THE BLOG

03
Oct

Max Out Creative Content!!

Part-2 of Our Entrepreneurial Approach to Brand-Marketing.

‘Max Out Creative Content’

Creative content produced for websites, re-formatted for brochures, introduced on social media, re-purposed for print ads, used for digital mail, traditional mail, animated for YouTube, inserted into proposals, placed in Powerpoint decks, etc, etc.

The number of destinations for high-quality and effective creative content is absolutely limitless.

Whether we’re talking about impactful infographics, art-directed photography, story-telling videos or even carefully crafted text. Whatever the medium, whatever the end-use, at the loft we advise our clients to truly maximise every last bit of resource invested in creative projects.

Creativity you’ve invested money in, dedicated time too and worked hard to produce alongside your own team and brand/marketing/ creative providers.

The work we created with one of our industrial clients several years ago for their Sustainability Report was used and re-used in the most fantastically effective and resourceful way.

Infographics used in the initial report, re-purposed as social media campaigns, re-formatted to be included in pitch-decks and animated as videos for YouTube. What’s more they were re-branded for their sister organisation and the initial report itself became a customer-facing document too.

An exceptional way to maximise a creative budget.

‘Max Out Creative Content’

Part-2 of our Entrepreneurial Approach to Brand-Marketing.

Drop us a line if you’d like to find out more.

Have a great weekend folks!!

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

To check out The Entrepreneurs Loft >>>

30
Sep

Existing Clients First!!

Increasing sales as quickly as possible is pretty much the holy grail of all high-growth companies, of all Business Founders, Leaders & Entrepreneurs, for all those individuals in a hurry to make it happen.

More sales staff, new campaigns, marketing materials, etc.

All potential answers.

Sometimes the main answer’s closer to home.

Serving (and eventually) selling to existing customers can be massively easier and faster than building trust with new people – stats say up to 6 times faster. A number that gets bigger with high-value services.

Direct mail, letters, targeted social media, even organised high-quality telesales campaigns are all great ideas.

However, we just love the value-add of newsletter systems.

Carefully crafted emails sent to help existing clients.

Several years ago we collaborated with a Glasgow-based software company to help increase license renewals (and sales) of their financial software tools. We had found that their users were only using a fraction of their software programmes. We worked closely with them and their team to send a simple newsletter each week. Every time, introducing one new feature of their software to existing users.

No hard-sales, just good service and tremendously well received too. What’s more, the exercise itself helped improve customer-service.

A marketing success story repeated several times over during our many years working with the company and as a result, massively increasing license renewals and sales.

By giving first, we gain permission to try to sell.

(Not exclusively but) Existing Clients First, Part-1 of our Entrepreneurial Approach to Brand-Marketing.

Have a great weekend folks!!

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

To check out The Entrepreneurs Loft >>>

05
Sep

Hero Content

We’ve just put up a new blog-post on our sister-site about all of the wonderful benefits of hero-content.

Click here to see more >>>

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

To check out The Entrepreneurs Loft >>>

04
Sep

The Entrepreneurs Loft, Service List

Shameless plug alert!!

Sorry just this once, we’re going to go down the slightly more direct route.

We’ve finally got our working service list and landing pages together for The Entrepreneurs Loft.

Check them out…

Brand Marketing
https://entrepreneursloft.co/brand-marketing

Marketing Strategy
https://entrepreneursloft.co/marketing-strategy

Marketing Support
https://entrepreneursloft.co/marketing-support

Brand Strategy
https://entrepreneursloft.co/brand-strategy

Brand Culture
https://entrepreneursloft.co/brand-culture

Social Media Marketing
https://entrepreneursloft.co/social-media-marketing

The Entrepreneurs Loft is the big brother/sister of the loft, a new agency-offering exclusively supporting the growth journeys of High-Growth Founders, Leaders & Entrepreneurs.

In-line with our lightweight approach – everything’s pretty minimal for now, used as much for learning as it is for gaining business, will almost certainly be improved in due course (yes we will add some pictures & graphics) but most importantly done, out there and hopefully strong enough to get this bit of the job done. For Now!!

Let us know your thoughts?

All comments welcome…

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

To check out The Entrepreneurs Loft >>>

10
Aug

The Entrepreneurs Loft

Working with High-Growth Founders, Leaders & Entrepreneurs has always been one of the most enjoyable, rewarding and fulfilling parts of our journey at the loft – over the years we’ve been lucky to help high growth companies and impactful leaders in technology, software, food and drink, charity organisations. The work is always challenging, tight for time and a little chaotic but as mentioned it really does help us to bring the best out of ourselves…

The Entrepreneurs Loft is a new sub-brand offering created by the loft to serve High-Growth Founders, Leaders & Entrepreneurs – to help them build businesses of scale with fast, imaginative and a completely personalised service. We’ve taken everything we’ve learned in 10 years in business, all our wins, all our losses and most importantly the lessons we’ve learned along the way and packaged them to create a unique service.

We can’t wait to share more about The Entrepreneurs Loft but for now, this is the link to the new microsite. https://entrepreneursloft.co

Drop us a line, let us know your thoughts and as always, if there is anything we can help with – please don’t hesitate to let us know?

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

To check out The Entrepreneurs Loft >>>

08
Jul

Looking for Freelance Designers/Web-Designers

Hi folks, due to lots of lovely creative projects, we’re looking for designers/web-designers that can help us out over the next couple of weeks.

If you know your way around WordPress (and possibly Elementor too) give us a shout, we’d love to hear from you…

Thank you please.

Benedetto

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is thrilled to manage a great team, work with brilliant clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

17
Apr

Maximising Creative Budgets, 6 Quick Tips…

‘Making Every Penny of Money & Every Second of Time Count’

Throughout the years, it’s been our mission to make sure that our clients (and ourselves for that matter) maximise every single bit of time and money we’ve got when taking on creative projects… Exceeding expectations is always the goal, here are a couple of quick pointers on how we do this.

1. Be Unashamedly Commercial
Sometimes we’re bombarded with choice – what kind of project? Website updates, infographics, social campaigns, etc. Do we enhance what we have or start again? At the loft, we start with a budget, write a list of activities and then prioritise the ones that deliver the most benefit first . The more commercially valuable a project, the more bought-in the management team will be and the more you’ll enjoy the process.

2. Being Organised Delivers Better Results
If you’re having quality case-studies written by a professional copy-writer, have them spend a tiny bit more time re-formatting the content for your social channels. If your photographer is on-site doing individual pics of the team for the website – again see if you can have those pics re-formatted for social media, for brochures, or even for future press-releases, etc… Also, when you’ve got a professional on-site look to get as many activities as possible in one visit – your provider’s set-up and travel times will eat into your creative budget so best to take a full-day packed with great activities to get more high-quality content than 2 x half-days, etc… Just make sure you provide a good lunch and lots of good coffee. However, and this is a big proviso, this is all dependant on you being organised from the outset, so every time you’re engaging a creative professional or agency. Think what else their time could be used to give additional value. In all honesty, good providers should be making you aware of these value-adds beforehand.

3. Become Invaluable To Your Provider.
The company that can give more work to one agency, one photographer, one designer, etc will undoubtedly become more valuable to that provider which should allow you to command better rates or terms.

4. Direct is Fine
Seriously. Most creatives love working with decisive, no-nonsense types of clients that know exactly what they want and who may even be quite blunt with their feedback. Almost, the yin to their yangs. It saves so much time for everybody involved. I’m not saying be deliberately mean but clear about what you’re looking for.

5. Fast Deadlines
Fast deadlines are wonderful for maximising efficiency – everybody just has to be focussed, concentrated and on their game from the get-go. Also, most good creative providers are usually quite happy to know that there is a deadline to protect against spec creep and therefore their profit margins. However, proceed with caution, be reasonable with your requests and consider using this tactic sparingly. There is a line and it’s best not to cross it – you’ll know from the provider’s reaction when you’re close.

6. Ask For Reference Images Or Even Sketches
If you’re not entirely certain of what you want, then simply ask the agency/creative provider to take a very small amount of time to provide some reference examples from their folio, some other examples from other providers or even a quick series of sketches, etc… This will help you to more quickly understand what you want, respect your relationship and to de-risk the project for both yourself and the provider.

Just six quick tips from many years maximising creative budgets for our clients and ourselves.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. 

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is thrilled to manage a great team, work with brilliant clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

 

 

19
Nov

Quick Wins!!

More pings from the contact form, unexpected calls from new clients, offers of collaboration, bigger re-orders, greater recognition, fresh possibilities, new opportunities, big wins, small wins and best of all – quick wins… (A must for any great marketing strategy.)

Quick wins are good for the soul – they give little jolts of excitement, fresh doses of motivation and much needed vindication. They help to build crucial momentum for those big and lofty goals you’re chasing.

At the loft we get determined, sometime obsessive about the tiny wins – those little momentum shifters that get everything moving – one new customer, one more enquiry, one more phone call, one more view on social. We know those tiny wins compound over time and deliver real value.

Over many years, we’ve developed countless super lean action plans (these are our kinds of marketing strategy) – single pages of A4, presented like scrap-book pages, put together in an hour or two, presented in about 15 minutes, approved, put into action and delivering value for the client in a matter of days.

No days lost to unnecessary consultancy, no time lost on laborious presentations, no 22-point strategic plans and no Return-On-Investment that is so far into the future you lose interest.

What’s brilliant about the leaner approach is that it gives the client a quick win, some immediate value, a reason to get excited – something to build on. Brilliant for people that are time-poor (almost anybody scaling a company) and most of all – their success stimulates new and more exciting ideas giving everybody something to build on.

More weighty plans will always have a place but we’re big believers in keeping it light, being a bit more outcome-focussed and getting as much early momentum as possible.

“Go as far as you can, when you get there, you’ll see how to go farther…”

Brilliant for rapid growth with brand, marketing and creative services. If you have ideas in mind or would like to chat to us, give us a shout, we’d love to hear from you…

Benedetto

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is thrilled to manage a great team, work with brilliant clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

 

Useful Links

The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries >>>

<<< Accelerate by the loft

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

14
Nov

Undercover Billionaire

Very little matches the sheer thrill, excitement and emotion of start-up entrepreneurship – backing yourself to do something special, taking a chance on a new product/service, winning those first customers, creating teams with little or no experience, building systems, exploring new paths, finding their limitations – all done at pace, usually done with a fluctuating bank balance and fluctuating sleep patterns too. I have a serious respect for anybody who has been able to build a business from nothing into something sustainable and of scale- which leads me to Undercover Billionaire.

Undercover Billionaire is a programme which explores all of the above and so much more. Released in the United States by Discovery, where they send an entrepreneur to an unknown place, take away their identity, their contacts, their wealth, etc and give them an old phone, a truck and $100. They have to take on an alias name and are tasked with creating a $1,000,000 business in just 90 days. This second season sees three incredible entrepreneurs take up the challenge – tech investor Monique Idlett, real-estate developer and designer Elaine Culotti and The Founder of the 10X Movement – Grant Cardone.

Safe-to-say, it is a brilliant watch, I don’t spend much time in front of the TV but I’ve already been through this series a couple of times. There is just so much to learn from three entrepreneurs who are well past the start-up phases of their careers do what they do best – the sophisticated-yet-genuine way that Monique is able to build relationships with others, her ability to plan and create value too, the just awe-inspiring drive, determination and can-do attitude of Elaine Culotti who also possesses something rare and special in the way she puts together teams of people who just love her despite her pushing them all to their absolute limits. Finally, Grant Cardone, the reason I got into the show in the first place, Mr10X’s salesmanship is definitely something to admire as well as his infectious enthusiasm and ability to deliver. Without giving too much away, all three of them achieve something spectacular not only with the businesses they build but the relationships they create throughout the process.

We’ve had entrepreneurship programmes on the telly for a while now but there is definitely something quite special about Undercover Billionaire. All three of these outstanding individuals are tasked with the challenge to see ‘if the American Dream is still alive and well in the 21st century.’

What you see is that although they each have unique talents – there is nothing there that can’t be learned and done by any/all of us – Undercover Billionaire, well worth a watch…

Benedetto

Useful Links

Watch Undercover Billionaire >>>

Monique Idlett >>>

Elaine Culotti>>>

Grant Cardone >>>

<<< The Loft’s Entrepreneurial Approach

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

For more information on brand-building by Benedetto >>>

28
Oct

New Design & Branding Projects P3

Part 3 of a new series showcasing some of our exciting Design & Branding projects launched  in the last few years…

Practical Steps to Better Mental Health

One of the clients we’ve found most fulfilling to work with over the last few years is the TRC Group, an organisation which provides integrated therapeutic support to individuals in both London and Edinburgh. With a new website launched just before lockdown in early 2020 – their large, experienced and diverse therapeutic team began creating short posts to help people with the emotional toll of lockdown.

Posts included relaxation techniques, coping mechanisms and other free tools/techniques/thought-pieces to help people better cope with everything that was going on. Useful at the best of times times, priceless during the several phases of lockdown we’ve had during the last 18 months.

We were more than happy to work with the TRC Group to help them put together all of this outstanding content into its own digital library with collated blog posts, resource centre and press articles.

https://trcgroup.org.uk/library>>> for more info.

A tremendous function that I’m sure we can all gain some value from…

 

A More Connected Scotland

‘Technology as an enabler’

‘A vehicle for providing fresh opportunities’

‘Creating ways and means to improve the quality of life for the people of Scotland – all of Scotland.’

These were just some of the ideas that we were asked to communicate when creating an infographic for Seric Systems several years back.

Our magnificent team put together a wonderful visual of a Scotland re-created as nodes and links, imaginatively including several icons to communicate important ideas such as diversity and inclusion, all underpinned with the stunning blue brand colour of Seric Systems.

Thrilled to recently see this infographic still being used many years after it was originally designed, slightly re-purposed on this slide-presentation for SmartSTEMs, as well as Seric, with the sister’s charity’s stunning brand wings now included.

 

Welcome to Glasgow

Delighted to welcome friends from Norway, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, Germany, Australia, China, Canada, USA, Indonesia and so many other nations to Glasgow…

In the next couple of weeks the city of Glasgow will be proudly welcoming delegates from all over the world for COP26. As a proud Glasgow-based company we were thrilled to be given this opportunity to help our friends at the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce extend the international hand of friendship with this special COP26 graphical skyline – each of the participating countries recognised with one of their country’s most famous landmarks mixed in with traditional Scottish elements, icons of sustainability and our very own Nessie making a guest appearance…

We hope all involved enjoy their stay and once again, a very warm welcome to Glasgow…

If you’d like to find out more about our Design & Branding services contact us to find out more…

Benedetto

 

Benedetto is an enthusiastic creative and business person.

His journey has taken him from a career in car design through to his current role as the Founder of the loft – A Design & Branding Agency based in the heart of Glasgow.

He is honoured to manage a great team, work with great clients and have a lot of fun mixing with so many great people in business.

<<< To see more of the loft’s brand solutions 

For more information on brand-building by Benedetto >>>