Any design agency including ourselves who has done some serious (or even not so serious) web design work knows what a pain Internet Explorer 6 can be.

There are many websites popping up with developers trying to eradicate IE6. Let’s not forget that even Microsoft wants you to stop using it. Unless, of course, you’re on Windows 2000, which for some reason doesn’t run IE7. Odd, since all the other alternative browsers work on Win2000.

Designs that render correctly in compliant browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Safari just do not work in IE6 (or sometimes even in IE7 and IE8). Significant rework and workarounds are often required to make a website “compliant” for IE6.

So why does internet explorer have the highest percentage of users you may ask……well is hardly surprising really! Internet Explorer is still the more used browser because most users are using a Windows OS and have not bothered to install another web browser or have been unable to due to strict corporate guidelines.

Also Note that since March 1st 2010, Google no longer supports IE6 on its Google Docs and Google Sites services. IE users will have to upgrade to at least version 7 if they want to use those products.

So to conclude this blog and now that we have rolled into 2012 its time to make a pragmatic decision, near perfect media will not longer be supporting IE6 with any of our web design work. We won’t purposely make sites IE6 non-compliant, but if we have IE6 issues we will not be implementing any workarounds. It’s just not worth the hassle to cater for a web browser that no one should be using anymore unless their running a clunky ten year old PC and if that’s the case they wouldn’t exactly be our target audience or the type of customer we love to work with anyways.

Error #1: Writing Inwardly

Prior to founding nearperfect I worked in-house for many years, I’ve fell victim to the inward-focus syndrome on many occasions. It’s easy to do. You spend all day dealing with the intricacies of your products and services. You’ve made a huge intellectual and emotional investment in every product innovation and point of differentiation. You love thinking about your products, you love improving them, and you love talking about them. It’s only natural that you want to shout from the rooftops and tell the world your product’s story in all its splendour.

Problem is, the rest of the world isn’t interested in your story. Customers don’t have time to admire your greatness. They’re too busy searching for ways to make life better for themselves. A high-level Web page answers one question of the reader above all: What’s in it for me? To illustrate, we’ll stick with products, although this applies to other types of pages as well.

A well-written category-level product page talks a bit about features, a little more about benefits and a great deal more about the experience. This last element is especially important and exactly where most pages come up woefully short. Let’s use a mundane example of this principle in action by considering a hypothetical Web page for a packaging machine:

Feature: Up to 100 cycles per minute.
Benefit: Faster Production.
Experience: Getting more product out the door per shift means you’ll blow away your productive goals and be a hero. You might even get a promotion.

Note:

1. Setting a “word budget” forces discipline. Not only that, it relieves the anxiety over having to determine how to approach each individual product page, thus eliminating one of the biggest causes of delay in Web development projects.

2. Focusing on the experience forces you to think about the target audience of the page in question. The experience I described speaks to an operations person. If my audience is made up of C-level executives or purchasing agents, then I would need to describe a completely different experience. If I’m writing for all three audiences, I may have to rethink my word budget. In any event, having an audience in mind prevents a Web page from devolving into that cursed, watered-down, “everything for everyone” messaging that says absolutely nothing.

3. The purpose of a high-level page is to get people interested in the product. Once they’re interested, they may crave more information about features and benefits. Perfect. Tell the long version of your story on a detail-heavy product sub-page. Companies need not neglect features and benefits; they just need to suppress the urge to hit visitors over the head with them the minute they walk through the door.

If you’re still not convinced, listen to legendary copywriter John Caples, who is quoted in Made to Stick (page 179) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath:

Caples says companies often emphasise features when they should be emphasising benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

Quick Tips for Writing Outwardly

• Before you start writing, collect feedback from customers and prospects. Ask them why they buy from you, why they don’t, and how doing business with you has affected them.
• Start with an outline. Associate every feature with a benefit and every benefit with an experience.
• Have a customer read a draft and then explain to you why they would want to buy the product. If the customer “gets it,” you’re a star.
• Do the same thing with a person who knows nothing about your product and industry. If that person gets it, you’re a rock star.
 

Error #2: Burying The Lead

Websites are a poor medium for subtlety. Visitors decide whether to stay on your website within a few seconds. If you can’t communicate why a page is important to them immediately, your conversion opportunities will vanish. Look at the two paragraphs below. Which conveys your most important message more quickly?

Your most important message is here., sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

OR

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate your most important message is here. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Online marketers like to sneer at newspapers, but we can learn a lot from print journalists. For instance, they don’t bury the lead. To illustrate, here are a few leads I recently pulled from the Times:

• “Companies cranked up hiring in April to the fastest pace in five years…”
• “European markets snapped a three-session losing streak as gains in the banking sector and better-than-expected UK jobs data for April sparked a rally.”
• “Women may have fared better than men during the recession, but they are not making up lost ground as fast as men in the recovery.”

Now look at your Web pages. How do your leads stack up? Are you leading with the main point? Are you giving visitors a reason to read further? If an in-house writer is not familiar with Web writing techniques, they may approach the project as if they were writing a novel, assuming that visitors will read their new website from start to finish.

This assumption is disastrous. People skim and scan Web pages, their eyes bouncing around like pinballs. For any given Web page, visitors are likely to read the headline and the first few lines of text; beyond that, any body content they read is gravy. Expecting someone to read an entire page of content sequentially from beginning to end is wishful thinking, period. The most important words on the page must be the easiest to find, read and comprehend.

Quick Tips for Unburying the Lead

• Before writing, ask, What is the key takeaway I want visitors to have after they visit this page? That’s your lead.
• Highlight your lead idea in a bold font. This is especially helpful when you can’t work it into the first sentence.
• Use plain language.
• Keep your most important points above the fold, as sub-headings, as the first sentence of a paragraph and as bullet points.
 

Error #3: Mediocre Meta Material

Some of the most important text in a Web document isn’t the on-page content at all. Certain meta elements have an enormous impact on the user experience, brand awareness and conversion. Meta elements are bits of HTML code that are read mainly by search engine robots. However, two meta tags in particular speak to humans as well, and mastering them is critically important for copywriters.

• Meta Title
The meta title describes the subject matter of the page and is ideally 65 characters or fewer. Visitors see the meta title in their browser tab and in search engine results; it is the most important piece of information that Google and other engines read on a given page.
• Meta Description
The meta description, ideally 155 characters or fewer, is a snippet of text that is displayed under a link on a search engine results page (SERP). The meta description has little if any SEO value but is important for conversions.

Meta Titles

Because Google values meta titles so highly, including primary keyword phrases in them is imperative, preferably towards the beginning of the title. For human readers, a title tag should clearly and straightforwardly describe the nature of the page. In addition, the tag can also carry a branding message.

Here is an example of a strong meta tag: “Enterprise-Level Credit Card Processing, Merchant Accounts | Sagepay”

At 68 characters, we’ve gone slightly over our recommended maximum. But having branding keywords (i.e. SagePay) at the end is OK: Google may truncate the last few characters, but visitors will see the branding message in their browser tab, especially if they bookmark the page. The title tag will further extend brand awareness if the visitor tweets the page or likes it on Facebook:

Meta Descriptions

A meta description can set your page apart from others on a SERP. Here are seven tips for crafting a good one.

1. Don’t overuse keywords. This will make your description look spammy. For example, “We have promotional coffee mugs, custom mugs, custom coffee mugs, and custom mugs for coffee.”

2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points!!!! Excessive punctuation can be interpreted as aggression. It pushes people away.

3. Avoid extravagant claims. They undermine your credibility.

4. Include an incentive to click through to your page:

• “Order one, get one free.”
• “10% off your first order.”
• “Learn how our service can reduce operating costs up to 15%.”

5. Focus on the user benefits of your product or service.

• Bad example: “High R-factor insulation.”
• Better example: “Insulation to keep your home warm and toasty.”

6. Mention your location if you are a local business. This helps searchers instantly connect your business to their need.

7. Establish your credibility:

•“In business since 1965.”
• “BBB accredited.”
• “Over 5000 satisfied customers.”

(Whereas title tags are always displayed, description tags are not. Today, Google doesn’t always pull meta descriptions into its SERPs; instead, it might excerpt on-page content related to the user’s search terms.)

Quick Tips for Meta Magnificence

• If an SEO is working on your project, have them generate title tags based on their keyword research, and then tweak as needed.
• If you do not have an SEO, back up a step and reflect on why you are building the website. I believe that an un-optimszed website is not worth building.
• Title tags should be consistent in style and form to enhance the user experience. Meta descriptions need not be consistent at all.
• Because of character limitations and the need for concision, writing these tags can be time-consuming. Remember, though: you don’t have to achieve perfection for launch. Tags can be changed at any time, and analytics experts often suggest that they should be.
 

Error #4: Saying Too Much

Enough said!!!!

Ciao

Russell

This is an all too prevalent issue and it’s understandable, particularly in today’s economic climate that ‘the bargain’ is searched for when looking to employ any service. However, there are so many pitfalls with website design and development that by and large this can really be false economy. The range of skills required to design, develop, host and maintain a website can be wide and varied and it’s almost impossible to find someone with no industry experience who has learnt to make a web page using Microsoft Front Page during an ICT course at school but would have nowhere near the depth of understanding and technical ability to produce a website that will serve the purpose for which it was built.

First impressions are vital to any online business whether new or old, a badly designed business website can quite easily be misinterpreted by customers as a badly organised, stuck in time company, …..which lets be honest, isn’t good for winning new customers is it?.

Nowadays it’s not a matter of just ‘having’ a website online because everyone else has one but a matter of having a website that provides potential customers their first critical impression about your business, translates the right message about your company, be modern, functional, eye-catching, contains logical/transparent navigation, is written with well optimised/keyword-rich textual content, has all the correct coding practices in place, conforms to website coding convention guidelines, conforms to accessibility guidelines etc, etc, etc.  In fact, there are dozens of principles that need to be applied to produce a good website that again someone who doesn’t work as a professional in the business wouldn’t know.

Furthermore, there is a vast difference between graphic design and web development for example an amateur ‘Jack of all trades’ is not going to be proficient in all areas sufficiently leading you to a website that is deficient in key areas.

Obviously, nearperfect are a website design, graphic design, website development and search engine optimisation (SEO) company and so would be pro the professional approach but from experience with our client base, some of whom had previously gone down the ‘friend’s neighbour  ’ approach, we can say hand on heart that it’s tantamount to throwing good money away in most instances!

1.Know more about you!
2.Capture a coherent set of requirements and relate them to the project’s delivery.
3.Build a structured expression of these issues which is prioritised and agreed.

It’s a balance. We want to know about you as the client. We also need to capture the requirements of the project in a structured way. Complexity is commonplace and our team are well used to dealing with this but there are limits. Russell and the team are able to work their way through quite complex marketing, technical and usability issues. If there are structural issues or seemingly irresolvable issues between a client’s own teams, then frankly, the meetings aren’t going to be the best use of a project’s budget. Resolve them first. Decide on your priorities. Then hold a meeting with the nearperfect media team.

I use the term structure a great deal. Really, I mean clarity. The studio is a flexible and fast paced environment. I want our consultants to be able to clearly express the requirements we discover. You’ll know exactly where you stand, we’ll know exactly what you mean and together we can move forward with clarity and purpose.

The Increasing value of Social Media

With search engines indexing more and more social data almost on a minute-by-minute basis, the increased value of social media from an SEO perspective should certainly not be discounted. Just last month, Bing and Twitter hinted at the continuation of their deal which allows Bing to display Tweets within search listings. Even with the loss of real time search in Google, the development and investment in Google+ shows commitment to a signal source which will become an increasingly significant factor in influencing Google’s search results over time.

Search engines must react to the most relevant signals they can in order to ensure the quality of search results returned to end users. In this case, using social signals are the next logical development for them when considering how they should identify and rank content. The content that users share, discuss and endorse socially is an ideal indicator of relevance. As a direct result, SEO strategies have already begun to include social activity in a targeted attempt to increase rankings.

Social isn’t just about gaining links

It is important to understand that social media isn’t purely about gaining links but is about providing valuable content, interaction and engagement with your customer, client or prospect base. As a result, any social media strategy needs to seriously consider the SEO opportunity, but should not be guided by it.

Defining the success of Social Media however cannot be based on the weighting that search engines give to social media activities alone and how these affect keyword positions. If social media is about providing valuable content, then it is the potential for fans and followers to share and link to this content which makes it such a valuable asset to SEO; building links to your social profile pages and your website in turn. This valuable social content also drives traffic and builds your company profile, brand and image in the wider context, demonstrating benefits over and above making gains within the rankings.

So in response to the proposition, yes, social media can be (and will become even more) effective for SEO, but being short-sighted about its benefits and not integrating as part of a wider strategy is ultimately, a mistake. If you can develop an integrated social media strategy, it is possible to gain significant advantages from your social media space, not purely for SEO but for your branding, lead generation and client nurturing efforts.

2. Simplicity is elegance
The graphical elements of web design and the spatial relationships on your web pages play an important role. Visual appeal means more than just attractive graphics and vibrant illustrations; the form and overall theme of the site are crucial, and must be both attractive and uncluttered. There should be a natural flow to the navigation of the site, and any good designer knows this.
The simpler and more elegant the design of a website, the less time it will take to load. Consumers (and search engines) quickly move on from sluggish sites, and those vital seconds could mean a potential customer hits that back button in their browser and moves on to a competitor. The best form and design can also help cater to consumers increasingly using their smartphones for browsing.

3. Your website is worthless if no one can find it
Unless a business is an already established brand, with years of marketing budget spend behind it, the chances are most traffic will get to their site through a search engine. Search engine optimisation (SEO) should be considered in all elements of the design process. Working with a web designer who understands what your site needs to climb search engine rankings and generate traffic could earn your business back those design fees, thanks to the extra income an optimised site might generate

nearperfect media specialise in more than just design and development, we can create bespoke designs that are SEO friendly. Learn more by giving us a call.

• Meets the needs of sales and marketing
• Is compelling
• Can be created quickly
• Can be created cost-effectively
• Supports the sales cycle

We covered a lot of ground in our discussion. But I’ve put together some of the main tips and takeaways here as a summary.

Understand your audience:
Whether you create content to raise awareness of your products and services, establish thought leadership, increase your search rankings, feed your social media engine, or nurture your leads, remember that your ultimate goal is to generate sales leads. It’s a point many marketers lose sight of.

TO DO:
Start by analysing your sales funnel:

• What sales objections and questions do you typically encounter for each stage of the sales funnel?
• Who are you speaking to if you had to categorise them by persona?
• Do you have content that addresses their objections or their questions for every stage?

A big portion of the content will be used by the sales reps and not just for your marketing efforts. So the key steps here are:

• Determine your personas.
• Understand your buying cycles.
• Map your content to your funnel.Fill any gaps you find with new and relevant content.
• Create alignment with sales

Marketing and sales may not qualify leads the same way. You need to have a handle on the differences so you can create content that addresses the needs of both marketing and sales.

TO DO:
Sit down with your senior sales leadership and perhaps a top individual performer to discuss what signs they look for in a lead at every stage of the sales cycle. Obvious signs may be job title or company size, but there may also be smaller signs — like specific customer pain points — that would equally qualify them.

Assign weighted values to each qualifier. You’ll soon learn what is important to the sales cycle, and you can then create content as well as calls to action that will help you determine if a prospect qualifies as a lead.

These factors should influence your content development and promotion efforts and will quickly get sales to buy in to your efforts.Be prepared to repurpose your content
You need to balance the demands of your tight budget and the buyers’ needs to consume content in their own preferred channels and format.  Make your life easier and minimise the impact on your budge  by repurposing some of the content that you create to fit other platforms.

TO DO:
Plan to repurpose key content. For instance, if you host a webinar and record it you can:Reproduce it as a podcast.Transcribe that podcast into a pseudo-white paper.Take some of the key points in the white paper and turn them into a blog post.

Leverage some of your sound-bite worthy quotes from any of these assets for social media traffic generation.

Now you have at least four pieces of content from the one piece you spent time and money on to create. With all of the content you’ve just created, your website looks more impressive and credible, and your prospects have more options for consuming your content through their preferred channels.Cross-promote whenever possible
In any business field, there is only so much that is new and content creation-worthy at a given time. Even the best writers can get writer’s block and find it hard to create new materials. You can overcome these issues by using content created by others to inspire your own content development efforts.

TO DO:
Share content you find with others by using your own words and points of view to create more robust and interactive conversations with your audience.

Some ideas:
If you see a great video or read a great white paper, create a blog post that highlights what you learned from those materials or record a podcast that reviews key lessons from your own perspective. Always be sure to attribute the content to the original author or provide a link, if possible.

Check out the associated discussion forums (including those on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and comment on relevant articles and share your perspective, making sure to refer back to any supporting content you’ve created that can add value to the discussion.Use technology to create efficiencies

There are many ways you can use technology to make your job easier and scale your time more efficiently. This is especially true when creating and promoting your content.

TO DO:
If you have a Mac computer, you can use some of its free programs like iMovie, or GarageBand to create videos or podcasts  or to turn a video into a podcast and vice-versa.

If you’re a PC user, free, open-source programs like Audacity work very well for creating podcasts.

Don’t be afraid to use your webcam to generate YouTube quality content videos (just be sure to use good lighting and incorporate your points concisely).

Rather than being a slave to your social media networks, tools like HootSuite can help you distribute your content-based promotions across multiple social platforms at all times of the day using its scheduling capabilities.

While these points summarise what we discussed, I want to add one more key point for consideration: Create a content calendar. For such a complex and important discipline as content marketing, it can be overwhelming to tackle the whole job in one piece. So after you have completed an analysis of your content needs, schedule each action you need to complete to reach your goal. You’ll find the process to be far less daunting and more affordable once you understand it doesn’t need to be done overnight.

It is a constant advert for the sophistication of its owner. An indication of the kind of person or company it represents. For many it will be the first contact that they have with your organisation.
You want them to think ‘nice jacket’.  Not ‘that looks warm!’, or ‘did your mum buy you that’ and certainly not ‘that’s rubbish’.

Cheap websites are bad
For an average business person a website is:

• An essential part of their sales and marketing processes
• A catalogue of company information
• A statement of what the business has achieved
• AND a portal for it’s customers.

For someone willing to create a cheap website it is a collection of HTML pages, put together with little regard for the needs of the client and a chance to make a quick buck from someone trying to start a business. With the exception of a few sites they are tricky to manage, hard for customers to use and unreliable. They are also a quick fix which cause their owners problems when they go wrong.
Buying a site like this is the equivalent of going up a mountain in an old cardigan
It will offer little support. It’s deficiencies will harm your chances of reaching the top. And you’ll wish you had started with something more suitable.As a customer commissioning any sort of website is a leap of faith; so why will spending make it more likely that you will be successful?

Planning?
Cheap website providers cut back here when this is the most important stage. Business people tend to know their business well but building a website is different to any other company purchase. Unless you already work in web you will need:
• Expert advice on how to communicate your business to an online audience
• Help with structuring your site journey so that your traffic actually leads to some sort of outcome
• Someone to explain how to use your website going forward to make it work for you
• Advice on how new developments in web technology could help you.

WARNING: Failure to deliver a well functioning website will reflect badly on you even if

(i) your initial budgets were insufficient (ii) you were charged with bringing in a project with no training or guidance (iii) the person you chose to plan your project didn’t contribute a solitary idea.

Avoid Dodgy Execution
“By keeping costs to a minimum we help your business get off the ground fast..

”The second half of this sentence is often omitted:
“…and in the process completely disregard any requirements you might have for a CMS or web platform”

Making sure that your website is built on the right software is important. A website needs to be an extension of your existing brand and business; so if your customers are used to a level of service which is not replicated on your website you’re in trouble. Spending that little bit extra can mean that you get a well made CMS which ranks well in search engines. It will be easier to manage and add content too, which will make the job of managing your website easier and faster.

Support
|It is unlikely that someone who is willing to build a website for £500 will have a well drilled customer services team. This seems obvious but it is often forgotten!!.

Users’ demands from websites can change on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis and when this happens you need to be able to act fast. By choosing an agency with a permanent staff of account handlers you will be able to explain your change of requirements quickly and get qualified advice on how to gain an advantage or avert a catastrophe. If you don’t have that constant network of support you could be waiting days to move on a huge opportunity or be twiddling your thumbs for a week while your reputation goes down the toilet.

Conclusions
Buying a website is very much like buying a jacket:

• It needs to be reliable
• It needs to do a job
• It needs to look good
- It should ideally be guaranteed
• It should be comfortable
- It should be customisable
• Other people should look at it
• You should feel proud to own it
• If you have a bad one people will remember it for a long long time

Either way is fine, it’s just beneficial to set expectations early on so that you can make sure you have the right agency on board. All too often, companies leave hugely important branding and messaging decisions in the hands of their web team – and if you’ve engaged a traditional web design agency, this may or may not be their bag.

Web Design agencies come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are creatively focused, meaning their portfolio is a impressive showcase of beautiful web design; other agencies may have a strong technical edge, allowing them to knock out CMSs in their sleep and always be able to execute high quality technical solutions to help your business. Others may have a strong SEO advantage, and claim to get you the right traffic visiting the site. But out of all these strengths, these can easily be fairly redundant unless you can define a strong brand position, clear messaging strategies and clarity around what you, or what your services are. A full service agency, such as nearperfect, is proud be be able to offer all of the above.

However, not all prospects realise when they set out on their web design journey just how important it is to either a) have a very clear and defined brand positioning strategy or b) know if their chosen agency has the experience, and while web agencies worth their salt have had to adapt and add branding, positioning and marketing expertise to their team in order to pitch with any confidence as a full service agency, many haven’t.

Don’t confuse the two briefs

It’s a tall ask to expect an traditional web agency to be able to come up with the correct messaging, tone of voice, or service proposition alongside a standard web design project, it takes time to do correctly and needs to be valued as an important step. This is where most SME websites fail to make any real impact – when they were designed, the wrong people were asked to do the wrong jobs. If a website is poor, it’s more than likely that the brief didn’t explore in any real depth the brand and positioning strategy, or the web agency didn’t have the experience or budget to fill the gap and meet the expectation.

Taking the appropriate time to understand the different elements of brand strategy is key to ensure the success of a web project.

Take a look at the list below, if you have a very clear idea for each, then you’re about to give a dream brief to your agency! If it’s clear that perhaps some more thought needs to be considered, then bear that in mind when looking for, or briefing your web team. It’s important a clear vision is either defined using the help of a full service agency, or thought about prior to thinking about a web project. The biggest mistake is to confuse a humble web design exercise with something of greater importance. Web Brand Strategy Elements

The Company

• What is the current situation with the business?
• What’s the long term vision?
• What’s the nearer-term mission?
• Cultural values?
• Business goals?

The Customer

• Who are the audience groups?
• What are their desires / goals / beliefs and habits?
• What are their needs?

The Market

• What is the marketplace in which you are competing?
• Are there any market trends to consider?
• Who are the traditional and non-traditional competitors?
• What are the industry, category and segments in which you compete?

Category and Position

• What’s your company differentiation?
• What is the single differentiating idea you intend to own in the minds of your customers?

Messaging

• What’s the brand promise?
• What are your key messages and support points?

Experience

• What is the company providing and what are the benefits that customers can expect to enjoy from them?

If you would like to kick off a web project, or positioning exercise, please get in touch and we’ll help you to get your marketing defined and your website generating quality leads.

• It can deliver the message clearly. Not too many business owners are aware that good branding is actually a good method of communication. If the design of the brand is right, it can deliver the message to the customers even without the aid of expensive advertising. That is why it is necessary to do extensive research with respect to the needs of the customers to create a brand that is not only suited to their needs, but can also deliver a message to them. When the connection is developed, the customers are no longer mere customers but clients.

• It can create business credibility. For many business owners, credibility is not developed overnight. It is a product or service of continuous innovation, aggressive marketing campaigns and delivering the promised excellence in service or products. As the credibility of the company grows to a deeper level, the clients can easily associate the brand with the company. When the brand is registered in the minds of the people, the credibility of the company began to be established.

• It can create a connection between the product and the client. In almost all cases, people can easily find a connection with their favourite brands. This is simply because in all areas of human life, good products and services have become the silent witnesses of their success and failures in life. This is how important a brand is to a company. In fact, a well-thought of brand can surely develop a strong tie between the company and the countless clients who are continuing to patronise the company’s products and services.

• It helps motivate the buyer. As previously said, branding helps develop connection between the product and the clients. When the connection is strong, the brand can be a good motivator for the clients to continuously purchase the products or services. This is one of the amazing results of the relationship between the company and the clients. This is only possible, however, if the company has a unique and appealing brand that people can easily associate themselves with.

Surely, there are other ways to become successful in any business endeavour, but there is nothing more certain than having a recognisable, appealing and unique brand that customers/buyers and clients can easily associate themselves with. The importance of having a brand is the key to having a successful business.