I started blogging about the public affairs 2.0 in November 2011. At the time, I was a newbie to the world of lobbying and digital marketing. I understood that the social media was a game changer to the way internet will be utilised for the policy campaigns and to influence people. Facebook and Twitter were still novel communication tools to the policy crowd. If anything often looked down upon as a gimmick by the old establishment.
After nearly fours years in the game, 1.0 otherwise known as your website is still the cornerstone of the digital strategy. This is the final destination to drive all the web traffic. There you should have all your policy briefing papers in a snack bite size ready for people to consume. If you are a consultancy, it should be your service offer. If you sell a product, you should be selling it from the first landing page.
Your social media and other online communication tools should work to drive web traffic back to your website and subsequently grow your audience base. I will not touch upon the paid social media advertising as each platform is slightly different, but Facebook and Twitter should be at the core.
Keep on top of your Google Analytics daily. Analyse which pages are being visited and which are not. Provide your visitors with more of what they like. Investigate and change pages which are being ignored.
Make sure that your website is SEO friendly (search engine optimisation). This is where it gets interesting, as your organisation lobbies for a specific regulation, wouldn’t it be great if your position paper is ranked first in google search?. Therefore, make sure to use appropriate keywords, this includes meta tags and picture names.
Google Adwords provide data on number of times search terms have been looked up and similar keyword used. There you can also find out how much it would cost to bid for an advert per click. If the issue is of great value to you, it might be worth setting up the Google Adwords’ campaign. If you are a charity, you might be eligible for a $10,000 dollar grant per month.
A video uploaded on Youtube with right keywords can have a positive impact upon your Google search ranking. If you have pictures at your disposal, publish them on Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr. Write a brief description for each of them, and subsequently share on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
With each description add a bit.ly link to take them back to your website. Every time you publish on Facebook or Twitter do it with a picture and a link. Make sure your digital strategy is coherent.
Make sure you collect your visitors’ email addresses. They are industry’s gold standard. The visitors who sign-up for your newsletter display trust and interest into receiving further information. Therefore, they are much more likely to respond to your service or product offers in the future.
If you require further advice don’t hesitate to contact me at Home of Digital Communications.
