Arlen
[00:00:57]
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast. Everyone. I am your host Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Shaival Mehta who is the owner of Delesign, a flat rate unlimited graphic design service. We work with agencies, marketing teams and e-commerce businesses to help them create all sorts of content from infographics to animation videos, social media content, logos. Pretty much anything you can describe, we can create.  He also has experience running other businesses such as Molecular Apps on Shopify which effectively is used to build apps for Shopify merchants. His overall strategy is to effectively help e-commerce businesses focus on their core competency and leave the rest to us. So thank you and welcome for being on the eCommerce marketing podcast.

Shaival
[00:01:47]
Yeah, no, thank you Arlen thanks for having me on the podcast. Love all the work you’ve been doing in the eCommerce space. So I invaluable lesson from space. So a main valuable lessons learned from your podcast. So love to be here.

Arlen
[00:01:56]
Okay, great. I appreciate you having on and thank you for that today. We’re gonna be diving deep and talking about something that you’re force very familiar with, and that has to do with branding specifically for e-commerce companies, the importance of branding, kind of some definitely actual things that a, an eCommerce company can do to really brand themselves, because I think it’s branding these days, as you already know, is really more important than ever that you properly brand your company and you set yourself apart from your competitors, but, you know, before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you did get into what you’re doing today?

Shaival
[00:02:32]
It’s quite funny. I mean, I, I don’t really have any graphic designing background or any branding background as such. I’m actually come from an engineering background, started in tech consulting by profession, and now I’m the COO of Dell design. So a year or so ago, we sort of saw an opportunity to move out and do something a bit more entrepreneurial. And along with my two partners, we decided to acquire Dell design, really saw it as an opportunity to work with e-commerce businesses and really help them accelerate their growth. So what we really kind of wanted to do with Dell design was the opportunity we saw is how can we make graphic design accessible to everyone, not just to those that can afford the big bucks and really have a whole graphic design team in build. So that’s where the Dell design business model really appealed to us. And therefore that’s sort of the business we’re running now, which is providing eCommerce businesses, subscription based model, where you pay monthly and you can get a dedicated designer allocated to you and, and you can produce all this sort of graphic design content that you want. So, yeah, that’s, that’s where we are at.

Arlen
[00:03:30]
Okay, great, great. Yeah, that’s good stuff. It’s I think very, more, more important than ever now. And I see companies like yours that are providing the graphic design service on a, a service basis being much more needed, just because it seems like every few months we’ve we get a new social media platform that pops up and businesses have to create graphics for that. They have to figure out their plan. And each one of these platforms, as you’re aware of, and a lot of our audiences are aware of the graphic requirements are a little bit different for every platform. And so if you don’t have somebody on your team to be able to effectively do that, anytime you wanna post content, then it can be a, a challenge because this is something that as we all know has to be done in an ongoing basis, there’s no like one post and it’s done, you know, you can’t just post it infrequently. You’ve gotta always continually post communicate with your audience, grow your subscribers across these platforms. And you know, the only way to do that is to feed them content, feed them informational material, not only promoting your business, but also informing them about different subjects that you’re familiar with.

Shaival
[00:04:35]
No, absolutely. And, and that’s perfectly, you know, the, the spot we wanted to hit is graphic design is becoming more and more important across the board. And as we said, you know, e-commerce businesses they’re coming in with their own ideas in terms of what they want to do as a business and graphic design. Isn’t at the forefront of it. For, for them, they really care about the product and making sure the product is correct. And that’s where we sort of kind of step in to, to tell you, you know, leave the graphic design servicing, work to us at a cheaper rate. You don’t need to kind of get in house designers. That’s where kind of breaks a bank as well. And that’s where we really think a model like Dell design really works for deeper people.

Arlen
[00:05:11]
Right? Definitely. Now, as I alluded that earlier branding these days, I think it seems to be more important than ever. Why do you think that actually is?

Shaival
[00:05:20]
Yeah, unfortunately I think, unfortunately, it’s, it’s no longer just about your product, right? It’s, it’s getting your product out there and telling your story to your customers and with kind of the eCommerce space really blowing up the last couple of years, significantly as well, but it’s been happening over the past 10 years. The barriers to entry are very low to get into the eCommerce space. It doesn’t take a lot, but what is very difficult to do is how do you distinguish yourself? And that’s where I think branding really becomes very important, enables you to tell a story to your audience. And you really use that branding to kind of uncover what your vision is and what your values are as a business. And you can tell a lot more through branding than you actually kind of just think about it. And, and you’re like, okay, branding, you know, it’s not, it’s not so important.

Shaival
[00:06:02]
My product’s kind of the key thing. Right. But what we’ve seen as branding is really a differentiator. One of the things that we see nowadays is the millennial generation. It takes what eight seconds or so for them to kind of lose their attention span. So you literally have eight seconds to kind of get your message out there and make sure if they come across your ad, they’re clicking through on it. And that’s where I think making sure you’ve got good branding, strong sort of messaging for your brand, it really helps you stand out. So yeah, for, for me, really branding kind of solves three purposes. It helps drive professionalism for your brand. It really shows that it’s your professional brand, you’re consistent across the board. It helps create an identity for yourself, someone looking at, you know, if you think of black and orange at the moment, you think Amazon first similarly, you know, if you think of kind of Google scholars or you see that anyway, you associate yourself with that brand. And that’s what I think a lot of eCommerce brands are now trying to kind of do and, and create an identity for themselves. Right. Right. Yeah. I think the third one is really connecting with your audience branding again, helps you connect to your audience. You want them to be associated with you. So that’s yeah. For, for me, those are the three main reasons why branding, I think is really important.

Arlen
[00:07:09]
Yeah, for sure. As you mentioned, the barrier to entry for eco eCommerce businesses is, is pretty low. I mean, anyone with an idea or a product or service offering that has enough to pay for the basic plan on any of these shopping cart platforms like Shopify, you know, this could be $20 a month or whatever that’s as low as a barrier is that’s a pretty low barrier to entry.

Shaival
[00:07:31]
It’s ridiculously easy to just start your

Arlen
[00:07:33]
Business. There definitely is. It’s easy. But the, the good thing about it is even though that barrier to entry is, is so low. It’s the only a few businesses are gonna really gonna rise to the top because as you and I know it’s difficult to really submit yourself with what you’re offering, as you know, a solid company, it’s difficult to begin ranking for the search engines, Google specifically, and really get out there. So even though it’s easy to just launch a business, it’s not, it’s not that easy to, to sustain it and, and to really give visibility. So that’s one good thing. Everything that you were saying is, is totally correct. As far as from a branding standpoint, if you do some effective branding and continually set yourself apart, you’ll, it’ll be clear when people are searching for specific keywords or your specific niche. It’ll be kind of clear that you’re a leader amongst some others that are into your space. Now, as far as from a graphic design standpoint, what would you say are some methods of using distinctive graphic design work for doing branding, you know, for an e-commerce business?

Shaival
[00:08:40]
Yeah. It’s a graphic design, you know, it’s, it’s really more than just choosing fonts and just choosing your color. It’s really how you pull together more than just that you wanna make sure the content you want your readers to read is focus on that. And there are a lot of mechanisms that you can use to do that. Some of the things that we consider and we work with are on our clients is first and foremost, it’s using a customized logo. Logo is really the face of the business. So it’s one of the most important elements that you need to design up front. And what we typically tend to say is to avoid using just logo templates or generators to get that. But on the other hand, even if you are getting a logo created, you don’t need to overcomplicate it. Sometimes simple is the right solution, but yet making it unique enough.

Shaival
[00:09:21]
So logo’s definitely one of them. The other thing that we typically see, and we, we do suggest is, is making sure there’s a branding style guide for your business. Again, that’s to drive the consistency across your business, across your marketing material, and just generally across the teams that are working for you and making sure they’re all talking the same language from a branding perspective. So we suggest eCommerce businesses have their own branding style vet as well. And then the other one really is, as we say, first impression is last impression. And for most eCommerce businesses, that first impression is your website people landing on your landing page. So a lot of focus is around how can you make sure your landing pages are effective? The contrasting colors that you use, the white space that you have around it, your call to action buttons, the colors that you use for that, all of those sort of elements become really important. And therefore, that’s one of the other things that we really ask clients to focus on. And we suggest e-commerce business is really look at making sure that they they’re using techniques that have worked before for others as well.

Arlen
[01:10:19]
Definitely. And it’s always good because, you know, there’s certain things, as you mentioned that have worked before, you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel most of the time. And you know, that’s, that’s the beauty of today. All of the data is really out there. It’s not too hard to see what your competitors are doing, what some of the leaders in your space are doing. And not to say that you have to just go out there and then copy or clone what they’re doing. But yeah, you can definitely, I would say, get ideas and adapt different design styles for your own purposes and, you know, come up with your own originality based on what may be working for another business that’s in your space. So yeah, definitely what

Shaival
[01:10:56]
Add. Exactly. And, and I think you, you find that correct. Yeah. A lot of times what we do see people do is look at their competitors’ work and see how can we do that differently so that we stand out, but sometimes you don’t need to do it differently. You just need to do it better. Can use the same concept, just do it better.

Arlen
[01:11:10]
Exactly. And from design, you know, there’s a lot that can go into it. As far as you mentioned, a company needs to have not only start with their logo, they have to have a style guide. They need to make sure that what everything that they put out is consistent. And that’s kind of the whole thing with branding. You want people to recognize you. So if they see an ad on Facebook and then they’re, they jump over to Instagram or LinkedIn, wherever you’re advertising, they want to be able to put two and two together. Okay. That’s the same company. I recognize that logo. I recognize these designs, or I recognize these particular graphics. So very important that you have that in place. I think early on as well in is something that is something that you shouldn’t wait on, because like you said, the best foot is that first foot that you put forward.

Arlen
[01:12:00]
Yeah. So very, very important that you do that now to have success with branding across all of these social media platforms. As I mentioned earlier, there’s so many platforms coming up, coming out these days. I was actually recently earlier this morning, actually I did a, it was a actually went live. It was a, a clubhouse group. And they did a, a room this morning with some other marketing companies. So you have apps like that, which is that’s really just audio, but there still is some graphic components that are required for that. So you have that app, you have TikTok that’s really exploded over the years. Instagram is, is always really gonna, it seems like it’s gonna continue to grow. And you know, there there’s countless other platforms that are really just on the rise today when creating graphics for these multitude of platforms. Is there a specific rule of thumb that you should follow when you’re thinking of creating graphics for them?

Shaival
[01:12:54]
Yeah. So I think one, one of the things you, you mentioned earlier as well is, is making sure that there’s consistency across your branding across these social media platforms. So as you said, if you go from one platform to another, you do want your brand to be associated across them. As soon as you see that, you know, it’s this brand. But I think one important thing to understand is, you know, each social media channel is different. The messaging that you gave on a social media channel is very different. If it’s on Facebook, you know, a lot of people are on Facebook more to kind of see what their friends are doing, see what they’re up to. So the a and the messaging that you’re getting up there is very different to the ad that you might wanna display on, on Instagram or on a Pinterest, for example.

Shaival
[01:13:31]
So they’re, they’re all sort of very different from a messaging perspective. So that’s definitely something to look out for. And again, I think designing can really help with seeing how you tackle the different messaging. And I think another key thing to re really think of is when you’re doing your social media ads, you’re really thinking of the customer journey that you’re looking to target where within the customer journey is your audience gonna be, you’ve got, you know, are you just trying to grab their attention or have you grabbed their intention? And then they’re showing interest in your product. And therefore, is that the level you’re targeting or is it more towards the bottom of funnel where they’re interested to buy and it’s helping the decision making process? Yeah. So depending on that, again, it really, your design will really influence what you’re trying to do.

Shaival
[01:14:11]
You know, if it’s attention, you can have some more contrasting colors just to bring out the messaging. If it’s decision making, you know, it it’ll be something we in fact recently created a report as well. It’s a very short report and on five things we think you should consider for helping your social media graphics. So we, we talk about, you know, the, the quality of your visual. So making, as I mentioned, the contrasting colors and what sort of color palette you use for it, right? The size of the font you use again, that will really influence what messaging you’re focusing on, the typography that you use, how you engage with your audience. Again, depending on the social media platform you’re on quite often, people create polls or memes that work quite well as well. And I think one of the most important thing is making sure you’re sharing valuable content.

Shaival
[01:14:54]
And that is, I think some of the times that gets missed. It’s all well and good. You have good graphics, but you need to make sure the content goes it’s valuable and your audience really kind of gets the right message from it. And the final one is, it’s something you mentioned before, as well as making sure you post consistently and frequently content becomes obsole very, very quickly nowadays. So how do you stay on top of it? And again, how does your graphic or your design reflect kind of the new trends that are coming up? So, yeah, I think those are the four or five key points that, that I think have

Arlen
[01:15:22]
Great, great. Those are some great points. One of the things I was actually just thinking about when it comes to graphics and it specifically for social media platforms, you know, these days, anybody that’s been on social platforms has, has seen a multitude of different ads. And I don’t know if I’m, I’m seeing as much of this. I was seeing more of this a few years ago, were different brands were going with the, I guess you could say shocking off type of methodology when they were doing their branding and their graphics, where it was something that was just so striking that it would just catch people’s attention. They would just either have to watch the video. They would either have to click on the call to action. You know, you still see that these days, but I remember several years ago, that was really the big thing.

Arlen
[01:16:04]
And even in here in the, in the us, I know here in the UK and here in the us, even with traditional advertising on, on television, that was the theme that I, it was still seen. And like, you still see it today where you see this totally outlandish stuff that doesn’t seem like it’s even related to the product. My question though, is, is there a fine line when you’re thinking about doing something to track people’s attention with a kind of a striking ad, is there a fine line with offending people versus capturing attention? And is there certain things that a brand has to worry about staying away from?

Shaival
[01:16:37]
Yeah, absolutely. And when you’re talking about it, I that’s, what was coming to my mind is sometimes these kind of all striking ads, they’re great. They do grab your attention. And then this is what I look at when I go on, you know, my Instagram or Facebook, I’m actually looking at, you know, which ads am I stopping and actually looking at and why are they grabbing my attention? I keep questioning myself that. And I think they’re okay. They all like the ones that do kind of come right out there, they’re fine. As long as they live up to the promise when you do click through gotcha. The ones that I don’t like are the ones where you’re clicking through and then it’s sort of bait and switch sort of offer. Right. And I think that really puts people off pretty quickly. And nowadays, because we’re given such a wide variety of, of options across anything that you’re looking to purchase, if a brand is doing something like that, you can be switched off quite easily. And, you know, you just simply go to the competi and not give them a second chance. Right. So there is that fine. And I think, yeah, you need to really be careful when you do that and what sort of messaging you’re getting across. I quite actually like the witty, witty ads that are there, where, you know, it’s quite clever and, and kind of gets you to laugh as well. And those actually really for me grab my attention.

Arlen
[01:17:39]
Yeah. I totally agree. And likewise, I, those tend to kind of capture my attention as well. The humorous ads, cause you know, a lot of times at these brands know that when people are on social media, a lot of times people are either, you know, supposed to be working the computer, but you know, they’re flipping back and forth between their Facebook, their Instagram and things like that. And you know, anything kind of funny or witty, that’s gonna break up the monotony of their day. You really can CAD captures people’s attention and then kind of pull them in. So great advice there. So as we get ready to, to wrap things up, if you don’t mind sharing some examples of some different e-commerce brands that have utilized effective branding, you know, to achieve growth and what are some specific things that they’ve done, these are either brands that you maybe worked with or just some that you’re familiar with in general.

Shaival
[01:18:23]
Yeah. I mean, I’m gonna pick one of the obvious ones, but I think I’ve, I’ve always kind of loved it is Amazon massive brand, but the brand that they’ve got there is it’s really clever for people that don’t know. They’ve actually had six different logos before they settled on the orange and black one that we’ve got. So, and, and no logo really lasted more than two years other than the one we’ve got now. Right. And guess the reason why I find it so good is just, it’s very simple, but it has a lot of meaning as well. It’s just two colors, black and, and orange, but what really stands out is that orange, which is kind of giving a big smile across the a and the Z and it’s elegant, but it’s highlighting dominance as well. So that’s what the colors sort of give out.

Shaival
[01:19:00]
And it also tells the story along with it, right? The a to Z where the arrow goes from, they deliver anything from a to set. Right. And just the clever use of that. I, you know, I don’t think the name Amazon came when they were thinking of the logo. It, it in fact happened the other way around the logo came after the name Amazon was there. So just the clever use of that for, for me is brilliant. And nowadays you see kind of just a smile being used. So it’s just how identifiable the Amazon branding has become with us. And, and, and if you think about it, you know, AWS, Amazon web services, right. It became massive just on the back of having such a good brand established it, of course, had the money to do it. But, you know, the branding just makes you trust AWS, even though it’s a complete different product to what they started off with, which is their online selling business.

Shaival
[01:19:46]
Right? So that, for me, it, it’s quite a great example of how branding’s being used. There are a couple of other ones as well. Hush puppies is another good one in terms of just the funky colors that they use. And it just really goes with what sort of style they’ve got, which is casual, casual shoes for the world, et sees another one, again, classic logo, but really kind of white classic, but it really defines kind of the, the concept that they have, you know, it’s, it’s, they’re designing special, customized stuff for people and, and it kind of gives it off in just a logo that they have, I think.

Arlen
[02:20:16]
Right. Yeah. Those are some great examples for sure. And speaking for as far as Amazon is concerned. Yeah. One of the things that also an e-commerce company needs to keep in mind as well. We talked a lot about the branding across all of your platforms, your social media platforms, your websites, your logo, if you’re a, let’s say a D TOC company, your direct to consumer product company, and you’re sending product that also has to translate down to your packaging and all of the materials that people are getting. And Amazon does a great job with that. Cause I’m thinking of, you know, I’m a huge prime member. I’m constantly ordering stuff from Amazon. And if you look at their boxing, everything down to even their tape has their logo. So it’s kind of unmistakable anytime you see a box from Amazon, you know, it’s, it’s Amazon and those are the things that they played some close attention to, even though they’re a platform for other sellers to sell, they’re selling other people’s products. You know, of course they have their own brands within, under Amazon, but they make sure, you know, that this is Amazon. And then, you know, of course when you open it up, you have that particular product from, you know, whatever company’s providing it, but they make sure that you, you know, that it is Amazon. Absolutely.

Arlen
[02:21:20]
All right. She, it was a, been a pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate you coming on. I’ve learned a lot of regards to branding. It’s very refreshing to know that these days you can still set yourself apart by following some of these best practices that we talked about. And so any e-commerce brand can set up a kind of a solid branding infrastructure, as long as they kind of adhere to these best practices. So I always like to shift gears here with my closing fun fact question. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact with us that you think our audience would be interested to

Shaival
[02:21:51]
Know, I’m not sure how much the audience would relate to it, but I’m a massive cricket fan. Now. I know it’s not massive in, in the us. Yeah. I’m a huge cricket fan. So I represented Belgium a few years ago. Oh, okay. For the national site there and that’s yeah. That’s something I do kind of just to de-stress and, and one of my passions.

Arlen
[02:22:08]
That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, of course, here in the us cricket is definitely not really a thing at all when people see it, I guess initially, if you don’t know anything about it, you see the back, you see the ball, people kind of try to liken to baseball here in the us, but it’s totally different. Yeah. It’s not like baseball at all. It’s totally different. I’ve seen that just even the throwing style and the way you swing the bat, the type of bat it’s different, but I know every time somebody sees it that it’s not familiar with cricket, that’s the immediate kind of two and two they put together, but it’s just not like basically. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I, I appreciate that. And Cheval, lastly, before we let you go, if any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about branding or, or anything related to that, what is the best way for them to reach you?

Shaival
[02:22:51]
Yeah, you can. Yeah. You can always reach me on LinkedIn. You can email me on sh Dell design.com. You can even just go and have a [email protected] and then see what we offer as well. So just feel free to reach out to me.

Arlen
[02:23:04]
Awesome. Thank you, Shava for sharing that we appreciate you coming on today for the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Shaival
[02:23:11]
Yeah. Great talking to you. Thanks a lot.

speaker 1
[02:23:13]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be shorter rate review, subscribe, and share it with everyone. You know, are you looking to take your digital marketing to the next level, but are tired of weeding through countless YouTube videos with unproven and untrusted marketing strategies? Well, we have the answer for you. The more sales every month, online digital marketing course in this information packed course, you will learn effective keyword research link, building content, marketing, and much more to attract and convert your site visitors into paying customers. Just go to more sales every month.com and sign up today for a low one time fee. In addition to this power packed course, if you would like to get access to a growing repository of digital marketing articles, PDFs, and e-books check out, get osi.com/resources and opt in to get full access to our library of priceless marketing information, to help you take your digital marketing to the next level.

Podcast Guest Info

Shaival Mehta
Founder of Delesign