For All The Social Media Fans
Marketing is an unfamiliar concept for many nonprofit organizations. It's important that these organizations understand that marketing is more than just the old sense of making a sale or obtaining a donation.
Define your target market, research similar organizations and associations.
Determine the desired outcome of your marketing efforts.
Develop a social media marketing strategy. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook can provide you with ways to reach out to those interested in your organization in a low cost and effective way. Social media works great when it comes to reaching those who are passionate about causes that individuals hold dear to their hearts.
Research and maintain your prospect and customer databases. Do not let these resources be wasted. Use them for special mailings, follow-up telephone calls, event invitations, alliance development, research profiling, and market segmentation.
Show and advertise the results and objectives that your organization achieves. You fill find that it is effective to showcase those that are receiving benefits, inversions, activities, and projects.
Always actively search for alliances with other organizations, commerce, government, advertising media, and business. This step alone often brings the most benefit to nonprofit organizations.
Before we even talk about how to fix what goes wrong, let’s talk about the positives. One of the best ways to minimize social media damage is to proactively create an environment that encourages positive feedback. There are two main things you should do to keep the accolades coming.
There are plenty of studies showing that if your employees are happy, they will deliver good service to customers. Not only does this minimize potential damage, but it leverages your brand in a very positive way. Keeping your employees engaged and letting them know how they fit into the corporate culture goes a long way.
Train employees on the proper use of social media tools. Your employees represent your organization, and if they have a solid, credible personal brand, it will carry over to the company’s image.
Keep in mind, however, that someday the other shoe might drop. Many companies have fallen prey to negative press, so don’t put your head in the sand. It’s not about “if” something will happen; it’s about “when.” In this transparent, authentic and real-time world, expect a hiccup to occur. But be prepared.
In the end, the issue is less about the mistake that was made, but the reaction that came after. So, here are some tips to follow if you find yourself in a damage control mode.
The execution of your social media campaign will be different to traditional marketing campaigns in its approach as you take into account transparency and open, honest communications – however, the planning should not differ.
When approaching social media, you first need to clearly define the success metrics you will use for the duration of the campaign before executing the strategy.
These success metrics will help you to understand where the return on investment will come from before investing your marketing budget in nurturing and supporting a new business community, paying for the production and development of online videos, product demonstrations, or even the cost of developing a corporate blog.
Without pre-defining metrics at the planning stage, you cannot feedback and refine strategies that could have an overall impact on the success of activity that will help shape future campaigns.
Quantitative: increased traffic to your website, number of sales leads, savings on customer relationship management, reduction in call centre costs, recruitment of new staff.
Qualitative: engagement with customers, types of communication, quality of followers, market research and feedback.
Social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, communities, blogs, podcasts and videos have many ways of contributing value.
Setting success metrics in the planning stage will help you identify the value social media can offer your business, at the same time as helping you measure the success and demonstrate the benefits of activity to your organisation.