Nonprofits and charitable organizations use marketing and social media to raise awareness, increase donations, and grow a community of supporters and followers. One of the best ways to achieve these goals is to create unique and exciting content throughout your marketing channels. The familiar phrase, “content is king” essentially means that content is a powerful tool for connecting audiences, supporters, volunteers, and donors to your organization.
In order to have a successful content marketing campaign, your plan should focus on educating audiences about your organization and cause, and showing them why your mission is important for the social good. Effective, engaging content encourages audiences to follow through your calls-to-action, including making a donation, volunteering, or sharing your message through their social media channels.
We’ve done our homework, and have come up with 7 tips for improving your content marketing strategy to help you tell you story, and drive your audience to get involved with your organization and your cause. Don’t have an existing content strategy plan? No problem! You can use these steps as a guide to starting one:
1. Know Your Audience
Who is reading your social media posts? Who is donating? Who would help your organization make the most change? Don’t be afraid to brainstorm with your team and come up with an outline of your audience. Once you know your audience, you can create content that engages and elicits a response from that audience. Getting to know your audience takes time, and you should be prepared to measure campaign results, clicks, donations, and engagement in order to help you know what is working, and what could be improved.
2. Create a Content Strategy Plan
Creating a strong content strategy plan will help you stay organized, consistent, and up to date. Your plan should outline your goals, strategies, tactics, and key channels, and is a critical first step in building a strong content presence. Your plan should also come with a content calendar, with detailed information on monthly focuses, goals, events, promotions, and more. A content calendar will help you stay on track, and keep you from falling behind or rushing to put content together at the last minute. Without a solid, documented plan, even the best ideas will fail to reach their full potential.
3. Tell Better Stories, And Tell Them More Often
Use visuals and graphics to share your story and help share your mission. If you help rescue animals, include photos of the animals, and the people involved. If you make back packs for children in other countries, make sure you include photos and videos of the backpacks and the children in your content. Try to brainstorm some content ideas with your team. It helps to have 1 or 2 people in charge of the content calendar, but everyone should be involved in content ideas, like photos, contests, videos, blogs, podcasts, infographics, quotes, etc. Remember to be consistent in your posts. Audiences like to see consistency and reliability across web platforms. If you post 2-3x a month, and are not seeing the engagement rate increase, try posting more times. Don’t let your audience forget about you (but don’t spam).
4. Create Channel-Specific Content
This means that you should think about what channels you want to have a presence in, and figure out each of the best practices for each channel. Do you want to post to Facebook? Look into Twitter as well, and see if you can cross promote. Remember if you cross post, please use the appropriate image sizes and posting format optimized for each channel. It’s ok to post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, but don’t let a social media tool do it automatically. You’ll end up with links instead of pictures, and it will look lazy, and not intentional. Post the picture to Instagram, and then post the picture to Twitter- don’t let it “spill” over.
5. Make It Shareable
To help promote your content, audience and followers need to be able to quickly and simply share your content with their communities. Make sure your content is able to be viewed on social media, blogs, and emails, and that it is mobile formatted and responsive. Also, remember to use the correct image and graphic sizes, and to include links.
6. Track Your Metrics
It’s important to analyze your numbers, and use them for learning more about your audience, and your content. Did your photo get as many likes as you had originally predicted? Was your blog reposted? Did you see an increase in twitter followers? These are important findings that can help you create the right type of content for your organization. Use your findings to help you improve your content, and continue to grow your audience.
7. Don’t Be Afraid To Refresh And Repurpose Content
Take existing materials, like flyers, press releases, behind the scenes photos, quotes, reviews, articles and reuse them. Were you featured in a blog? Tweet about it! Post it on your website. Did you see a higher-than-expected engagement rate on a photograph? Use it on your Instagram or Pinterest account. Include it in your tweets, and Facebook posts. With the volume of content on social media and websites, it’s ok to take advantage of the quality of your content and use it several times to attract a larger audience.
Having a strong content marketing strategy plan will help your organization’s presence on the web and social media. It also helps you keep track of your growth and benchmarks, and helps you grow your community and educate your audience about your cause.
Hope you find this post useful!
Let me know if your organization has any content marketing best practices that have been successful for your organization!
All my love,
Blondie
