Why do we need a guide to promote issues online? Isn’t everyone online, and we all know how to use the internet to interact with each other?
Well, yes in many ways this is true, however, there is a skill to doing it effectively to get the results that we desire. If done in an unskilled way we are quite possibly sending out a message that’s being heard by no-one or even worse only by those that are already on-board with your message. This type of failure feels like ‘success’ as you can get a lot of interaction and comments online without actually achieving anything.
Define Your Audience
Firstly define your audience, who do you need to reach? This may differ from who you’d like to reach or who you would prefer to interact with. If we take the example of spreading the message of renewable energy use, the mistake here could be, let’s reach people who have an interest in getting renewable energy. But it could be a waste of your resources to get to these people as they most likely would have sought out the info on their own at some point, or already know it. A better demographic to target would be, people who would benefit from it but may not have thought of it as a serious option.
Track Your Aims
Now we can define what our aim is, and for this campaign, I would suggest that the aim is not simply spreading the word about renewables in general. But to encourage home-owners to install small-scale renewable generating devices such as wind turbines or solar panels. So our aim now becomes tangible and, more importantly, measurable as we can monitor how many people we engage with and then go on to get installations of turbines or panels.
Be Sure of Your Message
Now we need to come up with a message that speaks to your audience and also encourages them to get on board with your aims. The key here is a most likely financial gain for the home-owner, followed secondly by an interest in saving the environment, so your key demographics are those that cross-over these two categories, and then secondly those from one or the other of these categories.
Get That Message to the Right People
So to target this group of people who may benefit from using renewable energy you then need to find a message that speaks to this group. So to encourage take-up of renewables you’ll want to find homeowners and those that have disposable income and are interested in property alterations and also making or saving money. So it’s important to tailor your advertising and online promotion to these people, and it may make good sense to have an expert firm do some lead generation for you.
Be Sure to Follow Up
Always make sure once you’ve ended the campaign to follow-up. Firstly take your objectives and see how you feel you achieved them. Secondly, take what measurable outcomes you had, so how many interactions you had and then what percentage of these ended in actual renewables being installed? From this data, you can easily calculate the cost of every single outcome and assess how worthwhile it was.