Full transcript of “Copy this marketing strategy to BLOW UP your business.”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 I am so incredibly tired of watching immensely talented creative people struggle to make sales. Most creatives approach sales and marketing from this very kind of haphazard flying by the city your pants just making things up as you go kind of place and their business really struggles as a result. So in this video I'm going to walk you through the exact marketing strategy that I have used that has directly led to tens of thousands of dollars in sales. And it's not hard. I'm not a genius, okay? I'm not a rocket scientist. I've just spent a couple of years studying business and marketing, reading a bunch of books, and trying this. And now I get to share all of these lessons with you. And if you've been watching my content for the past couple of months, you have seen this
0:46 same strategy in practice, whether you've noticed it or not. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. And let's get started. So at its core, this whole strategy is really about building a world or a library of content that will serve as an evergreen sales engine for your creative work, for your business. Right? The goal here is to not be on the social media hamster wheel 24/7 to be in a place where you are not actively putting in effort for every single additional sale of your creative work. That said, this is not a oneanddone kind of thing. at its most effective. This is a strategy that you will follow for years to come. And the first step is to create that
1:32 world, that library of content that I talked about. And when I use this phrase world of content, I mean creating an interconnected system of content, an ecosystem of content that all works together to attract your ideal audience and then guide them naturally toward the products that you offer. The hard truth is that a lot of creatives are making the exact same content as literally everyone else. Another time lapse, another work in progress post, another studio vlog or day in the life post. And there is obviously nothing inherently wrong with these formats. But you got to admit, when you're making the same content as everyone else, you are leaving opportunities on the table.
2:19 you're not standing out very effectively. And that's what I want to teach you here. I want to teach you how to stand out. How to naturally attract folks that are really interested in your work to your content. The entire point of you posting your creative work on social media is not to get famous. It's to build a business that can make you money, right? Like that's the point. Maybe your point is that you want to get famous. I don't know. That's also a fine goal. I don't judge you for that. But for a lot of folks, you're posting on socials because you want to make money from your creative work. Okay, cool. To do that, you cannot post the same things as everyone else. You have to stand out. And to do that, we have to leave some of these beloved formats behind just a little bit and diversify. So, instead of creating content that's just like
3:05 everyone else, let's focus on creating content that directly connects to the story and the value of your creative work. I think that your content should reflect the specific value your products provide, the story behind what you create, why you do what you do, the values that drive your creative work, and the interests that you share with your ideal audience. So, let me give you some examples of what this would look like actually in practice. Let's say that you are creating a graphic novel. It's a fantasy epic. Okay, you have spent years of your life on this. It is entirely original, but it's kind of loosely inspired by some elements of Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Studio Gibli. There's like a devivve to it, but also kind of deep roots in
3:51 character-driven storytelling. Um, lots of really original worldbuilding concepts, and you're working on it for a long time. Let's also say that you have a Patreon and a YouTube channel maybe, and the book isn't out yet. The graphic novel is not finished yet, but you're going to self-publish it when it's ready. Really targeted content, like I mentioned earlier, would include things like deep dives into your world building or your writing process, right? Commentary videos, even analyzing the world building in popular fantasy media. Maybe you also create videos where you share the research behind specific elements of your world. Like I watched a whole video recently on fantasy maps that I absolutely loved. I thought it was a great video. And focused content here would also include things like more
4:38 detailed, laseredin, focused studio vlogs on specific elements of your world building or your graphic novel. Like maybe you have an entire kind of art vlog that's focused around creating concept art and expressions and studying the kind of vibe of your original characters. And notice here how we are not leaving your creative work behind. It is very much front and center, but we're also not creating the same content as literally everyone else, right? We have our own kind of unique spin on things. We're creating more original content that's focused around the themes and the values of our work so that we can attract people. People like our ideal customer that might not even
5:25 realize that they like graphic novels yet. They might not even know that they are a fan of whatever kind of art style that we're creating, but they are interested in the themes and the values surrounding our work and our content. And we are able to naturally attract all of those folks into our community and create something really special. And when you are ready to sell, you will have a pool of folks that are very much interested in your creative work. Let's do another example of this kind of content strategy just for fun and say that you are a landscape painter that really cares about climate change and focuses on painting areas ravaged by wildfire. Tailored content for this kind of person would look like video essays
6:11 on climate change and environmental activism, stories on the specific locations that you paint, their ecological significance and what caused the catastrophe. You could even talk about what actions folks could take to help these areas recover faster. And notice here how your art again, it is the forefront, right? We are exploring all of these themes through the lens of your work. You're building a very kind of values aligned community of folks that are interested in your art and also your mission. I think that would be way stronger than a marketing strategy that revolves entirely around creating the same content again as everyone else. Yes, the market is saturated. Yes, it is
6:58 hard to stand out. So, put in effort to stand out. When it comes to standing out online and creating an immersive experience for your audience, having a website is really, really important. And that is where the sponsor of this video, Squarespace, comes in. I recently used Squarespace to create a sales page for my selling made simple workshop, a 90inute workshop I held that focused on teaching creatives how to sell in a way that felt natural and authentic. And the process could not have been easier. Their fluid engine system made designing the page as easy as dragging and dropping elements where I wanted them. It was so easy. What I love about Squarespace is that it gives creative entrepreneurs everything they need in one place, beautiful templates designed
7:44 to showcase your work, e-commerce tools for selling your products, and email marketing features to nurture your audience. If you want to give it a try, go to squarespace.com/kelsey Rodriguez and use my code kelseelsey Rodriguez at checkout for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. The next part of this strategy takes that world that we created, okay? That library of content and it connects it back to all of our paid products. Okay? If you skip this step, if you ignore what I'm about to say here, it's not going to go too well. You are not going to have the results that you could have. Everything will kind of fall apart a little bit because if you want this evergreen sales engine, you have to
8:31 sell. You have to sell in your content. I am a very firm believer that basically every single piece of content you create should have a call to action somewhere. If it's not in the video or the photo carousel or whatever it is itself, it should be in the caption. I know that sounds kind of spooky and scary and nerve-wracking for a lot of you. And maybe you're worried about being annoying or coming across as insincere, but hear me out here, right? We already know that a fraction of your audience sees any given one of your posts. Creative people have waxed poetic about that particular problem of social media. So why do we forget this when we have a thing that we want to sell? Why is it that we then immediately pump the brakes
9:17 and refuse to mention it consistently? You know what I'm going to say here? Okay. If you want sales consistently, you have to waiting for it. That's right. Sell consistently. That's right. Yes. Thank you. And to be clear, this does not have to be hard. I am talking about a simple one to two sentence call to action that naturally communicates the value of your work and invites someone to purchase. So, let's practice. Let's practice this skill literally right now. So, lately, I have been teaching my students a very simple kind of fill-in-theblank style of call to action. If selling really truly makes you feel very uncomfortable, this is kind of a nice jumping off point to start off with. So, let's go back to those two examples that I brought up earlier, the fantasy graphic novelist
10:05 and the environmental activist landscape painter. A starting point for our call to action is going to be this. Just a heads up that blank is now available. If you've been wanting Blank, you can find it at blank. And for our graphic novelist, this call to action might turn into something a little bit more like, "Hey, just so you know, the first five chapters of my graphic novel are available on my Patreon. If you want to get a sneak peek at what I have been working on, you can start reading for just $5 a month, and new pages come out every week." So simple, right? That's not painful. That's not gross or inauthentic. That is extremely casual for the landscape painter. that kind of same fill-in-the-blank call to action
10:50 would look a little bit more like this. Just a heads up that my new print collection inspired by the recent LA fires is now available. 20% of every single purchase goes directly toward mutual aid funds for those affected. So, on top of supporting me as an artist, you will also be supporting a good cause. The link is in my bio. Again, it's really natural, right? We're just taking that template, making it unique to our work and the value that we are providing and saying that I really want to challenge you to do a bunch of these. Have a bunch kind of ready to go that you can cycle through in your content. If you want more kind of guidance here, more inspiration, I will link a paid resource. It's like 14 bucks down in the comments and in the description. Okay,
11:35 so notice how these call to actions really naturally flow from the content, right? The graphic novelist, it's linked to the content. The environmental activist landscape painter, it's it feels natural for them, right? It is very values aligned for both of those hypothetical creators. It's not supposed to feel very heavy-handed. The more authentic and conversational, the more effective it will be. All that you want to do is just communicate where someone can support you. And you want to do that consistently, ideally in every single piece of content that you post, be that within the content itself or in the caption. So if you follow this strategy, you will have done two huge things for
12:21 your business. Number one, you'll have built an evergreen library of content that will naturally attract your ideal audience into your business. And number two, you have turned that world of content into a sales machine by actually focusing on sales and doing clear call to actions in the content itself. You have the lead generation, the thing that brings in customers and the thing that actually converts those prospective customers into paid buyers for your work. That's huge. That's that's a business. That's literally a business right there. That is the two foundational building blocks of what it takes to make this your job. And if you want to learn more about selling as a creative, I will link that workshop that I mentioned down in the description. But
13:07 yeah, that's kind of it for me, guys. If you want to keep hanging out, I strongly recommend that you watch my business breakthrough series. Episode 4 of that should be coming out in a couple weeks, maybe even next week. I'm not sure. But anyway, yeah, you should watch that. It'll be somewhere on the screen right now. And I hope to see you there.
