Ep 14: We’re Back + New Series Overview

We're Back + New Series Overview

Sarah

In this episode, we will be going to discuss the new series we are introducing on how to build a successful brand and website. We will be sharing our guidelines and best practices for you and your business. Make sure to check out our show notes for all resources and external links mentioned today, and this will also be in the format of our newsletter, so make sure to subscribe, and check out our website for more information. Let’s catch you up on what Citrus has been up to these past few months.

In recent months, we have welcomed new faces to our team. Christine Rose and I have recently joined Citrus and we love it. It already feels just like family. We’re super excited to be part of the team and we can’t wait to help you with your design needs.

And for our client’s Spotlight this week, we are very excited to announce that our client, Houston Volleyball Academy, just launched the redesign of their website. Let’s just give them a round of applause quickly. Just a little background, Houston Volleyball Academy is a Houston-based volleyball club that trains children at young adults ages 8 to 18, how to play and excel in indoor and beach volleyball. The HVA team came to us after falling in love with Sunshine Volleyball Club’s dynamic website, shout out to everyone at Citrus for designing and launching that site as well, it’s beautiful.

HVA came to us wanting a facelift on their website with design inspiration from Sunshine’s site. We had a blast designing this new site. We made sure to include dynamic components just like Sunshine Site and even added a few more goodies in there, and we can’t wait for you to check it out. So head to hva.club and give them some love on social media as well. The link will also be in our show notes for easy access.

Did you know that November is lung cancer and stomach Cancer Awareness Month?

One of our clients, CenterPoint Radiation Oncology, proudly treats people who are currently experiencing gastric and lung cancer. Dr. Rosalyn Morrel, founder of CenterPoint Radiation Oncology recommends that early detection and personalized treatment, like the care that she provides at CenterPoint, increases your likelihood exponentially of overcoming cancer. If you would like more information, please visit Centerpointoncology.com. You’ll find information about cancers that they treat as well as treatment options and a way for you to schedule an appointment to see her, reach out to them, and show them some love on social media.

I don’t know about you, but I love staying up to date on what’s trending in the design world. In each episode, I’ll be sharing relevant news and trends that can help you and your business.

This week we will be reviewing and discussing the equity effect principles for the post-pandemic organization, so this resource is from Sparks and Honey, which is an amazing cultural trend identifier website where you can find information on current trends. The description for this report reads the lessons from 2020 that have illustrated our endless capacity for Brazilians rebuilding and empathy, but they have also shown the vast disparity in opportunity justice and economics that still prevail in the US and globally.

In this report, we explore various principles gleaned from living through the pandemic and established equity or the quality of being fair as a leading determinant for well-being. It’s the responsibility of organizations of all kinds to claim equity as a strategic grounding ideal. This report covers the five cultural shifts, which every company now needs to reckon with and why is equity the answer.

So these five shifts will affect how everyone works, whether businesses change or not. We outline key principles to get ahead of these cultural shifts and build the post-pandemic organization. The shift starts with accountable action and ends in a resilient future. Define the human-centric organization of tomorrow, specifically with an eye on diversity.

Our future is asking us to share wealth, resources, and know-how to create more equity in a world where people, organizations, and environments, when inhabit can thrive. When that happens, there’s an exponential effect that river breaks across people, organizations, and society. So if you would like to read the full report or would like to explore other news and trends, the link to the PDF and their website will be located in the show notes.

I think this is incredibly important to go over. I don’t know about you, but I feel like especially after the pandemic, things have changed and to be relevant, to be cutting edge, to be relatable, we need to pay attention to these changes, and we need to evaluate what is going to work in our society now, things are different, the same things aren’t going to work. So I challenge you, please read the report it’s super interesting, and let us know what you think.

All right, now onto our main topic, a recent theme I have noticed, which is so beautiful is the increase of people wanting to start a business or a brand and are unsure of where to start or exactly how to do this.

We often receive questions like, how do I start creating my brand and website?

Or, what’s the process?

Or is this something I can do or take on myself?

Taking those first few steps can be extremely difficult and confusing. This series is meant to answer these questions and help provide some guidance for you and your business.

We will be starting a new series called The Roadmap to Building a Successful Brand and Website, where we share with you our guidelines on how to create a successful brand and website for your business. In each issue, we’ll be diving into a new phase from this roadmap, which also includes your very own PDF, which is available for you to download in our short notes.

So please make sure to do that right now. Pause this, go to our website, sign up for our newsletter, and if you all already signed up, please pull up the most recent newsletter. You’ll be able to find all of our links and more information there.

You may ask, why is branding so important in a business?

I see this question get asked a lot. Branding definitely can be something where we look at it and it just feels right and easy, but we forget how much thought and attention is behind it. Branding dictates the world of who you are and what your brand is and how you want to be perceived. This could allow for greater influence over how your audience sees you. Branding may look easy and honestly is often easily overlooked, but overall, it can dictate which brands are ultimately successful. It is important to sit down and think about who you are and what your brand is and what you represent.

Having successful branding allows you to build relationships with your clients or audience, especially today being able to stand out and be relatable is extremely important. You want people to remember you, and relate to you and your brand. You want people to feel included.

We’ll be going more into depth about the importance of your brand and brand identity next episode. So please make sure to subscribe and check out next week’s episode.

So what are the different phases of this roadmap you ask?

So in total, there are seven phases. Each week we’ll be going in-depth on how to complete each step and how you and your business can be successful.

So these phases include phase one, discovering your brand and identity. In this phase, you’ll be focused on determining your brand’s personality and how you wanna be represented and perceived. We’ll help you research and set your target audience as well as determine the tone of your brand’s messaging.  

Phase two is the initial acquisition. This is an important phase as we’ll be confirming our brand’s name along with social media handles and getting started with a website platform. This is a really important base phase, that we cannot lag on, so we’ll be going more into depth on phase two.

For phase three, we will be discussing the design process. So this phase will be working on your brand’s visual representation across multiple platforms. This can easily be thought of as the easy phase or the fun phase, but just depending on your understanding of yourself and your brand and understanding of the process, this can be fun or this can be a lot of work, but we are here to help you make this process easier and help you be able to figure out for yourself. Is this something I can do or is this something that I need to ask for help with? Which is okay.

For phase four, we will be going over content creation, so we’ll be working on getting all content ready for all platforms, like our new website, products, and even social media.

Phase five includes development and production. So this means setting up your website and importing all the content, making sure your website is set up for you and your business and set up in a successful way that will let your customers know what you sell, who you are, and how they relate to you, and what value you will bring to them.

Phase six includes our pre-launch, so we’ll be working on the pre-launch checklist, which we will provide you with, but this pretty much is getting everything ready for launch. A lot of work, but super exciting and something to look forward to.

Phase seven, probably the most exciting phase is the launch and post-launch. We will be ensuring everything is running smoothly, and also we’ll be following up with marketing campaigns. To make sure that your business is successful and that you’re following up with all of this new traffic, with all of this new attention. You want people to stay with you. You want people to be interested and follow through.

If you have any questions on any of this, please follow us on social media and feel free to reach out to us there. We wanted to say thank you so much for listening. We are super excited to be starting this podcast again, and we can’t wait to bring you all of this insight and be able to interact with you all.

All episode materials will be available in our show notes, so please remember to download the journey map and stay tuned for the next episode where we will dive into phase one, discovering your brand and identity.