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Katherine Ann Byam 0:27
Hello, everyone and welcome to the show. This is Women in Sustainable Business, as well as Where Ideas Launch - The Podcast. We're doing a double show in this episode. So thank you so much for joining us live on the show tonight. We have with us Michelle Miller, who is a brand strategist on the West Coast of the US. Michelle, why don't you say hello to everyone. Hi, everyone.
Michelle Miller 0:51
It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Katherine. My name is Michelle Miller, and I own Minty Made, which is a sustainable branding and web design studio.
Katherine Ann Byam 1:01
Yeah, it's really wonderful to have you. And Michelle has been in the Women in Sustainable Business community for about six, seven months now. And she's been with us in the membership as well for just about the same time. And she's an incredible stylist and designer and all of these things. And she's now running a full-service studio and Minty Made. So I'm really excited to talk to her a bit about her journey to building this business and where it all came from and where she is now.
Michelle Miller 1:29
I'll start off with just a bit of my background. I have been in corporate and small business marketing for the past 10 years. And I most recently worked for a nonprofit that was based around getting women into construction careers. And I really did enjoy that job. What I found throughout most of my corporate career is just noticing more frequently the amount of waste, the amount of energy that's consumed by all these major corporations. And I actually sat on a couple of different small focus groups within those organisations to talk more about sustainability within the office space within the trade show industry which I was in for a very long time as well. And during COVID and the pandemic, I was able to take on more projects that were based around wellness and sustainable businesses. And that allowed me to go full time with Minty Made as of January of this year. So it's been an exciting year, businesses stayed steady. And even though more people are out and about travelling now, there's still a large push for getting content out in the world, making sure that you're differentiated amongst your competitors, and really showing the impact that each small business large business everyone has, as we're really in this all together for minting our global missions.
Katherine Ann Byam 2:55
Exactly. Thank you so much for sharing that. And that's I think that's really important. There are a number of sustainable brands out there now that are willing to make a change. So people who are prepared to not just say they want to change but to make change happen. And I really applaud it. It's something that's, that's so encouraging as we around. But we also struggle with scaling these businesses and making them leverage the impact that they really want to leverage. And I think branding has an important role to play in that I wanted to ask you, what are you? What are your reflections on the things people get wrong when they try to brand themselves?
Michelle Miller 3:30
Sure, I really talk about sustainable brain most of the time. And that's kind of has a double meaning in itself where people tend to just do a quick fix on their branding. They'll pick a colour that they like, they'll pick a font that they like, throw something up there, make a logo quickly. And they don't really design with their target audience in mind, they design with what they like what they think looks good. And that's not always what's best for your brand and messaging. So that's the number one, I would say common mistake that I see people making as they're starting out on their businesses. I also see people jumping on a lot of these trend trains. And for us in the eco-community, we're familiar with fast fashion versus slow fashion. And it really is the same when it comes to branding. There's a lot of trendy script fonts out there. There's a lot of trendy flashy websites that we see when we're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. And I really tell people not to fall for jumping on that bandwagon and really sticking to what the roots are of your brand. All of my brand work is deeply rooted in strategy which is so important, especially for a business just starting out because it's an investment not only if you're DIY your own brands, that's a lot of your time that you could be building your business elsewhere, but also if you invest in a brand and or web designer, that's a large investment too because there's a lot of work that goes into that to make sure that your messaging is clear, and that you're reaching the customers or the clients that you're trying to serve. I would say one other mistake that I see is people creating a logo or a brand around one product or one service in particular. And because our businesses, all of us in this club are set up to scale, you don't want to box yourself into a logo that just has a photo of, let's see compostable utensils or something like that. Because if you offer more products down the road, then all of your brandings have to change. And you have to go back and revisit that.
Katherine Ann Byam 5:48
That's really, really good advice, actually. And pivoting a bit to what are the sort of key things that we need to think about in succeeding so just right now. At the moment, we're running a Copy Bootcamp in the club, but it's interesting to see how many people are making discoveries about their ideal client as they go through this journey of copywriting. What are the key things to make sure match up when you're coming to a brand strategist? And you want to go through what you want? What sort of things should you prepare? What is important to that process?
Michelle Miller 6:23
Definitely. Through my own strategy, when I work with clients, it's a couple of core pieces here, there's getting clear on your values. And what I learned through a course that I took called the Ego Citizen Course a couple of months ago, is trying to separate your own personal values from the values of your business because there are two different value bases there. And though you are the face of your business, like in my case, I am, with many small business owners, there's only the solopreneur in the mix, really hone in on what your brand voices as well. So values, brand voice... If your brand were a person, I always ask people to describe what their brand looks like, what their brand smells like, what their brand tastes like. And it really evokes all the senses around what your brand is aiming to accomplish and what your business goals are. Speaking of business goals, that's another question that I asked before I even work with any business owners is what are you trying to achieve? I really steer people away from "all I want more followers" or "Oh, I want more people to join my lives." It's all about reaching that end customer converting them into a buyer or a subscriber. And really having clear business goals, I think is the number one thing I'd say to have. Prepared when you talk to a brand strategist, a copywriter, a photographer, any service provider in general.
Katherine Ann Byam 7:57
Absolutely. These are important ingredients. And I was also trying to explain yesterday, the difference between an ideal client and a client. And I think it's really important for all of us to understand that having an ideal client does is not an exclusive thing. It's not like you don't serve everyone but it is about that brand focus, right?
Michelle Miller 8:17
Sure. One of the exercises I have my clients do is telling me about an ideal client. And then I actually create an ideal client profile for them where I write a little story about, let's say, Maria. Maria goes shopping at the farmers market every day with her reusable bags, she stumbles upon a bulletin board at the end of the farmers market sees a business card that that is intriguing and well designed. And that's how that purchase path works toward your business. And that's really helpful for people because they can start to see, "Oh, my, this ideal client avatar, even though they're not real or fictitious, is a person" that they can see that whole streamline of them finding out about their business and moving into inquiring. So I love going through that exercise with people, they really appreciate that when I asked at the end of our projects, what was your favourite part? They always say the fact that we were able to work together and come up with two to three of my ideal clients, and they really start to see how that can come to life.
Katherine Ann Byam 9:29
Yeah, wonderful. So I want to pivot again about full-service studios. So I know that this is something that has been sort of trending of late. So people start off maybe with branding only, but then they start bringing in other services as they know you've done as well this year. And why is it important to bring those things together in terms of impact for your customer?
Michelle Miller 9:53
Earlier this year, I made a decision. When I speak to clients and they're interested in moving, I actually package copywriting, my web design, branding and photography all together because it allows me to coordinate and collaborate with both the copywriter and the photographer, both on a visual and a verbal and for copywritten standpoint. It really helps us all go in the same direction at once with what the brand voice is saying, what the messaging should be, how the brand should portray itself with imagery and such. And it's very hard to work disjointedly with either copy coming either from the client themselves or another copywriter, and kind of fitting that square peg in the round hole. When you're trying to fit it all together. It's really a team effort. And I'm of the belief that it should be approached that way. And it's made a huge difference in just conversion rates that I've seen for people's websites, people signing on or buying products or services. And I will never go back to the way it was before. And I think a lot of others are moving in this direction for the same reasons. It's these business groups like this that you started, Katherine are an incredible help to fostering that collaboration with others.
Katherine Ann Byam 11:20
Absolutely. So I think I think these are all wonderful tips. I want to now pivot to something that's more even more important for all of us as we're all based online pretty much every day. And this is about the sustainability of your website itself. And we like to do pretty branding shoots and have heavy images that look beautiful, but we know that this isn't good, either for the environment. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how to make your websites more eco friendly, or tips in that direction.
Michelle Miller 11:54
I would love to, in fact, I just read another book. I have it right here. It's called belief. I believe he's based in the UK, his name is Tom Greenwood. For anyone interested in this book. It's called Sustainable Web Design. It's a short read. But it has a lot of great tips and findings that I've added to my knowledge base. When you look at a website, as you just mentioned, again, back to the trendy things that are going on in the web design world, we see a lot of flashy graphics, a lot of animation, a lot of things that move and these are all large contributors to page weight. Page weight is a complicated formula to try and figure out what the energy or how much energy is being emitted from your website but it's a good baseline. You can measure that in data. There's a couple of other tools that I'll share in the group actually after we get finished up here that show how much or how green really enjoyed plugging my own website into there and seeing where it ranked. Some other ways to limit your energy consumption on your website is to opt-in or purchase your domain hosting from a green host. And there's a list of them. If you just type in green web hosting online, they'll come up. A lot of these hosting companies are committed to hosting their platforms, fueled by 100% renewable energy. And it's great that that's becoming more popular as I've seen over the years. I just switched mine over from GoDaddy which is a large hosting company here to Green Web Platform hosting. And a lot of people worry, "Oh, well their networks go down or is it as reliable and it is. It doesn't make a difference. A lot of the large platform hosting companies have downtime too. And I just sleep better at night knowing that I'm investing my money in a company that's committed to sustainability. Also, being mindful of the colours that you choose. This was a really interesting find that I had a couple of months ago. White space, you would think that on a website more white space is better because it's keeping things simplified, but it's actually the opposite dark colours use a lot less energy on your screen than white, light blues, bright colours. So that was very interesting for me to find out. Be mindful of your movement. So a lot of JavaScript code. I won't go to I won't go into too much of a nerd mode on the development side. But a lot of code that's on the website is unused. So think of it as you would garbage in the trash can. It's not there to be used anymore. There's no purpose to it. And so that's if you're working with a developer asking those questions about what's needed. You can accomplish a lot with compressed images with some streamlined code and really still deliver a valuable and memorable customer experience without having all of these different elements that don't really add to the experience at all. And then hiring a sustainable web designer that has these practices in mind that we'll walk through not only what materials you're going to print your marketing materials on, recycled paper, seed, paper, all of that. But someone that really knows the ins and outs of what it is to create a sustainable website. One more thing to add is the whole accessibility piece. It's very valuable if you can create a website that can load quickly and actually be accessed offline. As we're moving into more advertising into countries that don't have as fast internet speeds as maybe we do, it's very important for these websites to be accessible by those who have limited bandwidth.
Katherine Ann Byam 15:58
Really great tips. Thank you so much for sharing so much with the group and community. What's the direction of your business for the next few years? Where do you see it going?
Michelle Miller 16:09
Sure, I actually plan to host some workshops myself on sustainable web design so that either there can be tips helpful for people that are DIY in their own website, and maybe don't have the time or money to invest in a full rebrand or website design right now. And I would also be going to be focusing on creating specific web pages or landing pages for eco businesses to show what their impact actually is. Those would be more interactive, but not in a way that would create a lot of excess energy like I just talked about but really showing what difference that company or that small business is making. Because we see a lot of sustainability pages out there. It just has a short paragraph on why they're committed to sustainability. But Patagonia - that's one of the companies I admire greatly. They have a very detailed page about each of their business practices, how it contributes or limits global warming. And I want more businesses to have the opportunity to show that and really put numbers down to show their commitment and not just write about it in a sentence and hope that's enough.
Katherine Ann Byam 17:27
All right. Thank you. Thank you so much, Michelle. This is really insightful, and we'd love to have you back sometime in the future when you have new news to share about where you've gotten to with a sustainable web design. Thanks so much for coming to the show.