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The Importance of Loyalty in Modern Marketing

Even when customers find a product that meets their needs, they may still be interested in trying out and experimenting with other brands. What can your business do to make them stay?

What is Brand Loyalty?

Simply put, customers who are loyal to a brand will continue purchasing from the business and will likely try new products from the brand. Customers who are loyal to certain brands will be more likely to leave positive reviews, to encourage others to try the brand, and to be an invaluable word-of-mouth brand ambassador. Customers who attach positive experiences to a product or brand are devoted and unlikely to be swayed by your competition’s marketing efforts. In the day and age where customers have endless choices, it is priceless for businesses to have customers who repeatedly choose their brand over others, regardless of convenience and price.

Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty

Though closely related, there are key differences between brand loyalty and customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is the commitment from customers to continue purchasing from the business based on the value and money-saving benefits received from their purchases. Customer loyalty is largely dependent on price, money benefits, and rewards as opposed to positive experiences and relationships.

It is chiefly based upon value and customer spending power; the more value the customer receives, the more they will shop with your brand. As discussed in the last section, brand loyalty is built upon positive experiences and positive perceptions of the brand. These customers will return again and again because they value the positive experiences and the subsequent gains from their relationship with the brand. Brand loyalty is based upon emotion while customer loyalty is based upon tangible or quantifiable value.

However, both brand loyalty and customer loyalty can cause customers to eschew other brands and stick by yours. Brand loyalty and customer loyalty are equally important. As a result, businesses should aim to target both in their marketing strategy. Why?

The Power of Loyalty

Businesses are often unsure whether they should invest more in customer retention or more in new customer acquisition. Which is better for their business? Far too often, businesses choose to focus on attracting new customers rather than nurturing their relationship with existing ones. It is completely understandable for businesses to want to grow their customer base. However, by focusing all their attention on new customers, they lose the opportunity to build lasting loyalty—which sustains brands for a lifetime.

At its core, a powerful brand is built upon loyalty. Loyalty builds a solid foundation for long-term, sustainable success. Businesses with loyal customers can withstand just about anything. Not only do they continue their operations, but they continue to grow and thrive. Brand loyalty and customer loyalty retain current customers, create lifetime customers, increase the lifetime value of each customer, and turn customers into invaluable brand advocates. Loyal customers will invariably attract new customers as they spread positive word-of-mouth and social media reviews of your products and services, majorly reducing marketing costs and giving your business more leads.

How is Your Business Building Loyalty?

Loyalty isn’t easy to come by, and it can easily evaporate if you aren’t nurturing customer relationships. What is your business doing to build meaningful relationships with customers?

Are you ready to learn ways you can invest in your customers? Check in with Sun Sign Designs next week as we continue exploring loyalty and how businesses can build it.

Just like other marketing efforts, there isn’t a one-shoe-fits-all solution. If you’re ready to craft a unique marketing strategy that builds loyalty while fitting your business’s needs and goals, contact Sun Sign Designs for a consultation. We love solving difficult marketing challenges.

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Inventory Efficiencies Businesses Need to Grow

Inventory management can make or break a business. It is much more than simply having the right products and maintaining accurate stock counts—it is having the right products at the right time in the right amount. For product-based business owners, this is a difficult tightrope to walk. Not having enough stock on hand runs the risk of losing sales while having too much stock ties up funds and can cause business owners to lose money.

There is no shortage of challenges when it comes to inventory management, but business owners introduce more problems when they manually manage it. Manual stock counts and spreadsheets may work in the early days, but as sale volumes and inventory increase, it becomes unfeasible for a business’s long-term growth and success.

Manual inventory management not only takes immense time and effort, it is also prone to error, slow to update, and doesn’t give business owners analysis on performance. Even the smallest mistakes or misjudgments cost valuable time and money when it comes to inventory.

What is the solution for business owners who need to unlock more time and money to invest in their business?

Automated inventory management software can help businesses majorly optimize and streamline their entire inventory process and easily integrate into their accounting software.  Not only do businesses benefit in terms of time and money saved, there are now opportunities to improve every phase of your inventory’s lifecycle.

Keep Accurate, Real-Time Counts

Inventory is constantly changing. Throughout each day, there are sales, returns, exchanges, and damages to log. Keeping accurate counts of all your stock and balancing orders with returns can quickly become time-consuming and error-prone with spreadsheets. Irregular inventory management and human error leads businesses to lose track of the units they have. This can result in ordering too much or too little, which are both costly in their own ways.

Using an automated inventory system keeps accurate counts of your stock for you, updates your inventory as soon as orders are placed, and notifies you when you need more. Business owners can quickly see what products they are running low on, see what’s been selling well, and place orders before they run out. As a result, businesses can detect problems and opportunities early on.

Prevent Excess Stock and Dead Stock

No business wants to see their products languishing and collecting dust on their shelves. Automated inventory management alerts businesses to low-turn stock early on and gives them the best chance to sell it before the product becomes outdated or expires. For example, businesses can employ sale strategies, such as special promotions, and give the product extra marketing attention to turn the stock without incurring a loss. This improves the lifecycle of every product, saves money, prevents waste, and avoids costly cuts into profit margins.

Avoid Missed Opportunities

Nothing hurts more than missing a profitable opportunity, especially for growing businesses. A business finding itself in a stockout situation hurts for many reasons. Not only do they lose valuable revenue, they also risk backorders, canceled orders, customer dissatisfaction, and their customers turning to competition. Maybe the business missed a reordering point or didn’t realize how fast units were turning over. Either way, a simple mistake can lead to a domino effect of problems and loss. Automated inventory management helps business owners stay on the pulse of consumer demand and aware of popular products that need to be reordered.

Forecast and Anticipate Needs

Demand forecasting is an important part of successful inventory management. What do your customers want and when do they want it? Sales statistics and analytics allow businesses to make more data-driven decisions. With easy and quick access to reporting and metrics, businesses can anticipate customer needs, forecast their sales trends, and make strategic decisions that give them an invaluable competitive edge.

These actionable insights are priceless for growing businesses. Knowing the seasonality of your products and leveraging the customer trends unique to your business ensures that your investment pay off.

Improve Cash Flow

Cash flow is especially important for small-to-medium-sized businesses and emerging businesses. Having cash tied up and sunk in dead stock can, unfortunately, be the beginning of the end. An optimized inventory management system ensures working capital is not restricted, so these businesses can continue to keep up with costs and grow.

Plan and Be Ready for Growth

Spread thin by spreadsheets? Spreadsheets are outdated and will not be able to handle the demand and complexity of your inventory management. Plan and be ready for your business’s growth. Contact Sun Sign Designs to discuss and find an automated inventory management software that will work best for your business.

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Improving Your Business with Automated Accounting

Business owners know all too well how a pile up of back office work can provide serious setbacks for them. Instead of getting to focus on core business activities, they are forced to pause and complete all the necessary operational work that still exists behind the scenes.

Accounting and bookkeeping activities are fundamental to every e-commerce business, but business owners manually managing them can quickly become frustrated, especially as their business grows and their financial data becomes increasingly more complex. While this work is vital on an operational level, there is a problem if business owners find it is consuming all of their time.

From basic invoicing, billing, and expense sheets to more complex financial analysis, reporting, and tax prep—there are many facets to accounting that need to be consistently and meticulously updated daily, weekly, and monthly. What’s the solution for business owners who want to unlock more time to invest in their business?

Using an automated accounting software allows all financial processing to proceed faster and become less demanding to the business owner. Automation unlocks valuable time for business owners to focus on new projects, products, or service offerings they have long put on the back burner due to the toll of administrative work. Let’s look at the major ways automated accounting can improve every business.

Major Time Savings

Perhaps the greatest benefit of automated accounting for business owners is the time saved. Automation eliminates those time-consuming, repetitive bookkeeping tasks, such as recording transactions, sending invoices, creating detailed spreadsheets, managing and storing important financial documents, and more. These tasks are critical to the success of every business but become low-value in comparison to the work that advances a business’s mission and growth.

As a result, these business owners have much more time to focus on high-value activities, such as meeting with clients, researching and developing new products or services, or creating content that engages their audience.

Increased Productivity and Efficiency

Accounting tasks that may have previously taken business owners hours, days, or weeks to complete can now be done for them to save considerable time. Time-consuming but necessary activities like month-end reporting or expense reporting can now be expedited with automation. With more time freed up to focus on core business tasks, owners can optimize their workflow. Instead of putting off new projects to complete administrative accounting tasks, business owners can now prioritize and actually accomplish the creative projects that add value to their business.

More Accurate Records

Completing accounting work manually opens the door to human error, which can cause timely and costly mistakes. These mistakes can lead to hours of work pouring over finances and correcting the errors, which can result in lost revenue or even fines. Automated accounting eliminates the potential for human error. A computerized system inherently means fewer mistakes and more reliable bookkeeping, so business owners can rest easy.

Unlock New Data and Valuable Insights

Financial data fuels the modern business, but it can be increasingly difficult to unlock, especially when financial analysis and interpretation isn’t your expertise. However, knowing this data is essential to understand what is the driving force of your business’s success or what is the obstacle that is blocking progress.

Automated accounting helps business owners unlock these answers quickly and easily. There is more data to review and understand, which gives business owners more context to learn and grow. Perhaps most importantly, it saves business owners the headache of compiling data and analyzing it themselves. Instead, the data, numbers, and financial insights are readily available. Business owners then have more time to formulate strategies and put them into action.

Your Business is Ready to Benefit from Automated Accounting

Manual accounting and bookkeeping is only putting more work on your plate and slowing down your productivity. Harnessing automation in your accounting and bookkeeping lifecycles will save your business valuable time and give you the opportunity to move forward with creative projects that will grow your business. Are you interested in automation and what it can do for your business? Contact Sun Sign Designs today.

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Efficiencies Every Nonprofit Needs

Nonprofits are made up of passionate, dedicated people who want to make a difference in the world. These organizations have big goals to achieve and complex problems to solve, but they often work with a limited pool of resources. The staff of these incredible organizations knows all too well how repetitive manual tasks can take time and effort away from mission-driven activities.

Instead of devoting time to high-value, mission-critical work, staff members, volunteers, and even executive directors are forced to wear many different hats and complete time-consuming, repetitive tasks, such as performing data entry, sending invoices, sending donor emails or newsletters, requesting information for forms, and more.

How can nonprofit organizations get more time back for mission-focused work while still completing these necessary tasks? Many nonprofits are now turning toward automation to streamline routine tasks and focus on what really matters for their nonprofit: their service offerings and their relationships with clients, customers, donors, and the community.

Automation tools increase the resources available for a nonprofit’s core mission. As a result, nonprofit staff members are supported and empowered to complete higher value activities, such as improving current service offerings, developing new products or services, or meeting with potential clients, customers, donors, or community leaders.

Prospect List Management

Nonprofits depend on their list of donors and volunteers. In a nonprofit’s early days, managing all the information about contacts, client lists, and customers isn’t too difficult. But as the organization continues to grow and acquire more donors, volunteers, and clients—it can get increasingly chaotic and confusing to manage. Automated list management can save nonprofits from major headaches by organizing all of this for them. In addition, these automated systems can also filter through customer interactions to find quality leads the nonprofit should spend time on.

Form Management

If there is one thing all nonprofits are familiar with, it is forms! Whether it is an application for membership, volunteering, or participating on the board, it will most likely require some tedious data entry. Using an automation tool that specializes in data entry can smooth the entire management process, reduce manual error, and save staff members valuable time.

Email and Marketing Campaigns

With automated email marketing, nonprofits can prearrange settings that trigger email communications after a certain action is completed on the part of a donor or customer. For example, if someone signs up for your nonprofit’s newsletter, they may automatically receive a welcome email. Or, if a customer leaves an item in their cart, they will get a reminder email. In addition, nonprofits can break their audience into segments and customize their communications, send out different content based on each subscriber’s preferences. Automation means much less time spent on formatting emails and more time spent on improving your nonprofit’s service offerings or meeting with clients.

Personalized Communications

Receiving a birthday message or a special thank-you after making a donation is an easy way to make donors and members feel special. However, without an automation tool, this is a task that quickly becomes unmanageable and time-consuming. Using a software that does this for you can help your organization make thoughtful personal connections with your donor base and community without detracting from your core mission.

Social Media Scheduling

Nonprofit organizations can save major time with automation tools that schedule their social media posts and automatically deploy them. This hands-off approach allows nonprofits to curate all the appropriate content in advance, schedule it out for the right times, and sit back and relax. As a result, nonprofits do not have to manually post the same content across all of their social media channels, which can save them up to 6 hours per week! Scheduling posts on service offerings, special announcements, or industry news means nonprofits can stay in continuous conversation with their audience and stay in the forefront of their mind.

Data and Analytics

Analytic tools are essential to measure the success of communications and campaigns. With automated analytics, nonprofits can obtain fast and accurate reporting on the impact of these communications. These analytics provide crucial guidance on what is and isn’t working for the organization. Data and analytics tools allow nonprofits to easily manage their database, build relationships with members, non-members, and donors based on the data collected, and ensure each relationship is being approached in the right way.

Platform Management

Is your nonprofit ready to benefit from automation but concerned by the prospect of managing these tools? We understand. With so many new ways to engage your audience, it can be overwhelming. But your nonprofit doesn’t have to do it alone. Sun Sign Designs personally consults and manages these automation platforms for your nonprofit, so you can focus on the work that matters.

Is Your Nonprofit Ready Benefit from Automation?

Running a nonprofit organization requires a lot of manual work, but implementing digital tools that automate this manual work is what takes the excess work off your staff’s plate. Automation tools improve nonprofit efficiency and help organizations overcome resources barriers. As a result, your nonprofit can focus on mission-related activities and explore meaningful avenues of growth.

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Why Your Business Should Never Stop Marketing

Having a consistent marketing strategy in place is essential to the success of every business. Industry leaders with unforgettable brand names, tag lines, and products know the importance of sustained, ongoing marketing.

Though their sales would likely continue even if they halted their marketing, these businesses know they should never stop because it helps them maintain their growth, retain brand presence, reach new markets, and continue as a leader in their industry.

Marketing is not a one-time solution only used to fix problems or achieve a specific goal—especially for small to medium-sized businesses. Businesses that abruptly halt their marketing efforts once they accomplish their objective will immediately lose momentum.

Don’t Let Your Business Lose its Pulse

Without regular marketing engagement, a business’s number of new leads, customers, and clients will plunge. Suddenly, the business finds itself back to square one. Why? Because without sustained, ongoing engagement, a business basically ceases to exist.

Once You Lose Momentum, It’s Hard to Catch Up

Businesses that halt email campaigns, social media posts, or content creation become invisible in the eyes of their current customers and potential customers. When customer acquisition and new cash flows stop, businesses will find themselves going into crisis mode and scrambling to implement effective marketing strategies that reopen customer communication.

Momentum is hard to gain in the first place. By consistently marketing, businesses won’t put themselves in the stressful position of trying to quickly build it all back.

Even When You Accomplish Your Goals, Keep Moving Forward

Consistent marketing not only keeps your business visible, relevant, and growing—it also gives your business the space it needs to experiment and innovate. If a business has a steady marketing strategy that maintains their current growth, they have the opportunity to test out new marketing techniques that may or may not work for their audience. Instead of focusing on making ends meet, businesses can securely conduct marketing trials to see what works best for their customer base and to see what can reach new audiences. Businesses that consistently market better learn their marketplace, discover what works best, and build strong brands that are continually optimizing.

Savvy business owners know marketing is ongoing and always changing. Most importantly, they know it must be sustained.

Does your business need help navigating its marketing strategy?

Marketing strategies that work at one point for a business may not work later on, especially when managing new growth. Contact Sun Sign Designs to set up a consultation and discuss marketing strategies that will keep your business moving forward.

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Sun Sign Designs Launches MS Affordable Home’s New Website

MS Affordable Home provides a wide variety of special-needs populations with all-inclusive, affordable housing. They provide clean, safe, and accessible group homes and residential care homes to demographics in need of housing, such as veterans, seniors, low-income individuals, those seeking sobriety, and disabled or special needs individuals.

MS Affordable Home turned to Sun Sign Designs to create a beautifully designed website that speaks to their mission, backs their professionalism and credibility, and increases their visibility to their target demographics.

MS Affordable Home can’t advance their mission assisting those in need of accessible living environments without the ability to be found online. Developing MS Affordable Home’s SEO footprint was an essential element to helping them find local leads.

Since quality content is the cornerstone of relevant traffic, Sun Sign Designs performed extensive research in the affordable housing industry to write the keyword-rich homepage copy, articles, and resource materials needed to appeal to in-need demographics and convert leads.

As a result, health care providers or family members searching for housing for a patient or loved one in need can connect to MS Affordable Home’s solutions through a variety of content access points. This high-value, foundational content will be invaluable to increasing website traffic and local awareness of their services.

In addition to creating the foundational, cornerstone content needed to reach their audience, Sun Sign Designs built an aesthetically-pleasing, clutter-free website design that is easy to navigate, learn about their services, and fill out their housing application. Sun Sign Designs also wanted to visually emphasize MS Affordable Home’s sincere desire to support in-need demographics in their area. The imagery Sun Sign Designs carefully selected shows why it is important to seek support for special-needs individuals—because everyone deserves a place to feel safe, comfortable, and cared for.

Please visit MS Affordable Home’s new website at https://msaffordablehome.com/ to view their new design, imagery, and content. Let us know what you think!

 

Does your business need quality, foundational content to strengthen your SEO strategy? Would your business benefit from relevant traffic and increased local awareness? At Sun Sign Designs, we don’t just implement generic SEO tactics. We work with you one-on-one to develop a successful SEO strategy that is unique to your business. Contact us now to learn more.

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Sun Sign Designs Launches RVR Horse Rescue’s New Website

RVR Horse Rescue is a nationally-accredited, non-profit horse rescue facility located in Plant City, Florida. They are dedicated to saving and rehabilitating horses that have suffered from neglect, abuse, or injury. RVR believes every horse’s life is valuable and worth fighting for. Their top priority is healing horses in both body and spirit so they can live full, happy lives in the forever homes found through RVR’s adoption program.

RVR is run entirely by generous volunteers and relies on donations to help the horses in need. To effectively convey their mission and story to others in the community, RVR recruited Sun Sign Designs to redesign their entire website.

Sun Sign Designs knows every organization can benefit from custom photography. With only seconds to capture people’s attention, specialized images can really help non-profit organizations shine and stand out to their audience. Sun Sign Designs went on-location for RVR’s custom photography shoot and captured beautiful images of the facility’s horses and volunteers.

These custom photos empower non-profits to tell their story without saying a word. This type of visual storytelling successfully captures the essence of the organization’s mission and message. Custom photography allows people to get a close-up look and accurate depiction of an organization, which boosts their authenticity. In addition, when potential volunteers or donators are able to view team members as well as the horses on-site, they are able to put a face to a name and form personal connections with the organization.

While website visitors are likely to scroll past huge chunks of copy, creative, custom imagery will hook and anchor them. The visuals convey enough necessary information to get them interested in reading some copy and further exploring the site.

With Sun Sign Designs’ custom photography shoot, RVR is able to communicate the suffering that abused horses have faced as well as the triumph of their healing and recovery. The updated website design condenses previous copy and refocuses RVR’s non-profit mission and services with updated images and a refreshed design.

Visit RVR Horse Rescue’s beautiful new website at https://rvrhorserescue.org and let us know what you think!

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How the Right Label Design Can Transform Your Product

It’s the thing that can make us halt and do double-takes as we hurry through store aisles. It’s what determines if we put a product in our carts or back on the shelf.

Great label designs catch consumer attention, spike their curiosity enough to stop, and ultimately help them say yes to a product. Essentially, it can make or break a product’s success, regardless of the product’s quality or effectiveness. Strong label designs that speak to your brand identity are critical for getting sales and keeping your business running.

Shopping has dramatically changed over the years. In our world of chronic busyness, today’s shoppers are increasingly short on time and favor a grab-and-go mentality. They do not spend long periods mulling over different products in store aisles.  As a result, brands only have a small window of opportunity to capture their customers’ attention and influence their buying decisions.

It’s no secret that consumer purchasing decisions are often based on a product’s appearance. Though consumers will usually look out for familiar brand names, strong product designs have the ability to powerfully sway and influence buying decisions.

Capture Consumer Attention and Interest

Shapes, colors, textures, font choices, and other design aspects can ensnare even the busiest shopper’s attention—though, not for long. Once the design has captured the consumer’s attention and interest long enough for them to stop and inspect the product, the label has only mere seconds to influence their purchase decision.  Finding the right design for your product is critical. Some brands make the mistake that they need loud, busy designs in order to capture consumer attention, becoming a blinking sign of sorts. However, too much going on can turn a customer off. Sometimes in a sea of color, simplicity and minimalism is what stands out. Finding the correct balance in your product design is essential to securing that first look.

Bring Your Brand Identity to Life

Brand identity is comprised of a business’s core values and beliefs. A brand’s label should encapsulate this brand message and effectively convey it to the consumer through design. As a result, a product label can become a cohesive part of a brand’s identity and accurately tell a brand’s story. If the consumer identifies with those values and beliefs, they will be able to build a common connection and rapport with your brand. This is essential to building the beginnings of brand loyalty.

Evoke an Emotional Experience and Control the Conversation

Label designs have the opportunity to engage the consumer and build a memorable connection like no other aspect of the product. Label design is a pivotal opportunity for brands to have conversations with their consumers. What is your label design telling and showing them? Brand’s are in the driver’s seat here—where is your label design subconsciously taking the consumer?

Something as simple as color choice has the ability to evoke a subconscious emotional response that appeals to the consumer, whether they are aware of it or not. When consumers feel emotionally engaged, they act. Strong label designs should choose a deliberate message or emotion to attract their target audience and prompt them to buy their product.

Maintain Consistency

With label design, consistency is key. As your brand builds a portfolio of products, maintaining consistent designs across all the products is the foundation to building a cohesive brand identity. Using a consistent palette of colors, graphics, and other design elements across all labels ensures that consumers can immediately recognize your brand. Maintaining consistency in these design elements not only differentiates your product from other brands, but it builds product credibility, consumer recognition, and member loyalty.

 

It is never a bad idea for brands to reconsider and refresh their product packaging and label design. Label design is a customer’s first encounter with your brand, and it determines if they will take a chance on your product. Whether it’s a new product launch or a refresh of a current product, label design needs to effectively capture attention and convey your brand identity.

That’s why Sun Sign Designs refreshed Fawn Organics’ Laundry Detergent and other cleaning products label design. Instead of the previous bright blue label, Sun Sign Designs opted for a clean, minimalist design that is on-trend for organic products and that speaks to Fawn Organics’ core values of toxin-free products and environmental sustainability. The brown label evokes thoughts of biodegradability and instigates environmental awareness in the consumer, effectively communicating their brand identity.

Check out Fawn Organics’ new label designs at https://fawnorganics.com/ and let us know what you think!

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Why is Brand Storytelling So Important?

Storytelling has been an innate part of the human experience since the beginning of time. Stories have long captivated us and left lasting impressions. Communication and stories are a basic part of who we—humans are driven to tell stories and to listen to them. It makes all the more sense that storytelling has evolved tremendously over time and still persists today not only for entertainment purposes but also in business marketing and brand building.

At its core, a brand is essentially the story of a business. Storytelling is a timeless way to emotionally engage audiences, create personal connections, and to overall expand engagement. Unlike any other marketing technique, storytelling invokes the power of human emotion and connection, creating a deep sense of trust and shared experience.

Brand storytelling is no longer just an option but a marketing must in a world where consumers are swamped in a sea of content. How can storytelling build your brand?

Stand Out and Be Remembered

A business could offer the best solutions, services, or products. However, if their marketing and communication feel impersonal, it will most likely leave a lackluster impression. Consumers are continually flooded with statistics and facts, and they are getting tired of the same old marketing experience time and time again. Strong storytelling will instantly distinguish your brand from the pack. It offers a refreshing and engaging perspective consumers will remember. Consumers don’t always remember the fine details of products and services, but they will always remember a good story and how it made them feel.

Build Authenticity and Emotional Connections

Nothing connects a business to their audience better than stories. Storytelling innately allows people to connect on a deeper level because it focuses on shared human experience. When people see authentic characters and real-life conflict, it is difficult not to form a personal connection. Characters and conflict an audience can truly relate to create memorable emotional connections. The most successful brand stories evoke positive emotions that resonate with the viewer. This type of evocative storytelling allows brands to mean something more to the audience beyond what they are selling, humanizing the brand.

Build Trust and Loyalty

Brands simply cannot grow without trust or loyalty. If an audience finds the characters, conflict, or resolutions to be disingenuous, chances are they will remember your brand but not for the right reasons. If the audience finds the people and struggles in your story to be authentic and perhaps even reflective of their own experience, they will immediately feel a deep personal connection to the brand. If an audience can rely on a brand for genuine portrayals of the human experience, they feel they can trust their entire brand. Building this trust and credibility through accurate storytelling is the beginning of building enduring loyalty and strong customer bases that will last a lifetime.

Build Long-Lasting Relationships and Endless Engagement

Great stories create deep bonds between the characters and the audience, ones people often visit again and again. The audience’s feeling that they have been through the same struggles allows the story resonate deeply with them. Even when a story ends, it still lives on through the audience. Stories are a timeless medium that allow endless engagement and interaction. The ability for the audience to place themselves within the story is what truly can make a story and brand last forever.

 

Do you have the creative tools needed to build a strong brand story? Contact Sun Sign Designs to learn more about our video, photography, custom animation, and graphic design services.

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How Can You Turn Website Speed into a Competitive Advantage?

You wouldn’t think something as small as page loading speeds would impact something as big as the success of driving forward your business’s mission—but it does.

When a user first decides to visit your website, the first thing they notice isn’t your colorful web design, clean layout, savvy content, interesting  products or services—it’s your page loading speed. And for better or for worse, the way they perceive the rest of your website and business will depend on this first impression.

Research has shown that the modern user expects websites to load in three seconds or less. In fact, some users will even leave before the three second mark. These studies show that, when forced to wait longer than three seconds, the users will leave the website and look elsewhere. As a result, slow page loading speeds are directly correlated to lower traffic and conversion rates.

Imagine this: someone visited your website with the intention of reading your content or purchasing purchase a product or service—but you lost them, not because your website was unappealing, but because it simply didn’t load fast enough. It’s a shame that slow page speeds are what prevent users from enjoying the creative web designs and content businesses work so hard to create for their customers.

Consequently, business owners do not have a second to lose. Here’s how fast page loading speeds can immediately secure a competitive advantage for your website and business:

Capture and Maintain Consumer Interest

As we noted above, it isn’t enough to simply spark consumer curiosity—you have to also maintain it! Creative web design and strategic marketing will do the heavy lifting to get the traffic to your website, but fast page loading speeds will be the secret edge that maintains and boosts it.

When pages load quickly on your website, users are not distracted by inconvenience and don’t become frustrated. Fast loading times lock in visitors to your website. They won’t have time to think about leaving when you have a website design and layout that makes users explore. As a result, they won’t leave your website and can form their opinion based on all the hard work that went into the website’s design, layout, copy, and offerings.

Create a Positive User Experience

Even if your web design and content are more engaging than your competition, it won’t matter if visitors won’t stay long enough to interact with it. Every visitor is a potential customer. When page loading speeds and general performance are slow and clunky, it is an immediate turn off to the modern internet user.

You can put all your time, money, and energy into creating the perfect, most seamless user experience. However, it will all be for naught if you have slow page loading speeds. First impressions are incredibly lasting. Also, with so many options on the market, there isn’t a big reason for visitors to return and try a slow website again. Ensure your visitors’ experiences with your website are positive and lasting for the right reasons.

Build Loyalty and Trust

People expect lightning-fast loading speeds and an entirely frictionless experience. When they receive this in a website, they immediately feel taken care of and appreciated. They will see a website and a business that prioritizes their experience and appreciates their support. Customers will perceive the website as a quality business they can trust and that they can return to.

Even though design, content, and product and service offerings will certainly have sway in their overall opinion, fast loading times will tip the scales in the right direction. It is far more cost-effective for businesses to get loyal repeat customers to make another purchase than it is for businesses to obtain new customers. Consequently, fast websites will instill trust and build loyal customers.

Boost Conversion Rates

Slow page loading speeds could be killing your conversion rates. According to one study, improving your page loading speeds by 1 second can lower bounce rates and increase conversions up to 27 percent. Unhindered by slow speeds, more users can complete the business’s desired action, whether it be reading a blog post, filling out a survey, providing an email address for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. Page loading speeds clearly have an impact on businesses’ online revenue potential.

Ensuring your website has fast page loading speeds is a critical first step to growing your business and maintaining a competitive advantage over your competition. What are you doing to boost your website speed?

How Fast Are Your Pages Loading? Find Out Where Your Website Stands Today

What’s slowing your website down? Let’s find out and fix it together!

Regularly evaluating your website will keep your business on track to meeting your objectives. Sun Sign Designs offers a free audit of your website’s loading performance and provides the solutions needed to further improve it. Discover how your website is performing and learn ways to optimize it now.