Over the years, I’ve encountered various clients from the services and products industries. It has been a journey for sure. While the complexity of services and products ranges entirely, regardless of industry, I’ve always taken a holistic approach. When it comes to marketing, I strongly believe you must ensure marketing and business development initiatives overlap.
True Holistic Marketing
The goal has always been brand and revenue, in that order, while making sure you have a person responsible to oversee this is often the success or downfall for many organizations. This isn’t to say they’ll fail because of not having this individual in place, just that they miss the most crucial opportunities to grow. Without accountability, I regularly see things fall through the cracks, opportunities missed and planning derailed. Whether this is a contracted CMO, project manager, sales/marketing manager or, as with micros-typically the owner or business manager, the single point of the ripple is key.
Once you establish the brand, you must reiterate that and create content and initiatives that feed the bottom line. Otherwise, not only will you go broke, but you burn out contributing personnel rather quickly without reaching the goals you set, and they set for themselves.
Marketing and Business Development Time Investments for Small Business and Entrepreneurs
The ability to make time investments multiply is critical, especially with small businesses, microbusinesses or entrepreneurs who are wearing many hats or responsible for billable hours and revenue stream contributions. When asking organizational experts to create content on a product, an offering or area of expertise to support the services or products they offer, there is, in my opinion, a best practice. I have often taught clients about something I call the ripple effect.
The Kreativ Ripple Effect Methodology
This has been my “secret sauce” for with even the busiest clients over the years. The ripple effect is my planning and execution strategy, especially for small business and microenterprise clients, with the main goal of always making the most out of an initiative or campaign. Time is valuable, and what you spend it doing has to yield results or fulfill goals.
How, you ask?
SIMPLE. No, really. Stick with me here….
Content Creation 101
Create content in one or two ways—by recording or “written” format. Depending on the preference, the approach is different. Some people do a remarkable job with video or voice recordings and speaking on the fly, while others need to put pen to paper, so to speak.
Regardless, in the content creation coaching, I always suggest using an outline to start. This can often be considered the origin of the Ripple I talk about. For this former parochial school student, outlines are the highlighters of life. They sort our thoughts before recording or writing to ensure we are not only methodical, but thorough. I also recommend this format as it leads us to a couple of additional ripples I’ll talk about in more detail. But first things first…
Writing for the Reader and SEO Equally
People skim, and it is no secret Google loves titles and soundbites just as much. Since both create the perfect union, that makes this a bit easier, even for the unseasoned content creator. This also sets the stage to make it simpler to create and better grasp the attention of the reader. You’ll get a lot of love from your search engine team for this.
Outline Ideas
An outline can be 3, 5,10 -tips, guides, or subheading items. For example, if you’re creating a piece on Key areas to focus on when starting a Business, you could title it “Top 5 reasons to start a business”, create an intro summary, list 5 reasons in order of importance, add content descriptions for each of the 5 reasons, and finally a closing paragraph. Once complete, you have the beginning Ripples that’ll flow out from there and loo at you-content. You have the start of a true content!
The Ripples of Effectiveness
Now the Ripples I promised you…
Now that you have this draft of your outline, it’s time to blow it up. Whether you’re recording this via video or audio or filling in the missing pieces on “paper” so to speak, the result will be a full piece we can use as a blog, a video with one result feeding each or the other. And it leaves us open to bits to be fed to social channels in both info graphs and video snips, which we will soon touch on.
Your video can be easily transcribed and with the outline, I proposed you make, then edited, and a blog is the result. If you’re a person who prefers to “write” content, we can edit and create a video. Two pieces from one.
But wait, there’s more….
No cliché here, I mean more to keep the momentum of that Ripple. From here we edit videos and begin to grow a YouTube channel, TikTok, etc. to make a guide or checklist as a download, which some call the “lead magnets” or pull snippet videos, and we feed out in campaign-driven initiatives.
YouTube as Part of the Ripple
As I said, this content piece that originated from a video or resulted from the written piece can be used to build YouTube, TikTok, etc.
According to a Sprout social media study, YouTube is visited by nearly a quarter of the world’s population, equaling 2 billion monthly active users, with 70% of people purchasing after seeing it in a YouTube or video platform ad. This gives you a great reason to follow that Ripple with some strategy.
Social Media as Part of the Ripple
Thought-driven campaigns on social media work well. Those great content pieces with a call-to-action (or CTA as I call them), work both together and incrementally as individual posts with the result being that full post, download or supporting products or services on a landing page to help build the brand AND amplify the momentum for lead development. We can also use these to build ad sets featuring your expertise and build reputation overall. Leveraging you as the expert, provider of solutions or products to align with prospects.
Media and Third-Party Articles and Engagements
Those pieces serve as thought leadership, leveraging expertise and skill sets. Finding ways to publish third-party and use to pitch to the media for expert interviews is also great use. The lowest hanging fruit would be your own (Organizational and Groups too) LinkedIn page to show your connections and beyond you have the skills and can be considered an expert in those service areas.
The Ripple Effect has helped so many of my clients and colleagues to reduce the pressure of content creation. It also harnesses costs when the effect produces excellent results when added to a complete campaign. Funneling all efforts towards the end goal is a success for everyone. It helps set the path for building more content with clients and not fearing the pushback.
I hope this has given you that push and lessened the burden. Looking for more marketing tips and tricks? Follow our other social channels @kreativstreategies
About Kreativ Strategies
With over two successful decades in business development and marketing, we have the knowledge and expertise to create effective solutions that meet each client’s unique needs. More than simply coming up with great ideas, we strive to implement relevant strategies successfully that enable you to achieve your business goals at a reasonable fee.
We LOVE what we do and are dedicated to helping our clients succeed!
