Designing an amazing cover/header for your social media brand (or personal) page can be a bit more involved than it appears. Typically, you’d need to start by researching the correct size and confirming that it’s correct. That usually involves reading a bunch of long articles before even starting to design. It turns out there’s also a lot misinformation when it comes to the correct social media image sizes.

Once you do figure out the proper size, you might realize that your audience can be viewing the cover/header on any wide range of devices such as a desktop computer, a mobile device, a tablet or even a TV. … Yikes … This usually leads to hunting for a template that has all the guides built-in. These are typically only available for software like Photoshop and can be very clunky to use. They include complicated layer groups and don’t even always ensure your image is visible on all devices.

That all changes today with new “Safe Areas” in Stencil! Now you can turn on/off overlays on the canvas that show you exactly where it’s safe to put graphics in your header/cover images, ensuring they won’t be cut off by profile photos or other changes between desktop/mobile/tablet/etc. This is now available for all Stencil plans (even free accounts, yay!) and is automatically enabled for the following cover/header images:

• Facebook Cover
• Twitter Header
• LinkedIn Company Cover
• LinkedIn Personal Cover
• YouTube Channel Art

Just select one of those from the canvas resizer and the “Safe Area” guides will appear. If the overlays ever get in your way, you can always turn the “Safe Area” on or off, using the social media icon to the right of the canvas:

We hope you find this new feature extremely useful and this will make creating header/cover photos a total breeze. Here’s a quick video showing the creation of a Facebook Cover image from start to finish, in less than a couple of minutes:

Let us know in the comments if this was helpful and saved you a ton of time!

The post Create Perfect Social Covers/Headers With New Safe Areas appeared first on Stencil.

What Businesses Can Do To Make Customers Happy

Be Available

As simple as it sounds, you must be available. Depending on your business, you’ll have to find what method of availability is best for your customers. Is it using live chat, social media, phone, email, contact form, or all of the above?

 90 percent of surveyed consumers have used social media in some way to communicate with a brand.

Be sure to set hours of availability for your customers. If you’re an online business owner, it’s not necessary to be online at all times but make sure you’re there when you say you are. Nothing is more disappointing when you can’t reach a business at their supposed open hours.

If you’re not a local business and help people all over the world, create an FAQ page and Knowledge Base to fill the gap between time zones. If it’s a general question, they’ll get their answer immediately.

If you don’t have availability for your customers, how can you listen to their needs? This is the first step in creating a relationship with the customer.

Keep the Relationship Going and Growing

Provide customers with your knowledge and authority by using resources to inform them with a blog and email marketing. Keep the relationship going with informative blog posts related to industry tips and advice that can help your customers. Don’t just blog about your services. Make a space that they can come to for related industry information that can help them with their needs.

According to this study by Marketing Charts, 47% of consumers say the most important element of an ideal customer experience is fast responses to inquiries.

In order to respond to your customers, you must use active listening. Paraphrase their questions to clarify what they’re asking. This also lets them know you’re paying attention to them. This is particularly important when you’re on the phone with them.

If they’re providing feedback or criticism in regards to a feature or service, this is extremely beneficial to you. Take advantage to learn more about their needs and adjust as necessary. If possible make the change happen! Let them know that you’ll put it on the roadmap of projects or consider it.

For example, one of the biggest requests for Stencil was a cropping tool for designs. It took quite a while for it to happen, but when you have so many requests for the same feature from customers you have to get it done. The feature was clearly needed. It was placed on the roadmap and now it’s complete.

When you make a change happen, let them know about it. They’ll be thrilled to hear that their voice made an impact on your business. This will instill a solid relationship and build a community.

Transparency

Long gone are the days where it’s a “need to know” attitude of business. Transparency is winning customers these days. People want to know what businesses are up to and they want to be involved.

Buffer, a social media company, started the practice of transparency from the get-go and revolutionized online business work and culture. They publicly reveal salaries, equity, revenue, pricing of services, their product roadmap, and even the books they read! With transparency, they’ve built a solid community and are able to create new products and services with camaraderie and support from their users.

Many companies have followed suit with different ways they can be transparent. Companies like Slack and Twitch are using Trello boards for roadmap and discovery, which are completely public. Of course, Trello themselves has their roadmap public. Some companies have Trello boards for feedback and customers can clearly see what issues or complaints are being responded to.

People want their requests heard and if a company shows they’re responding, customers are more inclined to share the news.

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM)

Word of Mouth Marketing is impactful! Did you know 83% of Americans say that a word of mouth recommendation from a friend or family member makes them more likely to purchase a product or service? That’s a significant amount!

WOM has 16-25% higher lifetime value than those acquired from other sources. The customer experience plays a huge role in making this happen.

Jay Baer, the founder of Convince and Convert, talks about how to get customers to evangelize your business with talk triggers. A talk trigger is a strategic, operational choice that compels word of mouth.

Here are 5 types of talk triggers:

1. Empathy – Treat your customers with more warmth and humanity than they expect.
2. Usefulness – Deliver more utility than your customers expect.
3. Generosity – Deliver more than your customers expect.
4. Speed – Be more responsive than they expect.
5. Attitude – Just be a little different than your customers expect.

When talk triggers are implemented, word of mouth marketing prevails. This is an interesting stat as well – Women are 49% more likely than men to discuss products or services they perceive as “different” from the norm. It’s ok to be different! People want different. Above all, people want to be respected, listened to, and responded to.

Also, don’t look to celebrities to make your customers happy – 25% of Americans trust no celebrity or famous person to make recommendations. It’s not about connections or who you know.

For example, an oral surgeon provided a small gesture of comfort to his patients before even seeing them. He called the patient personally to ask if they had any questions regarding their upcoming procedure and to introduce himself. That call was his talk trigger. It showed he went above and beyond to establish trust and a relationship with a patient. They’re not “patient number 10,005” but with this phone call, they felt treated as a person. With this action, it started a domino effect and patients were letting their loved ones know they need to book with this doctor for their procedure.

It’s all about giving your customers a personal touch with your customer experience. It must be relatable and truly genuine.

Are you ready to make customers happy?

Making customers happy will get you more customers. PERIOD.

Let’s recap how to make customers happy with your business:

Be available – if you’re not available, how can you help your customers?

Relationships are part of life, even in business. In order to grow your business, you’ll need to create relationships to hear what customers want. Give customers features and services they want and need!

Be transparent – Be open to discuss business issues with customers. Maybe you’re not ready to be visible with everything but start with one area and it will be appreciated.

Word of Mouth Marketing – Use talk triggers to get customers. Talk triggers make people happy and they want to spread that happiness.

What do you plan to do to make customers happy?

The post What Businesses Can Do To Make Customers Happy appeared first on Stencil.

Research Three Items Before You Design a Book Cover

Genre-Look

Depending on the genre of the book, you’ll have to consider if a photo background or color background will be best. If you’re not sure which would be best for your book, do some research and take a look at Amazon. Search by genre and you’ll quickly find some significant differences.

Take a look at the Editor’s Picks for Teens and Young Adults. Almost all of them were illustrated covers except for one in the Non-Fiction category. That’s a tip off that if you’re writing for teens or young adults, hiring an illustrator for your cover would be best.

You’ll see in the Mystery and Thriller genre, the book covers are photo backgrounds with large text.

That brings in another tip to consider – typography. Understand when creating a book cover the image will be rendered into a thumbnail image. That means super-tiny print for the eyes. If you want people to see the title and image on the cover, the title must be large and the image must be in high-resolution.

Typography

The font you choose will be of utmost importance because it can make or break an image, especially if makes a potential reader confused. Make sure if you have a light-hearted romance book then use a whimsical, thin, or script font to portray what the book’s topic can reveal in its title.

Take the example above. The title fonts are fun and light, while the author name is in a simple font like Helvetica.

If the font does not match the relevant title or book genre then it can send mixed messages to a potential reader.

The great thing about choosing fonts is that there are so many to choose from! When you design the cover in Stencil, there are over 2,100 Google fonts to choose from or you can upload your own that you’ve purchased and had rights to. If you don’t see one to your liking, you can always shop around at sites like Creative Market, The HungryJPEG, etc.

High-Resolution Images

Images are extremely important to provide a background that will convey a bit about the story as well as clarify the title. Many people will find images on Google and that is a sure-fire way to get into legal trouble. Please do not obtain images that way. In Stencil, we provide a collection of more than 1.2M royalty-free high-resolution photos that can be used for commercial or personal use, this includes book covers.

Take a look at these most read e-books from Amazon. You’ll notice the quality high-resolution photos.

Even if you choose not to use a photo from the Stencil collection and use your own photo, make sure it’s high quality and not blurry.

Design a Book Cover in Stencil

Once you have completed your research you can get started with designing!  Now that you understand how your book should look based on related genre, shopped around for fonts, and have an idea for the background photo then pop into Stencil to create the book cover.

Most people who are self-publishing choose Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. In the KDP Amazon guidelines, the ideal cover dimensions should be 2,560 height x 1,600 width. You can save those custom dimensions in Stencil as shown below.

Let’s use a mystery genre to create a book cover! Love a good mystery.

All I had to do was search for a ‘dark’ photo in the Stencil collection. I found so many but this wolf photo was picture perfect for a mystery thriller novel.

Now for my title… (Hopefully you have one already picked out because that may be the hardest part for me!)

Our title will be, “The Journey as a Lycanthrope”.

I chose Buenard font at size 133 for the first part of the title. It should be nice and crisp for all to see even as a thumbnail. Then I chose a more dramatic font that looks a bit shady for Lycanthrope (AKA werewolf). For mystery genre, all the authors have their names nice and big almost as big as the title however in a simple font. I used an all caps font such as CINZEL.

That took about 10 minutes to do. Very simple but I achieved a look for an intriguing mystery book about werewolves.

When you’ve completed your design, click on the Print (300dpi) button, make sure it’s a JPG and click on download. You’re all set to upload to KDP or any other self-publishing site that accepts JPG format. By clicking on the Print (300dpi) button, you’re ensuring the book cover is at its best resolution. This is particularly important if you want to also sell your book on CreateSpace, which will allow you to have a paperback version of your book along with your Kindle version on Amazon. They have a Cover Creator where you can upload your JPG book cover that you made in Stencil and it will help create the back cover along with spine. For this process, they state it must be an image with 300dpi or it will be rejected. Be sure to click the Print button!

You can use this same process to create covers for stories on Wattpad! The only difference is to use custom dimensions of 256 pixels width x 400 pixels height.

The Power of  300dpi 

We added support for 300dpi downloads that are ideal for eBooks and anything you plan to print. We hope this will help with all your book design efforts and promotional work. Remember to click on the Print media type for awesome ads and marketing materials that you can print at a printing service. Now you’re bringing all your digital work into local business efforts. Pretty neat, huh!

You can even create designs and upload them to a service like Zazzle, to create t-shirts and other customizable items. Take note that although you can design these awesome items you can’t choose custom dimensions in inches. If you’d like to print a poster, you can upload your image to Zazzle and it will automatically size into the poster settings you’re looking for. However, if you’re looking to do a banner with large dimensions in inches, then this would not be the best route to take care of that. Keep in mind the power of 300dpi works on small print products in Stencil.

Are we sparking any ideas here for you?

Will you create a book cover or something even more exciting?

Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Design a Book Cover for Ebooks and More appeared first on Stencil.

Social media marketing can be a chore finding out what your audience would like to see, let alone creating images that will entice potential customers. Here at Stencil, we want to make social media graphics easy and fast for business owners. We’re making big strides in making sure that Stencil can become your go-to image tool. The faster and easier it is for you to make social media images, the better your business will flow with social media graphics made easy with templates.

Stencil’s Template Feature Makes Social Media Graphics Easy

If you’re new to Stencil, you can find an area in Stencil called Templates (left-side in between Icons & Graphics and Quotes). This is where you can find a template that can be used for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.

You’ll find that there are a variety of templates to choose from and underneath the Featured button, you can click on All to get a dropdown of different categories that would fit your needs. Have a look:

What are templates?

 

Templates help in different ways for each individual.

For some people, when they’re ready to create a social media image, they know exactly what they’re looking for but not sure how to put it together. Templates become a source of inspiration. They may not use the templates and start fresh or they’ll use a few elements and create a whole other look.

Some people are not sure how to start a social media graphic, and templates become their guide. The awesome thing about templates is that you can choose to do whatever you want with it. You’re not stuck with all of it, if you don’t want.

There may be certain fonts and colors you like about a template and change out the background to fit your needs. Or you may not like the colors and simply change the color.

A template can be used for each social media platform and saved in the My Templates section. This will be another time saver when creating images.

You can save the new image as a template with the button shown below.

What’s the purpose of templates?

Templates are used to make social media graphics easier and to keep a consistent look, especially for branding purposes. As a business, you may have a branding style guide to keep images consistent. The fonts, colors, design elements can be kept intact for future use. Therefore when all of the branding elements are saved on a template, it’s just a matter of switching out backgrounds and text. Fast and easy!

Keeping templates will keep your tasks more productive every day and not having to think about what to do for each image.

The Updates

Stencil’s goal is to listen to feedback of users and make Stencil better for everyone to use. We had an overwhelming request for more templates so we are adding at least 20 new templates every week! No more searching for ideas or inspiration to help create social media images. You’ll have new images to try out as a template.

Other awesome news about updates is that we have a new notification bell of updates that have been made to inform you of changes. Now every time something new has been added or an improvement has been made, you’ll know first thing when you’re using Stencil.

Check it out below! The notification bell is next to My Account while you’re creating your image.

If you’re curious to see the log of updates, you can always check here.

Wrapping up templates and updates

Creating social media graphics are so much fun to create when you have a source of inspiration and guide to help you. Stencil templates can now be that source of inspiration you need.

Let us know which template you like best and if you like the new notification bell in the comments.

The post Social Media Graphics Made Easy with Templates (Plus Updates) appeared first on Stencil.