How Can Digital Marketing Help You This Year?
As you consider your marketing strategy for the rest of the year, are you taking advantage of the power of the online channel? Digital ads allow you to reach your audience inexpensively and to read results of your campaigns quickly so you can build on winning tactics.
Wondering what options are available to you? Keep reading!
Where Is Your Audience?
Do you already have a great community following your association’s Facebook page? Are members of your profession engaged in conversations on LinkedIn? If you know the platforms your audience is already using, start your digital advertising there. Whether you’re promoting events or products to your current members or reaching out to prospects to convert them to membership, you want your ads to show up on relevant platforms.
If you don’t know where your audience is online, you may need to test several platforms and campaign types to find the places that work best for you. MGI clients have learned that running several types of campaigns helps them achieve the best results. These tactics often include:
Remarketing
The backbone of many successful digital marketing campaigns, remarketing allows you to follow your website visitors across the internet with targeted ads. These ads can appear on social media sites like Facebook or as banner ads on whatever websites your visitors are browsing.
Visitors usually don’t make a purchase the first time they click on a website. Remarketing helps to keep your association in front of warm prospects who are already familiar with you but have not taken the final step of joining or purchasing.
Custom Audiences
In addition to remarketing, many MGI clients run custom audience campaigns. These campaigns, usually focused on social media sites, allow organizations to upload customer lists and show ads to those specific people. This could be for a renewal campaign–showing ads to members who are about to expire–or for a conference–targeting previous attendees. Custom audiences can be a powerful addition to a multi-channel strategy since you can pair them with email, direct mail, and/or telemarketing efforts to reach your audience in multiple places.
Search Engine Marketing
When you are looking for prospects who might not have visited your website yet or who are not in your database, search engine marketing can fill the gap. Placing ads through Google or other search services allows your website to appear at the top of the results list when someone searches for a term related to your association. This is especially valuable because you can determine the landing page that a visitor will see. You can point them directly to membership or conference registration, whereas Google’s organic search results might send them to your home page and force them to dig to find the information they need, or some other entity could be bidding on the keywords that you are hoping will drive organic traffic.
Other Campaigns and Platforms
In a shifting digital landscape, MGI is always testing new platforms and campaigns. We’ve worked with clients to advertise on Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat as well as more traditional platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We’ve also had many clients test video in their digital campaigns, especially as they seek to reach younger audiences who are accustomed to engaging with video content online.
The options for digital advertising are almost endless and can be customized to match your association’s needs. If you’re wondering where to start, MGI can help! Contact Todd Michaels at tmichaels@marketinggeneral.com to discuss the strategies and platforms that could boost your marketing results this year.