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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Introduction

Dave Levy and I were honored to be asked to present at the United Way Youth Venture conference this year, an opportunity to talk to entrepreneurial teens about their social good ventures. When we started to think about what we could offer that would be of greatest benefit to students for their endeavors, we quickly realized that they probably had never had a single digital marketing class in their lives, and this age, digital marketing could help them tell people about their goals and ventures and earn further support.

We also faced the situation where some of the normal, traditional tools and techniques that we would use on behalf of clients largely would not be available. Pay–per-click advertising, brand building advertising, paid social media updates, and a variety of other very expensive tools are no problem for Fortune 1000 companies, but would be a significant problem for high school students.

As a result, our talk became about marketing on a shoe string, building reputation and digital presence with freely available tools, and, in many cases, using mobile apps. Despite coming from a variety of backgrounds, almost every student had an Internet-connected smart phone. That helped us to refine what we could share, and what we knew was accessible to them.

This book, intended for use by students everywhere, is the slightly longer version of the presentation we gave. We encourage you to use it, share it, give it away, and direct students who are working on social good ventures to use it. All we ask is that you not sell it or make a derivative work of it – although if you have an idea for anything additional, please send it our way so we can incorporate it.

Dave Levy and Christopher S. PennMay, 2014SHIFT Communications

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CHAPTER TWO

Basics of Digital Marketing

Basics of Digital Marketing

Let’s start by talking about three things that your social startup is going to need in order to be successful. Every business, every startup, every social venture, everything from the largest corporation to the kids' lemonade stand on the corner,

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all need to attract the attention of three types of people to be successful.

The first group of people that you will need to be successful are audience members. Out there is a big wide world, and a certain percentage of that big wide world will be interested in what you are doing. Your first job will be to find those people who could be interested in what you're doing, and get them to your digital properties such as your website or your social media profiles.

The second group of people that you'll need to be successful are leads. These are people from your audience who have raised their hands and said, "I am interested in doing business with you". They could say I am interested in helping you. They could say I am interested in donating to your cause. They could say I am interested in buying something from you. Your second job will be to take these people who are expressing interest and nudge them towards the behavior you want.

The third group of people that you'll need to be successful are actions, people who are willing to make some sort of tangible commitment to you. It could be volunteering, donating, purchasing, or joining up with you in some fashion. Your final job is to take the people who are leads and turn as many of them as possible into sales.

In a standard corporation, the job of generating audience is typically that of public relations and advertising. The job of generating leads is typically that of the marketing department. The job of generating sales is, unsurprisingly, the job of the sales department. In the beginning of your startup, the lines separating these functions will be very blurry or nonexistent. As your startup grows and scales, more and more people will take on specific roles in each of these three categories.

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CHAPTER THREE

Success Story: FSH Society

Success Story: FSH Society

One of the most important things for students and any entrepreneur to realize is that success is within reach, that success is possible. We want to highlight a client success story as a way of showing that the tools, techniques, and ideas in this book do, in fact, work.

The FSH Society is a client of ours at SHIFT Communications, and it is a privilege to work with this non-profit organization as they work to raise awareness

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of FSH Muscular Dystrophy - a specific type of MD that has become the most common. I won’t get into the basics of the condition other than to let you know that it can range in severity from preventing someone from whistling or smiling all the way to significant disability as muscle strength fades in the upper body, face and arms. The audiences for disease awareness organizations are many - patients, their families, caregivers and scientists, just to name a few. Connecting all of them together isn’t always appropriate in the tangible world, but online communities offer many different ways to bridge that gap.

When we began working with the Society, they had set up social media pages for their efforts, but they weren’t quite sure how to use them. Do they look for people talking about the disease and talk with them? Do they focus on promoting events around the country? Do they try and build a support network for those who are looking to engage after being diagnosed? Do they try and encourage donations?

The short answer – “Yes.”

People need different things at different times since they are looking at social media from those mobile devices, and that’s why any of those questions are relevant. That’s part of the beauty of the social media channels. An added bonus: elements that may be expensive to focus on in traditional channels - because they require direct mail, press releases or other items with costs – can be tested or

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piloted at almost no cost within social media.

The best case study to emphasize how the social media page came together was a push in February where we tied a donation to the organization to social media activity. The idea should have rallied people on its own, but even in the best plans and causes, things need a push. Success was tied to how easy the ask was to do from any type of access and the work put in by the team to develop that community to respond. One click of the retweet or like button, that’s all we ask. One initiative turned into hundreds of mentions, a great donation for the FSH Society and continued awareness and growth of the page.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Foundation Work

Prerequisites

Before we get into the tactics, the how of marketing your startup, we need to discuss the what and why. Why does your startup exist? Can you explain it in 140 characters or in a single text message? This is the groundwork that you need to do before you take a single step towards marketing your startup. There are three things you need to think about when it comes to being able to describe your startup.

One, what cause or mission does your startup fight for, or fight against? Be

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able to explain that in a single text message.

Two, what will the world look like when you have accomplished your goals? How will things be different in your community?

Three, if you remove the name from your startup and substitute it with any other company’s name, could you still tell that it was uniquely you in your description, your mission statement? Or is it so generic that your mission could apply to anyone and anything? There are thousands of companies that say they deliver quality products and services and care about the customer. No one can tell them apart, and therefore, no one really cares about them.

The essence of great marketing is being able to explain why somebody should choose you versus anyone else.

We’ve talked a lot so far about where to publish content. Let’s talk for a minute about what makes great content. I have what I call the 3-L rule. When you are creating your content, if you don't laugh, love it, or learn something, you have bad content.

Did you laugh when you were creating the content? If it was funny to you, chances are is at least mildly amusing to someone else.

Did you learn something when you were creating content? After all, you are the subject matter expert on your startup and the people it serves. If you didn't learn something new, chances are no one else will learn anything new from it either.

Finally, do you love what you have created? Do you talk about it to your significant other, to your boyfriend or girlfriend, even if they're telling you to shut up? Do you talk about it in your sleep? If you're so in love with the content you've created, if you just can't stop talking about it to people who frankly might not care about it, then you have created good content.

Your content has to do one of those three things in order to pass. Ideally, it does all three and certainly we want to shoot for two out of three ain't bad. But at the very minimum it must do one of these three. If it doesn't, then scrap it and start over.

My friend and fellow author Jay Baer has another great test for content. Ask yourself this simple question. Would someone buy this content even if they didn't want to do business with your startup? Is it so good that someone would pay money for it all by itself? For example, the investment company Bloomberg publishes a daily newsletter that is so valuable, people pay $2,000 a year just for

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the newsletter, even if they’re already Bloomberg customers for other services. That’s valuable content worth paying for.

You're probably wondering what does all this cost? Believe it or not, everything we have just shown you is something that you can achieve on a budget of $0. Even more unbelievable, most of these tools can be operated from your smartphone. Let's look at some of the tools and methods that you would need to use in order to achieve similar results for your startup.

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We're going look at 5 categories of applications that you can run straight from your smartphone, a grand total of just 11 apps. All of these apps are free, which means that you can run a startup on an almost literal shoestring. And the 5 categories of apps are social networking, e-mail marketing, content management, fundraising, and measurement apps.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Audience

Facebook

As we stand here, we want you to understand and believe one thing - that social media can in fact make an impact in telling people about a new organization. It is a big, bright beautiful world out there and the fact is that adding another kingdom to the world of online communities. Even those this map is outdated (2010 is a long time ago in the world of the Internet!), the biggest change is that the way you are using these different networks is almost guaranteed to be from your mobile phone. So, what we want to do is show you a few examples of the power of these networks, in executions that took no more than a mobile device to get people engaged.

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Let’s start with the biggest neighborhood in the online block: Facebook. Years ago, we used to start this presentation with the question, “How many of you are on Facebook?” Well, we don’t need to do that anymore, it’s just easier to assume that everyone is on Facebook, or at least enough people among your peers or the

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people you want to reach that it’s kind of important to consider. Plus, it’s easy, it’s fast and you already know how to do it. Using Facebook as your organization is almost the exact same way you use it as a regular user. The more people talk about you, or like you, the more you get a chance to see your name in the News Feed.

So, as we promised, everything we are talking about is about getting you going and things you could literally do right now from whatever mobile device you have on you today. You could take out your phone, log into the Facebook app and flip over to the left panel.

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You’ll see that there is a button in the middle that lets you create your own Page. In less than a minute, you could be up and running with a place to call home

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within the biggest social network. That’s not too shabby...and free!

Once you have the home, though, you can’t just rely on having it there to be enough. This isn’t the Field of Dreams - you can’t just build it and expect people to come. The focus then? Writing those questions, those posts and adding pictures that will actually get people to see you. Again, let’s focus on what you can actually do from your phone - you can manage everything on that Facebook page you created from Facebook, or you can even snag a Pages only app (so you don’t accidentally post to your own account!).

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You can also use something like Instagram, which I’d guess many of you again already use personally. Once you have that Instagram account open, you can link it

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to the page so you can link everything and take the picture and post it from the same place.

I know I’m an old fogey on this now, but I still see a ton of value from the way people engage and drive the discussion - we spend enough time there every day, why not try and make it worth it.

Twitter

One of the best social networks for building new audiences to find out about your company is Twitter. The reason why is that Twitter has a unique relationship model. I can follow you on Twitter, but you don't have to follow me back. That makes people much more comfortable about who they follow. Additionally, you

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don’t have to follow me to have a conversation with me. Most conversations on Twitter happen in full public view, and that means that people's friends and their friends can see their interactions with startups like yours.

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The first step to getting Twitter working for your startup is to create a profile. You can do this right from the mobile app. Pick a photo of either you or your startup’s

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logo, a headline image of some kind that is relevant to your startup, some basic information about you, and then a 160 character biography, the length of a text message. That biography is super important, because it is usually the first impression someone has. Choose a biography that doesn't try to cram in everything under the sun about you or your startup. Make it something that is a conversation starter, something that gives people a reason to want to talk to you and find out more.

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The next step in using Twitter effectively is to have content worth sharing. You have to tweet about things that will be of interest to the audience you are trying to

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attract. For example, if I am doing a startup about Community gardens, I might want to share gardening tips, ideas, photos of the work that I am doing. I might share videos of how to do certain difficult tasks from YouTube. At the end of the day, you need to share things that are going to be helpful and useful to the audience you are trying to build.

You will find all kinds of advice and information on the Internet about how to use twitter and other social media tools, Lists and lists of tips and tricks, but ultimately, you have to share something that other people want.

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The third and final part of building an audience on Twitter is following people who you want to have a conversation with. This can be customers or volunteers,

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this can be donors or prospective donors, this can be influencers in your community who can spread the word of your project. From your phone, dedicate time to using the search features to search for topics and people near you who would be great audience members. Try to follow 25 people a day.

If your targeting is good, you could see anywhere from 30 to 70% of them follow you back and start having conversations with you about the work you're doing. From there, do your level best to get them as involved with your organization as you possibly can, from donations to volunteering to advocacy to promotion.

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CHAPTER SIX

Leads

Website

In the realm of building yourself a home, you may also want to consider build a website. Now, the good news is that this is so easy these days - you don’t need to know much about the world of the code to make things happen.

You can simply go to a free service like WordPress.com and within a few minutes, again, have a home page up with who you are, what your organization does, and a place for people to contact you. I’d recommend downloading the application and seeing if you can get a site with your organization’s name - that will help take it from there.

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Another great and free option for your project’s website is Tumblr. You can set one up for free, apply any number of good-looking themes to it, and within just a

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few minutes be publishing text, audio, video, and a whole bunch of other types of media. Copy and paste in some code from MailChimp (in the next section), and you can collect e-mail addresses.

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Most Tumblr themes also support social media, so you can have people come to your website from social media, or send people to your social media accounts from

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your website. Tumblr is also excellent for supporting multiple users, so if you have volunteers, other organizers, or other participants, you can have them edit your Tumblr, or reblog their contributions from their personal Tumblr accounts. Finally, Tumblr is compatible with free marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics. You can use the industry standard measurement tool for absolutely no cost just by copying and pasting a little bit of code into your Tumblr theme.

One of the most powerful things you can do with Tumblr is reblogging. If you’re not ready to start creating great content, you can reblog other relevant stuff. This helps you keep fresh, interesting content on your blog every single day, without requiring the enormous time commitment it would take to create that content. Additionally, curation of excellent content on Tumblr is a way to demonstrate your knowledge of your space and your connection to everyone in it. Reblog and re-post often!

Email Marketing

When it comes to marketing your project, nothing works quite as well over the long-term as e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing gives you the ability to reach out to people who give you their e-mail address in order to stay in touch with what's going on in your project. You can send e-mails to supporters, you can send e-mails to donors, and you can send e-mails to people who are interested in your project. The only golden rule of e-mail marketing is to send e-mail only to the people who have asked to receive it, typically by filling out a form on your website.

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One of my favorite tools for startup e-mail marketing is MailChimp. MailChimp gives you the ability to send up to 2000 e-mails a month for free, before they

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charge you, so if you're doing a community project, chances are you'll be able to stay at the free level indefinitely. MailChimp gives you two different apps on your phone to work with; the first is a campaign manager app that allows you to send e-mail. The second is an e-mail composition app that allows you to edit e-mails right on your phone.

When it comes to building your e-mail list, you are not permitted by law to just e-mail anyone you want. That's both annoying and legally classified as spam. However, you can e-mail anyone who has given you permission to do so as often as they will let you. To build your e-mail list, consider a variety of free tactics, from showing up at events like this and having conversations with interested parties, to asking people to subscribe to your newsletter on social media and on your website, to publishing such an unbelievably good newsletter that is so useful that other people will want to share it .

If we go back to our example of community gardens, if your weekly newsletter

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contained amazing and useful gardening tips every week, you would find that growing your list would get easier and easier as more people shared it.

We do you get content for your newsletter? The easiest answer is from your blog. If you are doing a great job of finding and creating content about your startup and the industry it is in, you will have no shortage of things to share both on the blog and in an e-mail newsletter. In fact, if you want to avoid flooding people with a surplus of useful and if she content as you are surfing Tumblr, put some of it on your blog using the reblog feature and some of it in your e-mail newsletter.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Commitment

Kickstarter and Fundraising

We know that all of you are in different stages of what you are trying to build as your organizations. Some of you may be a little more beyond these stages and while we promised to make this about what’s free and easy to do, we don’t want to forget about the new rise of social media channels focused on community-giving and crowdfunding. In their own way, they are awareness drivers in their own and, not for nothing, stand to make you some money if possible! Who’s heard of Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a place you can go if you know what’s coming next and having something really specific for which you want to raise funds. Be focused in what you want to create, and list out the reasons why - then make sure you bridge that into your status messages, too!

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I don’t want to just focus on Kickstarter, which is probably the biggest one out there but doesn’t have a lot of focus on specific areas. If you are building something, like a product or a tool, that’s a good place to go. But if you are trying to get your organization going, you may want to evaluate one of the other similar places that are on the Web.

CrowdRise is one example: it’s where because you may want to go if you’re doing a fundraiser around a specific event, or even if you are hosting a fundraiser where you can ask friends to build their pages, too.

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IndieGoGo is another one: that is place that is attractive for non-profit organizations who are looking to gain awareness and support.

Affiliate Marketing

A shoestring budget doesn't mean no money at all. It just means that any marketing you do, you have to pay for out of the money you earn, the revenue you generate. Where does that revenue come from?

There's another avenue you can take, the avenue of affiliate marketing. If your community project is talked about enough, visited enough, and engaged with enough, you might be able to offer other people’s products and services for sale, and collect a small sales commission for each sale. This is what is known as affiliate marketing, and it's a great way to raise incremental revenue to pay for additional marketing costs.

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One of the most reputable programs is from Amazon.com, called their Amazon Associates program. The Amazon Associates program allows you to place items from the Amazon product catalog on your website or blog. When someone clicks on one of those items and goes to Amazon to purchase it, you get a small commission, typically around 1 to 4%.

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Will you make a ton of money this way? No. But you don't have to - many of the marketing programs that we have NOT talked about, that require payment, such

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as paid social media promotions, don't require a huge budget. You can get away with five or $10 per campaign, which means that you can pay for your marketing as you go. If you can raise $5 a week for marketing purposes using affiliate programs, you can use more and more advanced forms of marketing - and not have to spend your own money in the process.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Measuring Success

Google Analytics

So far, we’ve talked about your startup, how to publish great content in order to attract new audiences, and what great content is. Let’s now talk about how you can measure your success. When it comes to measuring the success of your new startup, there are so many tools available, so many different ways to look at everything that's happening, that it can be a little overwhelming. I'm going to give you a few basic things to look at in the free Google Analytics tool. Assuming that it is set up correctly, which is a topic for another time, you'll want to look at three different numbers.

The first number you'll want to look at is the number of new users to your

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website. If this number isn't consistently going up, your website and your startup is in trouble. You'll need to do more activities like write blog posts, maybe write blog posts for other peoples' blogs, follow more people on social media, attend more events like this. Do whatever you can to get more new people showing up every day, every week, every month, every year.

The second number you'll want to look at is the number of returning visitors to your website. This number should also be going up consistently. If it isn't, that means that people are getting to your website, but they don't see why they should come back. This is especially bad news if your startup relies on volunteers or other forms of active participation. To remedy a decline in returning visitors, create more content, more frequently, so that people have a reason to keep reading, to keep coming back, to keep talking to you.

The third and final number that you will want to take a look at is the number of conversions that have occurred your website. This could be people signing up on volunteer forms, this could be monetary donations collected, this could be products sold or services rendered, but it has to be something that is tangible and important. Again, you want to see more of these over time rather than less. If your conversions are dropping, then there's a good chance you have tapped out your current audience and need new audience. Or, the offer that you have is not a good fit for the audience you have. For example, if you are offering coffee to tea drinkers, It

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doesn't matter how good your website is or how pretty the design is, you're not going to get those tea drinkers to drink coffee.

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CHAPTER NINE

Conclusion

Conclusion

We hope that we have given you some inspiration and insight into how you can market your startup idea for almost no money besides what you're already paying for your smartphone, its data plan, and your time. You have seen today that success is achievable from our examples. Success is affordable, even on a shoestring budget. And success is practical even using just a smartphone most the time to run your startup's marketing plan. All you really need is to get started and build some momentum; once you've got momentum, you'll be able to secure additional customers, volunteers, donations, or other resources that will help you grow past the launch stage.

Additional Resources

To learn more about Google Analytics, take Google’s free courses:https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course

To learn more about email marketing, check out MailChimp’s free basic guides:http://mailchimp.com/resources/

To learn more about social media, check out Moz’s free beginner’s guide to social media:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media

Dave on Twitter: @levydrChris on Twitter: @cspenn

SHIFT Communications on Twitter: @shiftcomm

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Get More PR and Communications Insights!

Want to keep on learning about public relations, communications, and how they can benefit your company? Subscribe for free to SHIFT Happens, the weekly email newsletter from SHIFT Communications that wraps up what you should know each Wednesday. It’s completely free and will help you learn better how to leverage all of the earned media you’re getting.

Click here to subscribe to SHIFT Happens:http://www.shiftcomm.com/about-shift/news/subscribe-to-shift-happens/

Blatant Sales Pitch

We would be remiss if we didn’t say that if all of this feels overwhelming, we’re happy to help. Engage our services for your marketing and earned media needs and we’ll show you how your company and brand can shine, get attention from the audiences that will benefit you most, and drive bottom-line results in a measurable way.

Click here to contact us and engage our services:http://www.shiftcomm.com/contact/

Blatant Social Panhandling

If you liked this guide, please share it on the social network of your choice! Be sure to also follow SHIFT Communications on these channels:

Twitter: http://www.shiftcomm.com/t Facebook: http://www.shiftcomm.com/f LinkedIn: http://www.shiftcomm.com/l Google+: http://www.shiftcomm.com/g

About SHIFT Communications

SHIFT is an integrated communications agency with offices in Boston, NYC and San Francisco, composed of over 100 creative, smart, and sassy brainiacs. We help find, build, and convert the new audiences you need to drive business growth for consumer, technology and media companies, ranging from edgy startups to established brands.