2023 Content Strategy Planning: Tools, Guides, & Tips

Businesses, especially of the B2B and/or tech variety, often understand that they should be doing some content marketing. How do they know this? They usually experience all of the symptoms that a well-planned and well-executed content marketing strategy can ameliorate, if not cure outright. Those symptoms include:

• A decrease in or little to no organic traffic

• Few to no inbound leads (like site form fills)

• A small and/or very cold email list

• No brand awareness

Most businesses know they need content to solve these problems, but have yet to learn what content marketing entails, especially with strategy.

What is content marketing?

First, it’s important to understand what “content” actually is. Content is a general term for written items like blog posts, newsletters, and case studies as well as other mediums like videos or podcasts.

When that content goes online, it’s indexed by search engines like Google. That content is then ranked by search algorithms which determine whether you show up on the first page of search results or the 90th. 

Content marketing involves strategically creating these and other types of content to attract, retain, and engage an audience. Advertising puts a product or service in front of eyeballs; content marketing considers its audience and serves educational, hopefully entertaining information that reaches the right people and helps you meet your goals.

Content marketing terminologies 

Some marketing terms get muddled up. Let’s define these marketing terms:

Content marketing definition

Content marketing is an overall strategy that relies on different types of content like videos, blog posts, articles, ebooks, etc. While it relies heavily on search engine optimization and social media distribution to be visible, it tends to be educational and informational. Content marketing helps brands generate and nurture leads, build trust, and elicit conversions.

Social media marketing definition

Social media marketing requires a different context and approach for each channel. People behave differently on Instagram than they do on Twitter, and brands must adjust to fit each channel, rather than calling all the shots like they do with the content they post on their site. Social media marketing is also often a direct conversation with a community, while content marketing lets you share expertise or advice as a monologue. 

Social media marketing is well-suited to increasing brand awareness, building and interacting with a community, and turning that community into potential customers.

Digital marketing definition

Digital marketing is promotion through online channels. This includes SEO, PPC and digital ads, and email marketing. Digital advertising focuses on promotion and sales and takes up the mantle of traditional marketing like billboards or direct mail. It’s great for increasing reach, moving leads through the funnel, and pushing conversions.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing helps you educate your audience about what you offer, build trust, and demonstrate your expertise. It also starts to build a bit of SEO juice for your online presence so more people will find you. Done right, it will help you generate inbound leads (which will keep your sales team happy). Let’s look at the symptoms above and investigate how content marketing heals them.

Help meet your business goals

When done strategically, marketing will help grow your business. Part of marketing strategy is building your marketing goals to directly roll up into your business goals. Looking to increase revenue? Focus on your inbound marketing and conversion experience. Want to decrease customer churn? Focus on content that enhances the customer experience.

Increase organic traffic

Multiple factors cause decreasing or always-low organic traffic, but the most important one is the presence and quality of your content. If your pages are not targeted to what people are searching for, you won’t get traffic. And if your competitors target your audience better, your traffic will slip.Strategic content helps you regain and/or increase that organic traffic. And while traffic on its own is not an ultimate goal, it’s a necessary first step.

Educate to grow inbound leads and conversions

The right content will educate your audience about your products and services. By attracting the right audience and answering their questions, you create a comprehensive user journey that makes them want to get more information by, say, downloading your brochure or filling out a contact form. 

And with website content geared specifically toward conversions, you suddenly have a qualified lead pipeline where it was once a trickle. With the right content, some of those leads will convert themselves.

The other byproduct of educational content is that you’ll start building relationships with your customers. Educational content doesn’t stop at the sale; instead, it builds loyalty with your existing customers. The key is ensuring your content conveys exactly how you solve the challenges of both your leads and your existing customer base.

Build and nurture your email list

Once you get your content going and leads coming in, you automatically have an email list. Don’t waste this precious resource! Like a mother hen, you must keep your email list warm, which means sending out an email to your lists at least once a month.

Content marketing not only helps you gain new contacts, but it will also help you engage (or re-engage) with your existing list. No more wondering what to put in your monthly newsletter—now you have useful, educational content to point everyone to. Win-win-win!

Bolster brand awareness

With the right content and engagement strategy, you can get people familiar with your brand. After all, if they don’t know you exist, they can’t become your customer. A constant stream of quality content will help you cast a wider net and get people to remember you. (More in the brand awareness section below.)   

To do all this, you need a content strategy.

What is a content strategy?

Content marketing is not a game of luck like roulette. This is Stratego or Settlers of Catan. Writing about whatever pops into your head each week is content roulette: You might hit it right sometimes, but your follow-up will still face the same odds. Content strategy isn’t about one big jackpot; it’s about long-term success.

What you need before you start a content strategy

Here are just a few basics you need for your content strategy:

1. A clear understanding of business goals: Don’t build your content strategy on getting 10,000 site views a month; how would that help your business? Use clearly defined business goals to build a content strategy that will help you achieve those goals.

2. Audience insights: Even if you don’t yet have detailed demographic data you should have clearly defined personas. Content for a CEO is much different than content for a marketing manager or data scientist. 

3. Understanding of your value: The value of your product or service is not in its features. The value is the problem you solve. Defining value isn’t always easy and relies heavily on a strong understanding of your key messages and positioning.

What is a key message?

Every element of a content strategy should revolve around your key messages, or specific things you want your audience to remember about you that explain the value and/or service you provide.

Creating a key message isn’t easy, but we do have a key message formula to make it simpler and tell potential customers everything they need to know quickly.

Key messaging helps you build a content and messaging strategy that is intentional and strategic. Essentially, it’s the foundation of your marketing strategy and not something you want to skimp on. 

How to create your key messages

Here’s the thing about key messages: They sound like they should be easy to come up with. They’re not. 

Too often, companies, especially those in the tech sector, think that a list of their features is a key message. It is not. 

If you want to be memorable, you’ve got to talk about your audience, not about your product. Remember: You are not selling a product, you are selling the solution to someone’s specific problem. 

Customer pain points

Think about the pains your customers experience as it relates to your product. Let’s say you’re in cybersecurity. Your customers’ pain points are not:

• I don’t have a cybersecurity solution

• I need to protect my company/customer data

Pain points are:

• Regulations/compliance programs tell me I have to protect my customer data in a certain way but that way is difficult and expensive to do

• My business will lose a lot of money if we are hacked and I can’t afford to lose money

• I do not understand cybersecurity but my investors/board of directors tell me I must have something in place Or Else

• My existing cybersecurity solution makes doing even the simplest of tasks more complex and time-consuming

So sit down and think about the pains. What is at stake for your potential customers? For the moment, don’t think about their pains in relation to you; think about their pains as they experience them. Often they don’t even know what part of their problem is, or that there’s even a solution.

Marinate in their pain. List their pain. Understand their pain.

Your product value

Notice that this says product value, not features. With the same cybersecurity example, let’s explore what value is NOT:

• A comprehensive, user-friendly cybersecurity solution

• End-to-end integration with all your platforms

Value is:

• Automated compliance so you never have to worry about your compliance status

• Don’t get hacked: Protect your business from hackers and scammers

• Seamless cybersecurity your business teams hardly notice and your security teams love

This combination of pain and value is how we create key messages. 

Example key messages

We share plenty of examples of key messaging on our blog, including common messaging mistakes and some of the best website hero copy (which is based on solid messaging, see below).

We also sell a course that helps you build your own key messaging.

The most entertaining thing you can do for key messaging is followed Ellis on TikTok for insights. She gives tons of personalized, free advice.  

What is a messaging strategy?

Once you’ve got some messages together, you need a strategy. Many, many companies will work on their messaging, celebrate, and then let the document compile digital dust until a few years later, they decide they need to work on their messaging again. 

A messaging strategy helps you: 

• Effectively reach your target audience

• Share your unique selling proposition

• Create pitch decks that make investors want in

• Give your sales teams clear, consistent talking points with supporting collateral

• Speed up purchasing decisions

• Effectively market your brand 

The strategy part comes down to sharing your messaging across everyone in your organization and getting buy-in. That means ensuring no salesperson is making their own sheets saying whatever they think is right. The CEO isn’t putting together investor decks on their own. 

A messaging strategy is a collaborative commitment. It defines not just how you will talk about your brand, but how you will all work together to talk about your brand in the same way.

Also important: Messaging changes. What’s right for you this year might be different next year. Don’t feel like you’re locked in; make your messaging documents living things, but keep your internal processes and communications solid. 

It helps to designate a team who owns messaging. This doesn’t mean they have to create every single piece of written content ever to leave the walls of your brand. But it does mean that they get eyes on what teams have created and adjust as necessary. This is where a marketing team or consultant is extremely valuable.

What is brand positioning?

Positioning and messaging frequently get confused. As discussed above, key messages are short, value-based phrases or snippets that people remember you and care about what you have to offer. 

Positioning is about how you distinguish yourself from the competition. Are you the affordable alternative? Do you do it better/faster/stronger than the competition? 

To gauge your positioning against the market, I like to think about everything a company offers as a quadrant like this:

You have to find what you offer that fit’s into the top right quadrant. What do you have that makes you stand out from competitors but is also relevant to your prospective customers?

Why positioning is important?

Like key messaging, positioning is an important input into your content strategy. If your unique selling proposition is that your cybersecurity product is created by former black hat hackers that know all the tricks of the trade, would you want your key messaging and marketing to focus on how easy your tool is to use, even though your competitors have easy-to-use tools as well?

Hopefully, your answer is, “No.”

You have to show your prospects and customers how and why you’re different, and doing so will be a vital part of your content strategy. You’ll want to create content that talks about different vulnerabilities your founders discovered and exploited that they know how to prevent. 

Ease-of-use customers and quality-minded customers are two very different types of customers, and you have to talk to your kind of customer intentionally.

How can you ensure your content drives action? Build your content strategy

Once you’ve established your key messaging, audience, and positioning, it’s time to start putting things together into an overarching content strategy. Here are the elements to consider as you build your content strategy.

1. Your channels

How are you going to get the word out about your company? There are many channels to leverage, such as:

• Your website

• Your blog/resources section

• Your social media

• Paid search ads

• Email marketing

• Traditional advertising

• Public relations

The first four fall squarely within a content strategy. The last two are related but have entirely different fields of practice that should be considered, even mentioned, in a content strategy, but not managed by the same teams.

Paid online ads are a bit fuzzier. It can go with SEO, advertising teams, demand gen teams, and content teams. It fits a lot of places. Sometimes it’s even its own thing. It just depends on how you run your marketing teams. 

Website strategy

Website strategy as it relates to content includes:

• Messaging and positioning

• User journey (i.e. where do we want them to go after they read this thing?)

• CTAs (how do we tell them to go read this thing?)

• A/B testing

While this process can include a full website revamp, it can also include a simple copy facelift that doesn’t require an intense design process—if you already have strong branding.

Not sure if you have strong branding? Ask your marketing team or content consultant(s). Tell them you won’t fire them for their honest answer. They’ll tell you. (And don’t fire them for an honest answer.

Resources section

The resources section is related to the blog but also not exactly part of the blog. This is where you can deposit higher-value content like webinar recordings, longer guides, ebooks, whitepapers, research, etc. 

Some organizations “gate” their content, or require a user to provide their email address to view the content. This is good for building an email list, but also can be a deterrent for visitors. And if you don’t already have high traffic and name recognition, you may see low conversion rates. And since gated content is not indexed by search engines, it won’t get you traffic—only the landing page will. Initially, it’s usually a better practice to gate nothing, or maybe one thing. Then leave the rest free. 

Blog strategy

You should have a blog. A blog is the best way to gain organic SEO traffic and publish your expertise. Ideally, you should post once or twice a week to create and maintain a useful cadence. Organic SEO can snowball quickly, and the best way to take advantage is to publish regular, SEO-optimized content.

Doing your own SEO research isn’t overly difficult, but it does take a bit of time. You can use a tool like Google Search Console to investigate the keywords your site already ranks for. With SEO software like SEMush or Moz, you can research related key terms and determine which new keywords to target. 

Identify keywords that have low keyword difficulty and start with those first. Starting with keywords that are easy to rank for will help build your authority and establish your foothold as an expert/useful source in your space. As you build those out, start reaching for the higher-difficulty keywords (these usually also happen to have the highest traffic volume).

Social media

Most technical B2B businesses do not see a good return on channels like Twitter. Even some more established organizations struggle to get past about 1,000 followers. Does this mean you shouldn’t do Twitter? No. It just means that you should identify going in what your goal with Twitter is. Usually, it’s just to establish your brand’s presence and join or start conversations.

On the flip side, we’ve noticed many businesses do better with LinkedIn. Especially if the content you post on LinkedIn is valuable to the reader, not to you. Don’t fill your timeline with company news, employee interviews, and product updates. Like all good content, it should address the pains your audience experiences and touch on ways to fix that pain. Provide useful insights that will make people want to follow you and click your links.

Unless your brand is very visual, Instagram is not usually an important channel. TikTok, however, can be very useful. It does require at least one dedicated creator who can come up with consistent videos. TikTok is not the place to dump webinars or podcast videos unless you already have a very large following. 

Instead, follow TikTok trends, share useful information, have a personality, and make it fun. But if you don’t have the resources for TikTok, don’t feel like you have to just do something for the sake of it. You simply won’t see a return if you’re not highly dedicated to it.

Email marketing

Automated email sequences are crucial for your brand’s success, especially if you offer a free trial. As soon as someone signs up, they should be kicked into a nurture sequence targeted at helping them make the most of their free trial period and convincing them to become a paid customer. 

It’s important to regularly email your contacts, otherwise, you run the risk of your email list going cold, which can damage your delivery rate and sender reputation. If your list is cold, re-engage them with an email that confirms they want to remain subscribed before you start sending them offers. 

When you’re writing an email, whether it’s a sales email or a newsletter, know up front what you want people to do when they read their email. That means one strong, clear CTA, up top, and well-promoted. Up to two more secondary CTAs are acceptable, but try to refrain from including a million links in your emails. Until you’ve intentionally built your email list, it’s unlikely you have recipients who want to make sure they catch up on every single thing you’ve posted in the past month.

Paid search ads, traditional advertising, and PR

These don’t strictly fall under the purview of content strategy, so we rely on advice from the experts who specialize in it. We highly recommend a collaborative approach between content and these teams, as they have overlapping needs and interests, but have their own distinct skill set. 

2. Goals, metrics, and measurement

You’ll never know if your content initiatives work if you don’t track what you’re doing. Here are some metrics we recommend tracking.

Website metrics

• Organic traffic

• Top pages by visitors and time

• Changes in keyword rankings

• New visitors

• Returning visitors

• Time spent on page

• Bounce rate

• Conversions

Blog metrics

• Organic traffic

• Social/referral traffic

• Changes in keyword rankings

• New visitors

• Time spent on page

• Bounce rate

• Conversions

Social media

• Engagement metrics (aka vanity metrics, but can still give you hints as to whether your content is resonating)

• Clicks (set up tracking links)

• Conversions

Email marketing

• Open rate

• A/B (aka split testing) testing performance

• Click-throughs

• Conversions

Further indications that your content marketing is succeeding include: 

• Your sales team feels good about incoming leads and wants to share the content you’re producing

• A customer directly references a piece of your content as being helpful or influential in their purchase

• You begin to recognize patterns in the kinds of content your audience most engages with

3. A clear customer journey

New visitors are almost never ready to sign up for a free trial. So if that’s the only CTA you have, your conversion rate will likely be low. It’s a bit more likely they’d be willing to give you their email address for a very compelling gated offer, but this is often a high bar to clear, especially if they are wary of how much you might email them with promotions. 

Along the same lines, the more form fields you have on gated content, the lower the chances someone will submit the form.  

There are four stages to the customer journey: 

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Decision-making

• Purchase

You have to start from the top and encourage a visitor to make their way through the stages. The kind of content you need for each stage is different; decision-making content might include product specs and capabilities, while awareness-level content should discuss pain points and general ways to alleviate them.

4. A distribution plan

How has the response been to you hitting “post” and moving on with your day? Probably not great. Most startups need to build their audience, not wait for it to come. You’ve got to get your content out to your audience. 

 The most common distribution channels are:

• Social media

• Email marketing

• Targeted search ads

Don’t be shy about publicizing your content. Sometimes startups, founders especially, will refrain from promoting anything unless it seems absolutely perfect. Version one is better than version none, even with social media posts and email newsletters. Get that content out there  and start getting the results you’re working for!

Remember that with distribution, engagement is not guaranteed. So share multiple times, especially with social media. No one liked the post? Post the same link a week or two later with totally different social copy. 

5. A content production team

You can’t have a content strategy without someone(s) to generate content! The larger the team, the more you can create. One full-time marketing person can feasibly create about one blog post a week, accounting for all the other responsibilities they’ll have. You’ll need a team of at least three full-time content folks to get out two posts per week.

You can also hire content strategy consultants and freelance writers. With a content strategy agency or consultancy, you’ll get a higher volume of content and a strategy to go with it. 

6. A content calendar

You have everything you need, you just need to get writing. You’ve gotten this far by being strategic, don’t stop now! Plan the content out for a month or even a quarter with a content calendar. A content calendar ensures your teams can plan ahead, research, book time with SMEs, and have drafts ready by a certain date. 

For example, if you have an upcoming product release, you come up with a timeline and milestones, due dates, and tracking. Do the same with your content! You’ll ensure consistency, cohesiveness, and results. 

Benefits of a content strategy

A content strategy is one of the best B2B awareness tactics out there, yet perhaps one of the least leveraged. Here’s how content strategy can help your brand:

1. Build brand awareness

Content marketing is one of the tools most suited to building brand awareness. You won’t just “be” discovered; you have to work for it. Content strategy helps your brand:

• Share why you exist

• Make people care

• Get found

• Serve your audience with the information they really need

• Use the response to better understand your audience

Developing a content and messaging strategy will help you talk to your audience and showcase your value. 

2. Build brand loyalty

How does content build brand loyalty? If you want to reach your audience and provide repeated, high-quality interactions (which is definitely something you should want), content provides the means to do so. Loyalty in B2B is mostly a one-way street; you have to earn it and continue to justify yourself. Your audience doesn’t owe you anything, and your focus should be on them, not you. Here are some ways content strategy helps build brand loyalty:

• Provide educational, valuable content that your audience wants, needs, and appreciates

• Provides an owned platform (your website and email list) for you to stay in contact  and stay top-of-mind

• Builds a reservoir of data that will help you better understand your audience and in turn better help them

• Build a community and invite your audience to act as a resource for each other. Host webinars, events, and create videos—with a little creativity, B2B marketing can be just as interesting as B2C or D2C marketing

3. Own your platform

The only channels you can ever truly own are your website and the email list you’ve collected. Your social media channels could disappear tomorrow and you’d have no recourse. Google could change its algorithm so significantly that you’d never be found again. 

But what you do have is the platform you build with content marketing. It’s the way to get on the radar and reach people to share and ensure you can still reach your customers, even if every other channel closes. (Which it probably won’t, but sometimes it’s useful to consider doomsday scenarios when assessing the value of your marketing.)  

How to start building your blog content

Getting the strategy in place is one thing; getting started is another. Here are some concrete ways to do your research and get started.

Research topics

SEO tools are fantastic for determining what to write about. There are tons of free SEO tools out there. Here are a few of our favorite free SEO tools: 

• Answer the Public

• Keywords Everywhere

• Google Search Console

• Screaming Frog

Many people find success with other free SEO tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner, but we tend to stick with the above when it comes to free tools. 

We also pay for SEMRush and use it daily. If you’re going to keep content creation on your team, we strongly recommend paying for some version of SEMRush or Moz. They will help you discover keywords you rank for, keywords your competitors rank for, and keywords you should rank for. Then you’ll be able to track your progress.

Build content clusters/content buckets

Research your topics in chunks instead of one by one. Then you can group related keywords and identify clusters or buckets of topics you want to write about and rank for. For example, a compliance startup may want to start ranking for SOC-2-related keywords. Do the research then plan to write 3-5 articles about SOC-2, ensuring the articles all link to each other and your product page. 

Pay attention to title tags, meta descriptions, image titles, and alt text

It pays to pay attention to optimization on the backside of things. Let’s walk through each of these four subjects you want to optimize.

Title tags

A title tag is an HTML code tag that gives your page a title on search engines and in the browser title bar. It is okay if your title tag is different from the title that shows up on your page. For example, your title could be, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SOC But Were Too Afraid to Ask” while your title tag is searched optimized. An optimized title tag might read like, “SOC-2 Compliance for Startups.” 

Meta description

There are two things to be aware of in meta descriptions: keyword optimization and content that compels people to click. Like title tags, meta descriptions should hew closely to target keywords. To entice people to click, the description should also provide a cogent, compelling blurb that tells people what the page is about and why it deserves their click.

Image titles

Whether you’re uploading a meme or a detailed chart, name your image files with keywords. Instead of uploading “img89735987273469.png,” rename it to “SOC-2-for-startups.png.” Do this for every image you upload.

Alt text

Along the same lines as image titles, take a moment with each image to fill in key-word rich alt text for a little SEO boost.

Build a content calendar

Once you map out your clusters, put together a calendar of when each article is due and when each article will go live. This keeps your team accountable and makes it easy to answer any questions that come up.

If you’re outsourcing your content to a content strategist, they may expect you to do the content calendar. When you hire a content strategy consultant, get it spelled out who will create and maintain the content calendar.

Get to writing

Your internal or external content people should get crackin’. If the person is internal, they should not be:

• The CEO

• A developer (unless they are also specifically writers)

• A sales representative

Ideally, you will have someone at your company whom you have specifically hired as a marketing writer. Or at the very least, has the time, desire, and writing skills to be your writer. Often startups do not have such a person, and this is when we recommend outsourcing to an agency, freelancer, or consultant. 

Publish at least once per week

Especially in high-difficulty areas like software development, software testing, compliance, and cybersecurity, keywords are important in establishing brand awareness and SEO foothold as soon as possible.

It usually takes at least a month for a blog post to start gaining traction in organic search rankings. If it’s well optimized, its traction will continuously snowball. You want to give that snowball the longest runway possible.

How to start building your email marketing content

Remember that a blog is but a piece of content strategy. Another large piece is email marketing. Here’s how to get started on emails like nurture strategies or a newsletter. (Note this does not pertain specifically to cold sales or prospecting emails—while marketing should be able to provide messaging direction, these emails should be owned by the sales strategy.)

How to write a marketing email

Always start your email with value. You have to provide a reason for your recipients to open the email, and that reason will likely have nothing to do with you. It will have to do with them and how you will address and solve your problems. Here’s how to tailor each part of your email to value.

Subject line

You’ve got to make your recipient want to open the email. The subject line should be engaging. Questions work well, as do statements that make people want to read more and/or directly address their pain. In the compliance example, which subject line would you want to click on more? 

a.) Automated SOC-2 compliance for your startup 

b.) How can your startup afford SOC-2 compliance?

Preview text

A field not to be overlooked! The first few dozen characters are very important in getting people to click. It’s also a great place to share value, especially if you’ve addressed pain in the subject line. A good preview text to follow the above email subject line might be, “Get the SOC-2 cost breakdown you’ve always wanted but could never find.” 

Body text

For nurture emails that will naturally have a bit more text, keep them tight and get right to the value. Don’t waste time with, “Startups need to understand that compliance is important, but they may not be able to afford it.” People will stop reading.

Get to it with something relevant and eye-catching. “Can you afford SOC-2 compliance? The real question is, can you afford not to be SOC-2 compliant?”

CTA

Always know what you want your recipients to do when they read your email. Hit them with one primary CTA instead of throwing as many links out there as you can. If you want them to read or download your guide to SOC-2 compliance expenses, aim to have a button that links to the guide as far up as possible. The less scrolling needed, the better.

If you want to have up to two more secondary CTAs toward the bottom, you can. Just know that the more CTAs you have in your email, the more confused the recipient will be. 

Email marketing tips

Here are some extra tips for your marketing emails:

• Be brief. Lengthy emails have their place, especially for individual brands. But for B2B marketing emails, keep them brief, easy to read, and breezy

• Be convincing. This is the time to display confidence and conviction. You don’t need to take an overly salesy tack, but your language should be direct and convincing

• Add some personality. People like to read things that are interesting or fun, even if it’s B2B. Give it some voice and pizzazz.  

Email design best practices

We’re not a design agency, but we have seen what high-performing emails look like, here are a few high-level design aspects to look out for:

• Look modern. If your email looks like it’s from a previous presidential term, it’s time to update. Enlist a designer to update your template once every year or two so you look like the modern business you are

• Be choosy with images. Shy away from stock images; they don’t add anything to the email and they often look cheesy. Make your own images, even with a simple tool like Canva. It will add a lot of value and personality

• Be considerate. Make sure there is enough contrast between your background and your text. For example, light grey text on a white background might be difficult for anyone over 40 to read. Same with small text. Stick with only one bright color; too many can clash and turn people off