Click here to go to YouTube for testimonials from ThomasNet clients.

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At Acceler8 Creative, it’s our goal to help our clients succeed. Building distinctive, on-brand and effective websites that drive traffic and increase sales is part of what fuels that success. We have the expertise to help you improve results and the partnerships to take you even further.

Contact us today to discuss ways we can help turbocharge your online presence and success.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.

Acceler8 Creative helps take Unlimited Bandwidth to the next level

Unlimited Bandwidth delivers carrier-class network monitoring solutions that empower network operators to lower operating costs and capital expenditures, while increasing alarm visibility, alarming coverage and network quality-of-service for the telecommunications industry.

Over the last nine years, Unlimited Bandwidth has built their brand and reputation on providing innovative, reliable and cost-effective remote monitoring and network alarming solutions. Being one of the leaders in their industry, they looked to Acceler8 Creative to help raise the bar even higher by improving their brand image.

The first part of the brand initiative was to develop a new logo. The previous logo was a good representation of their core business. With new endeavors and technology solutions on the horizon, the new logo conveys stability and depth and accommodates the growth of their solutions offerings as well as tapping into new markets. This was followed by the creation of a new website. By changing the messaging to a more user-centric hierarchy, it positions the company to be more solutions-based rather than just offering products. The design and imagery used communicate the brand of the company – high-tech, innovative and user-friendly. The combination of relevant content and an improved brand image will greatly elevate their online presence.

Click here to check out Unlimited Bandwidth’s website.

Visit Acceler8 Creative’s website.

Phone 847-909-4569

Email Acceler8 Creative.