OUGD602 - Giving Union Societies Marketing Advice

As part of being the Union's Communications Officer, me and Joe Cox, the Union President, organised a workshop for the societies to help them with their marketing and give them advice to grow. Joe gave them a talk on how best to communicate with their members taking advantage of tools such as MailChimp.

I gave them advice on their marketing strategy and useful tips on how to build a visual identity for their society. Much of the advice I told them I had learnt at Spectrecom whilst working with their marketing team.

I advised the use of business accounts on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook as they allow you to easily monitor members usage. It would also be constructive to trial all formats to see which are most effective, and to ask members how they heard about events and got involved. They can then use the most successful platform to communicate with their audience.

Using email is the easiest and most professional way of emailing people and how frequently they can contact their members is up to them, but I suggested weekly and even daily depending on the content of the mail outs. It is important that they figure out their tone of voice for their emails too. Double marketing is useful, ensuring they promote once then promote again so that their members don’t forget.

Overall it is important to be consistent and not to alienate their audience.

In terms of their societies logo, they should choose a typeface that best represents their group and a colour palette and stick to this to ensure they are consistent. For their events posters they should keep to the same practice by limiting the use of typefaces and taking advantage of them to create hierarchy of information. Limit the colours used and keep to a brand guideline. This will make their posters stand out from a busy Union notice board.

I also asked for any information they would want released through the newsletter that is currently under development as it is a good opportunity to get their news out regularly.