Digital Strategies Used By Sevenly For Fundraising

Background of Sevenly

Marketing audit can be defined as an analysis as well as comprehensive examination of the marketing activities, objectives and goals of the organization. By performing a marketing audit, it is clear to understand the way an organization’s marketing efforts are managed, planned and changed when needed. Their performance is related to their goals of actual market plans and the changes required are noted down accordingly. Marketing audit helps in assessing the organizational marketing plan, figure out what is working, and what is not. After that, corrections and adjustments are made (Kelley and Merchant 2015). The organization chosen for this particular task is Sevenly is an organization that donates a particular part of their revenue for charitable causes. Aaron Chavez and Dale Partridge founded it in June 2011. After that, the organization launched a campaign called “seven days of change”. This campaign was an event for raising fund. An owner of a reality show follows the challenges and it was a great success. The report discusses regarding the digital strategies used by the organization and some issues in them. It further gives some recommendations for improving their strategies.

Sevenly, an apparel company that had been introduces for social good started off with only four employees. Now they have grown largely and they have raised around $3 million for various charities all over the world. The organization has taken the advantage of social media platforms in order to change the perspective of people (Partridge 2015). Their main aim was to raise an organization for non-profit purposes. They realized that the charities that provide services do not earn much popularity among people. As a result they, they do not receive much funding which would help people and children suffering from various illness. They have used social media platforms wisely for their business. They wanted to form an organization that could integrate both profit as well as purpose. As they grew their business the analyzed that the around 97% of their site traffic were received from Facebook. They have gained a lot of popularity over various social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and many more. They have reached out to You Tubers who had millions of subscribers and shared their story to them. Their objective was to pull the heartstrings of these popular You Tubers and convince them to make videos for them.

They tried to convince people famous on social media platform like YouTube and tell people to make videos regarding their story and mention the name of the organization. This would help to accomplish in many fields. Firstly, their organization would gain popularity among people and they would know their purpose. Secondly, people who are not aware of the charities would get to know about them. Thirdly, the people who would understand their purpose would want to purchase their products so that a part of it would be donated to the charities. As a result, they would get a chance to help the needy. At last, the You Tubers would gain more popularity because people support who aim in helping the needy. They are trying to send the message to the people that the money that they invest in buying their products is given to the children fighting with various problems like starvation. They are trying to help more and more charities. They have collaborated with around 89 charities.   

Digital Strategies Used by Sevenly

Their strategy to use social media as a platform to reach up to charities and help them with a particular amount has worked for them. They had posted videos and posts on Facebook and YouTube side by side. They have gained much popularity on both the sites. Reaching out to famous You Tubers has helped them a lot (Fan 2016). The You Tubers made videos regarding their organization and their objectives. Some of the videos had around 300,500 views and drew around 50,500 people to their website. Their results after applying the strategies were staggering. After their first campaign, they sold 864 shirts in the first week. They have earned around $6,125 for International Mission. After the first campaign, the organization had limited in its ability. Then they hired more designers and increased its production as well as distribution. They could offer wide variety of styles, products, colors. This as a result attracted even more customers. It used the platform of social media to its greatest extent. Social media marketing is the strategy that they have used for increasing their business (Kannan 2017). Sevenly had kept a stocked database, which contains the influencers of social media. These influencers were interested in the organization and could help the organization in getting popularity over internet. They have also used social media platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest even when they were not that popular. They have used an influencer strategy to create properties of social media. After that, they diversified into various platforms. The main mantra of the company being people matter has attracted many customers. They have extended their mantra to the followers of so (Ryan 2016)cial media and customers. They make videos on every campaign and explain the viewers regarding the mission of every charity to whom the company donates. They respond to every query of their customers as well as engage with their social media users personally. This proves that social media platform actually has suited to their strategy.

The key digital platforms, through which the company is engaging itself, are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The social media platforms used by Sevenly are used to increase their business as well as raise awareness among people regarding their purpose. It has been awarded as the most Social business. They gather funds for greatest causes through the social media platform. Every purchase made by any customer, a corresponding charity donation is made (Straker, Wrigley and Rosemann 2015). They have around 446k likes on their face book page. They use YouTube for making videos on every campaign they carry out. These videos help the people to know about their objectives. They post about their activities on many other social media platforms. This increases their viewers, followers as well as customers. They engage with customers all over the world. The customers that post queries on social media platforms regarding the products or originations are answered by the organization. The company interacts with its customers very actively (Holliman and Rowley 2014). They do not ignore any query from the customers of charity. They share content, which entertains people, promote others’s work along with their own. They also offer people various advices if needed. Being interactive with almost everyone is very important and this organization does it very well.

Social Media Marketing

The content that they share on social media sites are related to their activities that they carry out to aware people regarding their objectives. They also post on social media platforms regarding the products that they have in collection. They also update about the innovations that they have brought by in their products (Taken Smith 2012). They did not have a dot-com site until it grew. At very first, they had launched a Facebook page. The owners had an experience in running various face book pages so it was not difficult for them to maintain a face book page in order to grow their business. They started building their business. They also grew the number of audience on their Facebook page. They grew awareness through their page, which helped them to grow the number of people who readily helped them. They use Facebook to drive traffic on their site. The level of engagement is very high in case of this organization. They actively engage with their customers by answering their queries regarding anything. They take into account the complains as well as recommendations given by people (Taiminen and Karjaluoto 2015). The complains of customers are taken seriously and acted upon. The recommendations are noted down and try to apply them to help their business grow besides helping the charities by donating them. They take into note the type of posts that increase the engagement of customers. They post various photos such as colored as well as black and white. They run ads on their Facebook page and promote posts for various charities with whom they work such as Invisible children or Autism Speaks. This helps them to collect for the patients in a new way. They try keeping a balance between the engagement and sales. For each sales post, they provide five engagement posts (Smith 2014). They maintain uniqueness in their posts. They find different ways to attract customers and gain. They solve problems as soon as possible. They are very interactive with their customers. They have different professionals that handle the social networking sites. These professionals just work on posting regarding the activities or products. Higher professionals check the posts before they are posted.

The various social networking platforms work individually sometimes and sometimes they work together. Such as, when the organization posts regarding any of their activities or campaigns on a particular social media, they can share on other social medias as well. They may also post differently in all the social media sites and share the links in other sites (Royle and Laing 2014). This would collaborate the social medias and help in marketing even more. It would also help in increasing customers, as the posts would spread awareness among people. People would be encouraged to contribute for people who are suffering from various problems but cannot reach out to people for help. The social media platforms work individually when they attract customers because there are people who use Facebook but do not use Instagram or Twitter. Different social media platforms attract different categories of people.

Influencer Strategies

Maintaining the social media life of an organization is very important for it to increase its revenue. This organization maintains its sites on social media platforms in an effective way, which increases its business as well as encourages people to invest in their initiatives of helping needy people (Kline, Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2014). Direct incentives on digital platform would definitely increase the sales because there would not be any mishap caused due to cash payments to the employees. People working hard in attracting customers and increasing the revenue of the company are rewarded with incentives. This would increase the job satisfaction of the job satisfaction of the employees and encourage them to work harder.

Below is a prepared marketing audit based on business and digital strategy, conversations and online presence or website usability or creative design. In this audit the marking criteria would be as follows

4=high; 1=low; 0=doesn’t exist; NA not applicable (if no, proper reason would be stated)

	Scoring	Comments
Business digital strategy
The company is aware of the need for a digital strategy and its likely impacts	4	Company keeps updating their digital strategies.
Critical digital capabilities are built into the business plan and marketing plan	4	Their business plan as well as the marketing plan is outstanding.
Digital marketing strategy and plan established and being implemented	4	They not only plan new digital strategies but also implement them
Business plan and marketing plan are primarily focused on digital business	4	Their business actually runs like a digital business
Digital strategy is aligned with sales, marketing and operational objectives	4	They perform every function properly and align all the parts like operational objectives and marketing.
Staff have competencies to deploy strategy	4	They give equal preferences to their staffs.
Smart digital marketing goals are established	1	They have marketing goals but they need to be changed a bit in order to make it smart.
Has set aside a budget to develop content (e.g., white papers, eBooks, videos, other downloadable material, etc.)	1	They did not set a specific budget for their developing content.
Has identified the legal and ethical risks associated with going digital.	4	They have identified all the risks that they might face while going digital.
Total	30

Conversations
Factors	Rating	Comments
Can take customer orders online	4	They have the facility of online ordering.
Website converts at least 1% of web visitors	1	Their business is digital so they do not focus much on converting web visitors.
Can process payments online	4	Customers can process online payments.
Use end-to-end online ordering	4	They provide end-to-end online ordering.
Use end-to-end delivery/fulfillment	4	They deliver the products to the desired addresses of the customers
Total	17

Online presence/website usability/ creative design
Factors	Rating	Comments
Has developed and launched a business website.	4	The company has been into digital marketing through social media sites since a long time. They have a well-developed business website.
Customers know the company via profile images	4	Customers can know the name of the company from their display picture and about the company in the “about” section of their website
Easy navigation for good user experience	4	The people knowing the organization well would find it easy to navigate through the website.
Consistent website formatting	4	As the organization has been using digital marketing since the very beginning of their business, they have a good website formatting.
Content is free of spelling and grammatical errors	1	Sometimes the content has grammatical issues.
Readable content	4	The content posted in the website is relevant to their activities, campaign, or new product launch.
Strong branding/identity	1	They do not perform branding very well.
Web assets	0
Website has a “contact us” page	4	Web page consists of a contact us page which helps the customers to contact them when needed.
Clear “ call to actions” present	1	They acknowledge calls but they mostly stay busy in collaborating with various charities, this drives off their attention from “call to action” factor.
Rich media content	1	Sometimes the media content are not very rich.
Clear terms and conditions	0
Total	28

I would rate the overall digital marketing efforts of the company as 8 on 10. Some recommendations to improve their digital marketing strategy are as follows

• Review the digital marketing strategy: best results cannot be achieved by posting and letting it go strategy. This would lead the company nowhere. The organization should be familiar with the “rule of seven”. This rule states that the organization should make contact with their viewers or have a targeted exposure for around eight times before they get the best response from clients’ prospective (Tiago and Veríssimo 2014). The organization should get a new perspective on their digital marketing strategy and check what they need to improve, enhance or replace. This would help them to achieve their desired results.
• Have a proper team: the organization may form a team for digital marketing or may hire a 3^rd party company for digital marketing. This would help them to execute some new strategies (Mi and Nesta 2016). Some key roles that should be contained in the organization for digital marketing team are storyteller, curator, data manager, social media manager, customer service liaison.
• Diversify the strategies: having a multi channel marketing strategy would delivery good outcome but diverse channels would deliver better outcome (Barnes and Scornavacca 2014). The organization should not focus on a particular social media site may make it lose its opportunities form other networking platforms.
• Have a continuous improvement: the organization should not be satisfied with the popularity it gets on social media platforms. They should continuously test, receive insights from the analysts, run ROI scenarios, formulate some actions for improvements and execute them. Making a business successful in this digital world is challenging and very competitive (Armstrong, Kotler and Harker 2015). Digital marketing channels can be adopted for improving business strategies and obtain desired results. Making continuous improvement in their marketing strategies as well as their products would help Sevenly to attract more customers and as a result increase their revenue.
• Enhance the content with more videos, images and links: nowadays, digital marketing is based on integrating images, graphical content and videos (Armstrong, Kotler and Harker 2015). Presence of these can boost the viewership up to 94%. The site including visual content generates views as well as boots the engagement for specific category of audiences.

The issues faced by the organization and means to rectify these issues are as follows

• Poor SEO: this is a frequent issue faced by the organization. It is very important for the company to pay proper attention to SEO, it might be directly related to the low traffic. Building SEO consumes time and is a systematic process. It is very common for the entrepreneurs to make useless errors in SEO such as they might leave useless links on the website, they might forget to rename images, might not research using the appropriate keywords, they might lack quality in their content on the webpage and many more (Ström, Vendel, and Bredican 2014). These problems might be resolved by different SEO plugins like Yoast. It could be installed into the Word Press and is able to warn users on the deficiencies in SEO.
• Outdated content: outdated content is another issue faced by the organization. it is not considered as important very often. Up-to-date contents keep users updated regarding the whereabouts of the company (Ottman 2017). Lack of updates in the content causes drop in traffic and stagnation. Customers do not return to the website any more. User-friendly administrator interface should be used by the organization in order to overcome the issue. Usage of this makes the content management easy.
• Not using the latest trends:this is also one of the issues faced by the organization. nowadays technology has been changing at a rapid rate (Scarborough 2016). As a result, it is very important to track various changes that an organization would go through. The organization should implement various innovations for running a successful business.

If the organization follows my recommendations, they would be benefited in many ways. They would get better strategies for their digital marketing (Bharadwaj,A., El Sawy and Venkatraman 2014). The recommendations would also help the organization to follow up with the latest trends and update their posts accordingly.

The model companies that use digital strategies and can be used as a benchmark are Editor Group, OnQ Marketing, Assemblo, SEO cycle, Gomeeki, One Egg.

References

Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Harker, M. and Brennan, R., 2015. Marketing: an introduction.

Barnes, S.J. and Scornavacca, E., 2014. Mobile marketing: the role of permission and acceptance. International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2(2), pp.128-139.

Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O., Pavlou, P. and Venkatraman, N., 2014. Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights.

Fan, Q., 2016. Factors affecting adoption of digital business: evidence from Australia.

Holliman, G. and Rowley, J., 2014. Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of research in interactive marketing, 8(4), pp.269-293.

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Scarborough, N.M., 2016. Essentials of entrepreneurship and small business management. Pearson.

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Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.

Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.