When it comes to the best marketing strategies for social entrepreneurs, where do you start? It can be overwhelming to start marketing your business online, but we’re here to help.
There are many ways that you can build a loyal audience online, start getting customers and build online funnels that continuously bring in more customers. Let this guide be your starting point.
Start by creating a marketing strategy.
The first thing you should do is plan out how you want to market your social enterprise online. Think about your end goals, what you want your business to become, who your target market is and how you would like to get there.
Once you have your strategy thought out, you should come up with goals.
What do you want to accomplish in one year? Three years? Are you interested in driving more traffic to your website? Is it more to do with brand awareness? What are your niche goals? What are your business goals?
Most social enterprises have a combination of goals. Let’s say your goals for the first year are to drive more traffic to your website, and increase your email list by 10,000.
Looking at your goals, write down your marketing activities.
What do you need to do in order to achieve these goals? Your marketing activities could be to setup a Facebook fan page, setup a mailing list, start writing a blog or increase the amount of guest posts you’re writing for local publications.
Most social enterprises will focus on a combination of online and offline marketing activities to achieve their goals, but it’s all about an “opt in” marketing strategy.
After you’ve come up with your goals and marketing activities, you should write down what you need to complete your marketing activities.
Do you need a logo? Do you need to write guest posts? Do you need to setup a Facebook fan page? Write down everything you need to complete your marketing activities.
Once you have your marketing plan written out, what do you do next? You can start executing on your plan, but you should partner up with a marketing consultant or marketing agency.
Partner up with a social enterprise marketing consultant.
A social enterprise marketing consultant will help you put your plan into action, provide the strategy and tactical advice that you may need and help you figure out where you should be going next.
Having a social enterprise marketing consultant on your side will save you a ton of time. Sending your marketing plan to a social enterprise marketing consultant and receiving feedback can be extremely valuable.
If you have your marketing plan written out, it’s time to start executing on it. Set yourself up for success by trying some things out online each day.
Create a marketing spreadsheet to keep track of your marketing activities.
Keeping an up-to-date marketing spreadsheet will be super helpful. You can keep track of your marketing activities, what you’ve done and what you need to do in the future.
A social enterprise can succeed in any industry, but there is a formula. Find out how to succeed in any industry.
Work backwards.
The first step in figuring out how to succeed in any industry is to go backwards. Figure out what the most valuable marketing activities are for your business. If you’re a CPA, you should start to focus on listing yourself on directories for accountants, create a blog with useful tax and accounting tips and drive traffic to your website.
The reason why you start from the end is because the end is where you want to end up with your business. Why do you want to list yourself on directories? To build your brand awareness. Why do you want to have a blog? To create an audience who will drive traffic to your website.
We’re a Boston web design company and we have our own formula for success. It’s important to know what to do and in what order to do it in.
Once you’ve figured out what your best marketing activities are, then you can figure out where to focus your energy first and how long it will take.
Business owners should focus on a marketing project at a time.
The truth is that you probably won’t start out with the most valuable marketing activities. You will probably start with the tasks you think will be the easiest. That’s okay, but don’t do it! A carefully planned social enterprise marketing strategy will be very effective in the long run.
If you aren’t sure what the most valuable activities are, implement a branch strategy.
If you don’t know what your most valuable activities are, implement what we call the branch strategy. Choose three different marketing activities that may appeal to your target audience and start them at the same time.
Let’s say you’re a web design company in Boston, MA. You may target small business owners in Boston, so you may create a website, send out a local newsletter and start posting on a variety of local blogs.
If you’re getting great results with your local newsletter and blog posts, you can keep focusing on them. If they aren’t working for you, you can shift your focus to digital marketing tactics like SEO and PPC to get more traffic to your website.
You could start running ads in the Boston area with the aim of driving more traffic to your website. If your website traffic is increasing without paying for the ads, great! You can keep driving more traffic to your website with the help of SEO and PPC, or you can start running ads more aggressively and start adjusting your spending.
One of the absolute best things for a social enterprise to do is start building their email list. It’s a free way to build a database of people who want to hear from you and offers opportunities to segment your audience. It’s a no brainer.
Why should a social enterprise start building their email list?
A social enterprise’s email list is extremely valuable to their business. Our advice to social enterprise clients is that they should focus on their email list and work that list to death.
It’s critical that you start building something valuable, like a comprehensive e-course. The e-course should be valuable and benefit the students/subscribers.
You don’t have to have an e-course ready for every social enterprise to start building an email list. You can start by offering a simple download of free content or free handouts after the sign up form.
To start building an email list, you need to have a sign up form somewhere on your website. The art of proper popups takes a bit of practice. If you’re interested to learn how to setup proper popups, check out this post.
You want a social enterprise e-course to be extremely valuable to your target market. If you’re a CPA in Indianapolis, you could create a free download of your Ultimate Guide To Disaster Planning 2018.
If you’re a high-level web design company, you could create your The 5 Mistakes That Every Web Design Company Makes.
Want more insight on how to build a powerful social enterprise email list? Check out this blog post.
If you want to read about how to start building your email list with an established business, check out this blog post.
It’s very important for a social enterprise to have a professional profile that sets them apart from their competitors. This cover photo is extremely important.
Endeavor to make your social enterprise profile professional and intriguing. It should be interesting to your audience and make them want to learn more about your business. It should be reminiscent of what your business is all about.
Think about your business brand, and choose a background image that incorporates your logo and channels the brand that you’re trying to achieve.
You also want to express your USPs in the bio. What makes you different from your competitors? How are you different from your competitors? Choose career-related keywords that you want people searching for, and use them throughout your profile description.
A social enterprise could set up a business page on Facebook or LinkedIn and change their cover photos and copy regularly. A social enterprise could set up a blog and create a new blog post and desired action to tie to it.
The bottom line is that the cover photo and copy should be tweaked and changed to reflect the changes in the social enterprise’s business direction.
A social enterprise could use this profile update strategy to communicate seasonally changes in their business or to communicate changes in their business direction without doing expensive PR.
A social enterprise needs to have an active presence on social media. However, it can be hard to build an engaged community. They can post consistently. They can post helpful and interesting content. They can analyze their competitors’ profiles and copy their strategies. They can do digital events to engage their audience.
However, it can be hard to build an engaged community. On a Facebook business page, you can pay to boost your content. If you want to try Facebook advertising, you can use an in-depth Facebook advertising guide to do it correctly.
You can run Google Adwords ads as well. They run through the Google my business extensions.
They run through the Google my business extensions. You can boost your Instagram posts so that they show at the top of your followers’ feeds.
so that they show at the top of your followers’ feeds. If you use Twitter as your social media platform of choice, you can use Twitter promoted tweets or Twitter promoted accounts to get your tweets in front of your audience.
to get your tweets in front of your audience. They can use LinkedIn to boost their posts and get them in front of their target audience.
A social enterprise can encourage people to subscribe to their content that’s on other channels. As mentioned earlier, a social enterprise can also create a blog post to build subscribers for their blog. You can check out this blog post for more information.
If you want to get more information about how to set up a Facebook store, check out this blog post.
You can use YouTube to share videos that teach people how to solve their problems. You can also use YouTube to share some of your content that’s featured on your website and blog. You can use YouTube to share a video of an interview that you had in order to build your personal profile.
A social enterprise can use YouTube to experiment with different paid ad formats. A social enterprise can run Facebook promoted videos in order to promote their blog videos. A social enterprise can also run YouTube ads in order to be shown to people who have never heard of them before. If you want to see the top YouTube ads and learn more about YouTube advertising, check out this post.
A social enterprise can use social advertising to get their message out in front of their audience. This may be in the form of blogging on LinkedIn Pulse, posting on Instagram or sharing a Facebook post on LinkedIn.
If they decide to share content on social media, they can use social media advertising to get their content in front of their target audience.
What is social advertising? It’s a huge category of paid advertising that allows a business to show their message to a specific audience on social media.
Social media advertising is a specific kind of advertising that is placed on social media properties. It can include digital ads on social media channels (like Facebook and Twitter) as well as sponsored posts on media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
One of the first people to use social media advertising was Barack Obama’s team in 2008. They created a Facebook page for him, and they paid for Facebook ads to get their message in front of more people on Facebook.
Increasingly, social media advertising is about targeting key demographics. If a business wants to target 50-year-old women in the United States, that’s a very specific