A Guide to Nonprofit Marketing. Use these tools and resources to enhance your nonprofit's online presence and increase your influence among potential and existing supporters.

A Guide to Nonprofit Marketing. Use these tools and resources to enhance your nonprofit's online presence and increase your influence among potential and existing supporters.

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In the digital age, nonprofit organizations, like all businesses, need to do a lot more to succeed, from attracting potential supporters, organizing nonprofit fundraising to keep supporters engaged, and more. But marketing a nonprofit may be different than marketing a for-profit business. Instead of trying to increase sales, nonprofits need digital marketing to increase awareness, funding, and participation.

Digital marketing, with its myriad channels and tools, is vital to a nonprofit's success.Through smart resource management, you may leverage digital marketing to enhance your good influence in the real world.

Table of Content

1. Why Can Nonprofit Marketing Be Difficult

2. Benefits of Digital Marketing for Nonprofits

3. How to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Plan

• Define your digital marketing goals
• Understand your audience 
• Refine your message
• Create and distribute your content
• Track, measure, and refine your efforts

       4. Digital Marketing Strategies for Nonprofits

• Content Marketing

• Marketing Crm

• Email Marketing

• Digital Advertising

• Social Media

• Video Marketing

• Webinar

• Website

Why Can Nonprofit Marketing Be Difficult : 

Even if you've been on top of your online marketing from day one, this aspect of running a nonprofit can be difficult. Digital marketing success as a nonprofit starts with understanding what you're up against so you can overcome the following challenges:

• Small marketing budgets: Because nonprofits spend so much of their budget on support, it can be difficult to dedicate a portion of that money to marketing.

• Inexperienced Marketing Staff: Most nonprofit work is done on a volunteer basis or by a small staff of people wearing many hats. This means that for many nonprofits, knowledge of marketing strategies will be vague or non-existent.

• Difficulty in Outreach: Due in large part to the previous two challenges, it can be difficult to reach your audience as a nonprofit. And it doesn't help that a nonprofit's audience is often not a specific demographic. This increases the difficulty of generating leads with interested parties.

• Inconsistent contributors and strategy: Since the majority of a nonprofit's workforce may exist as volunteers or employees working for comparatively low wages, there can be high turnover, inconsistent workflows, and a lack of output and experience. It may also mean that strategies are inconsistent due to lack of necessary communication and unpredictable outputs.

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Benefits of Digital Marketing for Nonprofits : 

As a nonprofit, there are many potential benefits of digital marketing. From your landing page to your email marketing efforts, every little thing matters. Nonprofit marketing gives you the opportunity to spread the word about your cause, and raising awareness is an important part of making change. Digital marketing for nonprofits helps you expand your reach in general, so you can build valuable relationships with people who care about your cause and want to help.

For new nonprofits, nonprofit marketing can also help establish you as a trustworthy organization. It can also help establish relationships with potential donors, which is one of the keys to success for nonprofit organizations.

How to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Plan : 

Just like any other business or for-profit corporation, your nonprofit should have a digital marketing plan before getting started. It is an important part of a business plan that helps you make proper use of all your resources, including your time, energy, employees, and budget. First of all, it is important to know how digital marketing works as a process. In its simplest form, digital marketing involves 5 key steps, each of which should be included in your plan.

 

Define your digital marketing goals : 

The first step in any marketing plan is to define your goals. What specifically do you hope to achieve from your digital marketing efforts? Set your goals carefully—they should be SMART goals, meaning specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely, rather than abstract or unreasonable.

Constantly measuring your results against your goals will help provide stability and direction to your efforts. You can modify your goals as necessary to better reflect what is achievable and the approaches that will benefit your company. Although it is important to have goals in advance, it is difficult to know for sure which strategies and expectations will be most effective until you begin to actively employ them.

Understand your audience :

The purpose of marketing is to connect and engage your target audience. The best way to do this is to know who your audience is and understand the important things about them, like their concerns, desires, and pain points. It's important to research your audience and learn as much as possible about them. Make the most of that knowledge to decide how to get in touch with them. There are several tactics you can use to find your target audience.As: 

• Review what you know about your existing audience.

• Take a survey or ask them for feedback.

• Research the audiences of similar organizations.

• Identify demographic information.

• Consider who will benefit from your efforts.
   

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Refine your message :

 With your goals and audience in mind, you can begin to craft the message you want to send through your marketing materials. Take the time to refine that message so it's right for your audience but still supports your goals. Whatever your message is, it must be clear, engaging, and memorable to your audience.

Like your goals, your message should be open to modification, so that it remains relevant to them as your efforts evolve. It is important that your organization's message matches its actions, and that it is consistently promoted at every level of the organization.
You can have 1 message or multiple messages, depending on your goals and the scope of your projects. It can help to keep your initial message simple. This will give both your organization and your audience a clear idea of what you are doing and where you want to go. As your organization gains more experience and develops its identity, you can always broaden your message.

Create and distribute your content : 

Next, it's time to create content focused on your message and share it with your audience.

In some cases, this may be relatively simple. You can create a marketing email or a new series of blog posts. In other cases, creating your content may be far more involved, such as if you're creating a podcast or promotional video.

Once you have an idea of the material you want to produce, you may consider the most effective ways to distribute it.Tools like Content Studio can be helpful in keeping your branding organized. Consider what you will deliver through which channels based on what you know about your audience. And by using an all-in-one marketing platform, you can do much of this work from one place.

Also Read : Digital Marketing Career Success Stories: Lessons From Industry Leaders

Track, measure, and refine your efforts : 

Finally, plan to track everything you do and measure the results according to your goals and budget. To know whether your strategy is working, you need a clear understanding of how your efforts are performing.You might need to modify your approach if your outcomes don't align with your objective.

Whether you're dealing with signup forms, marketing emails, or social media content, there are a number of analytics tools that can help you collect data to measure performance.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Nonprofits : 

Digital marketing offers many different ways to reach your audience, all of which can be extremely beneficial for nonprofits. To decide what is best for your organization, it is useful to learn more about the benefits of each strategy and how to use it for your needs.

With so many options available to you, it can be tempting to take on more than you can manage. It is important to choose the best strategy for your organization, your goals, and your capabilities. Doing an excellent job of connecting with your audience on a few platforms will serve you better than having a ton of content and irregular engagement on many different platforms.
 

Content Marketing :

 Content marketing involves creating digital content and resources, such as blog posts and white papers, and sharing that content with your audience. Your content should be unique and interesting, but there are some basic qualities that good content has in common. Must have high quality ingredients:

Clear: Your message should be clear. The audience shouldn't feel like they need to understand or look up important information

Clean: Your content should be well presented and highly modified. It should not contain errors or look sloppy.

Consistent: You don't want to present contradictory information or messages to your audience, and your tone should be consistent across channels. You should also post on a regular schedule.

Relevant : Your content shouldn't stray too far from your original goals, and it shouldn't look outdated.

User-Friendly : It shouldn't be a fool's errand for your audience to try to find the information or resources they want. Make sure resources and tools are easy to access intuitively.

Marketing Crm :

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the management of interactions between an organization and its audience. Marketing CRM software streamlines these interactions by automating many activities related to customer relationship management, such as generating leads and collecting consumer data. This is especially useful for non-profit organizations that face inconsistent staffing. Automating customer relations tasks relieves some of the burden on physical staff members and provides long-term stability with little training.

Email Marketing : 

Email marketing is a great way to generate leads and keep your audience updated on your organization's activities. Email marketing is especially useful for nonprofits because it is so easy to automate, often managed through CRM software.

Although email marketing can be a great tool, it should be used thoughtfully. Send emails with information and initiatives that can really pique your audience's interest, don't spam them with every little endeavor or company update. And like other aspects of digital marketing, it's important to constantly measure the success of your email marketing campaign against your goals.

Digital Advertising : 

This may seem unfair to an organization that doesn't want to profit from its marketing efforts, but digital advertising and nonprofits go hand in hand. This channel is effective in creating awareness and raising funds.

Ads can be attached to your content in a variety of ways. You can create ads for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram or even on a search engine. However, it is important to research which platforms or search engines do or do not allow advertising, and what their rules are for doing so. For example, many platforms will not monetize content considered "explicit". Apart from funding, online advertising is also helpful in getting your brand and your message across.

Social Media : 

For each firm, social media marketing is an important must. Since social media is so widely used, having social media profiles for your nonprofit is just as important as having a fully functioning website. The following strategies can help make your social media presence as effective as possible:

• Choose your platform wisely. Focus on the platforms that best suit your message, content, and audience. For example, Twitter is a better choice than Instagram for sharing blog posts, because Instagram does not allow links.

• Post regularly. Posting consistently is important for a successful social media marketing campaign. This can be difficult without a dedicated social media manager, but platforms that allow you to schedule posts ahead of time and reuse content can help you get the job done.

Video Marketing : 

Video is a simple and effective means of communicating with your audience. They provide an engaging way to make your audience feel more engaged and establish your tone in a way that other mediums often can't match. Although creating videos can be expensive, it doesn't have to be.

While putting in as much work as possible into video production is necessary, communicating your message is ultimately far more crucial. Speak honestly and passionately about your goals, and find a narrative way to reinforce the cause you support. This is the centerpiece of a video marketing campaign for a nonprofit.

Webinar : 

Similar to video marketing, webinars are a useful way to connect with your audience and educate them about what you do and why. Webinar software like Google Hangouts allows your audience to interact with your organization in real-time in a conference call. Without the huge costs of publishing content or renting space for a physical conference, webinars are extremely useful in terms of engaging your audience and organizing volunteer efforts. For example, if you have an upcoming bake sale to raise money, you can host a webinar ahead of time to teach volunteers how to run the event.

Website : 

It's important to make sure your website aligns with your marketing message, is easy for your customers to navigate and use, and is search engine optimized. Websites are incredibly valuable (even indispensable) resources for nonprofit organizations. Having a clear central hub that serves as both a resource for information about your organization and a point of contact with it is essential. It is important for your audience to know what you do and where they may reach you.

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For marketing efforts that aren't free, you can apply for funding. There are many different grants available specifically for nonprofit organizations that want to better market their work. Google Grants and the YouTube Nonprofit Program are 2 examples of advertising grants provided by private organizations to nonprofits. Meanwhile, many government grants are made available to nonprofits at the federal, state, and local levels.
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