How the Chamber’s Brand is Evolving (Part II)

Last week, I outlined how the Chamber’s website and electronic newsletters have evolved. Read more here. This week, I’d like to continue with how some of our marketing and event collateral designs have changed – and also discuss how we’re utilizing social media to grow our brand even more.

Marketing Collateral
With the creation of the Chamber’s marketing brochure, I was given real creative freedom to further develop and enhance our brand. The brochure is a snapshot of what the Chamber does and what it has to offer its membership and the community – in essence, it is showing how being active with the organization can offer you and your company a “Greater Return on Investment. Greater Return on Involvement.”

The brochure quickly became my point of reference when it came time to think about redesigning many of our other marketing pieces – especially the things that are most often included in new and potential member information packets alongside it.

Event Collateral
After debating whether each of our signature events should have it’s own logo, it was decided that rather than putting two Chamber logos on all of our event collateral (in addition to sponsor logos), the Chamber logo would appear above or next to the event name, and then the theme (if applicable) would be a separate element in the design. This way, there would be no question as to whether the event was the Chamber’s. We began implementing this concept with the 2011 Small Business of the Year Awards and 5^th Annual Women of Influence collateral.

Event Signage
We recently obtained several retractable banner signs – welcoming Chamber, Leadership Tampa Alumni and Emerge Tampa Bay guests to their respective events. The goal was to have something alongside our sponsorship signage – which is typically branded for each event, but not necessarily for the Chamber – that tells attendees they are in the right place (and to further brand the Chamber).

In addition, we have a small sign with our logo on it that we place on the podium at each event so that when the speaker is photographed, our logo is always present.

Social Media
For a while, our Facebook page was mostly about events and event photos. More recently, we have implemented landing pages and a banner for our “profile” picture, rather than just our logo. Our posts have also become more engaging as we try to get followers to comment, participate in discussions and repost things that we share. Facebook has also become a place to share ribbon-cutting photos that previously were shared in The Inside View printed newsletter.

Twitter and LinkedIn are also outlets for branding growth. Our tweets regularly talk about the happenings in the small business community in Tampa Bay and LinkedIn is becoming more and more active with members posting discussions and questions to one another daily.

In order to drive more people to our social media pages, we added links (and our logo!) to our email signatures. As we continue to connect those platforms with each other and this blog, we will become an unstoppable entity in the social media world!

Brianna Faulkner
Graphic Designer
Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce