Invisible Details

If your body seems to be having some sort of health issue, the first thing anyone does is attempt to diagnose it. You identify the issue, sort out the causes and symptoms, and even see a professional if need be. Many people also have regular checkups with physicians or doctors, sometimes not because anything is externally wrong, but just to make sure everything is going well under the surface. The process of evaluating something gives you the opportunity to ask objective questions and really get a sense for what is happening “under the hood”. Whether it’s your body, company, brand, or anything else, you now have a framework to get a sense of the health of that thing. A brand is no exception, and in fact brand evaluation should be part of a regular schedule that you maintain throughout the year. Without taking a good honest look at the status of your brand, you run the risk of overlooking symptoms of deeper problems that could be detrimental down the road. In today’s episode we’ll talk about some methods

It’s not enough to simply have an idea of what you want your brand to be or how you want to be perceived. In order to remain consistent and to truly communicate what your brand is, you need to construct your brand identity. Whatever your brand projects is part of its identity. Words, imagery, color, tone, personality, it’s all wrapped up under the umbrella of brand identity. Your brand identity is the tool that gives you assurance that what your audience is seeing is consistent with what you want your brand to be. It takes the philosophy and internal workings of your brand and externalizes it for people to experience. On today’s show we’re going to provide an introduction to the idea of brand identity, how to develop a filter for what you already have, and some simple steps to get consistency fast.

Having a brand means having a certain kind of reputation. It means you are perceived in a certain way by someone else, whether positive or negative. The requirement of any brand is having someone else on the other side of it: a customer, a target audience member, a competitor, and so on. If nobody knows about what you're doing, your brand doesn't exist. Getting in front of people is not something that comes naturally to most. When you put yourself out there or when you allow your work or creativity to be public, it can be scary! The best part is: you're not alone. There are a lot of other people struggling with putting themselves out there because building an audience can be nerve-wracking. On today's episode, I want to share some of my experience with building and audience and help to alleviate some of the most prominent fears that hold too many people back.

Every few months or so people proclaim loudly that email is dead and [insert new platform here] is the future of communication. However for all of its flaws, email is not yet dead, and is nowhere close to being so. Estimates show over 3.6 billion email accounts across the world, and research groups have estimated that over 236 billion emails were sent in 2017…per day. Yes, that’s 236 billion emails a day, or 86 trillion emails in a year. Of course, a response to this might be, “How can my emails compete with 236 billion other emails in a day? How does this matter?” It matters because even though the scale is growing, people are becoming more and more sensitive to what comes into their inbox. Anything they want is purposeful, and what they don’t want is marked as spam. Today’s show is not about methodology or a how-to on how to set up your automations, but instead a look as to why email is still relevant and how you can leverage your brand through email. We don’t believe email is dead, and furthermore we

You might have heard the expression, “underpromise and overdeliver”. It’s the idea where you tell your customers or clients what they can expect, then giving them above and beyond what they expected. Sure, the expression is a cute one, but the idea of overdelivering is an interesting one. What exactly is the promise? Is it just as simple as knowing what you’re going to make and holding back some information about it? This episode is one of our conversational shows, exploring the idea of the promise and delivery, and if it actually pays in the end to overdeliver.

As hard as you may try, it’s impossible to please everyone that comes across your brand. Many people will love what you’re about, and some people will not resonate with it. Of course, there will always be people who don’t trust or like you. Trying to convert those people is often a misuse of energy, so it’s typically more constructive to work on building trust between you and your actual target audience. Building a brand is ultimately about building trust. When people trust you, they are more likely to stick around, both as a customer and an advocate. But what happens when that trust is broken? Broken trust and negative perception can come anytime and from anywhere, and it pays to be prepared for it. On today’s show we’ll be talking about how to prepare for the unknown and ways to show and prove to your customers that they can trust you again.

Everything you do for your brand should be associated with some sort of goal. When you sit down and take a look at the direction you’re headed and what needs to happen next, you set a point that you want to get to. Goals come in many shapes and scales, from publishing the latest newsletter to shipping your flagship course to hiring your 100th employee. When handled right, they can provide incredible direction and satisfaction upon completion. Once you start adding more goals to the list, however, they start to feel overwhelming if not handled or processed correctly. Which goal or task takes priority? How do you know when to work on one thing and not the other? Having a process to manage your goals, prioritize your projects, and actually accomplish anything is important for the health and focus of your brand. On today’s episode, we’ll be talking about some of the ways we approach goals and projects and offer some suggestions to get you deeper focus and see results faster.

You’ve probably never heard of Gary Dahl. Gary had an idea in the 1970s that would go on to make him millions. The idea? The Pet Rock. It was literally a box with a rock in it that people bought for $3.95. Originally created as a joke, Gary’s ridiculous idea resonated with the culture of the time and it became one of the weirdest business stories of our time. And that’s just one story. Determining the viability of a product or service can lead to a lot of sleepless nights. “Would people even buy this? Should I pursue it? Is this a waste of time?” There’s a disconnect between you and your idea. If you’re not overwhelmingly sold on it, it’ll be tough to sell anyone else on it. Here’s the good news: your idea is probably not as awful as the ones we’ll be talking about today! In today’s show, we’re going to be talking about some of the weirdest business ideas you’ve ever heard, and how the right idea at the right time can make all the difference to the right person.

Do you remember the last time you had an experience with a brand that made you absolutely delighted? What was the circumstance? How did it make you feel? We so often look at business with only the transactional side of things in mind, when most customers remember primarily the feeling of the transaction. When you add delight into the mixture, you improve the chances of that feeling being a positive one. Sweating the details can look different for different situations, but in every case it is an important factor of building a positive brand image. On today’s episode, we’ll talk about how much time you should spend on the details and offer some suggestions to make your customers’ experience delightful.

Today marks a big milestone for Invisible Details: we’ve reached our 100th episode! To celebrate, we turned on our cameras and opened up the broadcast to all of our listeners for a special public live show. On today's show, we talk about our favorite brands, things we can learn and bring into the new year, and our hopes and plans for the next one hundred episodes of Invisible Details.

One of the best ways to measure the success of your business is to set goals and track your progress to achieving those goals. Your goals might be conversions achieved, sales numbers, contacts subscribed, or any number of other things. In most cases, your customers or audience members have to perform some sort of action to hit these overall goals. Customer actions are the building blocks to accomplish your brand goals. For example, in order to hit a revenue goal, you have to have a customer take a certain action and purchase your products. As you list out the customer actions your business requires, you may start to see barriers or blocks a visitor might experience between first encountering your brand and performing the action. This is called friction, and friction often reduces the chance a person will actually do what you want them to do. On today’s show I’ll be discussing a few examples of friction, how to reduce friction, and how to improve the experience to turn potential customers into paying cus

Ideas are worthless. The only thing that matters is actually doing something about those ideas. Taking action is the variable that counts. Once you have an idea, you might start to work on it. You put in some work here and there, but realize after a while the scope of what you want to do is larger than you originally anticipated. You start adding to your process, revamping what you have. You redesign, you scrap and start over, you lie awake at night because it's simply not done. Why does it seem to be such a long time between having an idea and actually putting it out there? Why does taking action become paralyzing so much of the time? On today's show we’re going to talk about getting your ideas off the ground and avoiding the feeling of paralysis when it comes to taking action.

Your going to love todays episode. Language is a fascinating topic, and along with language comes the conversation about spelling, grammar, and overall structure of your communication. There has been an interesting observable trend over the last decade or so, a trend that has slowly diminished both the social requirement of good writing and increased the necessity of speed in our communication. The results are apparent and incredibly interesting as you study the nature of how people connect on the internet. Typos are just part of the charm, right? Not only this, but the internet has also connected people from all over the world, providing easy access and communication between peoples of multiple languages and cultures. This means there are more people speaking more languages in more contexts. If you are writing copy in a language that’s not your first but is the language of your target audience, the pressure is higher than ever to get it right. How you present yourself to the world influences how they s

A business relies on cash flow. In order for a business to survive, there has to be some source of income. This can look like product sales, services, donations, investors, or other means of financing. The common denominator is that there is income coming in (see what I did there?). The internet has brought about a lot of opportunities for businesses to thrive online, but it has challenges of its own. Hosting your business on someone else’s platform or building your income streams solely off of someone else’s business model is easy, but comes at a cost. For example, many creators on YouTube have attempted to build businesses on the platform through ad revenue. A viewer sees an ad, the ad counts toward an impression, and the creator gets paid after a certain amount of impressions. Yet over the last year, this type of monetization has become inconsistent at best. Creators blame the “adpocalypse” and that YouTube is to blame for their decrease in income from ad revenue. Is it really YouTube’s fault, though?

Today’s show is going to be a bit different. Today we’re talking about video games. Video gaming can be a bit of a controversial topic here and there, but we’re not necessarily talking about the content of video games as much as some of the lessons we can learn from some of the philosophies applied to gaming. Why do people buy games? Why is there such a huge investment by consumers into consoles, computers, games, and micro-transactions? What can we learn from a $100 billion industry about building brands, and how do we apply that? On today’s show, we’ll talk about some of the lessons we’ve learned from the gaming industry, and we might just have a little fun along the way.

One of the first things we learn to do in life is to recognize faces. Some research suggests that babies are able to recognize their parents within only a few weeks of being born, and that it could only take a few months of repeated visits from friends or family to recognize them as well. As we grow older and learn to study and memorize our surroundings, this process gets easier. We can instantly spot our friends from across a large room because we have learned to process what their face looks like into a specific response. Instant recognition is one of the main reasons why companies take great care in their visual branding. They want consumers to immediately know what they’re looking at and the company it’s related to. Without the luxury of massive scale like the larger companies, what can smaller businesses do to build recognition among their target audience? Is it better to be the front person and be the recognizable one, or have someone or something else the thing everyone remembers? On today’s show,

One of the questions we ask on this show most frequently is, “Who is it you’re trying to reach? Who do you want to help?” Establishing who your target market is arguably required homework at the start of your brand. It defines your methodology, messaging, and focus. If you have no target, you have no direction. Target audience can cover any number of factors, from varying demographics, business levels, industries, and deeply specific niches. Knowing who you’re trying to reach brings great clarity to everything you do. But what if your business is not necessarily tied to a single target audience? What if you can actually reach multiple kinds of people with your products or services? What if you have several products and each of them work for a person in a completely different market? In today’s show we’ll dive deeper into establishing a clear target audience, if it’s okay to have multiple target audiences, and how to evaluate how far your reach can go.

When it comes to the overall look and visual identity of your brand, it can be easy to fall into the trap of the endless redesign. Whether it’s been six months since your last logo update or the website you just can’t bring yourself to ship yet, redesigning can be paralyzing. On the other hand, your visual identity may actually need an update or a refresh. It might have been a few years and the way your brand looks doesn’t necessarily match the way it’s naturally evolved over time. Either way, if you’re basing the decision on your own subjective feelings about how everything looks, that may not be a good enough reason. When does it truly make sense to update your brand’s visual identity? How do you know when the redesign is ready? In this episode we talk about preventing the endless redesign cycle and how to plan and prepare for the longevity of your brand’s visual identity.

A new alert appears on your screen. You have a new subscriber! You get that warm fuzzy feeling as you click into their contact profile. They’ve put in their first name so you know what to call them, and there’s even a little avatar that was pulled in from their social media. They’re an actual person, someone who was interested enough to sign up and follow you. You’re excited. There seems to be some growth happening. Then things seem to plateau. You’re still getting subscribers, but people are dropping off. That steep upwards curve you once had seems to be leveling off, and there’s no apparent reason why. Self-doubt starts to creep in. Was it something you said or did? Are you no longer relevant? Are you actually helping the people you want to help? There’s really only one way to find out what’s happening with your audience growth, and that’s by getting good old-fashioned data. There are plenty of ways to get data, but certainly the most rewarding is through relationships. On today’s show we’ll be getting

Having a website in this day and age is nearly non-optional, as more and more people get connected around the world and are searching for solutions to their problems. While the internet may seem oversaturated with offerings, products, websites, social media accounts, and services, it is still the primary way that most people get their information. If someone is interested in you or your business, they’re going to search for you on the internet, and you need to be ready for that moment. This of course raises the important question: what should be on your website? While we aren’t going to be talking specifically about web design or how to develop a website, it is important to understand some of the philosophies of website strategy and content. In today’s show we’ll be talking about some of the fundamental principles of an effective website, how to position your content around your target customer, and why your website isn’t really about you, even though it is.