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By Queenie Ormidale
The challenge with any business, let alone a home-based one, is to master the art of creating the best image before your market, so that they see what you stand for and what makes you different from the rest. These days, with competition high and major players in every industry taking a huge chunk of the business deals away from the little guys, its no longer enough to just say what you do and expect calls to come in. Public relations and marketing professionals, business consultants and coaches will all say the same thing: its all about branding. Branding not only your logo, but your entire business philosophy, physical presence and even yourself.
To stay on top of the ball with your image basics, and before you even need to think of hiring a branding expert (in case your budget is low), take these steps into consideration:
Your website:
Did you make it yourself? Unless youre a web developer or web designer, consider it garbage. Setting up a free blog or using Dreamweaver just doesnt cut it anymore. Dont trust your own design or web skills. Theres actually an art that goes into it so that audiences will be captured and convinced to buy from you. Your website is usually your markets first point of contact with you, so make it count!
The key to a good website that sells is to have an internet marketer direct the project with both a web developer and a graphic designer. That way all the proper elements will fall into place and you wont end up with a fancy site youll have to re-do because it doesnt function well or rank on search engines.
Your logo:
Branding is not only your logo, but your logo does say a lot about your company. Make sure you involve a graphic designer in the making of your logo and discuss what represents you as a company to help bring that vision out with imagery. Dont get too fancy with logos. The trick is to make sure they can be printed in black and white first. If they meet that standard, youre ready for colour.
Your address and location:
Using a P.O. Box is increasingly considered a pass way of handling mail. Many mail handling services now come inside professional office buildings which will give your company a good image for walk-bys and those that look you up on the Google map street view. Not only that, with a professional mail handling service, you can have labels printed on all your outgoing mail with your logo and address and packages are received by a human and stored securely.
If youre using a house address, beware. Soon youll find that meshing your business with your private life simply doesnt roll. Youll have people stopping by and eventually have a hard time meeting with the big deal makers who will be less than impressed by your kitchen table office.
Your office:
Ok, so youve taken care of the above, now youre convinced to use a real office and business address. If you dont need one full time, consider a part time office, often found under virtual office when searching online for such a service. You can rent offices and boardrooms by the hour or day when you need them and your clients and partners will never be able to tell youre not a full time tenant.
Your telephone answering:
If you do decide, however, to go full time with your office lease or rental, remember that answering the phone is going to be a major part of letting customers and business contacts get a hold of you. Having a receptionist on staff gives the impression of a larger company on the other end of the line, and one that is worth doing business with. Again, if you cant find it in your budget or common sense to hire a full time receptionist, you can get one that works just the same by using a virtual office telephone answering service. Yes, they come with human receptionists who answer in your company name, although they do the same for other companies all day. The great thing is that you only pay a fraction of the cost of getting your own receptionist.
Dont be fooled an automated answering machine is never as effective as a human call answering service. Hang ups will be more likely the automated way and people who leave messages can easily change their mind by the time you get back to them, because theyve found someone else who they could talk to right away. Always go the route that you yourself would want to be treated if you were shopping around for a service or product.
Following the above guidelines will set you on the right track to providing that professional image when you need it most. Never seem like you are too small for the deal its worth a lot to take care of the above matters.
About the Author: Queenie Ormidale works with Central Park Business Centre, which has been offering
Vancouver office space, administrative services and virtual offices
to businesses since 1986. You can republish this article without this last sentence so long as you credit the author with a link to their website at www.executivesuite.ca
Source:
isnare.com
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