Part 2 recap:
Part 3
“I’m beginning to understand the benefits of marketing,” you admit. “But I’m still concerned about our lack of resources and time, which seem to be necessities in effective marketing.”
Marketing with a limited budget is a familiar story for most nonprofits (at GuideStar, we struggle with our own budget constraints often enough). Time is often also limited, so the question you should be asking is:
How can I convert my limited time into the most money (or into the most positive results)?
It’s not easy, but it is achievable. The following methods are low-cost evergreen strategies that will make remarkable impact if you stay engaged with them. I call them the “Two Os” of digital marketing.
Search Engine Optimization has become an increasingly ubiquitous digital marketing strategy designed to make your content appear higher in search engine results. Many organizations, however, neglect on-page optimization. This neglect can impede web traffic growth.
How should you apply on-page optimization?
Jonathan Long, founder of Market Domination Media, created a fantastic SEO guide to help get organizations started. Check out some of his key points to begin your on-page optimization:
Navigating Digital Nonprofit Marketing, Part 1 https://trust.guidestar.org/navigating-digital-nonprofit-marketing-part-1 |
Check out Jonathan Long’s On-Page Optimization Guide for a deeper dive on how to increase your organic traffic (traffic the comes to you site through online search engines).
Blog
Creating a blog will help you share your organization’s story, but a good blog has so many more benefits.
Blog posts also help strengthen your social media presence. Become a thought leader by sharing your content on different platforms. You’ll be growing your organization’s fan base as well as traffic to your website
Social Media
Most people are familiar with social media nowadays but still aren’t utilizing the potential power of the different platforms. Social media allows you to interact with customers, spread ideas, advertise promotions, and explain how people benefit from being connected to your network.
Communicating through social media is a powerful tool. It makes your donors feel valued and that their opinions are heard, ultimately creating a relationship between them and your organization. You should always strive to initiate and facilitate conversations on such social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter. After the conversations, analyze the feedback. Turn it into user-generated content to be shared across all your platforms.
Paid Advertising (Google AdWords/Social Media)
Getting people to visit your website is essential to your organization’s success. Pay Per Clicks, or “PPCs,” are a method of online advertising in which you pay for visitors on a cost-per-click basis.
Facebook and Google currently dominate the paid advertising market, not only in revenue earned but in client conversions as well. Testing a low-cost paid advertising strategy will provide you with a statistically significant sample size, allowing you to gauge easily the effectiveness and ROI (return on investment) of each campaigns.
Google Analytics will help you find the keyword you need to target your most applicable audiences and will help branch you out of your sphere of influence.
In Part 2 of this blog series, I mentioned setting up Google Analytics for your website to get started tracking site visitors, page views, impressions, etc. I also recommended that you sign up for Google Trends, which uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviors over time. Google Alerts and/or Social Mention will track when your business is mentioned anywhere online. All of these tools will help you monitor the results of the above-mentioned marketing strategies.
Come back in a few weeks, when we will dive into using website onboarding to educate your new visitors about your value proposition. We’ll also visit a few more outreach strategies and go over how to nurture visitors after they’ve visited your website.
Author: David Mundy
Source: GuideStar