Here are a few trends and examples of “meet the team” pages. One trend worth mentioning is the most popular:

1. Employee photos.

One idea for employee photos is to make custom avatars – like we did on Adcuda’s site. This is a great way to let an employee’s personality shine through while keeping the design professional and consistent. Our team page holds a little biographical line beside each employee photo – We like to show our creative personalities by sounding not-so-serious on our about page.

2. Social Media Links

As you know there are many professionals out there that have linkedin, facebook and twitter accounts. Why not have your potential clients connect with your employees? It is a great way to lead your clients to current events/thoughts and it builds strong relationships. Before doing this, make sure your employee’s content is appropriate. You do not want to damage your company’s reputation. There is also a way to add in a team member’s latest tweet to the page next to their profile. What fun!

3. Expanded profiles

While many sites only include basic information about each of the team, others include extended profile info. this is done through the uses of pop up windows, sliders, new pages, etc. Extended info is a geat way to give clients more insight into the employees behind a company. The simpler the layout, the more effective. You do not want to bombard your prospective clients with too much info – but it is nice to include info like “our story” or “what we bring to the table”

Here are some visual examples:

Th_nk

Blue Sky Resumes

MW Design Interactive

nGen Works

glue Isobar

Etsy

kudos smashing magazine

I tend to think of those that are a joy to work with. The groups that come to mind first, understand the benefits of what we do; they are proud to work with us and often tell their friends and colleagues about our shared successes and they are people I truly enjoy getting to know. We root for them and get so excited to review their reporting. We like to brag about what they do well and we do it a lot!

When you think of your favorite clients, what do they have in common? Are they from a similar industry? Common company size?Were they referrals from the same source? Identifying these commanlities can help you to hone in on your ideal client.

Isn’t everyone my ideal client you ask?! Don’t we want to sell as much as possible, to as many people as we can?

Sure, that would be fantastic. And would totally help fund the trip to Iceland I’ve been planning.  But not everyone is your ideal client.

What about the client that continually shops your service around every couple of months or the customer who really doesn’t understand the benefit of your product or the one that lives too far away and often cancels at the last minute? Are these people really the best match for your company? Will you have a long term relationship? Or will it fizzle out at the end of a contract?

The closer you get to identifying your ideal client, the better you can cultivate your marketing plan. Who are these people? What services or products are they looking for? Where can I find them?

Once you become more specific about who your ideal client is, the easier it will be to attract them.

So, who is your ideal client? Think about it and write it down. Now tell people. Start with us…maybe we know them.

This week was the perfect time to reorganize my scheduling and actually manage how I received new work orders, because we’ve now expanded into larger offices (merrily nicknamed ‘the Dungeon’)! Although my new desk is a tempting clean slate for post-its, we here at Adcuda have streamlined our workflow.

A fancy gadget called a Customer Support Ticket System is how we are going to queue our projects, and a shoutout to Zendesk for being the free trial that won us over. This great website allows our clients (and us) to have a record of the services required, plus it saves the designer (me) the ‘oops’ factor of writing down something wrong, say the exact model number or color of a car that needs to be front and center of an email going out in two days! It will ease the stress of second-guessing, and everyone involved will see exactly when their projects will be done. Now I can free up my mind from worrying and focus on the important things, like designing killer emails.