Marketing Your Activism

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Marketing your activism is important as it will be the key to sustaining your efforts, through the products and programs that you produce. As those products sell, and earn revenue, it will create more time and money freedom for you to fully engage in your activism.

Marketing can take several forms. However marketing your products and programs for activism, does not differ that much from marketing other types of organizations, products, or programs. One of the keys to marketing is to make sure that you engage in marketing efforts that you enjoy doing, This increases the chances that you will continue doing these activities, which ensures that you maintain consistency, which is vital to successful marketing efforts.

The first step in marketing your products and programs is to evaluate the level of investment in your marketing efforts. To be successful, you need to make an investment of either time, money, or ideally both. You may have to do one over the other until your revenue grows. You can gradually increase each as you convert leads into customers. If you are just starting out, then chances are greater that you will be able to invest more time than money. That is fine. This ensures that you have skin in the game in the beginning, and when you do start investing financially in your marketing, then you will have a better idea of where to put your dollars. In addition, you can use the financial investment to help you scale your marketing efforts and by extension scale your revenue up.

If you begin your marketing efforts with no or a limited budget, then you will have to engage in low-cost or no-cost marketing efforts at the beginning. One the most effective marketing efforts that costs very little, except for time, is networking. Generally speaking, people tend to feel more comfortable buying from someone that they knew or that someone they know is familiar with. In addition, if you’re just getting started, then networking is almost essential to getting your name and your products and programs out there so others know who you are and what you’re offering. In addition, there are so many more tools available today to help you market your services, such as linkedin, and of course other social media platforms. This allows you to create and build connections that you never would have the opportunity to connect with otherwise.

Advertising is still the elephant in the room, but if you’re on a budget then you can still find lower cost methods of advertising, rather than utilizing the large players that will costs lots of money. For instance, non-traditional advertising routes such as local businesses or organizations, maybe even sponsoring a little league team, or school band. This puts your name out in the community and garners decent publicity, and generally will cost less than a major advertising campaign on television or radio perhaps. Another option is to find trade groups or associations, that may be holding conferences or other events that you can probably secure a low-cost sponsorship. Of course you can go up a little and utilize Facebook ads or Google Ads, but these will be a little more expensive.

No one can deny the power of social media today. From politicians, to performers, famous athletes, to large multinational corporations. No one can escape the fact that social media is a major player in any marketing efforts. The availability of social media and the ease at which you can use it reach millions of potential customers, is undeniable, but it is important to make sure that you use social media strategically, and not rely on it completely. This is because the one thing about social media is that you don’t necessarily control where or how the content will be displayed and distributed. It is probably more effective to use social media to let potential customers know about your other marketing efforts or content that you have created. Another strategic use of social media is to utilize it as a way to connect with your audience or gain vital feedback regarding your products and services.

While social media is a powerful marketing tool, one of the most important places that you can land, in marketing today, is the inbox of our customers. An important piece of your email marketing is to create content that you can share via email. Utilizing content marketing and email marketing are important to actually create a movement, and secure repeat customers that are devoted to your products or services. This allows you regular contact with your audience and allow you to be able to put your content in front of your audience to allow them to get to know you and become comfortable with your offerings.

Content marketing allows you to put your creativity out into the world. It also provides a foundation to your products and programs. Typically the content you create will be a starting point or closely related to the products and programs that you create. You can create content, including free content that you can build off of and provide a deeper dive for your customers that they will ultimate reward you for with purchasing your products and programs.

Content marketing components can include such items as blogposts, podcasts, videos, live streams, webinars, and mini-courses. All of these components can be used separately or more likely in conjunction with one another to create a seamless stream of content that can be accessed easily and turn your followers into customers.

Another good thing about content marketing is that it combines activities that you will be engaged in any way with marketing efforts. In addition, it allows you to select the activities that you like most engaging in, and using those as your method of marketing your activities. This way marketing doesn’t feel like a chore, and you’re able to stick with it for the longterm. It is a win-win all the way around.

In terms of making it easier and more sustainable to engage in content marketing, you should create certain tools to help you along the way. These include creating a marketing checklist, so that you can ensure that you don’t miss any essential steps. Also, it includes creating a marketing calendar so that you can stay on track. In addition, you can utilize such strategies as time-blocking to ensure that you have sufficient time to engage in your marketing activities, and grouping common and related marketing activities where possible.

Remember to help you along the way to marketing your activism, follow these steps:

• Create a marketing checklist

• Create a marketing Calendar

• How often should you engage in content marketing?

• Group activities where possible
  

Now, to show you that I practice what I preach, here are my free offer and my call to action: To assist you on your journey, be sure to get your free goals roadmap here. Make sure to subscribe to our Blog here. Also, make sure to sign up to receive our free newsletter here. Also be sure visit us at our website, here to find more information about products and programs that you can take advantage of.

Until next time, remember keep fighting!

For Civil Rights,

Brian

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Brian K. Leonard, is a civil rights attorney, author, activists, and founder of Civil Rights University, and Civil Rights University Press. Civil Rights University helps civil rights activists, attorneys, and social entrepreneurs, build rewarding careers and sustainable organizations and businesses, by teaching them how to make a difference and a profit at the same time. Go to civilrightsuniversity.com, and follow Civil Rights University on threads @civilrightsu.