Promotion Pack – Flyer

The flyer was designed using the colours of my logo, I also used white as the text to stand out from the background. I decided to make certain words bolder and leave the rest of the test in the regular font. Once I was happy with my overall design I decided to print them out to make sure they worked properly. Below you will see my analysis.

As you can see the general layout works really well and actually looks very professional but you can see the lighter font doesn’t work when it is smaller. This means I need to remove this, so instead I will use sizing of the font to differentiate from the different areas. Below is the second and final version of the flyer, there are a couple of things worth noting in this version though. Firstly the background colour looks more like a black, I think this is more to do with my home printer than the colour being wrong so I will test this using the professional college printers and decide from there if I need to change the colour. The only other ‘issue’ is that at the top you can see the logo on the other side of the paper, this won’t be an issue in the final stage as it will be printed on thicker paper therefore will not show up.

Below you can see the three different iterations of the flyer I would be sending as part of my promotional package. The oldest on the left has faint text and is made from flimsy paper, the next is made from slightly better paper and has adjustments to the the type to made it readable and then the final piece on the right is printed on card with a gloss which looks very professional.

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Marketing Items & Content Ideas

First item I will include takes design cues from my letterhead research, in general I want to keep in line with my luxurious branding feel so I will create this to hold everything I put inside it. Inside this envelope, I will have a total of three different item. Number one will be similar to the Natwest item for promoting their mobile banking app, It will be shaped like an iPhone, the screen will feature an internet browser with search of a web designer and then the link to akbdesign at the top. On the second page it will be captioned “What I do” and then list with icons the specific things I actually do. These will be:

SEO

Logo Design

Web Design

Marketing

Video Production

Social Media

3rd page – Quote

“AS A WEB DESIGNER, I KNOW THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS IS IN THE INTERNET. I DREAM BIG, AND MOTIVATED DREAMERS MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. I CAN MAKE THINGS HAPPEN FOR YOUR BUSINESS.”

4th page – Contact me

Twitter handle

blog address

The second item I will create is aiming to close the sale, in effect convince the viewer to give their hard earned cash to me in exchange for my services, for this I will use a double sided A6 sized piece of paper. One one side it will be captioned “Am I right for you?” and then have sales lingo such as, “You need a quality service provided by multi-skilled designer who can capture your business visually and use current trends to present it to your clients in the best possible light. You want him to do all this whilst being affordable, friendly and professional with an edge to his the rest of his competitors”. On the second side I will have client comments and ratings of the service I have  provided them in the past.

The final piece with be credit card style item which has a discount for them off the services provided they use it within as certain amount of time, this will make them think they have got a quality service, with a discount and then potentially be pressured into taking the service before they  would have done otherwise.

Brainstorming

As you can see from my brainstorm there are a few areas in which I need to cover in initial research before I can start considering the technical requirements. A lot of the elements in the brainstorm I have already covered in my blog such as typography.

Something I found interesting was the flow of content, from a sales background I recognise there five major steps to closing a sale with a customer. I understand that it is different on the web as you can’t hear what they’re saying and you can’t talk to them, but you can still apply the same principles. The five steps to closing a sale are:

1 – Making sure you understand your customers needs, and making your service relevant to them. This is done by understanding your target audience which I have already done in my research.

2 – Come across as confident and trustworthy, as they will only put trust in you if you trust in yourself. In normal situations you would build rapport with the customer so that you become friendly and someone they can trust. As I can’t do this through the web, I will have to use other resources that available such as using colour, typography, content and design to create such an experience.

3 – Pitch your service/product to the customer, and as we don’t know anything about the specific customer I have to be very broad in how we approach this. This has to relate to everything single customer, essentially we are pitching blind, with umbrella phrases and statements that will relate to vast amount of people visit the site.

4 – Objection handling is usually where the customer would present their reasons for not wanting the service/product and you turn round and use hard facts to win them around. Again this is not possible on the web, so we have to consider alternative methods such as a FAQ page which is easily relatable and maybe a testimonial page.

5 – Closing the sale is the most important of all steps but also relies on the previous steps being completed properly. You sum up all relevant information, relate to the customer with the information you know about them all while making them feel like your doing them a favour, they are getting something valuable.

Using this approach you could turn a casual visit to the site into a lead for the company, and potentially a sale. Once completing all five steps you provide the customer with the telephone number so they can call the company.

So, explaining how the flow of the page works, I also need to work out the actual content of the site. Firstly the most important thing is the homepage with the contact detail, secondly the portfolio of work for the customer to be able to look at and see the quality of the service provided, this should have rollover images with before and after shots with feedback from the customer. Lastly there should be an about us page for the customer to read a bit about the company so they can decide themselves if they like the sound of the company. The about page should contain details the company, how many staff they employ, what year they were founded, their values and vision.

In line with certain sales techniques that I am aware of from a previous job, offering a guaranteed better rate than any competition is a good way to win over customers, also offering free incentives will mean the customer will feel like they are getting a better service.

Design elements that I need to consider are colours and typography, I need to make sure they are relevant to the client needs and appeal to it’s audience.

WEBSITE ANALYSIS 2 – APPLE.COM

The Apple website (http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/) has a great design overall but I am specifically looking at the iPhone 6 page for the design they have implemented.The homepage you are greeted with when you select the iPhone part of Apple’s overall site is this:

The product site has been split into ten individual sections focusing on design, display, technology, camera, connectivity, Touch ID (fingerprint scanner), Apple Pay (payment system), iOS8 (operating system), accessories and tech specifications. This can all be accessed the ‘explore’ button on the top right:

The page is full of subtle gradients for backgrounds to add contrast, smooth animations to enhance the user experience.

Looking at view of the site as a whole, you can see how perfectly structured the site is. The site again takes advantage of the negative space and fills it with visuals of the phone complimented by a small amount of text describing why the new phone is better. It tells the user what it needs to know pro be sold the phone and nothing else. If you break down the different sections of the page you find it is all sales talk. I have drawn on the image below to help break this down. The thing to bear in mind is that this page is to show the updates from the iPhone 5S, also note that seven of the nine sections have links to allow you to learn more in depth about that aspect of the phone.

1 –  Is an introduction to the phone itself,  Basically summing up the updates for the entire phone. This can be taken literally, the paragraph is

“iPhone 6 isn’t simply BIGGER — it’s better in every way. LARGER, yet dramatically THINNER. More powerful, but remarkably power efficient. With a smooth metal surface that seamlessly meets the new RETINA HD DISPLAY. It’s one continuous form where HARDWARE and SOFTWARE function in perfect unison, creating a new generation of iPhone that’s better by any measure.”.

I have capitalised the keywords to i will reference in the other points.

2 – “BIGGER/LARGER” are the keywords to be taken from section one. It describes the sizes and the names of the two products. This keeps the text to a very minimum, there is animation implemented into the page so that as scroll down the phones rise up.

3 – “THINNER” is the keyword to be taken from section two. This section describes the thickness of the devices and has a pitch to sell it to the customer.

4 – These are visuals of the device, again showing the size, thin design and quality of the build.

5 – “RETINA HD DISPLAY” is the keyword to be taken from section five. Again given precise details of the device in the terms of screen resolution. Aside from the details of this section, this is only the third image to contain a block of text, this is how Apple takes full advantage the negative space, making the content much more readable.

6 – “HARDWARE” is the keyword to be taken from section six, while describing the camera being better also giving you a visual of the product.

7 – “HARDWARE” is the keyword to be from section seven, describing how this model of the iPhone is the fastest yet and has the most LTE bands compared to the other smartphones.

8 – “SOFTWARE” is the keyword to be taken from section eight. This section causes further intrigue into the features of the iPhone, allowing the customer experience to transition flawlessly.

9 – Finally the last section is simply to inform and encourage the user to buy the iPhone. Giving them multiple options on how to do so.