The digital transformation of public affairs is well underway. In a virtual-first world, your digital communications, outreach, and advocacy are often the first point of contact a target audience has with your company, trade association, or nonprofit. Bullpen Strategy Group’s digital team combines the precision of political campaign digital efforts with content-centric strategies to cut through the noise and shape your narrative.
Whether you are just getting started, want to boost your digital efforts to the next level, or need to address a specific challenge, BSG Digital is your partner in evidence-based, metric-driven applications of digital marketing, data, and technology to drive your agenda.
Social Media Management
Social media is the primary channel for shaping public affairs narratives, distributing communications products, and building an echo chamber. BSG Digital offers full-service social media management for multiple channels, including development of content calendars to ensure your accounts are generating engagement and getting more followers.
The key to an effective social media strategy is posting consistently, maintaining relevance to your audience, and formatting content appropriately. Unlike traditional communications channels with social media, distribution and content are inseparable.
• Launch and maintain social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
• Develop content calendars to maximize channel growth and audience reach.
Email Marketing
Anyone can send out an email, but you need experts to ensure your message gets delivered first and then acted upon. BSG Digital starts with the three fundamentals of email deliverability: infrastructure, authentication, and reputation so your communications don’t end up in spam.
Next, we focus on creating email content that is optimized for action and achieving your organization’s goals.
• Correctly set up your email marketing program according to industry best practices to ensure
deliverability and inbox placement.
• Manage email marketing programs that drive actions like fundraising, advocacy, or content sharing.
Digital, Data & Tech Integration
A modern public affairs effort involves a combined team each using different software with each application generating critical data streams. Unfortunately, this data is too often siloed between programs and vendors.
BSG Digital will ensure your digital marketing, data, and technology are integrated to help you make smarter decisions. Whether that’s through automations or a manual process, we will own data integration.
• Work directly with multiple vendors to generate data reporting streams. Setup automations or scheduled export/imports.
• Build a “data lake” to maintain a single source of truth for all online and offline efforts.
Digital-First Content Development & Audience Building
Policy changes from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms are drastically reducing your ability to use paid advertising for issue advocacy. Yet it’s more critical than ever before to reach your target audiences with these channels. To do so requires creating digital-first content like newsletters, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels that attract and retain your own online audiences.
Most organizations can take the content they’re already producing, like press releases, letters, op-eds, testimony, or white papers and with our help, develop these into compelling digital-first content. A key part of successful digital content is baking distribution strategies into the content.
• Remix existing advocacy content into digital-first content.
• Build owned audiences around your content.
• Develop high-production value podcasts and vlogs.
Social Media Advocacy
In addition to creating more compelling digital content to overcome restrictions on issue advocacy advertising, organizations must turn to their stakeholders, employees, and allies to produce “user-generated content” that earns greater reach on social media platforms.
BSG Digital will develop the tools to help supporters create their own content – Tweets, Facebook posts, and more – to leverage for advocacy efforts.
• Create distribution channels or platforms for connecting with stakeholders, employees, and allies to drive social sharing.
• Remix advocacy content into easy-to-share items for supporters.
About BSG Digital
Eric Wilson leads the BSG Digital team. He has driven digital efforts for national and international political campaigns, top advocacy efforts, and corporations. Clients appreciate Eric’s cutting-edge thinking with a relentless focus on measurable results.
FAQs
STRATEGIES:
Ensure your profile has all of the necessary images and graphics in place. Write a social media bio that instantly explains your goals to new followers. Your profile is free real estate on the most popular platforms on the internet and you need to take advantage of it.
Consistently produce social media content that is valuable and relevant to your target audiences. If your social media channel is too self-promotional, followers will not be attracted. Develop a content calendar for each social media channel to ensure you’re posting consistently.
On Twitter, begin following, Retweeting, and replying to relevant accounts. On Facebook, pay to promote your page and stand-out content that will encourage target audiences to follow. Create a social sharing group of allies on each platform where you flag recent posts, encouraging signal boosting to reach more users.
STRATEGIES:
The formula for effective content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a clearly defined audience. Each component must be in place to have sustained success.
“Going viral” is not a strategy.
Your content must be for a specific audience. The content must offer value, such as information or insight, to that audience, thus making it relevant as well. The only way to build your own audience online is to produce content consistently. Start with the format you can follow every week before trying content with greater production costs.
STRATEGIES:
Inbox placement and deliverability are guided by three factors:
1. Authentication
2. Infrastructure
3. Sender Reputation
Ensure your sending domain – the .com or .org your emails come from – is properly authenticated for the email marketing platform you’re using. Email inbox providers, like Google and Microsoft, look to these invisible records to protect their users from scams, phishing, and cyber attacks.
Use a professional email marketing platform that automatically removes bad email addresses and makes it easy for a recipient to unsubscribe.
Follow email marketing best practices, including list segmentation, personalization, and permission-based marketing to build a strong sender reputation.
STRATEGIES:
Create honest, authoritative, and informative content on your own website, then share it with your stakeholders along with suggested social media language for them to post to their own networks.
Use a social media advocate platform that automatically alerts your team to new posts, offers seamless sharing, and measures the results.
If you’re not telling your story online, no one else will either.
STRATEGIES:
First, determine whether your objectives are best served with narrow- or broadcasting. If you’re seeking to influence a small group of hard-to-reach individuals, build out an influence map to determine who the target audience listens to and focus on those second and third-level influencers.
On the other hand, if you’re mobilizing grassroots or large employee bases, you need existing first-party data like member lists or petitions to supplement third-party data sources. With an enriched data file, you can then focus on targeted advertising.