Q Why is the design of my packaging important?

A. Packaging design can make a massive difference on the sales of a product and how it is perceived by customers.

For example, colour is very important as it influences your mood – it triggers a response: blue = calm, yellow = uplifting, pink =  frivolous, red = makes you hungry. You should also consider how your pack looks when stacked on a shelf together. Your choice of typeface will say a lot about your brand. Old-school typefaces give a handmade, traditional feel. Handwritten fonts portray a more natural, organic feel, whilst many cleaning products use bold, strong fonts to shout out about their benefits and beauty products tend to opt for delicate, thin typefaces. A product also has to feel nice to pick up, to touch and to use.

Keep it simple. Putting too many messages on a product can make it look cheap. A clean, simple pack is often more compelling and interesting than one that is trying to do and say too much.

And consider the print process, it’s no good approving a pack design that is over complicated and impossible to produce within your budget.

Q. Should I have a website?

A. It is estimated that Britain has over 50 million internet users (including mobile/smart phones) approximately 80% of the population!

So if you have a business, it’s simple, you should have a website!

You should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees and business partners can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.

You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression.

When it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter, whether you’re a one-man band or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don’t have a website, you’re losing business to other companies that do.

But, it’s actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad.

Your website is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.

Q. Why is it important to keep a website up to date?

A. Keeping a website up to date helps with google rankings and also improves visitors trust in what they are seeing. If your information is several years (or even months) out of date, visitors are not likely to return, or link to the site or recommend it to anyone else.

All these things will help drive traffic to your site and either improve the visibility of your product or increase your online sales.

It should be the responsibility of someone within your business to carry out regular reviews of your website. Check the content is relevant and make sure it is all working. Your website can make a big difference to the success of your business. Make sure it is up to date.

Q. How are smart phones going to affect my business?

A. The Smartphone is rapidly becoming one of the main methods people use to access the Internet. 25 percent of smartphone owners now use them as their primary method to access the web.

The rise of the smartphone as web access tool is due to the improvement of mobile web browsers on smartphones. In spite of the small screens on phones they are still very useful methods to get information from the Internet.

Smartphone adoption has grown steadily over the past few years, and that will continue as more people get exposed to them. The ability to jump on the web easily to get information is a powerful thing, aided by the fact that owners always have the Smartphone close at hand. So if your business is on the web you need to consider a mobile version of your site or at least be aware that the people accessing your site may not come at it from a PC or laptop. It is important to bear this in mind at the design and development stage, if it’s too late for that then maybe it’s time to revisit your website and consider redesigning it with Smartphone’s in mind.

Hello and welcome to the MarketingGuru.org.uk blog,

This site offers a no commitment resource with FREE advice on a full range of Marketing, Advertising and Web-based queries.

So if you have any questions or want a bit of FREE advice about how to promote your business, product or service feel free to post them to us either here or on our Linked-In group (just search for MarketingGuru.org.uk) and we’ll come back to you with a solution based upon our many contacts and over 20 years of experience.

Look forward to hearing from you soon,

Ryan