Marketing Strategy
Almost every project we undertake starts here. While we’re recognized for website development and brand design, neither of these can be effective without a solid underlying marketing strategy. This foundation starts with understanding who your target audiences are, knowing what mood and tone your marketing needs to create, and establishing the right message to ensure your marketing tells your story in the most compelling way.
Branding & Logo Design
Your logo is the cornerstone of your brand. The colors, fonts, and even the shapes in your branding send a message – whether intentional or not. That’s why we start with your marketing strategy: what’s the mood and tone your branding need to set? We use that information to suggest color palettes and font options, then we’ll develop the look for your brand based on that.
Our process is part science, part creative. We’re a little geeky: our logo template in Adobe Illustrator has one element, the golden mean graphic. (It’s the standard for nature and over a thousand years’ worth of satisfyingly appealing designs, so we’re not going to argue.) Starting from there, we pull in the colors and fonts for your look and let our imaginations run wild.
Typically, we’ll present you with three sketches of a design. Whether you love one, pieces of two (or all), or none, that’s feedback. We pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop the finished look that you love.
When we design your logo and brand, you’ll receive your logo in every file format you’ll need, plus single-color black and white versions, along with the native Illustrator file. We’ll also provide a PDF of your organization’s style guide with color names and values, fonts, and general usage notes.
Website Development
We specialize in WordPress websites. We typically develop a custom theme, based on your branding, to control the look for your site. We’ll research and install plugins to handle extended functions needed in your website, and usually write at least one custom plugin to add whatever features you need to meet your marketing goals.
Our website development goes beyond writing code, creating a responsive pretty picture that works on both your phone and desktop, and making sure your website is optimized for Google and other search engines. Those things matter, of course. But what’s most important – and what sets us apart – is discovering how your website can best support you. That looks different for every organization:
- Some organizations need a website that tells their story in a compelling way with emotionally-driven copy, images, and videos.
- Others need a site that emphasizes membership benefits, offering an efficient way to deliver those benefits online.
- Still others need a promotional tool and e-commerce for events, fundraisers, and products.
- Many organizations need to offer a simple, effective way to encourage supporters to volunteer and otherwise get involved.
- Most need a way to encourage supporters to donate in a secure, streamlined system that uses best practices to remove any barriers to completing donations.
- And, finally, all organizations need a way to track usage and analyze how your visitors use your website, to ensure that it is helping you meet your marketing goals.
Our job is to learn your goals, provide you with options on how your website can help you meet those goals – and then develop that website with you.
Once we develop your website, we train your staff how to keep it updated. Or, you can choose to hire us to keep your website content up-to-date; most of our clients choose a hybrid of both.
We also offer feature-packed, 99.9% uptime-guaranteed website hosting.
Copywriting
Whether you need copy written for your website, or someone to conduct interviews, do research, and write your newsletter, we’ve got you covered. Our managing partner served as a magazine editor before starting Heron Design, and she’s well-versed in AP Style as well as the art of turning complicated topics into understandable – and interesting – pieces of information.
We can help you develop compelling messaging that resonates with your audiences. Often, this requires research to figure out what will get your audience’s attention, hit their ‘pain points,’ or otherwise connect and send the right message at the right time. We can take that research and turn it into a library of taglines and copy that you can use throughout your marketing.
If needed, we’ll help you research the latest Google trends and keyword searches to make sure your copy is relevant with current search trends.
Marketing copy written for a 6th-grade reading level is skimmable and best-suited for keeping your readers’ attention. When ‘marketing’ is our writing goal, we use software to help us stay on track for reading levels and to ensure overall understandability. We’ll also proofread everything, both with human and computerized eyes, to make sure your words are as professional as you are!
Campaign Creation
Marketing campaigns, such as email campaigns, put all your elements into action.
Email campaigns are a perfect example of the need to balance psychology and technology in your marketing. We can help you with the technical side of setting up a campaign: from cleaning up your list and importing it into an online platform, to segmenting your audiences, to setting up your autoresponders, if needed.
We can also help you research the best subject lines to increase open rates, write your emails, find or create the perfect images, and design a look for your campaign that matches your branding.
Finally, we’ll help you keep track of every email’s analytics, so you know what works best with your audiences.