When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize this gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a logo for a fundraising event benefiting programs for children in their first 5 years of life. The simple approach of this design conveys the concept beautifully.

Let us start the slow clap for lamosca04. Check out more great work on lamosca04’s profile page.

Nicely done, lamosca04, nicely done!

I’ve previously talked about lean marketing – testing your ideas in small batches, listening to feedback, tweaking campaigns, and re-testing. There’s another important concept that complements lean marketing: marketing velocity.

Marketing velocity is the speed at which marketing efforts deliver measurable results.

Why should you care about marketing velocity?

The answer is deceptively simple: speed matters. Until you actually deploy your marketing tactics, you learn nothing. You can spend months strategizing, developing theories, creating collateral, etc. But real testing doesn’t begin until you actually market.

If your competitors are able to set their goals, develop strategies and deploy marketing campaigns at a faster velocity than you can muster, you will never be able to beat them in the market unless your strategies and tactics are materially better. Even if your strategies and tactics are better, you’ll still need to deploy them at a reasonable pace. After all, there are many good tools that allow marketers to track, measure and turn-around real-time insights about their marketing efforts. The best marketers can make adjustments and tweak their strategies in near real-time.

If your competitors are doing so and you’re not, you’re already falling behind. Ultimately, you need marketing that moves at the speed of ideas.

Here are three tips to help you improve your team’s marketing velocity:

1. Create a solid foundation for success.
2. Test in small batches.
3. Be prepared to change gears quickly.

Watch the video for more detail on these three tips and how you can implement them in your marketing strategy:

Every year, there are many entrepreneurs who start new businesses. And, of course, there are many others who never quite achieve lift-off. What differentiates the entrepreneurs who act from the dreamers who never try?

Chances are good that the perceived barriers to entry are just too intimidating to overcome.

According to a 2015 Gallup report, 25% of Americans have thought about starting their own business and decided against it. 

A business demands many skillsets – fundraiser, marketer, HR rep, web designer, and so much more. And since 62% of businesses in the US have 5 or fewer employees, this means that many of these responsibilities inevitably fall to the founder. The great news is that there is a huge variety of tools available to help support potential entrepreneurs.

We’ve gathered a collection of tools for startups and entrepreneurs that help you simplify, streamline, and get your new business running in no time.

Fundraising Tools

67.2% of entrepreneurs use their personal savings to fund their start-up. And, with the lack of personal savings ranking as the second most common barrier to entry for starting a new business, it’s impossible to ignore the importance of raising funds. Luckily, there are other options, besides draining your personal bank account.

Before you follow in the footsteps of 52% of entrepreneurs (who pay for their start-up by taking on debt before their business even makes its first penny) consider angel investors and crowdsourcing.

AngelList

AngelList is an online resource for would-be entrepreneurs. The site seeks to link start-ups with Angel investors to provide funding. Businesses can apply for funding with a wide number of incubators affiliated with AngelList here. AngelList continues to grow. Tech Crunch reports,

AngelList, the online platform that had made itself indispensable to early-stage startups for fundraising and recruiting, said it closed out last year having raised $163 million online on behalf of 441 companies. That’s about 56 percent higher than the year before in 2014.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter raises crowdsourced funds to a wide range of creative projects. They claim that their mission is to “help bring creative projects to life”; but don’t be discouraged if you’re not an artist, filmmaker or writer. Kickstarter welcomes projects in a wide range of fields.

As of May of 2017 Kickstarter has raised over $3 billion for almost 125,000 successfully funded projects. The important thing to remember about Kickstarter is that it’s an all-or-nothing platform. In other words, if you don’t meet your fundraising goal, you won’t see a penny of the money pledged to your project.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo is similar to Kickstarter in that it raises money through crowdfunding. But, Indiegogo bills itself as the “launchpad for entrepreneurial ideas”. Beyond the marketing spin, there are definitely concrete differences between these two platforms.

Indiegogo offers all-or-nothing projects like Kickstarter, but it also offers flexible funding options that allow an entrepreneur to claim the money raised even if they don’t reach their initial goal. Indiegogo also includes a marketplace service on their site that sells the products that have been funded through Indiegogo projects.

Whether you pursue crowdfunding or angel investors, know that you’ve got these easy-to-use tools at your disposal.

Know-How Tools

Another common challenge for new entrepreneurs is inexperience. After all, how can you have experience if you’ve never done something before? Eric Ries of The Lean Startup claims,

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Which means that you can make up for inexperience if you’re willing to do a little homework.  And there are several services that make doing that homework easier.

Startup Launch List

Startup Launch List is an online service that provides you with a list of common topics you should know about if you’re planning to start a business. You can customize the list by choosing the topics you’d like to learn more about. The site will then provide you with a list of articles (written by entrepreneurs, designers, investors) that address the topics you’ve chosen.

You can link directly to the recommended articles and start reading right away. It’s like a business course custom-tailored to your needs.  

Quora

Quora is a community Q&A site where people can ask questions and get answers – often from experienced entrepreneurs (and others across many different industries). crowdSPRING’s CEO, Ross Kimbarovsky, has answered many questions on Quora, and it’s not unusual to have some of the most respected entrepreneurs in the industry directly answer questions about themselves or their companies.

Google Primer

Google Primer is a free app offering interactive digital marketing and business lessons in 5-minute chunks. Since there’s no need to settle in for a long study session, this tool is fantastic for folks with a packed schedule. The lessons can be viewed offline- allowing viewers to gain important knowledge when they’ve got only a few minutes free.

Here’s what Primer’s creators had to say,

Primer combines Google’s knowledge with insights and expertise from leaders in the business and marketing industries, as well as other experts. Then we “Primerize” their insights to deliver them in the most accessible way possible.

Codecademy

Codecademy is a free, interactive online education site for learning to code. The site offers lessons in a wide range of coding subjects, including Java, SQL, HTML & CSS, Git and more. While the site isn’t intended for coding experts, it’s a great starting place for people who need an introduction to and basic understanding of coding.

In other words, it’s a great resource for an aspiring entrepreneur who may need to be able to hold an intelligent conversation with their future programmers and engineers.

Infrastructure Tools

Every business has infrastructural needs. Simplicable – an online business encyclopedia- describes business infrastructure as

…the basic facilities, structures and services upon which the rest of a business is built.

It’s easy to overlook things as simple (but vital) as how your employees will communicate efficiently, how to get a business phone line or who will handle your HR needs. But these basic, nitty-gritty tasks are essential to every business. And, there has never been a better time for first-time entrepreneurs to tackle their infrastructure needs.

There are a wide range of online services and apps that make setting up your business easier than ever.

Slack

Slack is the go-to communication platform for small businesses. Matt Mansfield of Small Business Trends had this to say,

… we’ve seen online collaboration apps come and go, but few have caught fire like Slack. The innovative “team communication” solution offers groundbreaking functionality that is just too useful to pass up.

Slack is an instant messaging app that is organized by channel to keep conversations sorted by relevant topic. You can also send direct messages or make voice or video calls. Slack allows your employees (remote or office-based) to communicate in real-time and maintains a single searchable archive of all business communications.

And, the price is perfect for a brand new business- free to start! Slack offers a free unlimited trial. But you can upgrade to additional features and support a larger team with scaled pricing (we’re big fans of Slack and use it at crowdSPRING).

Gusto

Gusto is an online service that acts as your entire HR department. Gusto manages payroll, new employee records, healthcare and 401(k) benefits all in one integrated platform.

Business News Daily recently shared an article declaring Gusto their top payroll service for sole proprietors or S Corporations.

Gusto combines excellent customer service with an all-encompassing payroll service that’s easy to use.

To learn more about why Gusto made the top of their list, check out their article here (we’re big fans of Gusto and use it at crowdSPRING).

Dropbox

Dropbox is a fantastic solution for all of your file storage needs. Businesses produce no end of documents and files. And, it’s essential that you have access to those files when you need them. It’s just as important that they stay out of your way when you don’t need them.

That’s where Dropbox comes in. Jill Duffy of PC Magazine says,

Dropbox is among the simplest and most elegant cloud storage and file-syncing services. It gives you access to your files from nearly anywhere. You can install Dropbox on virtually any computer or mobile device. Dozens of apps integrate easily with Dropbox, too, making it highly versatile.

A Dropbox Basic account gets you 2G of space and is completely free. And, if you and all of your employees have a Basic account, this may be enough to last you through the lean early days of your business. But, never fear- there’s plenty of room to expand. Standard business plans start at 2 terabytes of space and you can learn all about business pricing here (we’re big fans of Dropbox and use it at crowdSPRING).

Grasshopper

Grasshopper is a virtual phone system. And (even though there are days when you don’t even want to think about picking up a phone- or is that just me?) every business needs a phone service.  But, Grasshopper isn’t your usual phone service; it allows you to transform your personal cell phone into a business line.

Grasshopper provides your business with a local or a toll-free business number and extensions for each of your employees. It offers a voicemail transcription service that delivers your message in text format to your email. And, Grasshopper offers call forwarding to any cell phone. So, you’re always ‘in the office’. If you want to be.

Mailchimp

MailChimp is a free email marketing service that provides professional email templates, list management tools, name gathering forms and more to help you build and communicate with your audience via the web.

As your business grows, MailChimp can scale with you to handle larger message volume and advanced features. Pricing for these higher service levels start at $10/month and climb to $199. We’re big fans of Mailchimp and use it at crowdSPRING.

Molly McLaughlin and Fahmida Rashid of PC Magazine reviewed MailChimp in March of 2017. They concluded,

If you are a small business looking to get started with easy-to-use email marketing software, then MailChimp should be part of your toolbox.

Zoom

Need to have a meeting with your remote employee team? How about a call with a prickly investor and you want to read their facial expression when you talk? Sometimes a phone call isn’t enough and you need to see the person you’re talking to.

Zoom allows you to hold video calls, communicate via instant message, and perform screen-sharing for collaborative meetings. Zoom’s basic tier is free to use, while team pricing ranges from only $14.99-$19.99 per month. This makes it a very cost-effective communication tool (and one we love at crowdSPRING).

Branding Tools

Starting a new company is exciting for so many reasons- one of which is that your new business is still malleable and full of potential. What will you company do? What image will it portray to the world?

Answering these questions and defining your business into a recognizable brand is one of the most import tasks you face as a start-up.

Mahesh Nair of Entrepreneur India points out,

For a startup, “Visibility creates Opportunities”. The faster they become visible the closer is the possibility of a commercial success. It is only through branding that your market will learn of your existence and your products.

The following tools will help you establish your new brand so you can get visible as soon as possible.

crowdSPRING

At crowdSPRING, we provide crowdsourced creative services. We have helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, businesses, agencies and non-profits with a wide range of creative design services. crowdSPRING can help you with every element of a brand identity including company naming, tagline naming, and logo design.

Using crowdSPRING for branding is ideal for start-up businesses because it is the most cost-effective way to get multiple design options, allowing you to find the branding elements that feel right to you. We’ve talked about this in the past in our article, “Level the Playing Field with These 5 Crowdsourced Designs.“

Instant Domain Search

Instant Domain Search is a free online service that allows you to search for available domains for your online presence. Having identified what your new brand is going to be you’ll want to establish a website that reflects that brand as your online base of operations. Forbes’ Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle asserts,

By now it’s clear that if you don’t have a website, you’re missing out on opportunities for customers to identify who  you are and if they want to spend money with you.

Instant Domain Search will not only tell you if the domain name you want to represent your company online is available; you can also register the domain name straight from their site.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that searches all Google activity and notifies you if one of your alert topics is being shared on Google. As a new start-up founder, you’ll want to be aware of any conversations taking place online about your new business. Good news, or bad news- it’s important to know what the world is saying about your brand.

Feedback like this enables you to react quickly to help build your brand; or change directions, if necessary, to protect it. But you can’t respond if you don’t know what’s being said. Once you create your alert topics Google Alerts is always scanning for the information you need.

Google Alerts can be inconsistent, but it’s hard to complain since it’s a free service. For more robust social listening, we recommend talkwalker. Talkwalker (free and paid plans) monitors conversations about your brand across social media and the web for a more complete view of what is being said about your company.

BrandYourself

BrandYourself is a web reputation management service. Don’t like what Google Alerts is telling you? BrandYourself helps you to “clean up, protect and improve your Google results with one easy tool.”  Cloris Kylie of All Business reports,

Your online reputation is an essential component of your personal brand. When you protect your online reputation, you safeguard your brand, and a successful career or business can only be cemented on a rock-solid brand foundation.

BrandYourself’s software walks you through the process of cleaning up your brand’s online reputation – or building one. You can sign up for a free account to use their DIY Tool, but they have paid services as well if you need a little extra help.

Design Tools

As a brand new entrepreneur, chances are good that you don’t have the time (or, possibly, the skill) to design and code your own website from scratch. But, being busy doesn’t get you completely off the hook. As we’ve already discussed, having a website is vital for your new start-up.

If you’re not quite ready to shell out the bucks to hire a professional web designer to build your whole site, you’ve got options. There are great web design tools at your fingertips.

Weebly

Weebly is considered by some to be the easiest to use web design service available on the net. Weebly provides plenty of customizable templates and a drag-and-drop interface that makes building a site easy for even the most inexperienced web designer.

You can create a basic, good-looking website on Weebly at absolutely no cost. Once you’re ready to add on more functionality- like an online store, Weebly offers more advanced plans ranging from $8-$25 per month.

Squarespace

Squarespace is another online DIY web design service. They are known for their award-winning templates and a wide range of customization options. The customization options may be a bit overwhelming if you’re new to design, but the resulting control is great.

Unlike Weebly, Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, but their pricing scales based on how complex your site is. Websites cost $12-$18 a month and online stores range from $26-$40 per month.

Shopify

Shopify is your e-commerce one-stop shop. Since its inception in 2006 Shopify has done roughly $34 billions in sales across 400,000 Shopify stores. The site offers a template-based web design function, but their most impressive selling point is their robust set of e-commerce features.

E-commerce Platforms (a comparison blog for, you guessed it, e-commerce platforms) rated Shopify as their best e-comm platform of 2017. So, if your goal is online sales, Shopify is a great place to start. Shopify can also give you the ability to sell from a social media site or in person, making it a very flexible e-commerce option.

Pricing for a basic Shopify site will run you $29 a month. More advanced options are available; to learn more about the pricing structure just click here.

crowdSPRING (again)

The 200,000+ creatives at crowdSPRING help entrepreneurs and businesses with much more than logo design and company naming. We’ve helped thousands of businesses build stand out websites and landing pages for as little as $399. Rather than using a pre-built template, our creatives can design a custom website that perfectly represents your brand and goals. Just like our other design projects, all web design projects are backed by our money-back guarantee so you only pay for a design you love.

We realize that starting a new business can be a scary prospect. But, hopefully, the tools we’ve shared with you help take a little of the edge off. With so many useful and low-cost services available to back you up along the way, now is a great time to take the leap.

Now you have the tools, but what if you don’t have the business? If you’re ready to become an entrepreneur but aren’t sure where to start, take a look at our free e-book Stand Out: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing and Managing a Successful Business.

Brand awareness reflects the degree to which customers or potential customers can recognize or recall a brand and correctly associate that brand with a specific product or service. Creating brand awareness is one of the key components in promoting a product or service.

In his article “The Brand Formula”, entrepreneur and marketer Seth Godin explains why brand awareness is important and presents a simple formula for measuring brand awareness:

What’s a brand? I think it is the product of two things:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don’t know what it means or does, it has zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do for me, but I don’t care about that, no power.

Godin goes on to write that he believes building a valuable brand involves building “the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you.”

Here are seven ways to help you increase the brand awareness of your company:

1. Provide Exceptional Service

It seems obvious: treat your customers well, and they’ll keep coming back. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen from high-profile customer service disasters such as United Airlines’ “dragged off of a plane” fiasco or Comcast’s disastrously viral “recorded phone call,” great service isn’t a given.

Companies like Zappos, Trader Joes, and Wegmans are renowned for their customer service. A simple search online turns up many stories of how these companies go above and beyond expectations to really please their customers.

There’s a good reason those companies go out of their way to make customers happy. Happy customers tell their friends and colleagues about their great experiences.

Such testimonials are powerful. According to a recent survey by Harris Poll, over 80% of Americans seek recommendations from family and friends before making a purchase of any kind.  Attaching positive experiences to your brand with exceptional service is an invaluable form of marketing.

StoreStream Metric’s Adrian Weidmann confirms this:

The two most challenging, elusive and yet most effective operational ‘home runs’ for your brand are the atmosphere and courteous staff.

2. Be real

Exceptional customer service has to include the idea that your company strives to be as authentic as possible. We’re not talking about farm-to-table dining and mason jars, though. Remind your customers that there are real people behind the brand. After all, customer service impacts the degree to which customers and prospects trust your brand.

Avoid canned responses and fill-in-the-blank emails, or if you must, make sure they speak in a personable, friendly voice. Admit fault when you can, and accept responsibility decisively and with humility. In general, avoid corporate speak, banish marketing “happy talk,” and above all, rewrite jargon with a vengeance.

According to KissMetrics,

Don’t make the mistake of giving your audience less credit than they deserve they are far more informed, aware, socially connected – and empowered – crowd than ever before with high standards… and boy do they have attitude. This is THEIR area too, and they can sniff out a scam at 10 paces.

Customers remember when they’re treated with respect and dignity, and being genuine goes a long way to building those connections.

3. Be Consistent

It’s difficult to build brand awareness when your brand is inconsistently designed or applied. Spend some time to do a complete brand audit. Go over the design standards you already have and consider building a style guide.

Work with designers (we have hundreds of thousands here at crowdSPRING, from nearly every country in the world) to refine any existing branding and fix what’s missing or in conflict. Brand consistency is about building a dependable, reliable experience; that stability helps customers form stronger connections, which raises awareness.

4. Go offline, hold an event, or a web seminar

The cliché that “sharing is caring” holds true for raising brand awareness as well. Use your company’s connections to bring interesting speakers in for a special event, or run workshops related to your product or service. The important thing is to provide some kind of real value to your customers. Inspire them, educate them, or give them food for thought and they’ll associate that experience with your brand.

At no cost, Google provides hundreds of hours of lectures and talks hosted by Google. Their “Talks at Google” series’ tagline is “where great minds meet.” By giving away these videos they reaffirm their key objective, which is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

5. Forge partnerships with other brands

Finding similar (or complementary) brands to partner with is an effective way to build your business and create more brand awareness. It can help introduce your business to a new audience and strengthen your brand’s perception with your existing customers. A strong partnership means that the success of one brand can benefit the other.

According to VividBrand,

Co-branding allows brands to combine their best elements and empower their similar market statement, creating a kind of ‘power couple’ that proves that the whole is greater than a sum of its parts.

Look for opportunities where partnerships are a natural extension of your business. The partnership between Pottery Barn and Benhamin Moore paint is a good example.

Pottery Barn and Benjamin Moore formed a partnership in the early 2000s after Pottery Barn realized they were getting a lot of questions about the colors used in their catalogs. The two companies collaborated on an exclusive line of paints and colors and then featured an easy way for customers to select paint colors on the Pottery Barn website. This tool still exists today, although Sherwin-Williams now provides the other side of the partnership.

6. Be present on social media

It’s a given now that companies and organizations need to be on social media. But being somewhere and actually doing something useful are different beasts, and using your social media presence wisely is a key element of raising brand awareness.

Not sure where to start? Social media is a great place to provide great customer service and humanize your brand at the same time. Let your customer service team manage your social media accounts and your audience will get to see real customers with real problems get the help they need.

Link to content you’ve created (such as blog posts or videos) and let your social media account become a “back channel” that lets people converse directly with you in real time. Ensuring that your social media presence is a two-way street and taking the time to leverage social media’s network effect is key. Shopify talks about using the 70/20/10 rule when posting to social media:

Essentially [the 70/2010 rule] is adding value and brand building 70% of the time, sharing others posts and ideas 20% of the time, and promoting you or your business only 10%. By doing this you begin to establish yourself as a thought leader, and naturally attract people back to your brand, because you’re giving them a reason to keep coming back.

Pampers uses social media as both a marketing tool for its products and as a way to build a community of parents (and soon-to-be parents) to exchange stories, ideas, and tips. Pampers North American brand manager Matt Griffith noted that this helps establish strong ties with customers.

When we can build these deep relationships with mom and really celebrate what’s important to her, we get a more meaningful relationship with her and that’s ultimately what she’s looking for when she’s making her choices.

7. Let people see behind the curtain

Another effective way to use social media is to give your audience a peek behind the scenes (aka BTS), to show them how your company works and plays.

According to Maja Jaredic, Marketing Director at Flight Media, BTS content makes your brand more human:

There is lots of value in BTS content. It Humanizes your company; Shows that you have fun; Reveals your love for your team; It shows you make mistakes, but you also laugh and live. And in order to build relationship and trust, this kind of content is a necessity.

What’s your flavor? Always impressed with @sonyadove, but this mood-ring color blend is BEYOND! #modernsalon

A post shared by #MODERNSALON (@modernsalon) on May 7, 2017 at 8:02pm PDT

On their Instagram feed, Modern Salon doesn’t feature just the end results of hairstyles or makeovers, they also show behind the scenes in the salon itself. Followers get to see the process as stylists go from zero to completion. Getting to see what really happens helps customers know what to expect while being both inspirational and aspirational.

Ultimately, brand awareness is about ensuring your customers are not just thinking about you, but also thinking about you in a positive, engaging way. Grow that awareness by being authentic, providing exceptional customer service, engaging with social media, inviting your audience to workshops and seminars, and finding like-minded brands to form partnerships with.

For more tips on building a successful brand, check out our latest ebook written by CEO and founder Ross Kimbarovsky entitled Stand Out: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.

If you’ve recently made a bad decision (or a baker’s dozen of them), you are not alone. Not a single person is immune from making bad decisions.

Humans make mistakes.

Let’s face it, even though we often deny it, we have inherently imperfect judgment. Anxiety, stress and fear can easily distort our choices. In fact, in the competitive and strenuous world of small businesses and startups, it’s much too easy to make bad decisions. Often, we don’t even know whether the decision we are making is good or bad.

This is because the aggregate total of the decisions we make throughout the day impacts our ability to clearly see the upsides and downsides of some of the decisions we must make. Plainly put: the more decisions we must make, the more likely we’ll make bad decisions.

This is known as decision fatigue.

In this video, learn the science behind decision fatigue and what you can do to avoid it (and bad decisions) in the future.

Image source: rawpixel.com

No matter what kind of business you own or the size of that business, chances are you’ll need a team of employees supporting you as you develop and grow your company.

A team is a group of people who share a common purpose and a common goal or set of goals.

A great team can make or break your business. That’s a lot of pressure put on us as business owners and entrepreneurs!

What differentiates winning teams from teams that fail or stagnate?

The key is to know what you’re looking for, and to adhere to the values that you want to instill in your team. Yunha Kim, founder of Simple Habit, emphasizes the importance of finding people who care:

Find smart people who care about the product. The most important thing you can do early on is build a team of people who move fast, work hard, and genuinely care. Your product will always change, and your early team members will have a huge impact in shaping it. Our team uses our product personally on daily basis and this has helped us build a great product.

With a clear direction, people who care, and a lot of patience, you can build a winning team that will set your company up for success. Here are six tips to help you build a great team for your small business or startup.

1. Identify Your Culture

Image source: Lauren Mancke

What are your values? Goals? Methods?

These are all things that you’ve either thought about or quickly should because they’re all essential elements in defining a company’s culture.

Your culture will be unique to your team, and will dictate the way you envision and plan for the future, communicate with each other, the amount of freedom within the company, and all the other details that make your company yours. Before you even begin to build your team, you have to identify the culture that you want those team members to embrace.

Unlike other aspects of business, culture is something that’s harder to teach. People will either fit in, or they’ll feel out of place and pull the team in a different direction. So before you look for people, consider the culture you’re building. And then identify habits of employees who will help you win.

For more information on identifying your team culture, check out 352 Inc’s blog post Defining Team Cultures Within Your Company.

2. Find Your Experts

Image source: Farzad Nazifi

Before you check for a culture fit, look for people with the technical skills you need. Depending on your company, you may need a mix of engineers, customer service people, marketers, designers, lawyers, managers, and more. It’s important to identify the specific roles you need to fill, and the skills that are required

Depending on your company, you may need a mix of engineers, customer service people, marketers, designers, lawyers, managers, and more. It’s important to identify the specific roles you need to fill, and the skills required for those roles.

Look for people that know their role better than you do. When you surround yourself with smarter people, you’re automatically forcing yourself to delegate all while strengthening your team by filling some of your own knowledge gaps.

For startups and small businesses, filling these roles all at once may be financially impossible. Luckily, smaller companies have some creative alternatives. They can hire people who have broad skillsets, like an engineer with design experience, or they can hire just the essential people to launch their product and then be on the lookout for additional team members once revenue starts rolling in. Holly Cardew, CEO of Pixc, offers a solution with her mentality of “always be hiring”. Cardew says that she saved a lot of time by keeping a growing list of potential candidates:

I thought I needed money to hire key players, however, in fact, I should have been making a list of amazing key players that I wanted to have on the team, ready to hire as soon as we grew. If you don’t do that, you waste too much time once you do have an opening: Recruiting, vetting, interviewing, and deciding. You can move much faster if you already have some amazing candidates in mind.

3. Check for Culture Fit

Image source: Joshua Ness

Although it should be obvious, it’s worth emphasizing: expertise shouldn’t be your only deciding factor when choosing a person for your team.

Make sure each person you choose for your team fits the culture that you identified earlier. Take a close look at how they communicate, what type of personality they are, or even how they respond to unexpected questions. You want to find out how they work, what types of people they like to work with, and how they react. Check to see if they share your company’s values, see if their personal goals would fit in well with your goals for the company.

Remember that a good cultural fit doesn’t mean that you found a new best friend to work with, it just means that there will be a good harmony in moving the company forward. Cultural fit also doesn’t mean that every person on your team is the same- diversity is an asset. But you do need cultural fit to succeed.

A 2005 study looked at the employee performance, satisfaction, and contribution of employees who both fit and didn’t fit a specific company culture. The study revealed that the employees who shared the company’s values and goals consistently outperformed the employees who didn’t fit in as well, and they also reported higher levels of satisfaction. Their cultural fit also ended up keeping the employees in the company longer, which helped the company focus on product growth rather than onboarding and team changes.

Also identify people who understand the difference between leadership and management. This difference is important because successful teams often reflect the work of many informal leaders.

4. Acknowledge Strengths and Weaknesses

Image source: Bethany Legg

Be aware that every winning team has weaknesses as well as strengths. The same goes for every individual person. If you only search for people with all strengths and no weaknesses, you’ll either come out disappointed and without a team, or with a team full of large egos- neither of which will help you and your company succeed.

Instead, acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your team, and think about how the different combinations of skills will help your team win. Nicole Snow, president of Darn Good Yarn, always tries to focus on how others can help fill in weakness gaps:

I’m not afraid to say if we aren’t good at something and we need to call in someone to support our needs.

For Snow, it’s important to bring in additional team members when someone needs extra support in an area. To her, it’s not a big deal if someone can’t do it all. Where someone may have a weakness, another person may have a strength. Try to look for people that fill each other’s skill gaps.

You can read more about weaknesses in How You Can Become a Better Leader By Recognizing Your Own Weaknesses. And you can learn more about team building in a terrific book, Tribal Leadership (we wrote about the book here).

5. Don’t Forget About Your Network

Image source: rawpixel.com

When building a team, it can be easy to start completely new and search for fresh minds outside of your network. But if you trust your network, chances are that they are connected to people who closely fit what you’re looking for in a team. Turn to people in your network for references, connections, or even advice.

It’s always helpful to have someone “pre-vetted” as an option. According to a survey done by Jobvite, over 59% of job recruiters rated personally referred candidates as being “higher quality” than those found through traditional recruiting methods. Since those candidates were of higher quality, recruiters often found their job searches stopping earlier.

6. Don’t Rush

Image source: Jannik Selz

A winning team can’t be built in a matter of hours. Like anything else that’s good, a winning team takes time and patience to build- so don’t rush the process.

You’ll have to take the time to interview people, vet them, bring them onboard, and integrate into your company. You’ll have to wait for people to learn how to work together efficiently, and how to use each other to grow the company.

Take your time when talking to people, when teaching people, and even when listening to people. Just like they need time to grow into your vision, you need time to reflect on the process. You have to constantly think about the specific elements that make your team successful, and how you can keep improving those elements. Ultimately, you need to give you and your team the time needed to succeed.

What are your strategies and tricks for building a winning team? Let us know in the comments!

For even more information on how to get started on building a winning team, check out our chapter on How to Hire Great Employees in our latest ebook, STAND OUT: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize a gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a cool logo for a Cape Cod brewery. A blackfish is a type of whale… and now a type of brewery!

Let us start the slow clap for miamiman. Check out more great work on miamiman’s profile page.

Nicely done, miamiman, nicely done!

In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING creative community of 200,000+ designers & writers from 200 countries. Today we feature Jahanzeb, who goes by the username jhharoon.

Jahanzeb is a self-taught designer (and self-proclaimed handyman) from Pakistan that has been on crowdSPRING for over five years. During that time, Jahanzeb has participated in over 700 projects with a focus on logo design. We asked Jahanzeb 12 Questions about design, creative inspiration, and what it’s like working on crowdSPRING:

1. Please tell us about yourself.

Hello, my name is Jahanzeb Haroon. I grew up and live in Rawalpindi, which is the twin city of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. I’m a full-time freelancer and father of three kids. My life resides in a triangle: work, family, and sleep. My main focus in graphic design is logo design but I also do other projects from time to time.

2. How did you become interested in design?

I’m a self-taught designer and began designing professionally in 2012. Before that, I never planned to be one. Instead, I worked as a computer technician and in my free hours, I spent time on the internet looking for new opportunities.

In 2011, I found a website that was offering logo design projects for freelancers. I had been using Photoshop for fun for almost a decade at that point so I tried my luck and started participating. After six months with zero success, I realized that logos are not made in Photoshop but in Illustrator. I watched a few videos about Illustrator and learned the difference between Vector/Raster and RBG/CMYK, and more. Then, I installed Illustrator and started learning it by myself.

I remember the designs I made in the beginning. They were awful.For two months, rather than participating in any projects I just watched them. I studied other people’s designs: what they were making, what customers liked, and what design trends were popular. I studied the design briefs in detail and compared it with the winning designs.

For two months, rather than participating in any projects I just watched them. I studied other people’s designs: what they were making, what customers liked, and what design trends were popular. I studied the design briefs in detail and compared it with the winning designs.

Eight months after I started designing logos, I won my first project. That day was a game changer for me: I knew that I could design and that buyers would like my designs. From that day forward, I was a professional graphic designer.
 

3. What led you to start using crowdSPRING?

After my first winning design, I began searching for other freelance websites. I found crowdSPRING on a search engine. The thing that most attracted me to crowdSPRING was its friendly and funny quotes. The first thing that made me smile was when I clicked on a contest and got the following message.

“This project is Double Top Secret. Just kidding – all you need to do is log in and you’ll be able to view the details.”

There are many other things that set crowdSPRING apart from others. The more I participated in projects on crowdSPRING, the more I liked it and decided to stick with it.

4. What inspires you?

If I had to describe all of my inspiration in one word, then it would be “Uniqueness.”
 

5. How would you describe your style?

I don’t like to stick with one style, I always love trying something new. I have seen some designers who follow only one style and even if their designs are well-done, all of their work looks very similar to me. Some of the styles I enjoy working with are Minimal, Retro and Modern.

6. What is the design process like for you? How do you start?

First, I read the brief and view all the relevant files and links. Then, I create a new file in Illustrator to write/draw my thoughts during the design process. I try to jot down the things that are relevant to the design and try to work out those concepts.

For example, if the project is for a restaurant’s logo then I think about the items that remind me a restaurant: fork, spoon, knife, chair, table, napkin, bow tie, hospitality, elegance etc.I pick one or two words and start working on the concept. Meanwhile, I search for relevant designs online for two reasons: to get inspiration, and to refine my concept if it has been done too many times by other designers.

I pick one or two words and start working on the concept. Meanwhile, I search for relevant designs online for two reasons: to get inspiration, and to refine my concept if it has been done too many times by other designers.

Once I get the right concept, which can be the most difficult part, I try to refine it and find the relevant font. I try my best to use a font that is free for commercial use so that buyer doesn’t have to spend money on a font. Once I’m done with the first round of designs, I upload the files and wait for the buyer’s feedback.

Once I get the feedback, I try to respond as quickly as I can. I provide multiple variations of my concept to give the buyer options and help them make the final decision. During the final handover, I give the buyer all the needed file formats they can easily use the design for both print and web.

7. What do you do with your free time?

In my free time, I serve as an electrician, plumber and general handyman in my house. What else you can expect from a guy who works from his home? When I have some extra time, I love to watch movies.
 

8. What is your most memorable project on crowdSPRING?

Rather than participating in projects with high awards, I prefer to participate in projects where the buyer’s feedback score is “Amazing.” The best projects are the ones in which the buyer provides me detailed feedback on my designs so that I can create the perfect design for them.

9. Tell us what you’ve learned since joining crowdSPRING.

A lot.

One thing that I specifically want to mention is that crowdSPRING taught me to work on my own original concepts. crowdSPRING has a very strict policy about generic designs, and I’m very thankful for that because that led me to discover new ideas and come up with unique concepts for every project.
 

10. What is your favorite part about working on crowdSPRING?

I don’t have just one favorite. And it’s not because I’m getting interviewed by you, I really like the options that crowdSPRING provides me which others don’t.

crowdSPRING is user-friendly. As I mentioned earlier, the friendly messages I get on different events are really enjoyable and helpful in a typical stressful work day.

crowdSPRING also protects intellectual property. If you create something then it belongs to you, and crowdSPRING really cares about that. They take rapid action if someone copies a design.

The hidden ratings are one of my favorite features on crowdSPRING. I have used some other websites, and it feels very annoying when designers start copying high rated designs. On crowdSPRING, I can participate on any contest without worrying about it.

Finally, I don’t remember the last time it took more than 12 hours for customer support to contact me whenever I need them. I usually get their response within 2 to 3 hours. Once, I sent an email on a Sunday about an issue and within hours I got response from Ross Kimbarovsky. I have never ever had an experience like that before where the CEO of a company is replying me on a usual support query. Thanks, Ross, you are awesome.

11. If you weren’t designing on crowdSPRING, what would you be doing?

I’m a handyman, I love to do work with my own hands. Making new things by hand is extremely satisfying. If I was not designing, I think I would be making something else that satisfies my creativity.

I am also planning to create a channel on YouTube about Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and other software training in Urdu. But, this is still under consideration along with my other 3,552 other plans.

12. How do you see graphic design changing in 2017?

Gradients, small details, multicolor, and designs that are hard to fit in a square and are totally out.

Minimal app-like icons with bold line art, negative space, and two colors max are in.

See more of jhharoon’s work here.

Start a 1-to-1 project with jhharoon here.

Thousands of businesses have turned to creatives like Jahanzeb to create professional, unique designs for their company for as little as $199. crowdSPRING’s Graphic Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Anyone looking to maximize their productivity, achieve goals, and advance their career must learn how to focus their attention and eliminate distractions.

Distractions in our modern day work environments abound; learning to direct your attention amongst the endless chatter in our lives is crucial to success.

There are many different strategies that can help minimize distractions, decrease stress, and improve focus. Not all work for everyone, which is why we wanted to explore whether there’s scientific support for some of those strategies.

We found five scientifically sound strategies and want to share them with you:

1. Meditation

Meditation isn’t just for yogis and new age-y folks listening to Enya. Vastly successful business people – Oprah, Jerry Seinfeld, Joe Rogan, Jeff Weiner and Arianna Huffington, to name just a few – are all advocates for the practice, and swear by its effectiveness in calming the mind and improving focus.

Studies have shown meditation can alter your brain matter by reducing your stress levels, which consequently leads to better mental health and improved decision making. A study published in Consciousness and Cognition, for example found that meditation training improved cognition, leading to a better mood, increased verbal and non-verbal reasoning, and improved capability for manipulating mental information.

According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, mindfulness meditation refers to “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surrounding environment.”  Anyone working in a highly stimulating, fast-paced environment knows that being centered, focused, and aware is critical to successfully navigating the overload of day-to-day activity.

The benefits of mindfulness meditation are clear. Regular practice can boost the immune system, improve your emotional well-being, and significantly increase your ability to focus.

Want to read more about how successful entrepreneurs use meditation? Check out our article on wellness: “Wellness Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs and Health Experts.”

2. Make lists

Making lists isn’t just for the scatterbrained among us. At any given moment, entrepreneurs’ busy minds are buzzing with ideas, plans, to-do’s, and an endless assortment of things you don’t want to forget. Lists are critical in keeping everything accounted for.

For some people, writing everything down is a great way to objectively analyze things so you can prioritize your day. Being able to schedule things well, delegate things to other people, and figure out the best use of your time will keep your day focused and productive. Need some tips to optimize your lists? Here are a few:

Write your list the night before

Writing your list the night before means you can start your day already prepared with what to expect and what needs to be accomplished. Sparing yourself the stress of figuring those things out during the chaos of the morning dash leaves you composed and capable of handling everything that comes your way.

Assign Time Estimates

Seeing how much time each task requires for completion is smart. You can make realistic decisions about what you’re truly able to accomplish, and your schedule will thank you for the reasonable estimates for each item you build your day around.

Re-Evaluate

If you’re consistently bumping the same to-do item to another day, you need to figure out why. Is it unimportant? Is there a problem that needs to be worked out first in order for you to complete it? Whatever the case, repeated rescheduling of a task indicates that it requires more attention to meaningfully address the item.

Having said that, to-do lists aren’t for everyone. In fact, in an earlier post on our blog, we explained why to-do lists can actually be counter-productive for some. Here’s what we wrote:

Despite our reliance on the tactic, research suggests 85% of a person’s output includes tasks not included on their to-do list, and that 41% of to-do list tasks never get tackled at all.

To be fair, those numbers actually make a lot of sense (and may feel familiar, if we’re keeping things 100). To-do lists lack the context necessary to be effective planning and work management tools. You end up with a number of tasks that need to be completed without real regard for the level of urgency associated with those tasks, the amount of time required to complete the tasks, or anything that will how you accountable for completing the tasks.

3. Exercise

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s time to get off the couch.

While there are often conflicting scientific studies about many things, you won’t find much disagreement about this: the benefits of exercise—physically, mentally and emotionally—are innumerable.

A study published in the British Medical Journal confirms exercise’s benefits. According to the study, short 10 to 40-minute sessions of exercise resulted in an improvement in mental concentration and focus: even a quick walk can have major benefits on your focus, productivity, and general well-being. If a focused mindset is a goal for you, it’s time to get moving.

According to Dr. John Ratey, who wrote a book on the impact exercise has on the brain, exercise increases your focus for two to three hours after you finish your workout. Do you find you have a time of day where you just can’t get your mind to settle? Try exercising a few hours beforehand, and find yourself with an ample amount of focus to compensate during your more challenging hours.

Exercise increases our confidence in our ability to accomplish challenging things. Entrepreneurs like the late Steve Jobs to powerhouse Mark Zuckerberg are key examples of confident leaders who have employed the benefits of exercise. Many entrepreneurs are also regularly advocates for walking throughout the day.

In fact, Facebook recently put in a half-mile loop on the roof of its headquarters in Menlo Park, California so that workers there can regularly have walking meetings.

When you have a healthy workout schedule, your sleep improves, too. Studies show that exercising before bed leads to falling asleep around 15 minutes earlier and extends sleep for an average of 45 minutes a night. Entrepreneurs who sleep better become quicker thinkers, have more focus and are capable of leading their industries in ways their sleep-deprived colleagues are not.

4. Declutter

If your workspace looks like an office supply truck crashed into it, your focus is bound to be distracted by the sheer volume of stuff piling up in every corner of your office. “Surveys show the average person loses an hour a day to disorganization,” says Lisa Zaslow, a professional organizer in Manhattan. “It takes much less time to get and stay organized. Think about how frantic and stressed you are when you can’t find something.”

“Surveys show the average person loses an hour a day to disorganization,” says Lisa Zaslow, a professional organizer in Manhattan. “It takes much less time to get and stay organized. Think about how frantic and stressed you are when you can’t find something.”

Whether or not you are particularly attuned to the mess inhabiting your life, clutter will still have a noticeable effect on your concentration. Researchers with the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute discovered that having too much clutter decreases the brain’s capacity for focusing and processing information. Your brain becomes overly distracted by the mass amounts of clutter threatening to swallow you whole, and it renders you unable to accomplish much.

Professional organizer Amanda LeBlanc says it’s not just about clutter, it’s also about having the right tools for the job:

“If you’re always getting up to find something you need, it’s difficult to concentrate on your projects. There are many studies showing that once a person gets up from something they are working on to look for supplies, they are much less likely to return to what they were working on when they left.”

A tidy desktop is your best bet to get off on the right foot every day at work. Work habits are reflected by the environments we work in; a clean office is most supportive of a productive workflow.

And it’s not just about physical clutter. As we wrote previously in our post How Clutter Affects Your Productivity, And What You Can Do About It:

June Saruwatari, author of Behind the Clutter explains that mental clutter is just as bad for your productivity as is physical clutter. She warns that even when you put physical clutter away, it doesn’t really go anywhere:

If you put it into a closet and shut the door, you are still carrying that with you. It’s important to get to the root cause of that one item and not just shove it under the rug.

Saruwatari explains that mental clutter is often caused when you clear physical clutter, but don’t necessarily dealt with it. This couldn’t be more true – especially for busy business owners and entrepreneurs who find themselves multitasking with endless tasks. Sometimes putting away those notes from the meeting you still have to review doesn’t help, especially if that stays on your mind for the rest of the day until you complete the task. For this reason, Saruwatari suggests a mental dump, 1-2 times a day. This translates into creating a to do list each morning, and prioritizing it. Then, at the end of each day, a moment of reflection and reorganization of the to do list. Since it’s impossible to get everything done in one day, it’s crucial that we are able to keep everything in it’s own mental container, only opening the lid when we are ready to deal with it.

5. Go for a walk / take a break

Sometimes the best strategy is to stop trying so hard and take a break. Our brains were not built to maintain constant attention, and taking short breaks can improve your ability to maintain focus over long periods of time.

Illinois researcher Alejandro Lleras examined the phenomenon known as “vigilance decrement,” in a study published in the Journal Cognition:

We propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused. From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!

There are a number of productivity systems you can try to help you work more effectively with breaks, such as the Pomodoro Technique, which breaks a task up into twenty-five-minute blocks, followed by a five-minute break. After you’ve repeated this four times, you then take a longer break of around thirty minutes.

Another option is the 52-17 method, proposed by the Draugiem Group. Through data from their productivity app DeskTime, they discovered that the most productive employees work for 52 minutes at a time, and then break for 17.

The reason the most productive 10% of our users are able to get the most done during the comparatively short periods of working time is that their working times are treated as sprints. They make the most of those 52 minutes by working with intense purpose, but then rest up to be ready for the next burst. In other words, they work with purpose.

Breaks can be anything from going for a short walk, letting yourself daydream, or even just doodling for a bit. The point is to disengage from what you were working on and change up what you’re doing. By breaking up your concentration, you’ll give your brain a chance to recharge so you can return to what you were doing refreshed.

As an entrepreneur, responsibilities, to-dos, and brainstorms can threaten to overwhelm your precious little time and attention. Staying focused in the middle of the hectic every day is a critical component in anyone’s ability to not only get work done but get work done well.

Following these tips might just help you find your way to a calmer, more productive, and highly focused workweek.

If not? There’s still always coffee.

But the scientific value of coffee is debatable.

Are you looking for other ways to maximize productivity and run or grow your business efficiently? Check out our latest ebook by crowdSPRING founder and CEO Ross Kimbarovsky titled STAND OUT: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.

In the days of Don Draper, agency life was different. Agencies had account men, creatives, and clients willing to pay a lot of money. Things have changed quite a bit since then.

When computers and the internet were added to the marketing mix, suddenly many agencies were fighting for their lives.

There are still heavy hitters in the agency world, but many of them have struggled to keep pace with innovation. Even smaller, more nimble agencies have found themselves in a position where managing overhead and declining client budgets is threatening their existence.

The truth is that agencies are spending so much time and so many resources on trying to keep up with the relentless pace of digital innovation that their overhead is ballooning while their revenue is eroding.

Companies, in the meantime, are playing Russian roulette with their brands by cobbling together piecemeal marketing through freelancers without any kind of strategic guidance.

Everyone loses in that scenario.

That’s where crowdsourcing can help.

Maintaining an in-house creative staff is expensive and takes a lot of time. With the crowd, you get access to a creative pool many times larger than anything you could tap in-house, for a fraction of the cost. While strategy is still necessary to make sure the crowd is effectively utilized, it’s far less expensive to hire one strategist than four designers.

Now you might be wondering – why would an agency crowdsource design when it can leverage it’s internal design team instead?

The answer might surprise you.

Watch the video for four reasons why crowdsourcing represents an opportunity for agencies to reinvent themselves and their business.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize a gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a logo for a business that does automated payments. They were looking for a text based logo with a robot character as part of the “i”. Many wonderful designs were submitted in the project, including this cool one from xtrada.

Let us start the slow clap for xtrada. Check out more great work on xtrada’s profile page.

Nicely done, xtrada, nicely done!

Are you an eager entrepreneur, ready to conquer the business world with your brilliant idea but unsure how to get funding?

If so, you’re not alone. 68% of potential startup founders worry about funding their business ideas.

Crowdfunding, one of the fastest growing funding resources for small businesses in America, may be worth your consideration.

Reports have shown a consistent increase in crowdfunded investments since the great recession in 2008. In a recent study on the Crowdfunding Industry, World Bank predicted that the crowdfunding market could increase to between $90 and $96 billion, which is approximately 1.8 times the size of the global venture capital industry today.

But, Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren’t the “Field of Dreams.” Simply building a crowdfunding campaign isn’t enough. With so many businesses seeking to capitalize on the crowdfunding trend, there’s more competition than ever. In order to succeed you’ve got to capture the attention and imagination of the crowd.

Gabriel Bestard-Ribas, who raised over $300,00 during the Indiegogo campaign for his Goji Smart Lock agrees:

Why do people support crowdfunding? Because they are drawn to a vision. One they want to engage with.

So how can you follow in his footsteps and set your project apart from the masses? A good idea is vital- but it’s also not enough to stand out in the rapidly growing and competitive world of crowdfunding. Good campaign design is a must if you want your project to succeed.

Here are essential design tips to help you craft a crowdfunding campaign page that will ensure your project captures the attention it needs to succeed.

Sell Your Pitch with Video

Your crowdfunding campaign is your opportunity to show the world how amazing your product or service is. Your goal should be to inspire people to become a part of your dream- by helping to fund it. Bestard-Ribas reflects,

Many people think of their campaign as just selling a product. But you’re really launching your company to the world.

So, we can’t understate the importance of making a good first impression. The key to that impression? A pitch video featured prominently at the top of your campaign page. Crowdfund Insider reports that campaigns with pitch videos raise four times as much money as campaigns without video.

Stephen Key, co-founder of InventRight and Inc. Magazine contributor explains why he believes videos are such successful selling tools:

Video is powerful. It resonates with people instantaneously. We love to watch it. If a picture is capable of expressing a thousand words, how much more can a video communicate?

And, if you’re going to lead with a video pitch, you’ll want to make sure it’s a good one.

But, don’t panic- you don’t need fancy special effects or a compelling on-screen romance to create a great video pitch. Forbes contributor Amadou Diallo claims that you can shoot the video on your phone if you need to- as long as you put significant time and thought into planning the video first.

Image courtesy of Kickstarter

The video for the incredibly successful Coolest campaign on Kickstarter is a great example of a pitch video. Narrated by the product’s creator, Ryan Grepper, the Coolest video demonstrates all of the many tasks his Coolest cooler can perform. These include blending iced beverages, charging your smartphone, and playing music, among others.

The video is short and sweet, clocking in at just under 3 and a half minutes. And Grepper manages to end with a call to action that reminds you why you’re there in the first place- to back an awesome product- without being too heavy-handed.

Here are a few action items you can borrow from the Coolest video- and you can execute each and every one of these whether you’re shooting with an expensive camera rig or on your iPhone.  

• Keep your pitch short and to the point.
• Write a script, practice it and stick to it.
• Build trust with your audience by telling your story and introducing your team.
• Stage your video to help your audience see your product or service in action.
• Always include the call to action or “Ask”.

Build trust with consistent branding design

Image courtesy of Every Interaction

Your campaign page is your new venture’s face to the world. It needs to tell your audience who you are, what your product is, and that you’ve got your ducks in enough of a row to be trusted. One way to communicate all of these things is through cohesive branding design on your campaign page.

The experts at Enventys Partners point out,

As with any business venture, you’ll need brand assets – logos, renderings, photos and more. This needs to come first.

These branding essentials should appear throughout your campaign page. A consistent visual message makes a lasting impression on your potential backers and provides credibility for your growing business.

Once you have these basic assets in place it’s time to think about the specific design elements you’ll need for your campaign page. Headers and other campaign-specific graphics outlining product details, stretch goals, and rewards and incentives will be needed to tell your story and sell your project persuasively.

The Kickstarter campaign for the second print book of the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist provides an excellent example of a unique and cohesive campaign design. All of the graphics for the campaign are drawn in the same style as the comic itself. The headers, rewards, and stretch goals graphics all share a similar color scheme with the cover of the book itself. Every visual included on their campaign page looks like it belongs with the rest.

What can you learn from the Strong Female Protagonist campaign?

• Use your recognizable brand assets throughout your campaign page
• If you have a unique color scheme associated with your business, use it throughout your campaign to provide visual consistency
• Create campaign-specific graphics in a cohesive style that a) captures the vibe of your brand and b) ties all of your visual graphics together

Feature your Product in the Best Possible Light

Showing off your product to its best advantage is a no-brainer. But, accomplishing that goal involves (at a minimum) two separate steps: providing professional-looking images of your product and calling out your product’s strongest features and design details.

Let’s start with creating professional-looking images.

Since the advent of online shopping, product photos have become an invaluable selling tool. Traditional stores allow a consumer to not only see but also to pick-up and handle the products they consider purchasing. Online shopping doesn’t offer that luxury.

Potential buyers (or in the case of crowdfunding, backers) rely on photos or renderings alone to determine what exactly their money is going to get them. Images convey what the items looks like, how it works, and the potential quality of the item. They also help a backer to see how the product might relate to their life.

Tyler Kapper of Big Commerce explains,

So, to turn browsers on your ecommerce website into buyers, you need to show potential customers your products in their best light, including how they can be used or worn. This helps to put the images into a lifestyle frame of mind for customers, who can then identify with the usage of the item, or move on to another brand.

Phazon, a manufacturer of wireless earbuds, was on top of their product imagery game when they earned 1816% of their original Indiegogo fundraising goal.

Phazon shared professional, well-lit images of the earbuds, as well as the earbud charging case. They also included images of the earbuds being worn while athletes participate in a wide range of sports activities, putting their claim that their earbuds won’t fall out under any circumstances up front and center. On top of that, they included graphic renderings of the earbuds, charging case, and cable; and a 360° 3D model of their earbuds.

After looking at this wealth of visual information I almost feel as though I’ve held and worn Phazon’s earbuds myself. And I want a pair! So what did they get right and how can you do it too?

• Show your product from all angles and, if appropriate, include close-ups as well as full shots. The more visual information you share about your product, the more confidence your backers will feel.  
• Make sure your photos are crisp, well-lit and in focus. Fuzzy photos look unprofessional and can give the impression that you have something to hide.
• If you don’t have an actual prototype to take pictures of, provide a rendering or digital 3D model.
• Show your product in use so that backers can understand it in its natural context and relate it to their own lives.

If you’d like to learn more about how to set up your own product photography rig on the cheap, check out these great articles from Shopify’s Mark Macdonald and Tyler Kapper of Big Commerce. Once you’ve got your product images ready to go, it’s time to start thinking about your product feature graphics.

Your crowdfunding campaign needs to be optimized for the average internet audience- which a 2015 Microsoft report revealed has shortened by one-third since the turn of the millennium. So, it’s important to provide a graphic (or graphics) that succinctly point out all of your product’s most valuable features.

UPRIGHT GO’s Indiegogo campaign did an excellent job of this. Their product graphics are clear and easy to grasp. This was particularly important for their product- a wearable posture tracker that vibrates if you start to slouch- as the tracker itself looks rather nondescript.

Despite the UPRIGHT GO’s unassuming appearance, the campaign raised over $1.1M, a whopping 4473% of their original funding goal. Perhaps their excellent product feature graphics had something to do with their success?

UPRIGHT GO included a graphic showing the physical value the tracker would provide to their wearers, as well as a graphic calling out the convenience features the tracker provides.

They also included an easy-to-follow graphic showing how the tracker is worn and a graphic with screenshots of the tracker’s accompanying app.

Here’s what you can learn from UPRIGHT GO…

• Use graphics to show your product’s best features- don’t bury the info in a wall of text
• Keep your graphic design simple and concise
• Focus on the value your product brings to the consumer
• Call out your product’s strongest features and selling points
• Show any value or benefit that can’t be deduced simply by looking at the product itself

Keep backers interested with updates and outreach

Regular updates to your campaign page, with details about stretch goals and new backer rewards, keep your current backers interested and encourage new backers to contribute. JD Alois of Crowdfund Insider recommends that you update your campaign page “all of the time” to keep interest high.  And these elements all need to be thought out as part of your overall design as well.

Kickstarter recommends updating whenever your campaign reaches a financial milestone– like reaching the first quarter, third and half of your goal; or a community milestone such as reaching your first 25, 50 and 100 backers. They also suggest announcing any changes you make to your campaign.

These changes could include new stretch goals (new financial goals along with accompanying promises of expanded features) and new rewards. Tiered rewards are a key component to a crowdfunding campaign; incentivizing backers to make donations of increasing amounts in exchange for exclusive rewards. Updated graphics outlining the details of these goals and rewards are a must.

Updates should also be shared by email and social media. Tech Crunch reports that most contributions to Indiegogo campaigns come from email campaigns, followed by social media (Facebook in second place and Twitter in third).

Constant communication shows potential backers that the people behind the campaign are working hard and care about what they’re doing. In turn, this builds confidence and drives strong backer donations.

So make sure these vital updates are shown the same care as the rest of your campaign page. Professional email templates and graphics will go a long way toward building trust. The Exploding Kittens card game Kickstarter campaign did an excellent job of tying their updates in with the rest of their design.

They included graphics (drawn in the style of the card game itself) showing their stretch goals and rewards. As each goal was met, they updated their graphics by crossing out the information that was no longer applicable and clearly directing you to the new relevant information. The result is playful and easy to follow. You can see the evolution of their campaign in action.

Take your cue from the Exploding Kittens team with these design guidelines…

• Incorporate your branding design elements into your updates with
  • A consistent voice/tone for marketing copy
  • Design assets like your logo and/or tagline
  • Consistent visual style with overall campaign
  • Signature colors
• Optimize your campaign page graphics for social media so that you can update multiple platforms with less effort
• Clearly show what has changed

A successful crowdfunding campaign doesn’t just take a great idea, it also takes great execution. If you follow the tips we’ve outlined above, you’ll be on your way to your own professionally designed crowdfunding campaign that will give your business the kickstart it needs. Now you just need a million dollar idea.

We know that designing a campaign can be a little daunting if you’re not a designer. The great news is that there’s help. crowdSPRING has a team of over 200,000 creatives that have helped thousands of businesses with logo design, branding package design, illustrations, marketing copy, graphic design, email templates and more. You’ll get tons of options from a variety of design perspectives so that you know you are picking the perfect design for your audience. And, our outstanding customer service team is available to guide you through the whole process.

Even experienced entrepreneurs and business owners often struggle when building a strong cultural foundation for their businesses. In fact, some business owners don’t fully understand why it’s important for a company to have a strong culture or what makes a culture strong.

Company culture is not about ping pong tables, fruit baskets, or free massages.

But what makes for a strong company culture?

A strong company culture is a common set of beliefs and behaviors among the company’s employees. An organization’s culture is not something that your employees bring with them their first day on the job. It exists through careful cultivation or through natural evolution, and it plays a big role in the success and productivity of an organization.

Here’s what most leaders and managers misunderstand: leaders and managers cannot fiat the culture of their company. They can, however, support the culture, or take steps to undermine it.

Having a well defined, celebrated culture promotes an organization’s identity in a way that nothing else can, and preserving it is an integral part of achieving a flourishing business. In fact, one of the most important things you can do to ensure the success of your business is to create and maintain a strong company culture.

According to Professor James L. Heskett,

effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with ‘culturally unremarkable’ competitors.

“A company’s culture and a company’s brand are really just two sides of the same coin,” wrote Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in his acclaimed book Delivering Happiness. He continues:

What goes around the office comes around to the customer. We wanted employees that really believed in our long term vision and really felt like this was the right culture for them.

Now that we know what company culture is, how can you nurture your organization’s culture?

Hire Right

No company culture can survive without hiring the right employees. You want employees whose own values and goals align with your company’s. This starts with the hiring process.

Ex-GE CEO Jack Welsh put it this way:

It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.

In fact, research shows that people whose goals and beliefs fit with their companies are more satisfied with their jobs, do their jobs more effectively, and are less likely to leave.

Hiring for cultural fit means having a defined set of values so you know what you want from prospective candidates.

• Make your criteria public so that everyone knows the values you’re promoting when hiring new employees. Many companies (such as Buffer, IDEO, and Asana) create presentations or slideshows so it’s easy to get a quick overview of what their culture and values are.
• Refer to these values when posting a new position, and make sure to discuss them with candidates early in the hiring process.
• Implement a solid onboarding process for new employees that expresses your company’s values and mission clearly. Create checkpoints during the first few months with employees to see how they’re doing, and gather feedback.

A company’s culture is a work-in-progress that can evolve and change over time. Ensuring that new employees feel comfortable to ask questions and talk with you will help keep everyone moving in the same direction.

Systematize Recognition

Recognize when your employees do something to embody your company’s culture. Public recognition and praise are good ways to restate what the values are, and can also build morale. Public praise is also an effective way to inspire the best work from your employees, as O.C. Tanner found.

37% of the study’s respondents said that recognition would motivate them to do better work. There were a number of other drivers of great work, such as pay, promotions, and autonomy, but recognition was the highest.

It’s important to integrate recognition into your company’s DNA, especially when you’re using it as a way to evangelize and extend your values and culture. Don’t just call out major achievements. Zappos is famous for how it recognizes and rewards its employees, from coworkers being able to nominate each other for $50 bonuses, to getting a really good parking spot if you “WOW” another employee.

Get Leadership on Board

One way that people learn is by example, and helping your company’s culture flourish means setting a good one from the top on down. To get an idea of what kind of behavior is acceptable, employees look to their managers, who look to their managers, all the way up to the executive level.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said about corporate culture,

Culture is learned behavior — it’s not a by-product of operations. It’s not an overlay. We create our organizational culture by the actions we take; not the other way around.[…] It’s easy to think that building a culture is about other people’s behaviors, not how you act as a leader. But I believe that culture change begins when leaders start to model the behavior they want the organization to emulate.

In a Twitter post, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh likened this to the murmuration of starlings, where giant flocks of birds play a breathtakingly sublime game of follow-the-leader, always moving in unison behind a group of lead birds.

Spreading your culture throughout your organization works similarly: start by setting the example, and it will propagate throughout the rest of the company.

Preserve Company Traditions

Companies may not be families (sorry, Michael Scott), but many of the traits of a healthy family are found throughout a company’s culture. In addition to communication, respect, good examples, and recognition, traditions play a large role. Integrating and preserving company traditions can make them into signposts through time that employees can rely on.

SinglePlatform’s Scott Britton recognizes the value of tradition: “One

One aspect that separates one company from another are the people and the things that you do together. When you do fun, rewarding things as a company, it’s awesome. And when those things feel unique to your company, I think they’re all the more powerful.

Whatever form your traditions take, try to incorporate elements of your company’s values into them. For example, if one of your company values is, “We go above and beyond, and give back when we can,” you could set up scheduled volunteer days where employees get the day to help a charity they believe in. At the end of the day, everyone could gather to share stories and experiences from their day with the rest of the company.

Whether it’s a quarterly “all-hands” meeting or bi-weekly game nights on the rooftop patio, company traditions bring together people in a way that makes your organization unique.

Encourage communication

Workplace communication is a critical element of any company’s success. We can’t collaborate effectively without good communication. Communication is a key component to a company’s culture. Other important components include how information is shared, decisions are made, and how your employees interact.

Create a workplace where employees feel empowered to share their thoughts, ideas, and comments. Your executive team should be equally empowered to listen and act on what they hear. Otherwise, you risk misinformation and communication breakdowns that threaten your employees’ ability to innovate and work together.

Not only do your company’s values thrive and spread through good communication; good communication means good business.

A  2010 WillisTowersWatson study on the costs and benefits of good communications found that:

companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.

To promote strong communication, create an open dialogue between your executive team and the rest of the company. You want to encourage communication by making sure that employees are not afraid to speak their minds, so show them that all ideas, comments, and ideas are welcome. Find and integrate tools to enable effective communication internally, whether using internal Slack channels or something as essential as scheduled one-on-ones between managers and their direct reports.

Your company’s culture is a living artifact that evolves and grows over time. But remember, a great company culture cannot be built overnight. It takes time, planning, and careful action. Leaders and managers must ensure that they’re encouraging good values and behavior by promoting:

• proper information sharing
• strong communication
• careful hiring
• encouraging positive traditions
• public recognition of success by employees.

Do these things well and you’ll build and preserve a strong company culture. Ignore them and you’ll quickly find yourself trailing your competitors.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Scott Kitun, CEO of Technori, to talk about crowdSPRING’s global community of more than 200,000 designers and writers. Over the past nine years, crowdSPRING creatives have helped startups, businesses, agencies and non-profits around the world with professional logo design, web design, print design and company naming.

The interview covered many issues, including how businesses and agencies can save money by leveraging crowdsourcing, how crowdSPRING has led the industry in protecting intellectual property, and much more. Here’s a short two-minute video summarizing some fo the interview highlights:

The full 17-minute interview is available on WGN Radio.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize a gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a logo/app icon for a billiard game app. Designers were to pit the 8 ball vs. the 9 ball in a sword duel using pool cues.

Let us start the slow clap for prasoonmohantk. Check out more great work on prasoonmohantk’s profile page.

Nicely done, prasoonmohantk, nicely done!

Are you a crafter? Does plucking an idea from your brain and crafting it into a reality with your very own hands make your heart sing? If so, you may have said to yourself at some point, “I wish I could do this for a living.”

The amazing news is that you can. The market for hand-made crafts is growing. Etsy, the internet’s largest crafting marketplace has reported steady revenue increases since 2015. Even Amazon has joined the party with it’s Handmade store.

In fact, millions of people in the U.S. and around the world are looking to turn their craft hobbies into real businesses.

“But, I’m a crafter. Not a businesswoman,” I hear some of you say.

You are not alone. You can continue crafting as a hobby. But, for those of you who are ready to take the next step… who are ready to make a living doing what you love and are most passionate about… Let’s talk.

Here are the 15 things you should do to turn your craft hobby into a successful business or career:

1. Choose a business structure.

2. Acquire business licenses or permits.

3. File and pay taxes.

4. Build profit into your pricing.

5. Establish a personal brand with which customers can connect. 

6. Create unique, original crafts with your niche market in mind.

7. Create a great customer experience by providing safe, easy transactions and making it easy to reach you.

8. Incorporate thoughtfully designed visual assets that embody your personal brand.

9. Show off your crafts to their best advantage with flawless product photos.

10. Create an efficient workspace.

11. Develop products that can be reproduced easily.

12. Purchase supplies wholesale.

13. Create a professional website to be a customer ambassador when you’re not around.

14. Communicate often via convenient email marketing.

15. Build relationships with your customers via social media.

Run Your Crafting Hobby as a Business

The first step to converting your crafting hobby into a crafting business is pretty obvious- start treating it like a business. But, in practical terms, what does that really mean?

There are a few essential steps you must take. You’ll obviously need a name for your new business, and we’ll address that below.

Let’s start by looking at the nuts and bolts of your new business: whether you should have a sole proprietorship, incorporate, register a partnership or an LLC (limited liability company).

What the heck is the difference?

A sole proprietorship is the “most basic type of business to establish” according to the SBA (Small Business Administration). You are the sole owner of the business; and, as such, are solely responsible for the assets and liabilities accrued by the business. This may be just the ticket for your brand new, baby crafting business as it is also the easiest to set up.

If you’re interested in a little more protection, an LLC (or Limited Liability Company) may be a better fit. The LLC business structure provides the limited liability features you would find in a corporation. The Small Business Administration has all of the details about these common small business structures and others.

To learn more about corporations, partnerships and other legal mistakes people commonly make when setting up a small business, take a look at our post and video: 10 Legal Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Small Business And How To Avoid Them.

Regardless which structure you choose, you need to be aware that your new crafting business, like any business, will need to pay taxes. The crafting blog Start a Craft Business cautions,

It’s vital that you follow the tax laws of your state and country if you want to run a successful craft business that will grow and thrive for years to come. There’s no excuse for not filing your taxes, no matter how much of a pain you may find it to be. It’s always better to have your paperwork in order.

Not to mention that the IRS gets cranky if they don’t get their split of your profits. So, be sure to check out the SBA’s guide to filing and paying taxes.

Once you’ve decided on a legal structure for your new business, you need to consider whether you need a business license so that you can legally conduct business. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration,

Virtually every business needs some form of license or permit to operate legally.

The SBA website has all the info you need to learn which license or permit is required for your new business in your state.

Before we move on from the heavy-duty business side of this conversation, I want to talk about pricing. Crafters have a habit of undercutting their own profit by setting their prices too low. The Etsy Seller Handbook includes an article entitled, “Are You Paying Yourself Enough?” which points out that paying ourselves fairly (yes, I am guilty of this, too!) makes us feel uneasy.

But, if your business is to succeed, you’re going to have to grow past that uneasiness and build profit into your prices. Emma Featherstone of The Guardian writes,
Make sure that you have worked out all your costs,” she said. “Pay yourself a decent hourly rate, include all materials and then add a bit on the bottom. If they negotiate on price then at least you will know how far you can go.

How can you set a fair price? The Etsy Seller’s Handbook provides one way to do this:

Materials + Labor + Expenses + Profit = Wholesale Price x 2 = Retail Price

However you choose to calculate your prices, make sure that those prices are setting your new business (and you) on a sustainable path. Nobody starts a business saying “I want to be poor!” So, remember to factor in your profit.

Run your crafting hobby as a business by…

• Choosing a business structure.
• Acquiring any necessary business licenses or permits.
• Filing and paying taxes.
• Building profit into your pricing.

Give Your Customers What They Want

Now that we’ve got the hardcore business details taken care of, let’s talk about something a little more fun- how to give your fantastic customers what they want. Craft customers are not looking for a mass-produced item that they can pick up unceremoniously in a big box store for a discounted price. Instead, they are seeking unique, original pieces from real-live craftspeople that they can connect with. And that’s awesome.

Jess Van Den of “Create and Thrive” (a blog dedicated to helping hand-made crafting businesses succeed) points out,

They are buying from you because they prefer to buy unique things, direct from the person who made them. Don’t make it difficult for them to get to know you…

To that end, here’s what you can do to give your future customers what they want. Start by developing your own personal brand identity. As a professional craftsperson, this includes presenting yourself as the face of your business, as well as choosing the name of the business itself.

If you google “how to name your craft business” you’ll find oodles of results providing lists of potential craft business names. The trouble is that every other would-be entrepreneur craftsperson on Google is looking at those very same name suggestions.

Now, you know that craft consumers are seeking unique goods from unique individuals, so those generic name suggestions just are not going to cut it.

When naming your business, keep in mind what makes you – and your crafts – unique. What is their essence, their personality? Then make sure that your name captures that essence.

Ross Kimbarovsky, serial entrepreneur and founder of crowdSPRING, recommends starting your business name search by considering what you want the name to convey and then brainstorming with those guidelines in mind.  And, whatever name you choose, make sure it helps your consumer to know – and remember- who you are.

To support the hard work you’ve done in creating a great, unique business name, you’ll want to make sure that you flesh out your brand identity by sharing a little bit about yourself with your potential customers on your website. That’s right- you’ll need a website… and a logo. But, we’ll talk more about that later.

For now, know that your future website will need an “About” page that shares your story as a craftsperson, information about your qualifications, the story behind your products, and any other unique quirks that are important about you. This section is all about building trust. Sharing personal information helps your consumers get to know you as a person, which gives more meaning to the items they’ll (hopefully) purchase from you.

Successful crafters know that a strong personal brand is nothing without awesome hand-made products to back it up. As a crafting entrepreneur, you’ll want to make sure that your products are not only well-made, but something that consumers actually want to buy. Van Den advises,

When you start making for profit rather than for pleasure, your perspective needs to shift.
You need to stop thinking exclusively about you, and what you enjoy – and you need to start thinking about your customers.

So, think about who your target customer is- and the more specific you can be about this, the better. Let your customer and their needs inform your products. Don’t lose your singular vision in the process, but cater your creations to fit what your customer wants.

You will, of course, get better at this as you meet more of your real-life customers. So, be prepared to shift and adapt. Just remember that when crafting for profit, it’s as much about your consumer as it is about you. So, give them what they want.

Finally, now that you’ve established a relationship with your customers through your personal brand and an awesome product, make it easy for your customers to seal the deal and buy. Consumers want safe, easy transactions supported by phenomenal customer service should the need arise.

So, give it to them. Whether you choose to sell at trade shows and fairs or in an online venue, make sure that you create the kind of customer experience that you would enjoy. Offer multiple secured payment methods, be upfront about your store policies to avoid unpleasant surprises, respond to customer service requests promptly, and by all means, make it easy to contact you.

Display your email address prominently on your website- putting it in a header or footer so that it is easily found from every page ensures that your customer can find it with a minimal of effort.

You’ll also want to create a “Contact” page that includes, at a minimum, a short email form (so that your customers can reach you directly from that page) and links to your social media accounts. You can learn more about crafting an awesome “Contact Us” page here.

Business cards are another essential piece of your customer service puzzle. If you’re selling at trade shows or fairs your business card is a vital contact tool. But, it’s also a memento of your customer’s purchase experience, whether they bought with you in person or online.

Think of your card as an extension of your brand identity in a handy, easy-to-carry form. When you look at it that way, it’s easy to see how important a tool it really can be. So, make sure your business card is designed to reflect your unique personal brand and clearly provide all of your contact info.

Give your customers what they want by…

• Establishing a personal brand that customers can connect with by choosing a business name that conveys the essence of you and your crafts; and, sharing your story and unique product info.
• Creating unique, original crafts with your niche market in mind.
• Creating a great customer experience by providing safe, easy transactions and making it easy to reach you.

Remember What Business You’re In

Let’s be honest, crafts may not be solely defined by their appearance; but, how a crafted piece looks like goes a long way in determining its appeal.

One-of-a-kind, hand-crafted goods offer quality and aesthetic value to the world. The people who buy them are not usually looking for the most practical or functional items. Craft consumers are often driven by an appreciation of the artistic value and a desire to connect with the people who have created their unique new item.

So, if you’re going to capture an audience driven by aesthetic appreciation, you have to appeal to their good taste on all levels. This means that good design is a requirement at all levels of your business. Don’t let a poorly designed website, logo or business card undermine your credibility as a purveyor of beautifully hand-crafted items.

Your crafting business needs a visual identity to go along with your clever business name and to support your personal brand.
A logo should be the very first item on your graphic design to-do list.  Experts claim that a good logo must be simple, timeless and memorable. It also must be an extension of your brand.

Your logo has to derive meaning from your brand, not the other way around. The world’s best brands are not well-known because of their logo, they are known because of the people and vision that the logo represents.

Keep this in mind when designing (or communicating with a designer about) your logo.

Once you have a logo you love, you can start to think about website design.

But think twice if you’re considering using a generic template. Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING warns of the dangers of generic template designs:

If you use an off-the-shelf template and your website looks like thousands of other sites on the Internet, you’ll miss an opportunity to create a unique impression.

There’s that crucial word again- unique.

Uniqueness is what hand-made crafts are all about. A single item crafted by a single pair of hands- no other like it in the world.

Your website design should reflect that uniqueness. And yes- you need a website. Otherwise, people won’t be able to easily find you.

Now, here’s why… a 2013 study< revealed that 56% of consumers don’t trust a business that doesn’t have a website. That’s more than half! Simply by virtue of having a website you’ve inspired 56% of your potential audience to have greater trust in you.

And, just as important, a website is an ambassador for your business. It’s there, 24/7, to introduce you and your products, answer questions and maybe even sell. All the while you can get on with the business of crafting, eating, sleeping and living.

Your website can be as simple as a landing page with pictures of your products, an “About Me” page and a “Contact” page. A better website will also include a page devoted to your store policies and customer service info. And the best website will also incorporate a blog and an e-commerce component with a gallery of your product listings so that you can make sales when you’re not even around.

If the idea of setting up your own online store is intimidating, check out Etsy- an online marketplace for hand-made crafts. Then direct customers to your Etsy shop from your website.

It’s not enough to have a website, however. You also want to be sure that your site’s design is unique and that it showcases your products and you.

Just like your logo, your web design should start with your personal brand. A well-designed website will expand upon and support the values and personality traits that you’ve identified as being core to your business. If web design is not among your many DIY skills, know that there’s help available.

Incorporate product photos right at the top of your website’s homepage to catch attention and showcase your crafts right from the very start. And be sure to invest a little money in good, professional product photos:

If you’re selling products and your customers will buy the products online, you need to make sure that the product photos – or graphical images and descriptions – are clean, crisp and appropriate. You can have a great site design, but if your product photos look terrible, your prospective customers will think twice about buying your products.

Jess Van Den of Create and Thrive concurs, claiming that your product photos will make or break your business:

The photo is the first thing that captures the eye, and usually the largest part of the decision-making process when all is said and done.

So what makes for great product photos? Van Den recommends white/neutral (not flash) lighting; simple, iconic backgrounds; interesting angles; and, most importantly, images must be perfectly crisp, clear and in-focus.

Remember that looks really do matter…

• Incorporate thoughtfully designed visuals logo, business cards, website) that embody your personal brand.
• Show off your crafts to their best advantage with flawless product photos.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

You may have heard the old adage, “Work smarter, not harder.” For a crafting business- where you will most likely run the business and create every single product sold all by yourself- this advice is even more vital.

Here are a few suggestions for how you can streamline your process and get the most of your valuable time and effort.

Set yourself up for success with an efficient workspace. Time spent scrambling to find lost tools or materials is time (and money) lost. Make the effort to figure out your physical workflow and create a space that supports it.

As a sewist, I know my personal tendency to carry around (and subsequently lose) my scissors and pin cushion. My solution? Place scissors and pin cushions at both my sewing table and on my ironing board. No more carrying, and so much time saved! Find your own personal productivity hacks to make your workspace work harder for you.

Another way to work smarter is to develop some products that can be reproduced easily. This can mean many things- maybe it’s simply a customizable item that you can create quickly in bulk ahead of time, leaving the customized elements to be added as orders come in.

You can also create craft patterns or projects that can be purchased digitally and printed by the consumer- allowing you to design and leave the construction up to your customers.

Jess Van Den recommends making reproducible products the core of your product line-up:

… I’m not saying not to make OOAK [one-of-a-kind] items – far from it! What I AM saying, is that if you want to have a successful online handmade business, you really need to produce a range of reproducible designs that you can list once, and then sell over and over again without having to do any additional work.

Finally, don’t forget that making the leap from crafting hobbyist to crafting entrepreneur means you have better options for purchasing supplies than overpriced retailers like Joann Fabrics and Michaels. Once you’ve legally established your business, you’ll be able to buy wholesale- and you should.

Buying wholesale means that you can buy supplies in bulk and at lower prices. This is a smart move on a couple of fronts. Firstly, purchasing wholesale means that larger quantities of supplies will be shipped to you, saving you time you’d otherwise spend making frequent trips to the store. And, secondly, it saves you money, leading to more competitive pricing.

Work smarter, not harder by…

• Creating an efficient workspace.
• Developing products that can be reproduced easily.
• Purchasing supplies wholesale.

Make the Internet Work for You

The internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. It’s how we stay in touch with friends and family, learn about what’s going on in the world, even find recipes for dinner and videos of puppies wearing bow ties. (And yes, I have a link. Leave a comment and I’ll be happy to share). It has also become a rich resource for entrepreneurs.

Utilizing the tools the internet offers can help you work more efficiently, keep initial startup costs down, and create a web presence that works for you every hour of every day.

We already discussed why you need a unique brand and an online presence.

But, the internet isn’t just for selling. It’s also for communicating. Online resources like Constant Contact and  MailChimp allow you to create email mailing lists and send email marketing campaigns to help build your audience and drive business to your site.

And don’t forget social media! Since you know your crafting consumers are looking for a personal touch in their purchases, make it easy for them to get to know you. Business Insider has named social media the “leading edge” in marketing- and establishing a Twitter or Facebook account is 100% free!

Social media gives you the ability to easily keep customers up-to-date on new products, store policies or sales. It also enables you to build a social rapport with current customers, while building low-pressure relationships with future buyers.

Nineveh Dinha Madsen of Forbes recommends creating a content calendar to make managing your social media more efficient and up-to-date.  She says,

Nothing is worse than coming across a company’s social media page only to find it hasn’t posted in two months or even years. Is it out of business? Make sure you’re active and, most importantly, be consistent.

So consider creating a content calendar to keep you on track. Social media marketing is too valuable (and too easy) not to take full advantage.

Make the internet work for you by…

• Creating a professional website to be a customer ambassador when you’re not around.
• Communicating conveniently via email marketing.
• Building relationships with your customers via social media.

So there you have it. 15 tips for propelling your passion for crafting into a career. Let’s recap:

1. Choose a business structure.

2. Acquire business licenses or permits.

3. File and pay taxes.

4. Build profit into your pricing.

5. Establish a personal brand with which customers can connect. 

6. Create unique, original crafts with your niche market in mind.

7. Create a great customer experience by providing safe, easy transactions and making it easy to reach you.

8. Incorporate thoughtfully designed visual assets that embody your personal brand.

9. Show off your crafts to their best advantage with flawless product photos.

10. Create an efficient workspace.

11. Develop products that can be reproduced easily.

12. Purchase supplies wholesale.

13. Create a professional website to be a customer ambassador when you’re not around.

14. Communicate often via convenient email marketing.

15. Build relationships with your customers via social media.

If you follow this advice, you’ll be well on your way to turn your crafting hobby into a thriving business. Good luck!

As we enter into a new golden age of design, good design has never been more important to the success of a business. Consumer awareness of good design is at an all-time high, thanks to companies like Apple, Target, and Starbucks, who make design a top priority.

The most successful companies know there are compelling reasons to prioritize design to improve the odds of success. Good design creates meaningful first impressions, helps you differentiate yourself from your competitors, can solve problems, and boosts brand awareness and the bottom line.

Why should your startup or small business invest in quality design? Let us count the ways…

A Missouri University of Science and Technology study used eye-tracking to determine that website visitors needed a mere 180 ms to form a first impression.

First impressions matter

People have a very short attention span. In fact, according to a Princeton University study, snap judgments count. The study found after seeing a face for only 1/10th of a second people formed opinions about that person. Judgments were made on attractiveness, likeability, and trustworthiness, and prolonged exposure to that face just reinforced the initial impression.

The same goes for websites. Three studies found that a mere 50 milliseconds were all people needed to form an opinion about a website. Google performed similar testing and found an even slimmer margin: a speedy 17 to 50 milliseconds were all people needed to decide how they felt about a website.

The results show that both visual complexity and prototypicality play crucial roles in the process of forming an aesthetic judgment. It happens within incredibly short time frames between 17 and 50 milliseconds. By comparison, the average blink of an eye takes 100 to 400 milliseconds.

When people first encounter a website or marketing campaign a number of questions go through their minds:

• Who is this?
• Is it trustworthy?
• Is it credible?
• Is it professional?
• Am I in the right place?
• Does this have what I want?

Think about what kind of first impression you want your customers to have. If you want to appear reliable and trustworthy, make sure your website design is cleanly laid out and uncluttered. Want to seem fun and exciting? Look into bold color choices and use imagery that has energy. Informative and useful? Put content up front and make it easy for people to navigate and find.

Effective design can go a long way in making sure your customers’ first impression is a good one.

An example of how Apple uses the principle of design consistency to good use.

Attractive design helps you stand out

Marketing studies show that the average American is exposed to around 5,000 advertisements and brands per day. Out of that veritable flood, they found only 12 made enough of an impact to leave an impression. You can help your business be one of those twelve through effective, attractive design.

Often when consumers are faced with a decision between things with similar features or benefits, they go with the one that they either recognize or that has a more pleasing design. Smashing Magazine’s Steven Bradley explained it well:

Human beings have an attractiveness bias; we perceive beautiful things as being better, regardless of whether they actually are better. All else being equal, we prefer beautiful things, and we believe beautiful things function better. As in nature, function can follow form.

A List Apart’s Stephen Anderson demonstrates this attractiveness bias well with a simple button example:

(Image credit: A List Apart)

Cognitively speaking, both of these are obviously buttons. Neither button is ‘wrong’ as in our previous example. However, research into attention, persuasion, choice, happiness, learning, and other similar topics suggests that the more attractive button is likely to be more usable by most people.

Use well-established design principles when creating brand assets, websites, or anything else that your customers see. Creating attractive experiences will go a long way to help your business stand out.

Good design solves problems (yours and your customers’)

How something looks is important, but addressing your customer’s problems is one of the most effective ways to leverage good design.

A good way for you to figure out what these problems are and how to address them is to use a technique known as “The 5 Whys”.

Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda created the “5 Whys” technique to uncover issues with his company’s manufacturing process.

Created by Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda as a way to uncover technical issues with his company’s manufacturing process, the 5 whys are a simple but effective process. First, you state the problem. Then you ask yourself “why?” five times.

Let’s look at an example.

Problem: Customers don’t understand why our product is better than our competitors.

1. Why? Because people think both products have the same feature set and functionality.

2. Why? Because our marketing concentrates more on building brand awareness and less on product awareness.

3. Why? Because our website doesn’t clearly state what our product does and what value it provides.

4. Why? Because our competitor does a better job of educating consumers on how to use their product effectively.

5. Why? Because we don’t know how to speak to our product’s target audience in a clear and effective way.

You can ask more than five questions, but five questions can typically help you work out what problems you need to focus on.

Another important part of solving problems through good design is having success metrics so you know when a solution is actually working. This can take many forms. Pure numbers (more conversions, more sign ups, more people clicking), higher customer satisfaction, or fewer calls or support tickets are just a few examples.

Whatever “whys” you decide to tackle and how you measure your success, addressing internal or external problems through good design can go a long way to improve your reputation and reach.

A report by Motiv Strategies and the Design Management Institute examined how Apple, Starbucks, Target, and other top companies turned good design into 211 percent growth between 2005 to 2016.

Good design helps boost your business

Here’s something to be wary of: badly designed websites are often not read, trusted or visited for any length of time. That means that more than ever, design is playing a crucial role in making sure your business attracts and retains a customer base. John Maeda, design partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, says:

Top companies are leading with design. Others that aren’t willing to invest in design because they think it can’t be measured or tied to ROI will fall behind. Business as usual is no longer good enough. Mature industries that have focused on more, better and faster now need to adjust their thinking to include design as a key value differentiator.

The idea that design is fiscally beneficial has been proven time and again. In 2005, a group called The Design Council studied 63 portfolios of companies that traded on the FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) over a ten year period. Companies that put an emphasis on design outperformed the FTSE 100 index by 200%.

It’s becoming more difficult to get the attention of consumers when they are overwhelmed with choice. Tellingly, Adobe’s 2015 report on the State of Content emphasizes that with 15 minutes to consume content, 66% would prefer to view something beautifully designed vs. simple and plain.

Want to stand out as a brand worth noticing? Beautiful and thoughtful design is the way to do it.

Design connects you to your customers

Great designs use color, layout, and smart font choice to connect to their consumer in meaningful, emotionally driven ways. Incorporating impactful, memorable, and emotional connection in the visual display of your brand is the best way to show the world who you are and what your brand stands for.

Your designs should support the principles you have built your company around, and strive to reach your customers’ hearts (rather than their wallets).

Create valuable, sustainable customer relationships by building your brand’s visual identity on the foundation of emotional connection. There’s no better way to secure consumer loyalty than by connecting you through your shared values, and a great design is the most effective way to illustrate them.

Ready to take the next step? Engage with crowdSPRING’s community of over 200,000 designers who can work with you to move your organization’s design to the next level for as little as $299.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Kevin Price, host of the Price of Business radio show.

Over the past nine years, crowdSPRING creatives have helped startups, businesses, agencies and non-profits around the world with professional logo design, web design, print design and company naming.

Kevin and I discussed crowdSPRING and ways that brick-and-mortar businesses (as well as online companies) can build successful brands by leveraging crowdsourcing.

Here’s the link to the audio interview (it’s a little over 16 minutes):

Marketing is the bridge between your product or service and your consumers.

Without marketing, products and services exist in a vacuum. According to Eric Samson, a marketer’s success is:

contingent on their ability to influence customer behaviors which makes doing marketing an exercise in consumer psychology.

Considering how important marketing is, businesses should be doing everything they can to improve their marketing strategy and techniques.

But where should you start?

Here are 7 fundamentals of marketing psychology that you can implement today to help your business succeed.

1. Emotion Trumps Intellect

One of the most valuable rules consumer behavior has taught us is that people respond better to emotional appeals than intellectual ones. Roger Dooley’s article “Emotional Ads Work Better” reveals that emotional ad campaigns perform nearly twice as well as ads with a rational focus.

It’s more persuasive to show consumers how a product or service can benefit their life in a meaningful way rather than showing them a list of features. Neuroanatomist, author, and public speaker Jill Bolte Taylor reflects,

We live in a world where we are taught from the start that we are thinking creatures that feel. The truth is, we are feeling creatures that think.

So, according to Jill Taylor, humans are feeling creatures first. But, why does how we feel impact marketing, sales and profit?

Antonio D’Amasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, asserts that emotion is an integral element of the decision-making process:

…emotion is a necessary ingredient to almost all decisions. When we are confronted with a decision, emotions from previous, related experiences affix values to the options we are considering. These emotions create preferences which lead to our decision.

When we understand that emotions inform our decisions through their linked associations, it becomes easier to see how you can use this information when planning your marketing strategy. While every consumer is unique and each has a unique set of emotional associations, we can nonetheless make certain generalizations.

For example, most people like to feel positive emotions like happiness, connection, and pride. Most people dislike sadness, loss, fear or regret. So, linking your product with positive feelings or showing how it can eliminate negative emotions is a compelling sales tool.

One good example is when companies use taglines or slogans. Positive taglines tend to perform better than negative ones.

Pro Tip

Start by doing your research. What associations will create positive emotions for your demographic audience? Conversely, what do they dislike or fear?

Then, build a campaign that helps your unique audience envision how your product or service will directly benefit their life on an emotional level. Create positive associations with your product by linking it to things your audience will like… or by showing how the product can eliminate things they don’t.

2. Me, Too! The Power of Conformity

In 1951 Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, designed a study testing whether a lone subject would, when questioned, give the obviously correct answer if they were surrounded by subjects giving an obviously wrong answer. The study revealed that 37 of 50 subjects conformed to the larger group and gave the obviously incorrect answer. Asch later reflected,

The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black.

This concept is called Social Proof. In essence, it means that people look for reassurance and behavioral cues from those around them. The logic goes something like this, “If everyone else likes it, maybe I’ll like it, too.”

It’s well known that such behavior is common among people. In fact, T.H. Morgan and K. Laland’s study “The Biological Bases of Conformity” suggests that conformist behavior in humans has its basis in our biology. They report that:

Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information and recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies that facilitate effective copying and decision making….early findings imply that humans may possess specific cognitive adaptations for effective social learning.

As Asch, Morgan and Laland point out, conformity is a powerful motivator. Since this drive to conform has been shown to be so deeply pervasive, it stands to reason that it can be a reliable tool for persuading consumers. As a marketer, you can use consumers’ desire to be included to affect their decision-making process.

Pro Tip

Create a social group to which consumers will want to belong. You can do this on a social network like Facebook or Twitter, or even offline, depending on the products and services your business sells.

Gather and display positive testimonials to create a social group of happy customers. Testimonials from real-live people inspire trust in new customers; as well as the desire to join the ranks of those who have benefitted happily from your product or service before them.

A good example of this is zealous advocates for Apple products. Apple takes great care to create phenomenal products and makes sure that the buying and unboxing experience matches the quality of the products. As a result, people who buy Apple products tend to be happy customers and zealously advocate to others.

3. Reciprocity: One Good Turn Inspires Another

Have you ever been caught off guard (and quietly dismayed) by a surprise gift at Christmas when you haven’t gotten that person a gift in return? We’ve all been there. And I’m betting I’m not the only one who hates that low feeling when you have to confess, “But, I didn’t get you anything…”

That discomfort is due to the principle of “reciprocity”.

Reciprocity is the idea that we want to do nice things in return when people do nice things for us. Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, tells us that even the simplest gesture can trigger our desire to reciprocate.

He reports that when a server in a restaurant brings a mint along with the bill that the resulting tips increase by 3.3%. But, if a server brings two mints, tips jump significantly to around 20% above their usual tip rate.

Dr. Cialdini is not the only one to note this phenomenon. In 1974 a sociologist from Brigham Young University, Philip Kunz, sent roughly 600 Christmas cards to folks he had never met. To his surprise and delight, roughly 200 strangers wrote back. Cialdini explains,

We are obligated to give back to others, the form of behavior that they have first given to us. Essentially thou shall not take without giving in return.

According to Cialdini, all cultures embrace this law of reciprocation. If cultures all over the globe ascribe to this social imperative, that implies a wide audience of consumers who may be affected by this technique.

So, how can you make reciprocity work for you?

Pro Tip

Offer your customers something small, thoughtful and free that is not contingent on purchase. Charitable organizations have already mastered this technique. They will frequently send a calendar, mailing labels or stationary to encourage donations. For more about using promotional products in your business, read “3 Ways to Make Promotional Products Work In the Digital Age“.

Be creative with your gifts and make sure that they are an item that will be of use to your demographic.

4. Priming and Foot-in-Door

NY University professors Bargh, Chen and Burrows conducted a study in 1994 asking their students to decode sentences from a random scrambling of words; and then to touch base with a nearby researcher when the task was complete. The words could create a wide variety of sentences depending on how the students chose to order them.

The resulting unscrambled sentences displayed varying degrees of rudeness, neutrality and politeness. The most fascinating part of the study is that the tone of the sentences the students uncoded predicted how each student would then interact with the researcher. Polite sentences yielded a polite interaction, while ruder sentences lead to more aggressive interrupting behavior.

This study showed a direct correlation between a primed frame of mind and a resulting action.

Priming is the process of presenting someone with a word, image (or sentence) that prepares them to be more receptive to a particular point of view. This study showed that priming can influence action as well as thought.

Similarly, it is possible to prime someone to say “Yes.” This specific form of priming is often called the “Foot-in-Door” method.

Don’t let the pushy visual of a foot blocking your door fool you. Foot-in-Door technique can be executed respectfully and with subtlety.

But, what is it?

Foot-in-Door is the technique of priming consumers with small asks (such as signing up for a free e-letter) to prepare them to be more receptive to larger asks (like buying a subscription to a paid newsletter). Neil Patel of Forbes sums it up this way,

The principle is this: Start by asking someone for something small. If they comply with your first small request, they will be more likely to respond to your next and bigger request.

Pro Tip

Prime your customers to say “Yes” by building a relationship of small asks early on. Forbes recommends requesting that consumers share comments on social media, read blog posts, attend free webinars or download an ebook as other useful examples of small asks that can prime consumers to say “Yes” later, when it counts.

Also, keep color in mind, as it has an important psychological impact on your messaging. Colors have certain associations that naturally lend themselves to priming.

5. Framing: The Art of Asking the Right Question

What would you say if I invited you to share a meal that is extremely low in nutritional value, but very high in calories and which may lead to poor health and weight gain?

I’m guessing you’d say no.

How about if I invited you to share my Chicken McNuggets- “They’re crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and fresh out of the fryer!” There’s a better chance that you’ll say yes to that one.

The fact is that those meals are one and the same. I just framed them differently. The Psychology Dictionary defines framing as:

the process of defining the context or issues that surround a problem or event in a way that serves to influence how the context or issues are seen and evaluated.

In other words, framing is the act of manipulating context to make consumers more receptive to your product or service. Our brains take in all outside information and then filter to determine which bits are important. This means that context is just as important to the decision-making process as your product or service itself.

The framing phenomenon was studied in the early 1980’s by Dr. Amos Tversky and Dr. Daniel Kahneman. Their studies showed that “…seemingly inconsequential changes in the formulation of choice problems [framing] caused significant shifts of preference.” They found this to be particularly true of decisions involving money.

What framing teaches us is that how you ask a question can determine how people will answer it. Tversky and Kahneman’s research revealed that 72% of people chose a positively framed option over 22% choosing the same option framed negatively. The research suggests that positively framed offers can increase sales.

Pro Tip

The simplest way to use framing to your advantage is to frame your product with a positive context. A more sophisticated application would be to create a positive framing context that appeals specifically to your audience.

Neuromarketing, a website devoted to studying neuroscience in marketing, suggests,

The way to maximize the impact of your marketing message is simple. Express the risk in negative terms, but present your solution using positive framing.

6. Mere Exposure and the Propinquity Effect

Mere Exposure Theory and the Propinquity Effect are both based on the same basic tenet- repetition creates familiarity and familiarity is good.

Mere Exposure Theory posits that the more people see something, the more they will like it.

I can personally attest to this. When wide-legged pants become popular in the late 1990’s I swore up and down that I’d never wear them. Of course, we all know that I eventually did.

And I was happy about it. But why did I wear them and why was I happy?

Apparently, the simple act of repeated exposure automatically triggers an increased positive association in our brains. ChangingMinds.org reports:

The more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more we will tend to like it….Things grow on us and we acquire tastes for things over time and repeated exposure.

Familiarity increases our positive reactions.

In 1976 Dr. Robert Zajonc conducted an experiment supporting this theory. Zajonc shared Chinese characters with subjects who did not speak Chinese. Though none of the characters had any meaning for the subjects to begin with, the subjects developed more positive reactions to the characters that they saw most frequently.

That’s it. He didn’t give the subjects ice cream when they saw those characters or remind them of how much they loved their great Aunt Meemaw. He just exposed the subjects to those characters most frequently.

The Propinquity Effect is a fancy name for a very simple, very similar phenomenon. The Propinquity Effect, simply put, states that people are most likely to become friends with the people they see most frequently.

Both mere exposure and propinquity can easily inform how you conduct your marketing.

Pro Tip

Keep your brand in front of your consumers. Regular advertisements and email communication breed familiarity and, as a result, positive associations.

You can take advantage of the Propinquity Effect by enlisting a spokesperson or character to represent your brand. Then strategically place advertisements or content with your new spokesperson in places (online and off) frequented by your potential customers.

But, remember… oversaturation can have a negative effect. Make your brand familiar- but not the houseguest who doesn’t know when to leave.

7. Scarcity: Act Now, They’re Going Fast!

How many times have you been compelled to buy because “There are only X left!”? Or, maybe you didn’t plan to buy a puppy that day. But, it was sooo cute and there were two other couples interested!

Scarcity is a strong motivator.

Ginny Mineo of Hubspot explains it beautifully:

This psychology principle goes back to the simple formula of supply and demand: The more rare the opportunity, content, or product is, the more valuable it is.

In fact, the perception of scarcity is enough to drive demand. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Behavior by Drs. Lee, Worchel and Adewole proves that an item doesn’t need to be genuinely scarce to reap the benefits.

Adewole, Worchel and Lee conducted an experiment offering female undergraduates cookies. The researchers presented the cookies (all of which were, in reality, the same) as being in either short or abundant supply. After having eaten the cookies, the subjects were asked to rate them.

The results were very telling. The cookies that were presented as scarce were rated more highly by the subjects than the exact same cookies that were said to be available in a more abundant supply. Furthermore, the cookies that were said to be scarce due to high demand were rated even more highly than the cookies that were said to be scarce due to an accident.

The perception of scarcity is clearly just as compelling as actual scarcity. But, the reason for scarcity appears to be important as well. Perhaps this is one reason why purportedly scarce products sometimes cause people to start fights. Remember the battles over the Furby, Nintendo Wii, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and many other such products?

Pro Tip

There are a number of ways to use the principle of scarcity to your advantage. Consider offering “limited editions” – the very definition of a scarce product. Maximize the impact by specifying the limited number of items available or by showing how few are remaining.

You can also create time-contingent scarcity by offering an early-bird sale available for a limited time or placing a countdown timer on your product page to motivate sales.

Since we’ve learned how useful repetition can be in affecting behavior, let’s revisit those 7 elements of marketing psychology just one more time:

1- Use emotional appeals over rational, logic-based ones.

2- Conformity is powerful. Create a social group to speak in favor of your product that others will want to join.

3- Giving your potential customers a small gift encourages the possibility that they’ll respond with a purchase.

4- Start with small, easy asks to increase the chance that consumers with say yes to bigger asks later.

5- Ask the right questions to motivate sales by framing your product or service with a positive context.

6- People like people and things that they see often enough to become familiar with. Keep your brand in front of consumers’ eyes.

7- If it’s rare, people want it. Create the impression of scarcity to drive sales.

Follow these 7 scientifically-backed techniques and you’ll see your marketing efforts thrive.

Ready to take the next step to help your business succeed? Engage with crowdSPRING’s community of over 200,000 designers who can work with you to move your organization’s design to the next level for as little as $299.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we recognize a gem submitted in this book cover project:

The challenge of this project was to create a book cover for a realistic fiction novel about two high school seniors who come together while having a very tough school year.

Let us start the slow clap for BesPAP. Check out more great work on BesPAP’s profile page.

Nicely done, BesPAP, nicely done!