One of our biggest challenges has always been the same: marketing.
When it comes to figuring out ways to help clients market their businesses and services, we love diving into the research and building out a strategy. When it comes to doing it for ourselves, it might as well be nails on a chalkboard. This seems to be a trend for a lot of design and branding agencies.
So instead of creating a whole robust marketing strategy that targets multiple channels and frankly overwhelms me after I write it out, we decided to make a game of it. We call it our 6-Monthly Marketing Challenge (please hire us for your naming and branding needs).
The game is simple: each month we are going to focus on one marketing channel or medium and go extra hard (or at least extra hard for us).
There are several goals with this format:
Create a bunch of content quickly that can then be recycled over time
Become comfortable with new formats and channels that we've been ignoring because we haven’t dedicated the time to learn them
Have fun because it turns out that turning our marketing into a 6-month challenge is more realistic than creating a normal marketing campaign
Now I can’t say I recommend this method to literally any of our clients. Marketing requires a strategy and plan and consistency, none of which this achieves. It also is going to be A LOT of work (probably a lot more than we’re even imagining right now). But for us, it will allow us to learn a lot about the different channels that our clients will be using and thus allow us to make better recommendations in the future. It also is forcing us to put marketing front and center as a business, something we’ve been wanting to do for literally two years but never knew where to even begin. So this is where we’re beginning.
This month’s Marketing Challenge: Blogs 4x per week (aka every work day; we take off on Fridays)
We have done blogs or short-formed writing for a long time now. But they’ve been pretty inconsistent and we definitely were not posting them 4x a week. We started here because as shocking as it may be, this was the least scary for us to kick off with. It also will provide a great foundation for future content as the challenge continues.
So if you’d like to follow along with this weird, self-imposed challenge, be sure that you’re following UnderBelly Creative! Here’s to Day 1 of 183.