As an organization, your business is committed to providing some social impact by virtue of your product or service. With a growing number of businesses adopting a form of social good or addressing social problems in their business, how do you stand out?
This requires a solid understanding of your potential customers and reaching them through targeted marketing strategies.
A marketing strategy is your business’ approach to reaching your desired customers. Before you embark on formulating that strategy, we have a couple of questions you should ask yourself.
- Who is your customer?
- Who could be your customer?
- How can you serve their needs with your product or brand?
- What are some periphery needs that your product or service also solves?
The answers to these questions will help you align your target audience with the right platforms. And from these answers you can begin to ask a few additional questions:
- How can you reach potential customers?
- What platforms might these customers be on?
- What content could supplement your product or service?
The digital mediums you pursue, connect you to your target audience. We will cover four marketing mediums that will help you generate leads for your business.
How to generate leads for companies committed to social impact
There are four areas that will help your company generate leads.
- A strong traditional digital marketing strategy, your email marketing, your blogging, your paid ads.
- A robust social media presence, and utilizing all that it offers.
- Trying out newer digital mediums like videos, podcasts, and webinars.
- Collaborative marketing
Traditional marketing
The traditional digital marketing outlets are still as important as ever. They are some of the most cost effective lead garnering methods out there.
Blogging
Blogging is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, and capacity to solve your readers problems. Content that answers your customers’ questions and provides solutions will build trust with your brand and product. Moreover, your expertise becomes an added value to your product.
Because blogs can be widely distributed on social media platforms, there is opportunity to reach wider audiences than just your targeted audience that you have already engaged with. Social media distribution can bring new traffic to your website and new engagements with your social accounts. It’s an amazing tool for building your brand, enhancing your visibility and leads.
But you have to blog consistently. Google loves new content, so the more content you generate, the more your website will be crawled. And visitors that become your regular readers will spend more time on your content and coming back to your site. That increased time spent on your page and low bounce rate will improve your search engine ranking. All of this is important because it will help your business reach the top of the Google search results, therefore becoming more accessible to more people.
Moreover, you are blogging to be an authority figure in your sector and to create a base of followers. Authority and loyalty are built. And inconsistency in your blogging stymies your ability to build either. If you have a blog but cannot make it a habit, partner with Wayward Kind! We will help you generate content ideas, a blogging strategy, and write and schedule your content.
Email Newsletter
Email marketing is one of the most effective conversion tools in the books. It’s comparatively inexpensive and can be very personal if done thoughtfully. Through email you can distribute your content, build brand awareness and community, and establish a relationship with your customer.
One advantage email has over other digital marketing forms is personalization. Your emails can be personalized to a specific person’s desires and needs, promoting relevant content based on the data you have collected from their interactions with your website, media, and product.
The nature of an email also is great for business. We are programmed to do something with the email, click on the link, reply, forward. So email can be a great way to drive traffic back to your website.
And best of all, data shows that every $1 spent on email marketing typically generates about $38 in return on investment (ROI). This can be a budget saver for small businesses. You can reach your entire audience with one email!
Paid Ads
Paid ads are based on keywords. When you know your potential customer, you can use what they are searching for to position your ads to them. Knowing your customers means you can target them in a more direct way.
Paid ads allow you more control. You are placing the ads in certain demographics, geographical areas based on behavioral data. The benefits of paid advertising are that you have immediate visibility to your targeted audience and measured in real time. If an ad isn’t working in a specific area, retarget it.
Utilize social media
Social media is a visual representation of your brand and your product, and a space to interact with clients. The medium is a great opportunity to expand your reach. Almost half the world is on social media, of all ages and demographics, so it can help you build brand community with your established audience, and position yourself to those on the outer edges of your targeted audience.
Moreover, social media isn’t just Instagram or Facebook, there are thousands of social media platforms, all for different purposes and audiences. So do research about the platforms your clients are regularly spending time on.
Optimize your profile
Make sure everything is in order for leads to contact your place of business, online, in-store, socially. And match your call to action buttons with what you want them to do. Do you want them to email you? Call you? DM you? Like? Follow?
Lastly, position links wherever you can. Provide various opportunities to direct traffic where you want traffic to be directed.
Incentivize the share feature
Allow your existing customer base to share your social content to their audience. By incentivizing the share feature on social media, you can reach audiences that you may not have associated with your brand. Moreover, it’s free!
And in reverse, share your customers’ images of your product! Social media is a way for potential customers to see themselves in or with your product. If they can identify themselves with it, you can convert a potential customer into a customer. Plus sharing your customers’ content is a free means of content creation!
Use hashtags effectively
Using hashtags allows customers to see your content without searching for it organically. Use your keywords as hashtags and when people are searching those keywords, your hashtag will pool your content with others using that hashtag.
Another great use of the hashtag feature is to create a brand hashtag, maybe a memorable saying to associate with your brand or your business’ name (we like #kindcrew when talking about our team).
People can use that hashtag on their posts of your product, and build a pool of images associated with your hashtag. From that pool, people can see your products’ popularity and brand community. People want to be a part of something, want what others have. A branded hashtag can create that sense of desire for potential customers.
Explore newer digital mediums
Part of lead generation is finding the digital mediums your potential customers are using. Billions of people have email and social media, but where are the niche spots your customers are tuning into for content? The newer digital mediums we list below are some great spaces to start researching and generating content for.
Podcasts
Podcasts are regularly scheduled programming, and usually have a following. Going on an established podcast in your market can help you reach new audiences that already have some attraction to your product or service. It is space for you to communicate your business to others, and will then lead to some conversions in website traffic and social following.
If you want to start your own podcast, you’ll have to build that following but they offer an awesome opportunity to repurpose content and bring in guests that can share your podcast and your brand.
Webinars and Workshops
If your business excels at something, holds special knowledge or useful knowledge, host a workshop or webinar! Choose topics that are relevant to your audience and advertise what attendees will gain from your teachings. During the webinar, position your product or service as a means to build on what they learned.
You can host this on Instagram or Facebook live, over Zoom, in-person. And then make it into video content.
Sharing knowledge is a way to attract potential customers, build community and trust with your brand. Moreover, having attendees register for the event with an email, provides continual access to a potential lead.
Videos
Videos forge stronger bonds with consumers because they are spending more time with your brand and product, which, in turn, makes them more likely to purchase a product.
The best videos you can create are how-to videos. ‘How to’ is one of the most evergreen sources of content. People will always need to know how to do something. Other video content you can produce is tutorials, client testimonials, sneak-peaks, behind the scenes, interviews.
Video is also an opportunity to repurpose your existing content. Take a blog post and make it visual, or demonstrate in real time how to use your product or service.
Collaborative marketing
There are brands that are similar to yours, brands that also work on your social cause or local small businesses that would make great collaborators!
Team up
With brands that are similar to yours, create opportunities to work together. Teaming up with organizations that work on your chosen social cause can help create awareness in your community, and get them involved in your social cause. If you are part of a local community, collaborate with other local stores! Other ideas include creating a group together, offering a joint opt-in piece to join both your mailing lists, discounts at one another’s businesses.
This works best if whom you pair up with will run a collaborative marketing campaign. Highlighting your business on their social media, on their website, whatever platforms they use.
You will reach more people and build long term relationships with enterprises which can lead to more events and cross pollination in the future!
Form strategic partnerships
Find an adjacent business, someone with the same clientele but different services than you and form a partnership. Your clients need both services, so when the opportunity arises you both would present one another’s business as the solution to those services.
By forming strategic and strong partnerships, you create an opportunity for collaborative success and consistent lead generation. Your partner will market your services and vice versa, and your work will help you, your partner, and your clients get the results they need!
Get started!
This was a lot of information! We know, but the best thing you can do for your business is allow for it to be seen. A marketing strategy is creating opportunities to be seen by potential customers. If you need help organizing the right marketing strategy for your business, reach out to us and we can get you started!
