If you’re not on the internet in some fashion these days, you probably don’t exist.
If you’re not on the internet in some fashion these days, you probably don’t exist. Now, it’s not necessarily required for a smaller post to have its own website, Facebook account, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and a, and a and a… you get the picture.
So, take a deep breath and just tackle one.
Take a look at how your community communicates events and services. Anchorage, it’s mostly on Facebook. Other cities, it could be a community calendar or MeetUp. Not sure how to figure that out? Reach out to a local marketing company or a college’s marketing school to ask for advice. Also, look at the quality of your posts on social media. If no one in your local post is a graphic designer or able to teach themselves a program like Canva, it might be worth it to pay a college student a few bucks to develop your fliers for the entire year. Make them generic enough that you can reuse them every year so you can save time and money.
For larger posts, having a snazzy website is a must. It’s where all Google searches should drive a person and prompt them for action. Post 1 worked with a local marketing company, Upper One Studios, to prioritize Google My Business, Search Engine Optimization and Facebook posts first, but we found that our growth was being limited by our dated website. Now we’re updating the website, which will hopefully drive more interaction.
We are also using Constant Contact as a way to easily email all our members at once. Again, smaller posts may not need this, but we have 1,000+ members across all three organizations, so it’s a must for us. We used it to send out our monthly calendar and reminders for important events. Mind you, we try very hard to think strategically about what to email so we don’t spam our members. We want them to want to read our emails, not delete them.
How does this tie into the business community? That’s how they’ll find you. They’ll want to know what you’re about, so having a strong social media game is necessary, particularly when partnering with others. We can use the insights from Facebook to tell our partners how many people we’re able to reach about the event they’re partnering with us. Then we make sure to tag them, so it connects to their community, too. Add in some nice hashtags and shares from your followers, and the audience gets exponentially bigger from there, especially if you do some paid advertising, too.
Laura Dean, adjutant and public relations chairperson at Jack Henry Post 1 in Anchorage, Alaska, which has more than doubled its membership, to over 800, in the last four years
- Dispatch