Starting a business isn’t just about selling products or services-it’s about building a brand that resonates with your audience. It’s an opportunity for creative expression and will ensure your business has a unique, memorable identity that will stand out in the market. A comprehensive style guide will guarantee consistency in your brand, ultimately leading to a strong brand presence and great content. To help you on your brand journey, we are sharing our 4-part process to create a brand identity that stands the test of time.
Part 1 - Getting to Know Your Brand
When creating a brand identity, the goal is to channel your brand personality and values into a clear visual style. In order to create an authentic and memorable brand, it’s important to start with some questions. What is the product/service you’re providing? What is the story and mission behind the business? Who is your target audience? Narrowing down your story, demographic, and goals will help to pinpoint the visual style that will best suit the brand.
Part 2 - Conceptualize Your Vision & Create a Moodboard
Once you’ve defined the core values of your brand, it’s time to conceptualize. We recommend starting with a moodboard - it’s a great way to quickly generate ideas and see what aesthetic you gravitate towards. Some things to consider when looking for inspiration include:
When all is said and done, the moodboard should align with the vibe and purpose behind your brand.
Part 3 - Designing & Refining
Once a general style has been established and you have your vision in mind, it’s time to bring your brand elements to life. As these are important decisions, it’s easy to get stuck on one idea - we emphasize the importance of experimentation with multiple concepts for logos, color palettes, and style guides. Aim for at least three variations of these to help you discover what feels most authentic to your brand. Once you narrow down a singular concept, continue to refine your elements until they feel complete and authentic.
Part 4 - Brand Guidelines
As the finalization of your design elements takes shape, it’s crucial to create them into a style guide-your own brand guidelines. Your brand guidelines ensure consistency in how your brand is presented across various platforms. Remember that this should function as a rulebook for how to use your brand. Anyone you pass it off to should be able to understand how your brand should be implemented. At minimum, your brand guidelines should include:
Once all of these boxes are checked, your brand is ready to launch! Remember that you don’t have to stop here. As your business develops and evolves, so does your brand journey. There’s always room for more innovation and refinement, so keep pushing the boundaries of what your brand can achieve.
Understanding and managing email subscriber preferences is key to an effective email marketing strategy. We wanted to share Good & Gold’s approach which provides a month-by-month plan to help you master subscriber preferences, ultimately leading to more engaging and successful email campaigns.
Goal: The aim is to focus on subscribers who are most actively engaged with your brand, as they will provide the most reliable data for your initial tests and analyses. Plus, adding first and last name fields to your signup and preferences forms will allow you to send more personalized emails to new subscribers.
Task: Start by analyzing your email list to identify the most engaged subscribers. For larger audiences, segment those who have interacted with your emails in the last 90 days. It's also important to update your email signup form and email preference page to include fields for subscriber’s first and last names. This will allow you to personalize your campaigns to each subscriber.
Goal: To plan a varied approach that not only drives sales but also enables direct connection with your audience. Each type of content offers a unique opportunity to engage and understand what resonates with your subscribers.
Task: Develop a content calendar that includes a mix of sales promotions, brand stories, and important announcements. Incorporate creative approaches, like the successful Winter Horoscope campaign Good & Gold recently launched for Alfred Coffee.
Goal: The primary objective is to understand which specific elements of your email campaigns are driving engagement. By controlling one variable at a time, you can accurately determine the effect each has on subscriber behavior and preferences. This focused approach to A/B testing will provide you with clear, actionable insights to improve your email marketing strategy.
Task: Begin A/B testing with your email campaigns by varying one element at a time. This could include testing different email send times (AM vs. PM), experimenting with subject lines (using emojis vs. not using them), and altering the placement of your call-to-action (CTA in the header vs. after the body text).
Goal: The objective here is to gain clear insights into what specifically resonates with your subscribers and have that inform your strategy with your next campaign. Did you find that more people opened your campaign in the evening? Consider sending future emails in that time frame.
Task: Once you've conducted your A/B tests, it's time to dive into the data. Analyze which version of your email campaigns performed better and why.
Goal: To further enhance the personalization and relevance of your email campaigns. By now, you should start seeing patterns in what your audience prefers, allowing you to tailor your content more effectively.
Task: Based on your findings from Month 2, start refining your A/B testing strategy. Try changing the metrics you're measuring for each variable. For example, if you found that more people opened your email in the evening, you should consider testing to see if they actually placed more orders in the evening as well!
Also, now that you’ve likely gathered the names of some of your new subscribers, try testing personalization in some of your campaigns.
Goal: To establish a more targeted and effective email marketing strategy that aligns with your audience’s preferences. The aim is to increase engagement, which could lead to higher open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately, conversions.
Task: Take the most successful elements from your A/B tests and start implementing them in your regular email campaigns. This might involve changing your email send times, updating your subject line strategy, or reformatting your email layout.
By following this 90-day plan, you'll be better positioned to understand and cater to your email subscribers' preferences. Not only does this lead to more successful email campaigns, but it also helps in building a stronger, more meaningful relationship with your audience.
Need assistance in mastering the realm of email marketing? We've got you covered. Connect with us today for expert guidance on your next email marketing campaign!
If you haven’t noticed already, Web3 has permeated discussions about the current state of the internet. While it’s true that we are still in the early days, how it is already affecting and will continue to affect digital marketing is becoming increasingly clear, and we’re at the point where it is already having a noticeable impact.
But first, let’s start with the basics:
Web 3 is, at its core, the theory that the internet will evolve away from centralized, tightly controlled platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon) towards a decentralized model that better incentivizes and rewards creators while expanding ownership to a broader base of users.
Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with the ideas that formed the current incarnation of the Web, describes it as the Semantic Web, “not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better-enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
When discussing decentralization, we’re referring to anywhere you can eliminate a middleman. Perhaps you’d like to be your own bank or make money directly from content that you create without having to go through somebody else’s centralized platform.
You may have heard the term Web3 referred to as “the same as blockchain or crypto”. While it’s true that one vision of Web3 is heavily centered on those technologies, they only play a part in the full tech stack of the next generation of the internet:
Artificial Intelligence is generally a blanket term for technology that allows machines to act, learn, and communicate as people do. Machine learning is a path towards that, but needs a lot of help from us to achieve its goals. That’s where Large Language Models come in,, like ChatGPT, BERT, and the various models of Hugging Face.
These models need to be trained by people. You do this each time you use ChatGPT or give DALL-E a prompt. Ultimately these models learn from us and are a reflection of our communal feedback.
In the future these models will help guide the way toward a decentralized web by reducing the need for human moderation and intervention, significantly reducing costs, and increasing the efficiency of everything from safely using social media platforms to giving medical advice to searching for new recipes.
First, let’s talk blockchain and crypto. While it’s a small part of Web3, it’s had an outsized presence over the past few years. NFTs in particular are already changing advertising:
Non-Fungible Tokens are still in their “toy phase”, and while most people still think of them as silly jpeg, we’re just scratching the surface of what these will become. Ultimately they’ll represent any digital representation of a real-world item that needs confirmation of its authenticity or benefits from being able to be transferred or traded quickly.
Some examples:
However, for most brands, the more immediate benefits of Web3 come from two areas:
The no-code/low-code movement takes out much of the need for traditional developers and aims to enable non-coders to develop applications without the need to filter their goals through developers and programmers. Squarespace and Webflow are all excellent examples of this that you can use today!
Meanwhile, platforms like bubble and weweb will allow businesses and marketing agencies to develop full-scale applications from scratch without code. Some examples:
Many digital marketers have already been using machine learning in their day-to-day without realizing it. Google Ads’ optimization and performance campaigns work via machine learning. Additionally,, if you’ve ever used Grammarly to help improve your copywriting, that’s based on machine learning too!
Some additional great examples of tools that can help bring your efforts to the next level include:
Ultimately, Web3 in all of its forms will change the way that we create and interact with the internet and with each other, but these advances, just like the applications and platforms we use today, are tools that need your creativity and passion to get the most out of!
So, what to do with all this knowledge? At Good & Gold, we’re developing effective ways for our team to leverage these powerful new tools across all our digital marketing services. We’re also keeping a close eye on the line between staying relatable, creative, and human, and using these tools to increase efficiency and accuracy in our work. In short, we’re doing the heavy lifting so your brand can benefit from this exciting digital future organically and gracefully.
Given the vast landscape of platforms, strategies, and ad types that it encompasses, Search Engine Marketing is one of the toughest parts of the ever-changing digital marketing universe. Need some help navigating it? We’ve got you covered.
The team at Good & Gold is spectacular. They were quickly able to assess our marketing needs and offered a thorough and measurable plan for achieving results. Working in partnership, we have exceeded most of the goals we set out to achieve and have moved on to impressive new objectives. Additionally, and importantly, the team is staffed by wonderful humans. We were cautious when bringing in a marketing partner, but the folks at Good & Gold have become an extension of the Stumptown family.
As a business owner facing the challenge and opportunity of bringing our marketing efforts up to speed in an increasingly digitally-driven industry, the team at Good & Gold went above and beyond in building out a continually evolving digital marketing roadmap with our ideas and brand top of mind.
The team at Good & Gold is not just knowledgeable and lightning fast, they are who we trust with our digital marketing needs. They have become an important part of our team who we rely on daily. Never has there been a challenge that have not been able to tackle.
