The past methods of disruption and traditional marketing are tired and less effective. Getting your inbox bombarded every day with updates that have little relevance can do more harm than good. One bad email can lose a lot of subscribers and kill many potential donors.So how does non profit internet marketing work?
Guess what, It's the same inbound marketing principals we've adopted over the years. Yes there are some differences in semantics but the concept is the same. You want to attract, engage, and convert, via your website for potential donors.
Start with creating your donor personas which are similar to buyer personas. These are fictional characters with very specific traits that help is target our potential donors. You can start with building your buyer personas.
Educate your donors. Blogging is for education and answering your donors particular questions.
Engage your participants. Create dowloads and offers to get people on landing pages and into your funnel.
If your website is over 2 years old build a new one or at least update the design. You may have spent thousands of dollars on a website but the new rule of thumb for a website redesign is now down to 2 years. That's why we use a new principal when designing a website using Growth Driven Design. This is the idea to build a launcing platform and continually refine.
I'm not talking about hiring a firm who's going to build links to your website. Those tactics are long gone for effectiveness. Search Engine Optimization is alive and well, it's just changed. Understanding how your donor personas are searching for charities to give back is crucial to the success of your campaigns. Start with some keyword research to determine what your donors are searching for. Make sure your website is optimized for search engines. Build content to attract visitors using Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing is a process that is continually refining itself. Starting a campaign must come with clear and specific goals in mind. Every journey begins with an idea of where you are going and how you're going to get there. By mapping out your strategy you can begin to see the process of bringing in more donors.
Are you trying to grow traffic to the website? If you have a good amount of traffic, are you getting a good amount of conversions? Do you have reporting and traffic set up and monitored?
Once all of the things above are in place then start working on your campaigns. These are the big picture that people can understand and become engaged with. Connecting people to a cause is an emotional experience.
All of this may seem daunting. That's why we have plans to make it easy to execute. To learn more: