The Importance of Creating a Cohesive Paid + Social Media Strategy
Amplifying Your Nonprofit’s Brand Across Channel
You’re getting ready to publicly announce a new program your nonprofit is offering. Your paid advertising team has been hard at work defining which audiences and channels they want to target this new campaign with, and your social media team has been prepping your profiles and planning out a strong content schedule to make a splash. But, will your various audiences have the same experience and customer journey across platforms and channels?
Creating a strong, cohesive strategy between your paid advertising and social media efforts is essential in helping set your organization up for success for a few different reasons—and ensuring consistent, cohesive coverage.
Create Consistency for a Strong Foundation
Creating consistency between your paid and organic social efforts can help your nonprofit’s digital presence grow from a strong foundation. If someone first learns about your nonprofit and the programs and services it offers from a paid ad and then clicks through to look through your social media channel to research your organization, having a similar look and feel and consistent messaging and information can ensure your brand’s mission and message is easily accessible.
By aligning your creative strategy between your paid and organic social media efforts and key performance indicators (KPIs), you allow for better full-funnel coverage to ensure that wherever your audience interacts with your organization, they can get the relevant information and make a decision.
How many times have you clicked on a social ad, received a text message, Snapchat, or DM, and lost what you were looking at? You remember the name of the brand and go to their social media profile, but can’t find what you were just looking at in any of their recent posts.
For example, if a nonprofit is promoting an upcoming event and is looking to grow attendance with new audiences through new paid media targeting tactics, ensuring that there is similar messaging on their organic social channel can help ensure that their audience can find the relevant information they need to ultimately register for the event—likely through organic posts or a Linktr.ee link. This can help close the gap between tactics and create coverage across efforts.
Turn Brand Recall Into Action
While consistency and coverage are important across your digital marketing efforts from a coverage standpoint, strong brand messaging can help improve your brand’s recall among your audience and drive action through remarketing tactics.
Your organization’s digital presence likely includes a lot of different facets—a strong social media strategy, brand awareness + goal-specific campaigns, an email marketing series. Ensuring consistency between messaging, brand tone and feel, and the information you’re sharing with your audience (e.g. what actions you are asking them to take, etc.) can help combat any brand dilution and drive more impact.
For example, you can run a paid advertising campaign focused on remarketing to those who like or follow you and/or previously engaged with your content on social media to promote a certain event or program. If the messaging for the remarketing campaign is consistent with your organic social content strategy, you can better engage with a familiar audience primed to take action, allowing you to increase conversion volume.
Efficient Creative Resourcing
Depending on how big your creative team is, building out completely different creatives for your paid advertising efforts and social media posts can be taxing. By creating a strong, cohesive strategy across channels and efforts, you can create graphics and copy options that are multi-use; allowing your team to focus on other projects and efforts.
By creating graphics and copy that work across multiple platforms and efforts, you can also home in and A/B test different messaging tactics to better understand how your audience interacts and engages with the content you produce and which content is more likely to drive action in the future.
Conclusion
Combining forces and efforts to create a strong, cohesive strategy between your paid and social media efforts is essential when planning how to market your next event, program, or brand awareness push. These efforts can help your nonprofit build brand consistency, create a strong, uniform marketing funnel and user journey, and help your campaigns increase engagement and return on investment.
At Media Cause, we’re well-versed in both paid and organic social strategies—learn more about our services here.