How to Get a Logo for your Horse Business

Branding, branding, branding…it’s all around us these days. Branding is certainly an important concept to understand as a horse business owner - it embodies your essence and conveys to your audience the feeling of what your business is about. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand, and must convey the feeling of your brand.

In a perfect world, you hire a graphic designer as you’re in the start-up stage of your business. You work together to develop your logo based on your vision and mission, and from your first days you have a logo to use with all your marketing materials and initiatives. Yup, in a perfect world that’s how it goes.

More often than not, businesses are started without a logo and on a shoe string budget. As much as you might want a logo, it slips down the list of priorities. There are a variety of ways you can get a logo on a shoe string budget.

1) Send out an email to your list of contacts looking for someone that does graphic design. Many people in the horse industry do more than one job to earn a living, and some do graphic design. You can then ask the graphic designers that you learn about to provide you with samples and pricing for a logo. This gives you a few proposals to compare.

2) Local colleges that offer graphic design courses often require students to work on projects. Contact them to see how you might become a student project. The logos that the students develop are usually done for no charge. If you don’t like what they come up with you are under no obligation to use it and have not spent money on it. If you do like it, you might ask the instructor if you can make a small donation, perhaps to a graphic design club at the school. You can also offer to provide a recommendation for the student which can come in handy as they look for work in the graphic design world.

3) There are some interesting options available online too. Check out www.99desgins.com. This is a crowd sourcing design service. That means that you choose how many designs you want to see based on pricing, and that many designers will submit one. You choose which one you want.

No matter which method you choose, when you have a logo design you’re interested in; show it to a few people that are your clients, colleagues, and friends. Ask them what they think. Ask them what their first impression is when they see the logo. Ask them if your logo will be easy for someone to recall and bring to mind. Ask them if the logo is “you.” You’ll be able to make changes based on their feedback so that your logo will speak to your audience and reflect you and your horse business.

Are You Listed in Google Places?

There’s so many great ways to increase your horse business exposure that are free. Of course, when I say free I mean that you don’t have to pay for them, but you will have to devote some time instead. One way is to get your horse business listed on Google Places, and in fact you may discover that it’s already there. If it’s already there, you’ll want to be sure the information is representing your business correctly. If it’s not already there, you are missing a chance at an online yellow pages of sorts. Plus, it helps to drive more traffic to your website. You can create coupons for those that find you this way, which provides you with some information about where your prospects and business is coming from. And on top of that, you can upload photos and video.

It’s really easy to either correct your listing and/or add to it, or to set it up if there isn’t one there. Follow these steps:
1) Go to www.google.com/places. Log into your account if you have one. If you don’t have one go ahead and create one. Google has lots of cool tools to use once you have an account and I’ll talk about more of these in future blogs.
2) After you’ve logged into your account or created a new one a link will appear that says “List your business.” Click on that.
3) The next piece of information Google asks for is your phone number. By filling this in, the system looks to see if it has any information on you. If it does have information it will pop up. You can correct the information that may not be right. If they don’t have you yet, fill in the information they are asking for.
4) Since Google doesn’t want just anyone signing up somebody else’s business with false information, the next thing that they do is to verify that you really are a representative of the business. They do this by giving you a PIN that you will have to enter online. You can choose one of two methods for them to send you the PIN. They can call you with it or you they can send it to you on a postcard. I did all of these steps in one sitting and chose the phone call, which came instantaneously. The postcard method will take longer.

Now you should be all set. You can create coupons for prospects and clients to download which offers another promotional tool for you. And it’s fun to go to google.com/places and enter your business name and see it pop up. Don’t expect overnight results from having listed yourself here, but do include it as one thing you can measure about your marketing and track quarterly and annually. You may find that during some seasons you have more contacts this way, which in turn can help you plan out promotions you might want to offer at different times of the year.