December 14th, 2012 // by Rob Williams

2012 Miles Design Holiday Cards

It’s the season for making wishes. What’s ours? We wish the very best this holiday season, and we hope you’ll spread a little Christmas cheer of your own by sharing our original W-I-S-H post cards with family and friends.

This Christmas, on behalf of our clients, we’re making a few extra-special wishes come true. Miles Design has adopted 2 small families through the Dayspring Center. As a team, we went shopping for the toys and other various items these families needed this holiday season in an effort to do our part on behalf of our clients and friends.

Happy Holidays from Miles Design

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December 11th, 2012 // by Rob Williams

Miles Design’s Twitter Engagers – A Thank You Post

Miles Design wanted to take the time to recognize and thank those of you who took the time and effort to share our content over the course of the last month. It doesn’t go unnoticed, believe us! Check and see if you made the list. Feel free to join in with the conversations below. The tweets are embedded into the post so you can interact with them as much as you’d like!

This month’s list:

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December 10th, 2012 // by Rob Williams

Von Glitschka visits Indianapolis!

Are you a bullsh*t designer?

The themed question that was posed to the audience filled with designers last Thursday by Von Glitschka at The Jazz Kitchen as he gave his “Drawing Conclusions” presentation to the AAF Indianapolis and AIGA Indy chapters at their national speaker series event. It was a question that was very well received, and by no means fell upon deaf ears.

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November 26th, 2012 // by Rob Williams

Brand Awareness Problems: 3 Forms & Examples

Brand awareness problems: one of the most common reasons for rebranding. Lets explore some of the most common awareness problems that we deal with on a day-to-day basis when discussing brand strategy with our clients.

Naturally, brand awareness takes many shapes. Any company that has been in business for any amount of time has some facet of awareness in their particular marketplace. But what type of awareness? Important questions to consider:

  • Is is the right kind of awareness?
  • What is the market’s impression of you?
  • Do targets understand the breadth of your company’s capabilities?

 
Lets consider some of the various awareness problems your brand might be going through.

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November 19th, 2012 // by Rob Williams

Co-Occurrence & SEO: Bringing Back the Power of the Brand

The million dollar question from clients:

Q: How do I rank well in search engines?

My answer.

  1. #1: Build a good brand.
  2. #2: Build good content.
  3. #3: Market your brand and your content.

SEO has simplified in the past year. If you’ve been paying any attention, you’ve seen SEO’s everywhere become “inbound” and “content” marketers, and for good reason. Old school, tactical SEO is becoming less and less effective whether they like to admit it or not.

Case in point: co-citation becoming a search engine ranking factor. (Stay with me, and I’ll explain.)

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November 1st, 2012 // by Rob Williams

Marketing Buzzwords – They Must Die

Here at Miles Design we’re looking to collaboratively administrate empowered markets via extensible researched growth strategies. We’re looking to credibly generate turnkey marketing solutions that will empower and motivate segmented audiences. Bottom line: we’re looking to dramatically engage top-line web services vis-à-vis cutting edge deliverables.

Did you catch all that?

Good, because you shouldn’t have. It literally meant nothing. Stay with me on this, there’s a point I’m trying to make…

I am morally opposed, and almost professionally incapable of utilizing vocabulary in this fashion. Marketing buzzwords, they’re just not helpful. The main problem with on-page online marketing these days are that we’re not making things simple enough. The Internet is already filled with a ton of crap we don’t understand and don’t have the time to digest. The name of the game in content driven online marketing is simple and instructive education for our audiences. Make sure your brand communicates your message clearly and definitively.  It’s time we stop over complicating our own vernacular lingo and keep things simple.

Recently the team here at Miles Design has been commenting about the latest viral videos popping up that are centered around poking fun at marketing-esque buzzwords. Check this video out from Adobe, for example:

Lets face it; we’re all guilty of this practice from time to time. These words weren’t just derived from thin air. At some point they actually meant something to someone and in most cases they still do. However, these buzzwords aren’t clear and definitive. They’re confusing and time consuming to understand. These facts, unfortunately, aren’t keeping brands from plastering buzzwords all over their websites. When I see this happening it makes me cringe.

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October 30th, 2012 // by Josh Miles

Inbound Marketing | Content Marketing – Miles Design Does That Now

The days of old are just that—old. More will be expected of your brand on a daily basis. Your online presence cannot simply consist of an online brochure for your products and services. Your audience wants to build a relationship with you. They want interaction. They want more and more, day in and day out. To do that, your brand needs to express some personality. And that’s exactly what we are preparing to deliver.

Rob Williams Director of Inbound Marketing

Miles Design has a reputation for serving the professional services industry with award-winning branding and design services. We understand, above all, the power of a well-positioned brand and have sought to bring that to every client we’ve served over the past 10 years. Miles Design is now embarking on a new chapter. We’re evolving to give our clients unmatched and unparalleled service and delivery as we expand our expertise into the inbound and content marketing space with our latest hire: Rob Williams.

Rob comes to us with a wealth of passion and experience in the inbound marketing space. He served as an SEO Consultant in his previous roll where he was responsible for developing and implementing diverse and effective online strategies for his clients – persistently working with them to increase their inbound traffic coming from organic search. He has a passion for his trade that we believe to be unmatched in Indianapolis. He understands what people are beginning to expect from a brand’s online presence, and he knows how to deliver that to respective audiences through detailed, researched online marketing strategies.

Rob is here at Miles Design to head-up and direct a new surge of service offerings for our clients. His role will include, but is not limited to the following:

  • Comprehensive Web Strategy
  • Research and analysis of the competitive landscape
  • Development of marketing funnels within client web properties
  • Implementation of strategy within web properties we build for our clients
  • Consulting on the utilization and optimization of inbound traffic
  • Development and implementation of content marketing pieces
  • Reporting on all aspects of the inbound marketing process

 

With the addition of inbound marketing to our branding and web design expertise, Miles Design now offers an even more comprehensive mix of marketing services.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Rob to the team. We’re taking the next step in offering our clients an even more holistic brand strategy.

Please, join us in welcoming Rob to the team! Feel free to tweet us or leave a comment in the comment section below.

Thanks for taking the time to celebrate with us!

- Miles Design Team

October 19th, 2012 // by Josh Miles

2012 Heartland Film Festival Branding

The 2012 Heartland Film Festival is underway. We had the privilege once again to create this year’s film festival branding, look, language, and advertising vehicles across the entire campaign. These are just a few examples of our design work including television commercials, t-postcards, and guidebook.

The film festival brand voice and identity were guided by last year’s theme of, “The films you watch can change the way you see.”

This year, the theme was “Sit perfectly still. Be moved.”

Television Commercials

The photography for the campaign was shot by Harold Lee Miller, and helped convey the “transformative power of film.” Continue reading…

September 28th, 2012 // by Josh Miles

Farewell Cookie

Today is Joshua Cook’s (aka Cookie) last day at Miles Design. Our dessert-loving, President of AIGA Indianapolis is leaving us to pursue new opportunities at Pivot Marketing.

He joined Miles Design in 2009 as an intern, and after graduating from Anderson University joined us as a designer. Cookie has been a great asset to our team during these past 3 years, and we wish him well.

Please join us in wishing Joshua tremendous success in his future endeavors.

To congratulate Joshua, you can reach him at his new email address: joshua (at) pivotmarketing (dot) com

September 14th, 2012 // by Josh Miles

Five tips to improve brand consistency

“Oh really? We didn’t know you guys did that.”
– Every B2B client in history

You’re sitting in a meeting with a long-standing client and they casually mention that they’re using one of your competitors to handle a new project. What?! This is a service your firm provides to other clients.

Why didn’t your firm even have an opportunity to bid on this project?

Five Tips Brand ConsistencyHave they not entrusted you with several successful projects already? Not only did they fail to consult you, but your client seems surprised to hear that you offer this service. Something clearly went wrong—lost in translation.

Fear not, good reader. This has happened to all of us at one time or another.

But why does this happen? Continue reading…