Love, RIPPLE100

Challenge: Here’s a startup with lots of momentum, but also lots to do and limited resources. Green Bride Guide is an online content provider and marketplace for all things green wedding – a segment where revenues are trending up even as wedding spend spirals down. Founder Kate Harrison is doing all the right things – building team, product, content, audience, and a revenue pipeline, even as she wraps up first round financing. How can micromarketing help?

Insight: There are countless players in the wedding industry: from vendors as diverse as invitation printers, caterers, and limousines; to influential channels, trade associations, and fairs; to engaged couples, family, and friends. Everyone of them is a stand-alone opportunity for focused and frequent micromarketing. But where does this startup start?

This is where micromarketing isn’t just about marketing. It helps you prioritize, focus on, and untangle key bottlenecks – and key audiences – in your ability to generate cash. Startup founders know this too well: before you get to customers and sales, you need (gulp) software developers, channel partners, investors, pilot or beta users, the beat goes on. What and who do you focus on to get it rolling?

Focus: For Green Bride Guide there is a hidden gem in the key hub of the $50 Billion wedding industry: wedding planners. Show you can successfully and efficiently reach wedding planners – and you’ve just shown a pretty good proxy for successfully and efficiently reaching both couples (buyers) and bridal vendors (sellers). That proxy is powerful – great news for potential investors, partners, and key hires. Everything about this Ripplecast was directed at wedding planners – from the campaign topic (green wedding planner certification) to elevator pitch to calls to action and video. We put Kate in a conversation with wedding planners. We asked questions they would ask. We emphasized immediate and practical impact on their services, their networks, their clientele, their fees. As well as the more collective significance of green weddings, and the poetry of coupling a long-term commitment to each other with a long-term commitment to mother earth.

See it live: Ripplecast 2010: Are You a Green Wedding Planner?

So what: It doesn’t matter what kind of business, politics, or nonprofit you have. This is stuff you can do yourself, now, at your next click.  Here are 3 options:

• Tune into Ripplecast 2010 for more ideas how to start micromarketing now.
• Get started with your own micromarketing kit at www.ripple100.com.
• For other ways we can help: email andre@ripple100.com.