Developing a brand style guide for your business

What is a brand style guide? A brand style guide is a set of standards for the writing and design of brand documents and publications.

A style guide can range from a single document to a multi-chapter, overall guide to the look and feel of your brand.

While brand style guides are extremely common for medium to large business brands, more often then not, smaller businesses either don’t know what they are or they think their own operation is too small to merit one.

Why is it important to have a style guide? One of the most important things for a brand to be is consistent. Consistency helps customers remember your brand. It is also important to make sure your brand’s style has uniformity in quality. Over the course of your business, you will likely work with different printers, designers, and copywriters. A style guide will help them pick up where others have left off.

Here are some things to include in your style guide:

Strategic brand overview: A few paragraphs that describe the essence of your brand. It should involve keywords for the people working on your brand documents to keep in mind.

Logos: When you have your logo designed, make sure you get graphic files (.ai, .eps). It is also a good idea to have different variations of your logo depending upon size. You never know who might need it and where it will end up. So, for instance, if you have a logo that is long horizontally, you might want to see about having a squared-off version. It might also be a good idea to have a logo that goes well with light backgrounds and another that works against a darker backdrop.

What to do (and what not to do) with your logo: Include some examples of flexible ways in which your logo could be used – as well as some uses that are out-of-bounds. Some examples of what not to do:

• Stretching the logo

• Placing the logo over a pattern

• Adding a drop shadow to a logo

• Cropping the logo

• Changing the logo’s color

Types of fonts and usage: Fonts are very important and should be consistent. There could be a few variations with them however. For instance, a serif font is used often in print and a non-serif is often used in web because print has more pixels than your standard computer monitor. There can also be differences in headers and content including sizes and line spacing.

Colors: Colors are extremely important and should always be included in your style guide. Color palettes should be the same both in print and the web color formats (i.e., RGB).

Copyrighting: It is very helpful for copywriters new to your brand to have a guide that gives them examples of how to speak when representing your brand, what keywords to emphasize, how not to speak and so forth.

Image use: Images can be key to how a brand looks. Examples of approved images or images themselves can be very helpful to a designer. I have worked with some very large international brands that are so particular about their images, that I could only use images they already had approved.

It is very important to be consistent with your brand’s style and it is important to always have a guide for current and future people who will be doing work for your brand.

Brand guides can be very large and include a lot more information than I have listed here, but the guidelines above should be a good start.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Free resources for entrepreneurs-turned-DIY website designers

There are tens of millions of small businesses just in the United States alone, which equates to millions of websites. Since the evolution of WordPress and other content management systems, business owners and their staffs are more often trying to maintain their own websites versus hiring outside help, especially in this slow-growth economy.

Even if you are a business owner who has hired a professional or an agency to manage your site, it helps to know what is going on with it, especially where SEO is concerned since most small businesses create their own content.

Here are some free resources to check out if you’re a website owner.

1. Crawl testing: What is crawl testing? Search engines crawl through your website to find links and pages they can index. Sometimes search spiders (crawlers) can have difficulty. This could be because of how the website is coded, maybe a faulty plug-in that is stopping it. Here is a free crawl tester I found.

2. Is your site’s code compliant with the latest standards? This tool is the industry standard and helps make sure that the HTML output code (the tag stuff) is valid: W3.com.

3. Browser testing: Instead of wondering and downloading every browser on the planet (which is hard if you have a Mac) this great tool by Adobe allows you to search several types of browsers at once and gives you a screen shot of the page when viewed on that browser you tested: Browser Lab.

4. CSS cheat sheet: Want to change a font color, change the height of something or stylize something on your site? More and more business owners are learning how to do this on their own and here is a great cheat sheet. This was my digital bible when I was a newbie.

5. Keyword ranking: A quick and simple tool to learn how you are doing in search engine land.

6. Meta tag analyzer: This is a useful tool you should use when testing out your blog posts and site content. It checks to see keyword density, your META tags and titles. It also shows the density of other URLS on your domain.

7. Wordpress cheat sheet: WordPress is built with a variety of pre-built PHP functions that lets you do things like show the title of your page, list links, categories and so on. This is a good little cheat sheet to help you add features to your WordPress website.

8. See CSS adjustments before you make them: This is my all-time favorite plug-in. I use it on Firefox and Chrome browsers. It allows me to see and play around with my website’s styling while it is online without me breaking anything. It really helps when adjusting font sizes, positioning content – really, for everything. A MUST-have if you are planning on making any adjustments yourself: Firebug!

As a small business owner, you are often forced to do things on your own due to budgetary constraints, and your website can often fall into that category. Knowledge is power. This list of free resources should give you the extra help you need to be a web-design do-it-yourselfer.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Keeping your business out of social media trouble

Social media can be very helpful to businesses of all sizes as far as getting new clients and customers, retaining existing relationships, and improving customer service. It can also put your business in trouble.

Social media is not only an instant portal to the world: Once a message is out there, it can never be deleted – ever. (Even if you press “Delete,” your message lives on.)

Fellow entrepreneurs, it’s important to make sure you are keeping your business out of legal and PR trouble and taking precautions. Here are some ways to do that.

1. Social media policy: This one is an obvious given — at least I hope it is. Always protect your company and your brand as best you can. Create a set of social-media guidelines for your staffers that clearly spells out your expectations. All of your employees should sign it.

2. Social media disclaimers: Have a disclaimer on social media accounts (especially Twitter) that the person tweeting is giving their “own” tweets/opinions and not speaking for the company.

3. Check employees’ social media accounts: It is one thing to have a social media policy, but are you enforcing it? Remember that employees’ negative comments about the workplace, their behavior online (if they are rude, swearing, posting improper pictures) can have an effect on your business and your brand. Your staffers are a representative 24/7.

4. Check DMs, mentions and comments daily: Remember that social media is a live portal that runs ’round the clock. Always make sure you are checking what people are saying about you and your business on social media. Even if you have an in-house staffer or an outside agency managing your social media channels, it is your company and brand on the line. Stay engaged. Social media can help you learn about how customers and potential customers are experiencing and viewing your company and brand. Don’t just look at the raw data about “Likes,” tweets, comments, etc. Take the time to look at the communications themselves. That could be the most powerful data out there.

5. Keep issues offline if possible: Social media is a “public” channel. The more a situation is talked about “online” the more the situation is exposed. Yes, there is such a bad thing as bad PR. If you have a customer being negative about an experience with your company and it is something you need to address, try to get the conversation off of social media immediately. How? Ask them to send you a DM. (Make sure you are following them before you ask — nothing says “I don’t care” more than not following that person.) Another option: Give the customer a phone number or email address. Be careful about admitting any guilt on social media as well.

6. Try to keep certain opinions to yourself: I learned this the hard way when I was first starting in Twitterland. Your job is to either be on social media to get clients or to be on social media and not lose them directly or indirectly. Would you decline to take on a client because of their political views? Probably not, but they might not want to be your client because you were ranting about your own politics online. I always tell my clients to be like Switzerland. You have no opinion.

Remember to stay safe out there. Celebrities aren’t the only ones who get in trouble saying stupid things and making wrong decisions on social media. Make sure your company and brand are well-represented. This isn’t the old days: Negativity can not only stay forever, it can spread virally.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Keeping your business out of social media trouble

Social media can be very helpful to businesses of all sizes as far as getting new clients and customers, retaining existing relationships, and improving customer service. It can also put your business in trouble.

Social media is not only an instant portal to the world: Once a message is out there, it can never be deleted – ever. (Even if you press “Delete,” your message lives on.)

Fellow entrepreneurs, it’s important to make sure you are keeping your business out of legal and PR trouble and taking precautions. Here are some ways to do that.

1. Social media policy: This one is an obvious given — at least I hope it is. Always protect your company and your brand as best you can. Create a set of social-media guidelines for your staffers that clearly spells out your expectations. All of your employees should sign it.

2. Social media disclaimers: Have a disclaimer on social media accounts (especially Twitter) that the person tweeting is giving their “own” tweets/opinions and not speaking for the company.

3. Check employees’ social media accounts: It is one thing to have a social media policy, but are you enforcing it? Remember that employees’ negative comments about the workplace, their behavior online (if they are rude, swearing, posting improper pictures) can have an effect on your business and your brand. Your staffers are a representative 24/7.

4. Check DMs, mentions and comments daily: Remember that social media is a live portal that runs ’round the clock. Always make sure you are checking what people are saying about you and your business on social media. Even if you have an in-house staffer or an outside agency managing your social media channels, it is your company and brand on the line. Stay engaged. Social media can help you learn about how customers and potential customers are experiencing and viewing your company and brand. Don’t just look at the raw data about “Likes,” tweets, comments, etc. Take the time to look at the communications themselves. That could be the most powerful data out there.

5. Keep issues offline if possible: Social media is a “public” channel. The more a situation is talked about “online” the more the situation is exposed. Yes, there is such a bad thing as bad PR. If you have a customer being negative about an experience with your company and it is something you need to address, try to get the conversation off of social media immediately. How? Ask them to send you a DM. (Make sure you are following them before you ask — nothing says “I don’t care” more than not following that person.) Another option: Give the customer a phone number or email address. Be careful about admitting any guilt on social media as well.

6. Try to keep certain opinions to yourself: I learned this the hard way when I was first starting in Twitterland. Your job is to either be on social media to get clients or to be on social media and not lose them directly or indirectly. Would you decline to take on a client because of their political views? Probably not, but they might not want to be your client because you were ranting about your own politics online. I always tell my clients to be like Switzerland. You have no opinion.

Remember to stay safe out there. Celebrities aren’t the only ones who get in trouble saying stupid things and making wrong decisions on social media. Make sure your company and brand are well-represented. This isn’t the old days: Negativity can not only stay forever, it can spread virally.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Getting your potential customer to say yes

Regardless of what type of business you are in, without customers, you aren’t going to be in business for long. Getting customers to say yes isn’t always about the product or service in itself, but how you present that product or service and how you ask for the sale.

We are all in sales in a way, from car salesmen to plumbers to entertainers asking their audience to buy their CDs and tickets. We even sell a spouse on dinner choices.

In business, sales are crucial, but so are opportunities to get a sale. Sales opportunities cost time and money, and can be the single most important factor in a business’s success or failure.

Here are five techniques to get a customer to say yes more often.

1. Getting off the “sales” call: People are often, if not always, on guard and defensive when put into a sales position. I start with using their name, not ma’am, not sir, not Mr., etc. I approach the conversation as if we have talked a million times, while at the same time being professional. I try to avoid boilerplate conversation-starter questions like, “How are you?” or “How’s the weather?” Icebreakers like these show that you are a robot, you don’t care and you are just making up for radio silence. Instead of asking about the weather, go to Weather.com and see the weather in the potential customer’s location, then say, “I saw earlier that it was really cold in your area, how are you handling that?” A quick check like this allows me to start a conversation without being typical. I also avoid using words like “you” or “I.” This isn’t about them and me; this is about how we can work together to come to the solution that is most beneficial. A customer who feels as if everyone is in this together and working together is more apt to take your suggestions.

2. Ask questions and listen: The more info you have, the more weapons you have to sell that potential customer. Within three minutes of the initial conversation, I will normally know where potential customers live, if they are married, if they have kids, their income; if it is a business, about how big the company is, where their locations are, what their industry is. I will use all of that information as a sales tool a few minutes after. Customers will give you all the tools necessary to combat their future rebuttals if you give them the chance to. Take a minute to learn their fears, their goals and their ambitions. It is much easier to get a potential customer to say yes when you are throwing their own words back at them.

3. Two options, three max: I rarely — and by rarely I mean NEVER — give a customer more than three options, and most of the time it is two or one. The more options a customer has, the more time to “think about it” and to “get back to you.” If you did your job right, you should have the info you need to know which product or service is best for your customer. If you don’t have that info, then ask for it. People follow leaders, so lead customers on the best option for them. Example: Based on everything you have told me so far, I feel that “we” should go with this option (list reasons). If you show that you have listened, that you know your products and services and that you have found a solution — rather than throwing a huge menu of options at them — they will be more likely to accept your recommendations.

4. Time is of the essence: If customers think they have forever to decide, they will take forever. I always try to place a time limit on everything. For example, during the holiday season, getting new business is rather slow and almost everyone wants to wait until the first of the year. They are in midquarter, they are focused on the holidays and they are just too busy to deal with this right now. So my firm offered a crazy special for all people who signed up by November and gave a deposit. It worked incredibly well. It worked for both sides of the transaction, because in January, we will be too busy to offer it and it wouldn’t make sense for us to. People and businesses don’t want to deal with the fact that they could have saved money. If you leave a sale open, it will stay that way. When I was a loan officer, it was always, “We should get your rate locked in before they go up” or “If we do this now, you can be in your home by June.” Always have a reason that person should sign up right now.

5. Always be closing: It’s an age-old sales axiom because it’s true. When you have a potential customer on the phone or in person, it doesn’t matter what they said about you or your products and services during that call and how much they would like to move forward; once they leave the room or hang up the phone, anything can happen. The odds of that sale going through have been dramatically lessened once they leave. In my line of work, which is primarily b-to-b, it can take many calls and meetings before getting a signed contract based upon the number of people who have to approve it, but even then I am trying to close on each call and make it such that there are as few calls and meetings as possible. The longer the process draws out, the harder the yes becomes. Always be closing. Always be asking for the sale. You can do this without being pushy on a sales call. Simply by saying, “Would you like to get started?” or “Why don’t I send you the paperwork for you to review?” or “How about we set up a meeting with your board and I can give a presentation as well as bring the paperwork,” you can get the ball rolling. Always try to move forward and stay out of stagnation. Also, if the person I am talking to isn’t the decision maker, my goal is to get in front of the decision maker.

Selling isn’t always just about your products and services. It helps to have great ones, but those, in and of themselves, can make you lazy as a salesperson. Try to get off the “sales call” as quickly as possible so that the customers forget they are on a sales call. Listen to them and learn about what their objections are and what their wants and needs are. And close with confidence. If you listened to them and you know your products and services, you should be able to confidently guide them into the right decision.

Lastly, use ethics. If a product or service is not right for a customer or has no benefit, don’t sell it. If you are great at what you do, you can make plenty of sales selling to potential customers who really need your product or service — and those satisfied customers will refer you to their friends.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Business ‘Impossible’: The Irvine approach

By Nick Harrison

Those who know me personally know that I am obsessed with the Food Network. One show that I am particularly obsessed with on the network is “Restaurant Impossible.” The show features Chef Robert Irvine trying to take a troubled restaurant from failing to profitable.Although “Restaurant Impossible” is based on restaurants, most of the principles on display in the show can apply to any type of business to make them more profitable whether they are failing, doing OK or doing great. There is always room for improvement.

Here are some of the lessons that Mr. Irvine is constantly driving home:

1. Decor: Regardless of what type of business you have, how your location (online and in person) looks to the customer can be an enormous factor in that customer’s experience with your business. Are the colors inviting? Certain colors like maroon and certain purples can turn a customer off. Is your location clean or cluttered? How your customers “experience” your establishment can reflect on the quality they perceive in your products and services.

2. Are you using fresh ingredients? There are reasons why, in my line of work, code is always evolving, and content management systems are always improving: the drive for greater efficiency, more stability and better options. If you are a services business, are you providing your customers with fresh techniques and skills? Are your products old while your competition has the latest? Using fresher “ingredients” can also lead to lower costs for you based on efficiency and results.

3. Customer service: There is nothing that can torpedo a customer’s experience faster than poor service. Amazing customer service can improve the customer’s experience when the products or services aren’t up to par that day and really improve it when they are. Are you listening to what customers are ordering? Are you double-checking to make sure the product or service is exactly what they asked for and expected? Most businesses can improve their customer service. It is inexcusable to not have your service be amazing. (Check out Crain’s recent “Masters of Customer Service” feature for ideas on how to get started.)

4. Knowing your costs: One of the most surprising things about almost all the episodes of “Restaurant Impossible” is that most business owners don’t know what their costs are. Do you know how much all your expenditures per month are? Do you know how long this service will take and are you factoring in cancellations, travel and equipment costs? I know that some of those things are scary to look at, but it is necessary. Knowing your costs can help you determine which products and services to keep, and which ones to highlight that have a better margin. Mr. Irvine finds out more often than not that the restaurant he is trying to save is serving dishes that are costing the owner more to make than he or she can recoup in sales.

5. Your menu: Is your menu too big? Too many choices can make it frustrating for the customer to decide. Too many choices can also lead to lower productivity and efficiency in your organization because you have that many more services or products to prepare and to be skilled at producing. It can also lead to waste, because if you have too many items on a menu, it means that there are a lot of items a customer is NOT ordering, which can lead to a lot of wasted time and money in some cases.

6. Special items: One thing that Mr. Irvine normally does is offer a special on a menu item, and by doing that, he is trying to sell more of one item in particular. What this does is lower the cost because it can be in bulk. Specials can also attract the customer because they are feeling they are getting a deal. Even in the services industry, you can have a special or a highlighted service you are offering to get more customers to lean on that service.

Businesses come in all shapes and sizes, all types of customers and all types of produces and services. The key principles are across the board in all businesses, though, whether you are a restaurant or a web development company.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

Five benefits of having a business blog

By Nick Harrison

A business blog can be a terrific way to increase your customer base and stay in touch with your existing one. There are, in fact, many benefits to having a blog, and the more you know about those benefits, the better your blog will be.

1. A blog can boost your reputation as an expert: Customers want to do business with people who are experts in their industry. So by projecting a knowledgeable image and sharing insights about the products and services you offer, your blog can have an impact far beyond your website. A blog is a terrific way to provide tips, answer questions and teach visitors about your industry.

2. A blog gives you more pages to talk about products and services: Having a blog can allow you the room to provide more information about the products and services you offer. An example, one of the things our company offers is building custom websites. Sure, we have a page about web development on our site, but by offering customers tips about things to look for with every blog post about websites, we can better publicize our offerings versus what we could do with just a single page.

3. A blog helps customers find you with SEO: One of the toughest things I deal with regarding SEO for business is this: I often run into clients who have very little content on their website but want to compete with sites that have substantially more. Each blog post can represent a new page of searchable content. If I only have one page on my website talking about web development, it is likely to mean I have one chance at a search ranking. If I have 10 pages about web development, that gives me 10 separate pages that can be indexed.

4. Social sharing: Blog content can give people the ability to share that content with others. It allows sharing on Facebook and Twitter and more. Regular website content pages are rarely ever shared.

5. Community building and interaction: A blog can be a great way to build RSS subscribers and social media relationships, which allows you to build a community of customers and potential customers to constantly be marketing to. With that built-up community, each blog post can essentially be a sales advertisement.

Remember that time is money and that there are other things you could be doing besides blogging, so, when you blog, make it count. Ask yourself how this blog post is going to help your business make more money. Am I thinking about SEO? Is this post going to help me sell my products and services?

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

The power of price in B2B

By Nick Harrison

One of the hardest things about running a business is making decisions in areas where you and your team might lack expertise. For instance, I work in a digital company – those skills don’t necessarily make us the best at choosing an accountant.

A lack of knowledge can lead you to come to the faulty conclusion that price = benefit.

We often perceive that because something costs more, it must be better. Sometimes that is the case, and sometimes it just isn’t. We may think that this attorney is better than the other one because she charges $300 per hour versus the other who charges $200, or that this SEO agency charging $3,000 per month is better than the one that is charging $1,500. When assuming that price = value, we can often pay far more than we have to for high-quality services.

My company recently lost a bid on designing an e-commerce site because our bid was too low. We happened to have a lot of the coding already done because of a previous job and didn’t have to redo it, just apply it. This would have resulted in savings for our prospective client.

We were told later that the reason we lost the bid was because the client felt more comfortable with the other agency since we came in too low, despite the convenience of ready-made code. We were also proposing the use of an e-commerce platform that didn’t result in tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing fees.

Businesses often pay the highest price in assuming they are getting the best work. Sometimes that may be the case, but a lot of times it isn’t.

Ask questions to determine what you are really getting. For example: Why is this price really different from that price? Is the price based on quality of work or based on salaries?

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

8 things to look for when choosing an SEO agency

By Nick Harrison

Businesses both small and large count on SEO, or search engine optimization, to produce traffic for their website.

Having a website that produces well on search engines can literally take your business from small to large depending upon which markets you are in, your margins and the products and services you offer.

Choosing the right person to maximize your SEO results isn’t easy, though. Tens of thousands of people and companies claim to be SEO experts. Here are some things to discuss with an SEO consultant or agency before you give them the job, and some things to look for along the way.

1. Do they have a multiple level plan? An SEO professional can do many things to help improve your SEO, such as on-page SEO, adjusting code, link building, social media and so forth. Make sure the person you hire has a grasp of all the different strategies available.

2. If they guarantee you Page 1 listing, think twice: I am not saying that it is not possible to receive a Page 1 ranking, but often companies that are making those guarantees will be using longer tailed keyword phrases or lower searched traffic keywords that can put you on Page 1 and even first position. But that kind of result won’t matter that much, since no one is even searching for those keywords. I recently saw a Facebook friend of mine post about their SEO results starting to kick in. The keyword phrase that was highlighted happened not to have anyone at all searching for it.

3. Do they understand website coding or know enough to work with your developers? How a website performs on a search engine can have a lot to do with how it is coded. I have improved a website’s results by doing something as simple as cleaning up bad code that caused Google trouble crawling and ranking the pages.

4. Automated link building: If your SEO professional is trying to add automatic linking and things of that nature, be very careful; you can end up hurting your results.

5. “We know somebody at Google”: Google’s policy is to not sell search rankings. If someone is telling you they know somebody at Google who can improve your rankings, this is most likely a lie.

6. Have they conducted a proper analysis of your website? They aren’t conducting proper analysis of your website unless they take into account factors like loading speeds, crawlability tests, keyword density and more.

7. “We cracked Google’s algorithm”: Truth be told, Google is constantly changing how it is achieving its search results. Google’s algorithms are extremely complex and there is only so much public information on them. A good SEO expert can get you results, but it won’t be because he or she “cracked the code.”

8. What keywords are they targeting? Your SEO expert should be going over the math with you on what type of traffic those keywords are getting and what a certain placement will mean for your company.

SEO success is a combination of many variables, and a good SEO expert spends years honing his or her craft. Unfortunately, just like social media and other forms of marketing, there are a lot of so-called experts who aren’t. So make sure your SEO expert is asking the right questions and working with you on the process.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors to major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

Join Crain’s LinkedIn group for Chicago entrepreneurs. And stay on top of Chicago business with Crain’s free daily e-newsletters.

12 steps to a better landing page

By Nick Harrison

A landing page is a single web page — a place where people “land” after clicking on an advertisement or the result of an SEO search.

A landing page that uses keywords properly can be extremely powerful in attracting Internet surfers. And, if It’s well-designed and it features copy directly related to the ad that brought visitors there, a landing page can also boost your conversion ratios.

A landing page normally has one primary goal: to get a website user to fulfill a certain call to action. These could include purchasing a product, gathering a sales lead or collecting an email address for your database.

Here are some tips for creating an effective landing page.

• Minimize distractions: Remember that the primary focus is the call to action, so things like menus can be distracting to the user. Try to avoid menus and other links. I will often use the logo as a home page link, so that users do have the option to go there but aren’t focused on a link they can press.

• Similar header to your ad: It is very important to have your landing page header match the language in your ad or social link — or come very close to it. When user click on your landing page, they are coming for a reason. They could easily either get distracted or just surf away from your landing page if the content there isn’t tied directly to what they were expecting to see.

• Bullet points: People aren’t going to read a mile-long page of content. Bullet points let website visitors scan to the important facts and features of your offer.

• Use testimonials: Testimonials are a key asset in getting someone to do something you want. Even if the visitor has no clue who the person giving the testimonial is, a quotation from a satisfied customer creates a positive vibe.

• Images: Images can really help you sell as they can give a quick representation of what you are offering. Keep images simple and size them appropriately, though, because they can also distract users from seeing benefits and your call to action.

• Social sharing: Enable social media buttons and email-a-friend features, so that visitors can share your page with their network.

• Keep above the fold: It is very important for the user to not have to scroll down to see your calls to action and important info. I always try to make my forms and submit buttons highly visible as soon as the visitor comes to the landing page.

• Limit the form fields: Sure, when we get a new sales lead, we would all love to have them fill out 20 fields of key information about themselves. But the more fields that users have to fill out, the less likely they’ll do so. Keep it to a minimum — just the stuff you absolutely need to know to follow up with those customers and stay in touch.

• Think SEO: Landing pages can be a terrific (phenomenal) way to get SEO traffic. Think about that when you choose the title, the URL, the headers, the content and even the image names.

• Test different variations: Try different images, variations of content and call-to-action buttons to find out which is giving you the best results. Whenever I create a landing page and an advertisement for a client, I am constantly tweaking and making adjustments to get the best conversion ratios possible. You would be amazed at the difference that the wording of a button can make.

• Contact info: I am a big fan of having a phone number and other contact information on a landing page. Sometimes people are leery about giving out their email address, or they just want to talk to a human. It also helps your credibility versus having a form with no contact info.

• Privacy and security: Help users feel confident that their information won’t be sold or given away (if that is the case). People can be skeptical when giving out their personal information and with great reason. If your web form is secure, a lock box image is great. It helps take some of the worry away.

Nick Harrison is creative director for Chicago-based branding, web development and social media firm Dashal, whose client roster ranges from small businesses to best-selling authors and major consumer brands.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @HarrisonNick.

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