Ultimately, a content marketing strategy is the best representation of your organization — donor-facing and what happens behind the scenes. Successful digital marketing strategies never occur without proper planning, but you can make them work in your favor with a bit of effort. To develop effective content marketing strategies, you should have a solid understanding of project management, including a vision and plan for each step.
Being a marketing leader doesn’t mean chasing the current and ever-changing trends or subscribing to the latest digital marketing services. Nevertheless, the possibilities for digital marketing are plentiful. You just have to go ahead and start a campaign with complete confidence after you’ve defined your path that you'll achieve your strategic goals.
The Ultimate Goal of Your Digital Marketing Efforts
It’s imperative to create an action plan that’ll help you increase your brand's visibility, attract new donors, achieve better conversion rates and increase revenue. Knowing how your nonprofit is positioned online, and comparing your competitors and industry benchmarks is crucial to developing an effective online strategy. If your team is expanding its digital marketing efforts, here are five things to always keep in mind.
1. Optimizing New Tools and Tactics
Accept the pace of change in the digital marketing world by optimizing tools — such as Google Ads — strategies and tactics for your organization to thrive and prosper. Applying strategic and automated processes to digital marketing can help increase effectiveness. Remember, creating a plan that delivers efficiency and better results throughout the campaign requires work and more upfront costs. Recent trends and technologies have made it easier than ever to connect with leads and donors, and achieve success. So, taking the time to invest in doing things well is crucial.
2. Acquiring New Leads
Your digital marketing strategy is an action plan for what you need to achieve. The primary goal is to attract new leads or increase brand awareness. It means that understanding which approach works best for your industry or niche is crucial. It’s also essential to answer the important questions your donors and leads want answered. So, taking surveys and polls of your current and prospective clients is a great way to get the questions you need to address. Ultimately, you’ll acquire and convert new leads with a comprehensive digital strategy to meet your company's marketing and sales objectives. Still, you've got to be in a mutual dialogue with your prospects.
3. Documenting Your Digital Marketing Plan
Digital marketing teams that focus on documenting their approach are more likely to succeed than those that don’t. Monitoring and evaluating your plan is always vital to successful marketing, but many companies don't do it, and, unfortunately, their results aren’t where they want them. Still, documenting allows you to see if your marketing strategies are working well or not. It also allows you to see what changes need to be made to inform how you’ll develop future marketing strategies.
4. Obtaining Donor Feedback
When planning and selecting digital marketing tools, focus on projecting your organization's expertise, skills and reliability in terms of content. Consider the market conditions, the wishes and needs of your donors, and what your competitors do. An easy way to monitor and evaluate your strategy is to ask new donors if they have heard of your nonprofit and how they came to know you. Make sure to know current client feedback and make it a point to ensure that your digital marketing goals match your stakeholders' goals.
5. Mix Things Up
As you know, content is the words and images on your site, social media platforms and email marketing messages. However, something essential is to mix things up and not just stick to one medium. So, experiment. For instance, you could use social media, email marketing, SEO, virtual reality and augmented reality. By incorporating these tools into your digital marketing strategy, you’ll engage with your audience and increase brand awareness. You’ll be known not just as a brand that only talks to consumers; instead, you’ll be known as a brand that fosters back-and-forth conversations.
Don’t forget many social media channels offer live video features, so it's easy to incorporate video content into your social media strategy. Look for ways to capture authentic video moments in real-time on smartphones because they’re affordable to produce, and consumers can see them.
Adopting to the Consumer Mentality
The key to the success of digital marketing in today's climate is to adopt the consumer mentality. Digital marketing requires companies to take a thoughtful and thoughtful approach to campaign design. You need to make full use of your social media profiles because they provide the kind of data that you would pay a hefty sum to a research firm to produce.
Try to solve problems with lots of free and valuable content relevant to your mission. Don't give up when your methods haven't yielded quick results — it takes build-up time. A quick consult with a web marketing expert can help you transform your efforts into a more effective strategy to reach your audience.
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Kristy Morris is a creative professional in corporate and nonprofit social media advertising and brand strategy. As the chief marketing officer at Funds2Orgs and Elsey Enterprises, she works with a suite of global fundraising brands and manages national campaigns for her clients. She hosts a monthly webinar with Funds2Orgs, teaching nonprofits how to make an impact with their social media strategy. Kristy is a passionate individual that loves nothing more than to help others make an impact in their market and the world.
Kristy also contributes monthly to her NonProfit PRO blog, “Marketing IRL.”