The power of social impact: Step up your organization’s content marketing game with these three pointers
Our contemporary social impact culture is heavily influencing the way all of us approach life, work, community, and wellness. People today are giving to charities from mobile phones to support hurricane relief efforts. We are volunteering at our children’s schools. We are paying more attention to where our food comes from, especially as caring for our own health and wellness becomes increasingly important to enable us to care properly for our families and neighbors.
As social consciousness grows, many of us are personally engaged in what are known as “content marketing activities” to support our favorite causes. Most of the time it’s informal marketing. We share a post on Facebook to encourage friends to join us in donating canned goods for a relief effort. Or we share photos on Instagram of our families celebrating at a favorite community event.
How can content marketing in today’s social impact culture bridge the gap between making a difference in our personal lives to achieving better business results? Here is an easy, three-point formula for stepping up your organization’s content marketing game.
- Be authentic. Not only is celebrating social connections through content marketing lots of fun (just ask my kids!), but it is also an imperative for organizations who want to engage new audiences and grow their businesses. Today’s consumers seek authenticity in online content. Even a simple two-minute video featuring smiling faces, warm messages, and your organization’s logo can be a real boost to engage your audiences.
- Be specific. Studies support the effectiveness of using content in today's social impact culture to influence human behavior, productivity, purchasing decisions, workplace performance, and rapid enterprise growth. Make sure your content is aligned with the specific action you want your audience to take, whether it is purchasing a product, establishing a charitable fund, or hiring your team for a project.
- Be everywhere. Make sure your content is posted and distributed across all channels, including social media, your website, e-newsletters, and one-on-one conversations. If your budget is slim, check out options for purchasing turnkey multimedia content, or learn new ideas from resources such as last week’s Content Marketing World Conference and Expo. (We especially loved reading the topic presented by Sonya Bradley to encourage “feeding multiple channels with content on a minimal budget.”)
Content marketing is a must in today’s social impact culture. Indeed, the Cause Marketing Forum estimates that cause sponsorship will have reached $2 billion in 2016, a 3.7 percent increase from 2015. In addition, 80 percent of global consumers agree that business must play a role in addressing societal issues.
It’s time to step up engagement with your audiences as work, life, community, and wellness are converging across all areas of our economy.