BEGINNING THINGS
Every business on the market fills a need, and yours is no different. You have a product that will revolutionize the way people think, act, or even feel. Maybe you provide a service that is going to change the way people do things forever. The problem is that nobody knows about it.
We understand the passion people have for what they do. If you could just get it out there, people will see and they’ll be beating down your door. You’re the first believer.
Good. You need that kind of unrelenting enthusiasm to get you through the reality.
For nearly all businesses, merely building something is not enough to spur a customer to make a purchase. You have to tell people, more than once and in a way that shows an understanding of customers’ beliefs, needs and wants.
You may find the idea of creating multiple pages of marketing text and calls to action daunting, but let’s say you’re up for starting the marketing ball rolling yourself. You’re an entrepreneur, you’re motivated, you know your product and with not much budget the DIY route is the way you’re going to go.
The web abounds with solutions to help you build websites and other marketing collateral. Wix uses their own savvy marketing to draw in people like you. Their barrier to entry is low. The initial costs are low (but quickly scale with every feature you add). The tutorial videos make it look so easy to get a professional-looking website. But let’s break that down.
Drag and drop builders like Wix are very easy to use within the constraints that are inherent to any system – you just have to work the way they want you to. The content they use in their examples is prepared by professional designers and copywriters to look the best it can in their system – and the only thing it’s meant to do is to sell you on Wix.
And that leads directly into your content. Will your content look as good in Wix’s templates? Have you written marketing copy and prepared professional-quality imagery before? Wix shows you how quick and easy their builder is. They gloss right over that they don’t create your content for you. The builder, ideally, is a pretty quick operation. The content can take days, weeks, months to create – depending on your skill level and the amount of time you have to devote to it.
While it may seem like an agency like Infinity Reef costs more – and it probably will up front – the good process we bring to the table and demonstrated results with our other clients is a better spend and more cost effective in the long run.
BIGGER THINGS
We’ve been talking about the smaller companies, entrepreneurs and start-ups. But what if you’re in a larger company? You might already have internal marketing resources, or you might not. But you know you need more, because every time you try to create the larger marketing messages and their various accompanying content pieces something else lands on your desk with a higher priority. As a result, the website/brochures/etc. are so out of date there’s still a fax number on them.
There is no doubt in our minds, and it’s not going to be a surprise to you, that the lack of agreed-upon-in-the-contract client-supplied content is the number-one barrier to launching a client’s website or other major deliverable, leading to missed deadlines and project cost overruns.
We can say that in over six years, IR has never missed its project deadlines because of something on our end. Touch wood. But there have been a couple or three that would have gone long because of late content if we hadn’t put in the extra hours. Still no missed deadlines, but in that almighty rush to do right by our client, compromises sometimes had to be made initially, only to be addressed later. If the hours aren’t put in up front, they will have to be made up eventually, at extra cost to you in dollars and stress for everyone.
There’s no idea of shaming anyone here, but there is a proven pattern of underestimating the sheer size of the task of creating content and devoting the appropriate resources to it. It’s not something someone with an already otherwise full plate of work can just tack on to their tasks, at least not without something else suffering or turning their 40-hour work week into 60, 80 or more.
With that experience, we start with an assessment of our clients’ content for facts and relevance as well as communication style and messages that resonate with audiences. We excel at packaging information and pairing that with the information architecture of websites and will always recommend a facilitated approach to creating or updating textual and visual content.
One, it removes the stress on your internal team focussed on activities more core to the business’ day-to-day operations, leaving you with the more manageable task of reviewing and approving at scheduled milestones; and two, we will most likely see things that you and your staff don’t see because you’re in the middle of it every day. We bring an objectivity and the knowledge of many different types of audiences to the work.
Our objective is to put more eyes on your business by creating the types of content that your customers want to see. By connecting you to your ideal audience through targeted messaging, we’re here to help you build the types of relationships that put your name to the forefront of your market, increase your ROI and give you the freedom to scale your business over time.
Infinity Reef is a small, nimble agency that outperforms for its size and responds well to client engagement and collaboration. Contact us and we’ll be happy to have an unhurried, in-depth conversation with you.
