Digital Marketing: 3 Things to Know
I was in middle school when I first had a MySpace profile and started learning how to code with HTML and CSS.
And then during high school, Instagram landed in the app store. The first photo I posted was of a frog by my parents’ front door.
In my freshman year of college, Snapchat launched and everyone I knew used it. Snap even took the place of Facebook Messenger for most of my friends.
Even though I grew up with these platforms, I didn’t become a social media manager until after I graduated college and started working in professional spaces.
So why didn’t my native experience with social platforms translate to marketing? Because I didn’t yet understand the strategy.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot, and I get to put that into practice here at Woolf Strategy every day. Here are 3 lessons I share with our clients from my years of learning:
1. Consider the long term
Imagine you’re developing content to promote your upcoming fundraising event. You know you need to have website elements and social posts, and you need to put the event in your emails.
It’s a lot to remember day to day — which means it’s easy to miss steps. Your short-term campaigns may not be successful.
But digital strategies consider the long term. A successful digital strategy will take into account your audience, their preferences, your message, and your annual campaigns.
With a good digital strategy, your short-term campaigns are planned throughout the year — and every piece has a purpose.
2. Driven by data
Once your strategy takes into account the long term impacts of your efforts, you can study your base metrics — the numbers you’ve collected prior to implementing your overarching strategy.
These numbers will tell you where to start. For example, if you’ve posted to social media for at least three months, that’s three months of data to tell you when your audience is online and what content resonates with them.
Use that information to iterate! Take what works well and play around with the pieces that aren’t hitting the mark.
Digital is all about learning as you go and tweaking your efforts over time.
3. Digital touches everything
Digital marketing is made up of posts and emails and websites and a whole bunch of other things that all have to work together.
Let me repeat that: All of your marketing should work together.
For political campaigns, that means your email program should align with your messaging, your fundraising, your advertising, and your volunteer mobilization. As the way many of us connect these days, digital needs to play a role in each of these areas.
In fact, we believe that digital touches every aspect of an organization — whether that’s a political campaign or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
When it comes to digital marketing, you need to keep a lot in mind. And it never ends. But when digital is done well, your community is engaged, your fundraising is rocking, and your events are well attended.
Now, remember how I said I’d share 3 lessons I’ve learned?
Really, I’m sharing 4 things you should know.
The last one is this: Digital is always changing. Your strategy needs to change too!
If your digital strategy hasn’t been updated in a year or more, reach out to us for help getting back on track. (And if your digital strategy has never been documented, all the more reason to connect with the Woolf Pack today!)
