It can be difficult to get the word out about young adult groups and events, and it can be frustrating when attendance is lower than anticipated. However, low attendance can be remedied fairly easily with a few techniques that utilize digital marketing to get the word out. The beauty of modern technology allows individuals to continually utilize easily accessible and free platforms to market their own product, service, or cause. The accessibility and attainability of social media can be an incredibly effective platform for the promotion of young adult groups and events.
6 Tips for Promoting Your Group
1. Know thyself.
Understanding your “brand,” specifically what you are trying to promote, and why you are promoting it can be a huge aspect of social media marketing. Fundamentally knowing and understanding your group or event can be one of the most beneficial things in creating and promoting content. Due to the fact that much of the posting on social media will be about the parish, group, or events that you are trying to promote, understanding what you’re about and laying out guidelines that reflect those standards will help your audience better understand what you represent.
2. Create eye-catching graphics.
Using websites like “Unsplash” for free stock photos and “Canva” for graphics creation can be a huge help for newbies to social media marketing. There are free pictures and templates that make your work look creative, professional, and attention-grabbing.
For greater continuity throughout graphics, choose a color scheme for graphics and images, and fonts. Doing so can help give your audience a notion of “something similar,” throughout the entirety of all of the social media outlets that you choose to use. Giving your audience a recognizable brand will certainly be beneficial in generating knowledge about your groups or events, as well as generating loyalty and distinguishability.
A list of websites with free stock photos can be found here.
3. Create a social media presence by making accounts on Instagram and Twitter, and launch a Facebook page.
Choosing and using social media outlets is, undoubtedly, one of the easiest and pertinent ways that you can reach your target audience.
Make yourself a Facebook “like” page and post both content and public events there. Invite everyone you know, and then invite everyone you know to invite everyone they know to “like” and engage with the page. Cross-promote your events on Twitter and Instagram to reach a wide depth and breadth of audiences.
The big three media outlets are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For a lot of audiences, who are likely the group of young adults that your organization will attempt to appeal to, graphics and visuals are significantly more engaging than words. Using and promoting primarily graphics across all three social media platforms will be an insanely large help to generating brand standards.
4. Hashtags
The importance of hashtags on Twitter and Instagram are crucial. Their use connects your media to infinite possibilities of audiences and other media. It is important to use hashtags that are promotional and relevant to your brand itself, so that promotions can reach a wide range and audience.
In addition, creating your own personal hashtag for your organization encourages attendees to post content on social media with your own hashtag, which can create brand recognition, identification, and acceptance among your target audience.
5. Use applications to continually schedule posts.
“Hootsuite,” “Tweetdeck,” and “Later” are for scheduling posts. These websites utilize scheduling services to post continual content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so that you do not have to worry about it.
6. Create and promote events.
Use the graphics you created to broadcast your events on social media. Creating an event on Facebook is incredibly useful, due to the fact that if attendees mark “going” or “interested” on your event, their friends list is able to see their engagement, therefore rendering a free promotion for your event.
It is also important to compel your target audience to attend events by giving them a fairly detailed description as to what the event is about. Giving your audience a detailed preview about what is to come is always helpful, since it eliminates any possibility of confusion.
Going Forth
In conclusion, the easiest and cheapest way to increase awareness about your young adult group, increase interest and attendance at events, is to do so by using social media. Marketing the product or service that you are offering is done fairly easily via social media, and the end goal of bringing people closer to God and salvation is quite noble. Giving young adults the opportunity, tools, and skills to do so is pertinent to the evangelization of the Church.
