The wonderful world of grassroots marketing

Tue, 05/22/2012 - 3:01pm

by Nickey Robare, Online Communications Coordinator

Organize! fish Last night myself and our Development Director, Micah Minnemma, came together at the access center to teach a workshop on the basics of Grassroots Marketing. Micah gave a great presentation on identifying goals and advocates for your project, and I talked about the wide variety of free and cheap online tools availalbe for grassroots marketers. If you've ever tried to dive into this topic, you may have found your head spinning with all the options availalbe. Lucky for you, I put together this handy cheat sheet of online tools, with advantages and disadvantages for each one. Do you have a favorite?

Once you've started thinking about this, I highly recommend you head on over to Beth Kanter's non-profit marketing blog. While Beth does focus mainly on non-profit marketing, the skills and tools she discusses can be useful to anyone who's trying to get the word out.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for a downloadable PDF of this cheat sheet!

Tool	Audience	Benefits	Drawbacks
Posters	General- also, people w/o web access	No web access required Can easily target audience based on where you place them	If it’s not eye-catching, it’s not very effective No easy way to measure effectiveness
Basic Website	General	Can be used as a robust font of information about your show. Easily measurable with Google Analytics Does not need to be constantly updated	Not necessarily easy to find Building a good website is hard There are a lot of costs involved- hosting, design, etc.
Email (personal)	Friends and family	Very personal- people will almost certainly read it. Free Email is still the most popular way to share content online	Can only contain a limited amount of information Not easily measurable
Email (newsletters)	General contacts list	Allows for more dynamic content than a basic email Most newsletter services offer some analytics Once again, email is popular	Open rate for email newsletters is low Most newsletter services charge money Unless you are or know a designer, it can be difficult to make it look really good

Tool	Audience	Benefits	Drawbacks
Facebook Fan Pages	General, but skewing younger (18-50)	Most popular social network in the world Easy sharing for your fans Good built-in analytics Inexpensive and effective advertising available	If you aren’t popular, your content probably won’t be seen Requires regular upkeep
Twitter	Younger (18-40), tech-savvy	Free Very popular Very simple Easy sharing built-in Great for time-specific sharing (i.e. “It’s 10pm, tune in now!”) Popularity less important than Facebook Tweets can be easily scheduled in advance	Built in analytics are minimal Requires very consistent upkeep to build a fan base Somewhat frenetic, can be daunting
Tumblr	Very young (15-25)	Free Popular with young people Easy sharing for your followers Simplest blogging service available Easily build a blog that looks like a website	Minimal analytics Like Twitter, very frenetic Not as popular as other social media sites
YouTube	General	Free No time limit, can upload HD videos Most popular video sharing site available Great tools for video sharing (captions, embedding, overlays) If you’re really good at it, you can make money	Need to tag videos well to get viewers Similar to Facebook, if you aren’t popular, people may not see your content
Vimeo, Blip	Online video lovers	Both have classier reputations Better options for HD content and aggregation	Best services are for paid users Less likely viewers will stumble on your video than with YouTube