Transcript
[INTERVIEW]
Ronda Nelson: Hello, my friend. Welcome back to The Clinical Entrepreneur podcast, episode 30. I am your host, Ronda Nelson. Last week, we talked about the importance of using the free tool, Google My Business, and how it is unbelievably effective for attracting your local customer.
This episode is day two of the 5-day Google My Business challenge, so if you’re reading this and you want to join in, it’s not too late to benefit. All you have to do is go to rondanelson.com/5daygmb. I’d love to have you.
What I wanted to talk about today are the digital assets that are a must-have for your business. Whether you’re a practitioner working from home or a brick and mortar, every business has certain digital assets. This is anything that you would use in a digital format on a digital or printed platform.
For instance, one of the things might be your logo, which is a digital asset. Another digital asset might be the colors of your brand. It is something that you would use either in print or online. Today, we’re going to talk about how you can collect and store them so that they’re all organized in one neat and tidy place.
Before we do that, let’s talk about the quality of your digital assets. When you’ve got quality images, like a great logo. Side note, I don’t really care about a logo as much as you put your best foot forward with your images in your copy, especially on your website. Everybody always thinks they need a logo first, I don’t think so. I think it’s actually the last thing you do. I think you get your message clear, you decide what your call to action is, you decide who you’re going to help, etc. I have some podcasts on that, but what’s most important is that we’ve got professional-looking assets.
Your images need to be well done and professional. They need to show your personality and style. If you are more of a straight-laced, buttoned-up, wear a tie and a jacket every day to work, then your images need to reflect that, and if you’re like me, just a pair of work pants on and a work shirt, maybe a jacket, then they need to reflect that. I’m a little bit sassy and edgy so that’s how I want my pictures to be. I don’t want to portray myself online as someone different than who I am in real life because my business and your business is just a reflection of you.
The other thing you want to make sure of is what we call on brand. Let’s say your colors are a really pretty green and an earthy tan color, you would not want pictures on your website of bright oranges and reds and yellows. You want a professional photographer having professional photos with some of your brand colors.
For example, watch those pharmaceutical commercials. All of the logos for the drug that they’re advertising always has a color. There’s one prescription drug advertisement that is green, and I can’t remember the name of the drug, Ibrance maybe. But everything throughout the whole commercial has green in it. It’s psychological branding. That person interacting with your business sees those colors and they say, “Oh, that’s Dr. So and So,” “Oh, that’s my acupuncturist.” Don’t underestimate the power of using your own wardrobe and maybe even your background in your branding.
Now let’s talk about what you need these assets for and then I’ll give you your must-haves. Here are some of the places you might use those digital assets. Obviously, you would use them on your website. So, if you have a picture of you holding a cup of coffee, you’re going to want the written part next to it to coordinate it with the picture.
You want a variety of different pictures to use on your website. You’re also going to use images on social media. Not every single picture has to be a view, but it needs to be on-brand. So, that’s your logo, those are your colors, we talked about that. You’re also going to use them on things that you are emailing or handing out to your patients.
I know quite a few practitioners who order coffee cups for their patients. It’s branded with their logo, name, and maybe a saying or image of a local attraction. That’s called swag.
You’re going to want to make sure that your emails are also on brand. When you’re sending those emails out to your patients, you want to make sure you’ve got your logo at the bottom and maybe your colors are right on that email. There are lots of places for you to use these digital assets, but here’s where practitioners get stuck. When they’re getting ready to do a website or send out an email or something like that, what happens if they get freeze and think, “Oh my gosh, where’s my logo? And what are those colors? And oh my gosh, where are those pictures and where’s that one headshot?” Those digital assets are stored in every single different place you could ever imagine. Some are on the hard drive, some are in the Cloud, some are on your phone, some are written down on a scrap of paper, it seems like they’re everywhere.
What I want you to do as homework this week is to make a place where you can store all those digital assets. What you’re going to want to do is make sure your logo is high resolution and in different formats, you can save. I recommend saving everything to an online platform you can access, such as Dropbox. For me, we have a folder that says “branding assets,” and inside that folder is everything we need to be able to get our brand out into the world.
So, branding assets is that Dropbox folder that we use to kind of collect everything. The first thing you’re going to want to put in there is your logo. You want your logo to be in different types of formats. And the reason you want them to be in different formats is that you may need just the image part of your logo or you may need just the words part of your logo. If you have one that can kind of be pulled apart, but you’re going to want them in different types of formats.
The second thing you’re going to want is your colors in your logo. Each of those colors has a number and that number is called a hex color, or a hex number. What you want to do with that hex number is store it. I recommend just putting it in a Word document. Get a little picture of the color, do a little screenshot of the color, and then put the hex number right underneath the color. The hex number starts with a pound sign and there is a series of letters and numbers, and when you plug that number in, it’ll pull up that exact color for you.
The next thing you want is some headshots. Headshots are going to be chest up, and you’re also going to want full body shots. You want some variety of positions in pictures. Aside from professional still photos, you’re going to want some lifestyle photos as well.
Those lifestyle photos are going to be ones of you sipping coffee, playing with your dog, sitting outside, or driving in your car. One of the ways you can organize those in the meantime is to start a Pinterest board. When you find an image or a shot or a pose you like, save it to a Pinterest board. That way, when you have that photo session with your photographer, you can share that Pinterest board with them and they have those for reference.
Once you’ve got all those digital assets collected, you’re going to put them in Dropbox, and then sort them by type. You might want to have a subfolder that just says, “logos and color.” You may want to have one that says, “headshots.” You may want to have one that says, “lifestyle shots.” You just want to make sure that they’re all in one place, but here’s one caution I will give you and it has to do with Google My Business.
Your Google My Business photos that you use, have to be taken from your cell phone and your location services have to be on because Google My Business wants to know that you’re taking those pictures of your location. I only have mine on when I absolutely need it, the rest of the time I turn it off, but when I take my pictures, I turn it on. When you do that, it puts the picture on a geotag, and that locates you on the planet, latitude, longitude, etc. It knows exactly where you are or where those pictures are taken.
Google will pin that geotag to the location you say your business is at and when it’s a match, it’s a winner. That’s when Google can confirm that those pictures are indeed coming from this address.
There’s my caution. Do not take pictures from your Dropbox folder and put them on Google My Business because they won’t have that geotag. As soon as you move that picture and store it somewhere, the geotag gets erased. So, for Google My Business, always take and upload them from your cell phone to Google My Business.
All right, that’s it for this week. Start thinking about how you can collect your assets, where you can store them. Keep them in a place that’s safe and secure and then begin to collect all of those things together. That way, at a moment’s notice, you know where everything is when you’re working on your website, creating forms, or working on handouts. Those images are going to be on your phone, but you’ll know exactly where they are and where to go find them.
Thank you so much for hanging out with me and taking a few minutes out of your life in your day to just hang with me on The Clinical Entrepreneur podcast. I love serving and helping you. Be sure to join the challenge if you need help or would like to know how to leverage your Google My Business; otherwise, you can reach out to me any time on Instagram. I’d love to hear how you’re doing in your business and where you might be stuck and I’ll see how I can help you.
[CLOSING]
That was a mouthful, I got a little overwhelmed with all that info, too, but it’s so good. This is a podcast you may want to go back and listen to again, just to get all the little nuggets out of there. If you’d like to join me in the Google My Business challenge this week, we’re going to do it Monday through Friday. I’m going live every single day, so be sure that you go to rondanelson.com/5daygmb. I will walk you through the entire process step by step, so you’ll make sure that you have your Google My Business all set up and ready to go. I will also put my phone number, don’t tell anyone, but it will be in the show notes and you can text me and I’ll be happy to chit chat with you via text. I love connecting with you.
At the end of the challenge, I’ve got something special to talk to you about, but you’ll have to get through the challenge to be able to find out. So, my friend, take care. Have an awesome week. Go run your business like a boss, be the CEO, and let’s make this an unbelievable year. Take care. Have an awesome week. Bye-bye.
[END]
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