Guest post by Hasan Shirazi, Logoinn

The significance of a unique logo for the purpose of marketing and branding of a company or its product is not hidden from anyone. Having a perfect logo could be the ultimate wish of any business owner who knows the real importance of visual identity. However, many a time, due to lack of knowledge or some other factors, business owners do some common logo design mistakes while building their business brand. These mistakes eventually develop a wrong brand image, and then a business has to face decline even when all other branding elements are fine. In this article, we have pointed out 5 common logo design mistakes most commonly made by business owners.

Not hiring a professional designer to do the job

On the surface you might think that designing a logo is not a complicated task. You may assume that nearly anyone with some taste and artistic inclinations can design a logo for you. However, reality is quite different. Designing a business logo is not a work of new or pastime amateurs. Continue reading

You might have an amazing product or service. You might have done a great job promoting it, everybody knows it, they can see it everywhere and new customers are likely to recommend it. But if the customer service you offer is faulty, say goodbye to repeat customers and to long term deals. Because no matter how good, affordable, innovative, useful your product is, there always are problems! In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be, but in ours, there are. And what happens when your customer has a problem is what turns your relationship with them into a long term one. Yet here’s where most businesses fail! Continue reading

I know a lot about the pressure in a customer support department! I know about the large number of emails, chats and phones an engineer needs to handle! I know how vague customer requests can be. But under all that stress and all that pressure and in that awful race against time, one rule still needs to be complied with: before starting to write the reply to an email inquiry, stop and read the initial message and make sure you understand it.

If it’s vague, ask for details. If you don’t get it, ask a colleague for help (support teams are usually quite tight and help each other a lot). Whatever you do, do not reply to the email when you don’t fully understand it. Don’t rush into sending a reply, just to tick another email off the target when you think you know what the customer is asking.

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I love reading SEOBook and from the SEO perspective, I think Aaron Wall is quite the guru. I also think he’s got very cool marketing and business development insight to share. But it seems Twitter is where our opinions start to differ. According to his post on Twitter, this microblogging platform is a big page rank waster, mostly because of the no follow links. True. He also seem to think there’s little to gain from using Twitter. Aaron also quotes Seth Godin on the fact that, just like the phone, Twitter is only a connecting medium, not a marketing medium.

My question to you is: if you could (legally ) listen to people’s conversations on the phone, hear them when they mention your product or service, if you could start your own conversation with them, wouldn’t you be all over the phone? I know I would!

Twitter might be nothing more than a connection between many dots, but it’s an extremely transparent one. You can literally watch thoughts spread through word of mouth. Tweets and retweets and the circle keeps growing. Continue reading

The first time you meet a potential client is crucial. If you start on the wrong foot, you’ll never see them again, as they probably have 10 other competitors to choose from. Don’t kid yourself that you’re the only company doing what you do in your area or country. The cruel virtual reality is that in most cases, you’re competing with the world.

With so many opportunities, second chances are a rare commodity in business relationships. So making sure you never hear from them again is rather easy. If the potential client called the meeting, some of these five issues might not be so devastating (maybe they’ll brief you on what they do), but if you asked them to hear you out, take these easy steps and they’ll work hard to forget you ever wasted their time!

Photo credit: Engin Erdogan
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