This is our extended entry for the Hubspot Inbound Marketer of the Month Contest.
Since it's creating in late January of this year, socialize your Cause has implemented a number of inbound marketing techniques and campaigns to help the site grow
The Socialize Your Cause Cause of the Week highlights a new organization or cause each week on the socialize your cause blog. The cause of the week is given the option to put the Cause of the Week badge on their site that links back to the SYC story on them. (much like this contest)
They are also given the ability to tweet through our three twitter accounts for the duration of the week. This not only help spread their message in their own words to a larger audience but help use subsidize the content we are posting out. The cause of the week also is able to take advantage of our Donate Your Friends Project. (explained below)
This also gives us a great opportunity to help out these organizations and build a lasting relationship, and if they are in the market for social media or digital marketing help we will be top of mind.
By interviewing leading industry experts in the field of digital marketing and social media we are able to provide great content to our audience, establish our brand in the space, and get to know some pretty powerful influencers.
Give you the ability to generate a Facebook like button for your sites sidebar. This enables visitors to like your site and thus have it show up in their lifestream for all their social graph to see. There is some SEO benefit to our site as well.
Through the donate your friends project We are able to help expand the reach of the organization by growing their Facebook fan base. This is done by leveraging the Social Graph of supporters. We have seen tremendous growth with our own page and that of the organizations we help.
We regularly schedule photos to post out through MobyPicture and Converse to syndicate the photos to our multiple twitter accounts and our facebook fan page. These photos add a deeper level of engagement than plain text updates and help tell a better story. They are also helping drive traffic to our site and organizations we support.
Site usability and social media best practices -
Giving users the ability to bookmark and share all of our content is always a top of mind priority.
This doesn't just stop with wordpress plugins, by using the tweet link maker from zeek interactive (http://bit.ly/9HlB8t )we use these calls to action to tweet out messages once forms have been submitted.
Converse - Gives users the ability to:-Setup Your Social Media Campaigns-Schedule Posts & Multimedia Content-Manage Multiple Social Accounts in one place-Autopost RSS feeds to all of your Social outlets-Analytics & Tracking to make sure your messaging is effective.
Even though we offer the ability to rebrand the twitter and facebook messaging aspect of our Social Media Marketing Platform, most users do not change this. Therefore, we are seeing massive branding happening on a daily basis for people utilizing our free platform.
The Tweets and Facebook messages that send through Converse, have hyper linked "via Socialize Your Cause" links underneath their messages. This is driving traffic and getting the world out to the world about Socialize Your Cause.
The idea of any website is to make it more than just a website. -
The concept of making the site as sticky as possible was on the forefront of our planning. We needed something to differentiate ourselves from the pack and keep people coming back over and over again.
A comprehensive content strategy was put in place, but anyone can make content. So, we decided that we need to have tools that people can leverage on a regular basis to help them with their daily activities. This is where Converse, The Facebook Like button generator (That can be made into a couple different ideas, much like grader series from Hubspot)
Socialize Your cause has seen a tremendous increase in traffic and conversion on both our site & the social media marketing platform due to our efforts listed above.
Through our combined efforts and use of these inbound marketing tactics we have won our very own Iphone, android, blackberry, yahoo tv, and desktop applications courtesy of David Siteman Garland of TheRiseToTheTop.com (http://bit.ly/aaC4v1)
We have also expanded the blog from a single author blog to a multi-authored blog (and growing...)
But most importantly, we are helping these amazing nonprofit & charitable organizations spread their incredible stories to more and more people through these social channels.
We are communicating with these inspiring people and learning something new everyday! This not only gives us a warm fuzzy feeling inside, it is just the right thing to do and we encourage other marketers to do the same.