Living in a world where billions of people are online at all hours of the day and night can be both daunting and exciting. On the one hand, it’s scary to think that your message could drown in all the online noise. While, on the other hand, there’s the sheer potential of it all. So many willing ears (or eyes) – you just have to reach the right ones! But, how do you know who to speak to and where to find them? What is the most effective Digital Marketing Plan for your business?
There are many charities out there, some of which do exactly what you do. The key is to distinguish yourself online and find ‘your tribe’ or community. In this blog, we give you pointers on how to create a digital marketing plan that makes the most of your marketing budget and time to deliver results for your social enterprise.
Decide On a Set of Clear Goals That You Want to Achieve
A great foundation for any successful cause is clarity and clear goals. One of the challenges we see social enterprises struggling with is making sure goals are aspirational but also realistic. A common pitfall is trying to do too much digital marketing plan with too little and as a result diluting your budget and over-stretching yourself, your volunteers and in some cases, your community.
It’s better to have fewer goals that will make the biggest difference to your organisation. Unless you have a very large budget or team for digital marketing, you will find that less is more. For every goal you have, you need to break that down into plans and actions and all of these eat into your (often) limited resources.
Work Out Which Digital Marketing Plan You’ll be Applying
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start working on how you plan to achieve it. Take a step back and look at your online platforms. From your website to social media, it’s important that you know what’s working and what isn’t – then make changes were necessary.
Most organisations we work with have a lot of valuable data available to them to help inform better decision making yet most don’t use this data. In some cases, they don’t know what the data is telling them, in others they don’t know what to do with the information.
Some of the most valuable data is available to you completely free of charge:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Facebook Ads Reporting
- Facebook Page Insights
- Google Ads
There are other more advanced paid tools that can be used to dig out additional information but for a lot of social enterprises and cause brands, we find they don’t even make best use of the free tools for your digital marketing plan so there’s no point paying for more data if you don’t use it.
Let the data guide your decisions. Sure, there’s some art required alongside science but making decisions purely on the latest trendy platform, gut feel or what your mother’s friend’s daughter told her, is probably not the best way to plan your digital marketing activities.
Dig into the tools available to you are see what you can find. Here are some ideas of what Google Analytics can tell you.
Delegate Tasks and Get the Relevant People on Board
Now, the real work begins. Share the work among the right people in your organisation. Give timelines for each campaign and create realistic budgets to work from. If you run your not-for-profit alone, this is the perfect time to consult with the relevant professionals where you’re lacking in skills or know-how.
You can’t do it all, no matter how hard you try or how long you work.
Create and Carry out Online Campaigns Based on the Year Plan
Start doing research and creating content which will appear in each campaign ahead of the time. This allows you to add and subtract things without being under too much pressure. Working in batches is usually more productive than piecemeal.
If you’ve done your planning, you know what you need when. You will know how many social media posts you need each day, how many different ads you need and in what format. Instead of preparing these daily or weekly, why not prepare a few months worth all in one go so that they are set and ready to go. If plans change or an unexpected event comes up, it’s easy to add these to your plans knowing that you’ve got the rest of the month’s content all covered off.
Keep an Eye on Progress
Monitor each campaign for hits and misses so that you know what to tweak for upcoming ones. Quickly stop any campaigns that are not bringing in the results you need to free up more time and effort to put into those that are getting results.
One of the brilliant things about Digital Marketing is that you can so easily and transparently track the results you are getting. Data is readily and freely available. All you need to do is look at the data and adjust your actions based on what it’s telling you.
If you recognise that you would be better to outsource some activities in your business, take a look at Amica Digital Services. You can even mix and match based on the skills and tasks you need to outsource. If you’d like some training in some of these essential online business skills, please book a discovery call and we can tailor training to suit your needs.
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*Editor’s Note: This post has been updated on September 2020 for accuracy.
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