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If you were to build a house from scratch, there are a LOT of people who are absolutely crucial to the process. You need an architect to draw up the master plan, you need a contractor to put everything together and plumbers, electricians and landscapers to help finish the project. I’m oversimplifying of course, but the point is that within the context of building a house, we all know what role all those people are supposed to play.

Not so for many small business owners with regard to their Marketing Communications efforts. Truth is that “Marketing” has become one of the most overused and generic terms in the business lexicon. A lot of people will tell you they are in “marketing.” In fact, they may be printers or sign makers, sellers of advertising, promotional products or direct mail. These are the marketing support “trades” and have a similar role in a marketing project as plumbers, electricians and landscapers would have in a home building project: vital to the success of the project and both strategically + tactically valuable, but only within their realm of expertise.

This isn’t meant as a negative, by the way… The people you’ve hired in these roles may have an outstanding knowledge within their specialty and may be savvy and creative. But that doesn’t mean you should trust them with your marketing strategy. You probably wouldn’t want your plumber to design an addition to your home, nor would you allow your dental hygienist to perform your brain surgery.

Be careful of you allow to advise you regarding your overall marketing strategy and do be sure that it isn’t someone who stands to profit from your continued patronage of one particular marketing tool over another. And trust me, it isn’t that their intentions are less than pure, they just CAN’T be an objective voice for obvious reasons. Look for your printer or sign folks to refer you to a marketing strategist or other trade when your needs are outside their expertise. Oh, and if they say they can build you a web site, just run.

And by the way, if your marketing strategist is the architect, who’s the contractor in all this? The person doing the bulk of the work and ensuring that all your rooms come together exactly as planned? In marketing, that role usually goes to the designer who is usually singularly responsible for maintaining visual continuity in your brand through every aspect of your marketing efforts from web to print to trade show to promotional items.

The nice thing about irregular-sized business cards is that they make a great impression when you hand them out and can even become a conversation piece. It’s an unconventional way to get someone engaged with you and your brand. But here’s the bad part… So now someone puts this card in their pocket and takes it back to the office and suddenly they don’t know what to do with it.

It can be difficult to file or scan as those tools are designed specifically for the standard 3.5 x 2 cards. I have a few odd-sized cards that people have given me over the years and so I’ve experienced this firsthand. Once I got a card from an art director that was absolutely remarkable. It was a perfect 3″ circle. Probably the coolest card I’ve ever gotten. But now it looks terrible because I had to file it away in my business card portfolio and it got all folded up in the process. And now every time I flip through my book, I don’t see a creative wonder in that slot, I see a crumpled mess.

A business card is definitely a branding tool and it helps make a first impression, but it also needs to be functional for the person who receives it. My recommendation is usually to get as creative as possible with the standard size card. Use a creative printing technique, round the corners. Maybe only round one corner. Do different versions, do something unexpected… But remember that the person who receives it may keep it for five or ten years so make sure it will stand up to whatever filing method your audience uses.

Now that the web is much more mature and we’re using it at a much higher level thanks to the proliferation of blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and countless others. And in my opinion, we’re seeing “flashiness” start to get in the way of our web experience rather than enhance it in many cases. Now the cutting edge web sites are the ones that present the simplest and easiest on the outside and the most technologically advanced behind the scenes.

So how does this relate to marketing small business on the web? Flash and the obligatory “intro” movie have become passé and loading bars, once a status symbol, are now obstacles that separate your audience from the content they came to your site to find. In our experience, we’re starting to find that the sites we launch that use a lot of flash tend to have higher bounce rates than the ones that do not. The “bounce rate”, by the way, is a measure of how many visitors come to your site and leave after seeing only your home page. Our clients that start video/audio rolling as soon as the site loads have the highest bounce rates of anyone we work with. It could be coincidence, but everything else that I see happening in the marketplace tells me that this quick and unscientific study is a reflection of reality on the web today.

S o what do you want on your home page? Slow-loading animation or video that scares your audience away or a simpler web design that encourages visitors to dig deeper? Many small business owners love the idea of having a flashy web site as they see it as a status symbol, a sign that they’ve made it… But I encourage entrepreneurs not to do it at the expense of earning business and opportunities online.

In todays newfangledy world of digital printers, online printers and bulk printers, you can get a thousand full-color, 2-sided business cards for less than $100. Sometimes considerably less depending on your source.

So why is this important? It creates a potentially valuable opportunity to make an additional impact at a low cost. Let me explain…

Many small business owners deal with several types of customers. Professional photographers, for example, often have both commercial and residential/consumer clients. And even within the residential segment, they may serve needs as varied as wedding photography, family portraits and baby photography. You only have limited space on the back of the card to showcase examples of your work (2-3 shots maximum). And there’s nothing worse than meeting a potential client and starting the discussion by explaining or apologizing for your business card because it doesn’t look like you’d be a good choice for their project. So what do you do?

Easy. Get several different versions of your card. One for commercial — because commercial clients don’t need to see any of your residential work, one for weddings — because brides know there won’t be a reshoot and want someone experienced, and one for families.

The same concept works for anyone that sells to several different constituents and helps you get the reaction you want when you hand someone your business card. And at a networking event, where you might meet lots of different people, shuffle the deck and hand them all out. It will be a testament to your versatility and make the experience of meeting you more memorable.

A lot of times it seems that we as small business owners look at our marketing to-do list from a tactical rather than strategic perspective. It’s a common pitfall that a lot of us fall into where we get so focused on getting things done that we forget why we’re doing them and what we expected to get out of them in the first place.

There’s no doubt that being tactical is easier; it’s certainly less work for us as business owners and we are likely to get things crossed off our list quicker than we would if we meticulously planned and strategized around everything we do… But we’re also more likely to come out the other end of that project with a “band-aid” type of solution that is not likely to get us the results we wanted long term… And soon we’ll end up with another item on that growing to do list: “re-do web site.”

It also goes without saying that most of us aren’t marketing, branding or web geniuses and can’t sit down and come up with a brilliant winning strategy in an afternoon. That’s why — and especially if anything I’ve written here scares you — the best recommendation I can make to someone who needs to start a new branding, web or marketing project (but doesn’t know where to start) is to contact an expert and ask for help.

Getting good help may cost you cash out of pocket in the short term, but it is certainly more efficient in both time and money than your eventual alternative of “redo web site” or logo or brochure… And that’s before we factor in the additional business that we won and opportunities we generated by doing the right thing up front.

And who wants “just” a web site anyway?

As a consultant and the owner of a design firm, I have these kinds of conversations with business owners all the time. They paid money to someone who disappeared. They waited months to hear from the designer that suddenly lost interest in their project after a long string of unreturned emails and phone messages. They didn’t realize until after it was too late that their designer didn’t have the expertise to properly and professionally execute the project at hand.

When I started my design firm, Zero-G Creative, I was determined to break these stereotypes and show business owners that they can get quality design, good advice and outstanding customer service without paying agency fees. We’ve offered transparent pricing, a solid design methodology and a satisfaction guarantee that protects businesses from being charged for additional revisions when they are unhappy with their designs.

But now we’ve taken our commitment one step further… Zero-G Creative has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau. It’s just another way for us to prove to our clients that we’re willing to go the extra mile to earn their trust and that we are confident enough in our track record that we’d be happy to have the Better Business Bureau publish it on their web site.

Trust is the foundation of any good business relationship and we believe in serving our clients in the manner they deserve. While we can’t make up for any bad experiences people may have had in the past, we can certainly give them a better design alternative now.

One of the most common problems that tends to arise during icon development is the tendency to go overboard. Good icons are simple and easy to describe… Nike’s icon is a “swoosh.” One of my favorite icons was the Cingular “orange guy” (may he rest in peace). McDonalds has “golden arches.”

But a lot of small business owners look at logos to be very literal and to contain a lot of information. When a client of mine in the mobile dog grooming business first came to me, his icon could only be described as “dog rolling in a soapy bathtub with wheels while washing  his back.” That’s not an icon… it’s a short story. When we re-concepted his logo, the icon we replaced it with was simply “wet pawprint.” And it’s a lot more iconic than the original could have ever been.

My rule of thumb is that if an icon can’t be described in three words or less, it’s too complicated. After all, if Ralph Lauren’s icon was “well dressed man on a horse wearing a striped shirt and sportcoat and hitting a ball with a polo mallot as he gallops through the field” instead of just “man on horse”, how many people would want to wear that shirt?

Special thanks to my good friend Ryan for turning me on to Springwise.com. For those of you that haven’t experienced this online beacon of entrepreneurial hope, please click through and check it out. This Netherlands-based web site sends its agents out to scour the globe for the most unique and innovative new business ideas. If you’re an idea-junkie like me, once you dig into this site, you won’t be able to leave your chair for hours.

My wife and I got hooked on this site this weekend and scrolled through more than a year’s worth of cool businesses. She found one from last spring that was especially interesting… There was an article about Dashing Diva, the Starbucks of nail salons and possibly the first chain of nail salons in the U.S. Here’s a short excerpt from the Springwise article:

“The United States has approximately 58,000 nail salons, most of which are “mom and pop” stores owned by Vietnamese and Korean immigrants. Claiming to be the first branded nail chain in the United States, Dashing Diva hopes to become the Starbucks of nail salons, creating a strong brand and offering customers an experience that’s different from other nail salons. While most nail places sport a hygienic but basic look, Dashing Diva has invested heavily in design, making it a marketable venue for bridal showers and Sweet Sixteen and birthday parties.”

It’s just another instance where an otherwise “white-bread” type of business has managed to use design as a major part of their unique value proposition. As Starbucks has shown us, design can go a long way towards establishing a premium price point and a memorable experience. How many times did you spend $4 on a cup of coffee before you went to your first Starbucks? Would you have ever considered giving your daughter a party at a nail salon? Probably not unless you have a Dashing Diva in your neighborhood (which is unlikely as there are only about a dozen of them so far).

The truth is that design is one of the cheapest ways to upgrade your brand/product/service. Dashing Diva isn’t really reinventing anything about the manicure process (though they are a subsidiary of an acrylic nail manufacturer)… They’re just putting it in a prettier box.

No one should extend themselves beyond their practical means to redesign their business, but think about the ways that you can easily improve on what you already have. For example, if you have a retail location or office, you COULD just keep your walls white. Or you could spend $20 on a can of paint and do an accent wall in one of your brand’s colors. Everyone needs a logo and business cards… Does it really cost you anything more to get nice ones? If anything, we’re talking a couple of hundred dollars for an upgrade that could ultimately define your entire business.

By the same token we also need to remember that there are costs involved when we ignore design… After all, as the article points out, there are about 58,000 nail salons in America… But so far there’s only one Dashing Diva.

Enjoy!