When it comes to your marketing message, there are many ways to increase your reach, and most of them require little or no cost.
Here are just some of them:
1. Create a “rollover”
Do you send out an email newsletter? Great! If so, make longer stories “roll over” onto your website, so people have to click through to read the rest. What’ve you just done? Gained another click to your website, where the visitor can see even more about you — and you’ve also alerted Google to increase your search engine optimization ranking. Now that’s what we call extended reach!
2. Create an email newsletter
Can’t do the rollover without the email newsletter. An email newsletter keeps your clients and customers informed about what you do — and, because it’s easily shareable, enables them to forward it to others. Which: extends your reach — for free!
3. Optimize your content
Create a relevant list of keywords (these would be the things for which you want your website to get found), then include those keywords in what you’re writing, making sure to use your main words at least twice on every page. That greatly increases the odds of you getting found (rather than someone else) when people are searching for what you do. Not sure it’s worth the (minimal) effort? Here’s why SEO is important.
4. Game out a social media strategy
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok are very different places on the Internet. Never thought of them as “places,” did you? But that’s what they are: virtual communities. Just as Atlanta and Los Angeles and New York are very different cities, so are virtual neighborhoods. A written social media strategy will help you align what works best in each community with your own organizational goals, and help you determine which content you can share across different platforms, and how you might need to treat it differently. Repurposing your content will, you saw it coming, help you extend your reach.
5. Drop a little money
And we mean a little: even just 10 bucks spent on Facebook here and there can be worth it.
Fifty bucks a month spent boosting your best posts, or a bit more to run Facebook ads, will certainly extend your reach to a whole new audience — and if you’ve gotten them to your website, you can retarget them.
6. Um, wait, retarget them?
So those ads that “follow you” around the internet? Those come from retargeting. Occasionally, people complain about them, but more often they find them helpful. (They’ve served as great reminders for me to get tickets to events before they sell out.) Once you’re set up for retargeting, the message you’ve developed — your fund appeal, your petition, your promotion, whatever — is now appearing across the web where your website visitor goes. That’s certainly extending your visibility!Again, these are just some of the many things you can do to expand your reach. Questions? Comments? Need help? We’re here for you.
– Lee Wochner