Raven Creative: Where Are They Now?

Yes, that’s a VH1 reference in that title. Pop-up video, anyone? Behind the Music? We’re millennials here…just really old ones.

We thought we’d pop back in here and answer the very important question of – how do you follow a brand launch? What do you do now? What are we doing now to stay focused and excited about our plan and goals?

It’s called a launch, but so many brands are so exhausted by the time they finally hit publish that it’s more of landing.

We wanted to make sure we didn’t lose the momentum from our launch, and the best way to accomplish that was with a plan…and people!

Starting the Blog

Now that we had a fancy new website, we got to work on developing a strategy and plan for The Feathered Edge, this blog.

We decided on a blog for a few reasons:

• SEO: Consistently updating our website through a blog meant that we’d always be giving both Google and our audience something new to find and a reason to stop on by.
• It was the right format: We knew we wanted to create and share longer-form content. Ideas, articles, portfolio pieces, client case studies, etc. Adding these haphazardly to our website would get really messy. A blog could be a great way for us to package all of these together and put some structure to them.
• Content content content: We knew that our marketing plan (more on that, later) hinged on having really great, owned content that would help our audience and was shareable.
• We all had secretly dreamed of adding blogger to our titles: Be thankful that it wasn’t vlogger.

While we’re still in this little publication’s infancy, we’ve managed to post consistently for almost 6 months now. The only reason we’ve been able to do that is because we’ve spent time creating and adhering to an editorial calendar and plan.

We’ve updated both since we launched to work better for our team, and continue to keep an open mind to new ways of getting work done. But without the editorial calendar or the definition of roles and processes found in our plan, we definitely couldn’t have maintained the consistency that we have.

Getting Social

We knew we couldn’t simply create blog posts and wait for the world to stumble upon them. We’re not Kardashians or Housewives. (And some of us are okay with that.)

Social media was an obvious place to turn to, but figuring out how we’d make sense of the crazy world of Zuckerberg has taken some time.

Once again, we started with goals and a plan, and narrowed down the networks and tactics that would help us move toward those goals. As we’ve grown our owned content base (the blog), we’ve let that take a bigger role in our content calendar.

Social is tough – on the outside, it looks simple and easy (and cheap!), but when you’re in the middle of it, it can be overwhelming and exhausting. It’s constantly changing, there’s always a new network or strategy you could be trying, and for bottom-line driven people, it’s hard to put a value on a share or a like.

But that’s why a plan and well-defined goals are critical. Having those pieces in place prevents us from chasing after the latest shiny object, and keeps us grounded and focused on the bigger picture.

We’ve decided to invest our time in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – and all of those networks are growing at a steady pace.

What’s Next

Our big goal isn’t to amass hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. No, our goal for the blog and social media is to support our main business goal: to be a creative partner that our clients can trust – to get great work done, as quickly and independently as possible.

With that in mind, we’re going to be focusing on creating valuable content that helps our audience, today. This means more blog posts, but also fun stuff like ebooks, guides, infographics, cheat sheets, and assessments.

In fact, we’re launching our first guide next week – keep an eye out for more information!