Redesigning the digital marketing strategy and execution for a charity
B.Inspiring is a charity run entirely by uni students and young adults.
The organisation has held over 20 leadership conferences since its conception in 2012. These conferences combine personal development and soft skills with Business, Law or STEM concepts to give high school participants (and university volunteers) a glimpse into how these disciplines shape society, the opportunities available to them and to inspire the next step in their education or career.
I started with B.Inspiring mid-2015 as a team leader, I then became the first STEM conference lead in 2015 and again in 2016, and then I became the Director of Marketing and Sales in 2018.
As B.Inspiring did not have a main office and the team stayed connected during the year through online channels, I had to design a way for the marketing team to consistently execute campaigns and increase online engagement while individuals worked flexibly and autonomously.
From the discovery stage, I learnt about how to structure engaging digital marketing posts through our social media channels, which enabled me to understand how we could better interact with and keep in touch with our high school audience before, during and after they have attended our conferences.
How might we increase the consistency and relevancy of digital marketing materials to increase user engagement and rate of conversion?
The high school students who attend B.Inspiring's conferences are smart, driven and talented individuals who are curious about what a degree or career in their chosen field of interest (Business / Law / STEM) would look like. For many of them, they are the first generation of their family in Australia and don't have family members currently working or studying in their field of interest to ask their questions to and learn from.
Before attending these conferences, some students may have heard about B.Inspiring from other students in their school, their friends and family from other schools, or their teachers who are encouraging them to go. However, before making the decision to commit to a three day conference, many students would conduct their own research to determine whether this was what they wanted to do through a Google search and connecting with B.Inspiring through social media.
Post conferences, high school students want to continue to connect with B.Inspiring and we encourage them to do so through our social media channels. As social media is a key communication channel with our target market, it is essential that we are able to generate content that engages with them before, during and after attending our conferences.
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We stopped the postings on social media for a month so that we could focus our time and energy on workshopping the approach to our digital and direct marketing.
After reviewing the design tools available, we decided to use Canva as the marketing team was already familiar with the tool, and it was easy to learn for new joiners.
As we had to keep operational costs as low as possible, we did not use the premium version of Canva. This meant that we were unable to access the branding functions of Canva, such as Brand logo and Brand colours. We used Google slides to supplement those features to maintain the consistency between the posts made by the marketing team.
Additionally, Canva's platform did not allow us to group the posts we created for each campaign into folders, so we used folders on Google Drive to supplement this function.
Nevertheless, Canva was a great design tool to use as it allowed us to create basic templates which the digital marketing team were able to all access and leverage to create consistent and on-brand posts.
To align the efforts of the dispersed marketing team, we created a posting schedule on Google sheets to plan our activities and assign responsibilities across the team.
We also aligned our social media marketing posts with the content of the direct marketing emails, which the sales team managed with schools, to enable consistent messaging with the schools and students.
As a result of redesigning the toolkit and approach which the marketing team took to execute their function, digital marketing content became consistently on-brand and easy to create - thus, postings became more regular. The update in visuals, along with more engaging captions and relevant hashtags resulted in a 29% increase in audience engagement across all of B.Inspiring's social media channels - including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
The assets created as part of this initial revamp of B.Inspiring's marketing function were used to create the foundational style guide for B.Inspiring.
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