The Key to Digital Organic Growth?- Social Localism
Digital Marketing is not just about getting together email campaigns and website updates. It is not just about making sure your company has social media accounts to share a statistic on the industry or regurgitate other sources of information and maybe throwing a comment on it. Digital marketing through social localism is an opportunity to create something people want to be a part of. A chance to show the culture of a company, the way employees engage, things that go on outside of a solutions page or job descriptions. What exactly do I mean by social localism?
Well, localism in its definition is preference for a locality, particularly for one's own area or region. So, thinking of that from a social perspective, local event networking. Business breakfasts, happy hours, conferences, awards, philanthropies, seminars, etc. Having a footprint in your local community creates benefits both ways. You’re helping other local businesses and events continue to grow and develop in your community and establishing new relationships that can down the road lead to development with your business. So how do you capture these moments for full benefit?
Get a group together. Give it a name, create hype around it in your organization. What does C4G have? The Mod Squad. Each time the group name is said there are instant laughs around the office. The name refers to an older TV series about undercover cops that most of who the Mod Squad encompasses has never seen makes it funny in a way. However, the Mod Squad has become a popular group as our online presence has created a buzz of engagement within the organization. We have people coming forward wanting to be a part of the group (hint: everyone is welcome) and attend the local events.
While at the events, you’re shaking hands, trading cards, but most importantly taking pictures. Take pictures of the environment; the crowd, the décor. If you’re sponsoring take a pic of the graphic, a group picture. Go live. Tweet/Instagram from the event using the event hashtag, tagging the event host and other participants. Now put your phone away and enjoy the event, the rest of the work comes tomorrow.
The next morning after the event is key in retaining any relationships. Here is normally when your follow up emails begin, but when your posts should also begin. Again, using photos from the event, event hashtags, tagging hosts and participants, location of event (geotagging). Here you can also post key takeaways of what you learned, or what your business can relate to. Over the course of consistently attending events and maintaining an online presence, you will see engagement increase in that group and throughout the organization. You will also notice the sharing and liking among your posts not only growing organically, but within the organization -an increase in participation, no longer sending out those “reminder” emails.
What has this done for C4G? Well, industry standard for social media post engagement is between 0.5%-0.99%, with impressions around 50-100. For email campaigns, it bumps up to 8%-12%. C4G is currently seeing numbers like 2.14% engagement rate, 1,200 impressions, and 19%-20% on email campaigns. And let me reiterate, this has been purely organic growth. What the Mod Squad and Change 4 Growth does within community involvement is something that I am motivated, inspired, and proud to be a part of. Follow us and see for yourself.
About the Author:
Brandon Friedel, Partner Development & Marketing
Brandon works on developing new business with a focus on building partner relationships. He also maintains a role in marketing, using digital and event strategies to continue to grow the C4G brand presence both locally and globally. Graduated from The Ohio State University in Communications, Brandon leveraged this knowledge into social media and digital marketing in the music industry where he drove the growth of his music projects to over 150,000 followers and 10 million streams.