Digital Marketing Plan: The Sparks Foundation

What is The Sparks Foundation?

The Sparks Foundation is a brand new education non-profit founded in 2016 trying to empower students with all the necessary skills to excel in their careers. TSF is helping students from all background to learn and connect with diverse people and help them to get ready to face the real-life challenges confidently.

It gives a hope that students can rise out of any situation, regardless of where they came from. Whether it’s from a family with a less than ideal financial situation or a family that simply does not support where they want to go. Either way, The Sparks Foundation (or TSF) is for you. This brand new startup was co-founded by people who believe that every student should have a chance at greatness, and they have created multiple programs to help students reach their maximum potential.

Graduate Rotational Internship Program(GRIP)

The first program that they have successfully put into play for about three months now is their Graduate Rotational Internship Program, or GRIP. This internship program is based completely online as a part-time internship for students to complete in the span of 3 months. GRIP offers internships for the areas of tech, marketing, and human resources. The first month works on individual tasks, such as writing articles and designing posters, the second month consists of group work.

The groups for the second month of the program are based on a personality test that all interns take at the beginning of the program so that all interns are placed into groups that will complement their strengths and weaknesses. The last month focuses on expanding the interns’ knowledge of the area they are working in. This program has been successfully running for a few months now, and TSF is expanding their programs to include a wider variety of students from a variety of different backgrounds.

Some of the other programs of TSF are as follows:

1. Student Scholarship Program
2. Student Mentorship Program
3. Student SOS Program
4. Workshops
5. Corporate Programs

Why is digital marketing important for any company?

The group of potential customers that are found online is a much larger group of people than you are likely to be able to attract locally. Using digital marketing, you can reach an enormous audience in a way that is both cost-effective and measurable.

Other benefits of online marketing include:

• The ability to interact with your prospects and learn exactly what they are looking for.
• The ability to reach a global marketplace.
• You can save money and reach more customers for less money than traditional marketing methods.
• Get to know your audience and allow them to know you personally.
• You can track responses to your marketing efforts immediately.

Digital marketing plan for The Sparks Foundation(TSF)

Digital marketing is a very effective way of gaining a lot of audience and let the people know we exist. This helps us in sharing our programs and learning opportunities we have for the students as well as other professionals. We will need to carry the process through multiple online platforms and techniques which are as follows:

1. Email marketing
2. Marketing blogs
3. Social media marketing
4. Advertisements

EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing has been around forever, and for good reason. It’s the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers, consistently winning out over all other marketing channels.

Emails can be sent on a weekly or monthly basis containing necessary information about the programs offered by TSF along with catchy posters. Links for the website and other social media platforms can me mentioned in the mails which will be a great plus point so that the user can connect to us via social medium accounts.

MARKETING BLOGS

Blogs are a great way to spread awareness about our organization. We can post all the content in form of a blog post on various websites so that the students can read in detail what the organization is all about and what it has to offer. Weekly blogs can be uploaded for better reach and consistent engagement of the users. We can upload the activity updates and pics so that the students see what is happening in the organization.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

In today’s world, most of us are connected via social media. There are various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. We can make use of these platform to advertise our organization and build our student community. Daily posts can be scheduled on all the social media accounts in order to maximize the reach and keep a strong social media presence.

Also LinkedIn is a great platform where many students are searching for internships and other leadership programs. We can make content and post there so that many students can benefit from it and enroll in the programs offered by our organization.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Google ads is becoming very popular to advertise about the company and its functions. It operates by using artificial intelligence due to which the ads reach the targeted audience automatically. We can post Google ads which will be shown to students searching for internships as a result more audience audience will be captured.

Above poster can be an example of sample post on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

MARKETING METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS OF OUR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

1. User Behavior

On their own, user behavior metrics don’t tell you much. When coupled with other metrics (such as traffic performance), however, they can provide marketers with directional insight about reader engagement and content performance.

I like to keep an eye on the following metrics in Google Analytics:

• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Pages/Session
• New/Returning Visitors

2. Impressions & CTR

Alongside traffic and user behavior, we should be tracking impressions and click-through-rate in Google Search Console. This will give you insight into whether the keywords our content is ranking for actually translate to impressions and clicks in organic search.

• Tools to Use: Google Search Console
• How to Find It: Performance > Search Results > Queries

3.Content Shares & Backlinks

The overarching goal of any content asset is to provide value for readers. Though no single metric can illustrate this, social shares and backlinks shed light on whether or not people are willing to share your content with their personal audiences.

Social Shares: See how well our content resonates with target audiences by looking at how many times it was shared on social:

• Tools to Use: BuzzSumo
• How to Find It: Search by URL (ex. Specific content asset URL or /blog/), sorted by top-shared content.

4. Keyword Rankings

Make sure to keep track of core keywords and review rankings on a monthly basis. Of course, this requires keyword research to establish priority keyword targets that we are working toward. We can use SEMRush to track keywords for our programs, but there are many tools out there to use.

• Tools to Use: SEMrush, Google Search Console
• How to Find It:(SEMrush) Search by URL & (GSC) Performance > Search Results > Queries

5. Lead Generation

Lastly we will need to be looking at how many leads our content brings in. For TSF, demonstrating that content furthers lead acquisition and/or nurturing goals is critical for securing budgets.

• Tools to Use: Google Analytics
• How to Find It: Conversions > Goals > Overview

SUMMARY

The above plan can be executed to expand the reach of The Sparks Foundation along with creating awareness among students about our internship and leadership programs. We will use the give metrics and tools to evaluate the performance of the on going marketing campaigns. This will give us suggestions on how we can improve and what content are the users liking. This was we can implement newer strategies and plans to build a community of students and young professionals which have similar mindset and are motivated towards learning new technologies to excel in their future careers.