By Emily Soccorsy

Being humble is a beautiful quality and a terrible brand strategy.

This is what I tell my clients when they say that they don’t want their content to be self-promoting.

And then I try to reframe their concern with this idea:

People want to know what you’re great at.

They’re eager to learn how you can help them address something they’re struggling with. If they’re curious about what you do, they’re probably pretty curious about how they can work with you.

When you don’t share these insights, you make it harder for your ideal clients to find you – which just sucks for everyone.

So I’m taking my own advice.

For years, I’ve been puzzling over expanding our offerings. Then about a year and a half ago, I knew I had to stop puzzling and procrastinating and get busy doing.

I’m pleased to share with you that Root + River has expanded its offerings. For the last year and a half, we have been serving clients in two key new ways.

We still provide what I believe to be the deepest, richest, and most effective brand strategy, messaging, and positioning for brands that want to change their industry, community, or the world through their brand. We are active practitioners of intrinsic branding, the category we created about six years ago.

Thoughtful Content Development

And now, we also offer thoughtful, intentional, and driven clients with content development (catapult content) on a monthly and quarterly basis.

What does this look like?

After a brand strategy engagement, clients convert into content collaboration. We interview them once a month, or once a quarter, and then create a month’s (or quarter’s) worth of compelling, on-brand content specifically optimized for LinkedIn and also perfect for email newsletters and company blog posts, too. It’s a mix of long and short-form content and includes recommendations for video content, too.

This content:

• grows your audience of current and potential clients
• differentiates you and your business from others in your space
• puts you, your ideas and your business, in front of people who are potential clients and influencers
• solves the problem of creating and posting (and sending out) consistent, high-quality, insightful content without hiring internally
• increases your SEO and sets you up for SEM

We call this catapult content because it takes your brand from quiet and passive to stand-out and resonant.

It gives you a rich bevy of content to send to clients, prospects or to engage with them on the platform you are most active.

It garners you the kind of attention and engagement that leads to opportunities to build business, to expand your brand presence and do things like speak at conferences, convert an audience into clients, publish ebooks or lead magnet tools, lead business development projects – and get your voice out there.

It removes barriers you’ve been trying to climb for a while – the ones that kept you from sharing your message and marketing your services in a sophisticated, educated, thought-leadership-driven way.

We also coach you up on how to engage on LinkedIn and continue to build your following – and provide support that minimizes the time and maximizes the quality of your time and investment in content.

Fractional CMO Services

In addition, for those select and highly motivated clients we thoroughly jibe with, we also offer fractional CMO services.

As a fractional CMO team, we take the quarterback position for our clients’ briskly growing brands. Working with the internal marketing team, we set the marketing strategy based on the long-term brand vision and short-term realities. We host monthly marketing strategy with a client’s internal marketing team and conduct content planning and coaching along the way.

We coordinate with designers, web developers, PR folks and anyone else on your marketing team – keeping them, and your projects, on time and on tone.

Small to mid-sized businesses get the insight and strategy of a CMO, the coaching and experience of a brand and marketing leader without the hefty CMO salary.

Their marketing is cohesive, compelling and organized.

Marketing and brand opportunities that were once missed, are acted upon and maximized. (This one makes me so happy because, as a business owner myself, I hate the idea of lost opportunities that run by simply because there is not someone on your team looking out for the brand.)

And we all get to watch the brand grow.

OK, that wasn’t so hard to share.

Mostly because as I was writing about it, I was smiling ear-to-ear thinking about the incredible clients we serve with these offerings.

Even more so, I am delighted and rewarded by the mutual trust and vibrant collaboration we’re able to develop with our clients through these offerings.

The topper is how we give our clients the opportunity to share their voice, spread their messages of hope and competence, and their thoughtful and service-oriented approaches with a world in desperate need of all of the above.

This year to come, we hope to continue doing just that.

Lastly, here are some signs you might be ready to work with us:

• You’ve worked with us in the past and have been feeling like you want to dig back into your brand and get it out there in the world.
• You have a big idea about an important conversation you want to lead in your industry, your community and/or for your clients, but you don’t know how to start it.
• You’re an accomplished professional — but are starting something new in a new space and need guidance, an internal team to walk along with you to get clarity of message and a solid plan to do things like have a handy elevator pitch, copy for a website, what to say on social media.

If you are interested in having a conversation about catapult content (that’s the best first step if we haven’t worked together before), click here to schedule a time to have a quick, answer-all-your-questions visit. If you’ve been a client in the past, and are curious about re-engaging, click here and let’s schedule a catchup. We’d love to hear what you are up to these days.

Let’s Talk!