Friday Five 004: Utilizing Your Marketing Budget & Staying Up To Date With Trends

What is the Friday Five?

Each Friday, we will be answering your most pressing questions from our Digital Marketing for Nonprofits Facebook group. If we don’t cover a challenge that you or your nonprofit colleagues are facing, drop us a comment below or tweet us @CommunityBoost and we’ll add it to the queue. 

Let’s dive in! 

Nonprofit Marketing Challenges

1) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Finding relevant content for our audience.” – Amy, New York State PTA

Our Solution: You have to ask yourself are you catering to what your audience wants? In order to know if you are, you have to ask your audience what they want and what kind of content they want to see. Also if you are lacking inspiration, the best way to go about this is to get inspiration from other thought leaders in your sector. Finally, the easiest way to find content that most organizations are utilizing is repurposing their content. Most of the time organizations have good content from the past that are more evergreen, this is the type of content you want to reuse and change up a little.

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Converting clicks to donations when running a Facebook Ad Campaign.” Melissa, Combined Jewish Philanthropies

Our Solution: When it comes to Facebook you have to look at your creative and your targeting. Is your creative inspiring and compelling? Does it capture your audience’s attention? Is your landing page you are using for the ad relevant? All of these are important. Your creative is the first thing your audience sees and if they aren’t inspired or compelled, there is a high likely chance they won’t convert and want to donate. Also, if the creative isn’t working on the Facebook channel, maybe starting to look at if you could use the creative in other social channels. The most important thing when it comes to running Facebook Ads are is how effective are you using targeting options on Facebook? With Facebook Ads you have to continuously be testing new strategies and optimizing your ads to make sure you are getting conversions.

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Budget.” – Debbie, Nashville Cares

Our Solution: Go out and find someone who has been a long time supporter and donor and re-engage them differently. There are many avenues when it comes to digital marketing and if you feel like the Google Ad Grant, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, etc can make a difference and help your organization, but you want professionals to manage these accounts. Let these investors know that there is potential in these innovative channels which you want to test to bring in new supporters and more visitors to the organization.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Staying up to date with trends.” – Ang, World Wide Lighthouse Missions

Our Solution: In this day and age, there are so many tools out there that can keep you up to date with the latest trends. Utilize the accessibility of blogs, podcasts, Facebook groups, etc. Also following causes and organizations that are doing digital marketing well. Get the inspiration you need from that and repurpose it to fit your organization’s needs.

5) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Reserving the time to learn about it and do it. Also an Ad budget is usually decided on a post-by-post basis.” – Eliza, Paso Pacifico

Our Solution: You have to make the time. Making time for marketing is something that will pay off in the long run, while it might seem hard to manage in the short run, it will have long term benefits for your organization. A lot of the time it’s all about getting ahead of things, so if you have seen certain posts have been performing a certain and used a certain amount of money in the past, then maybe next time you guys are deciding on a budget for marketing and social media bring up how in this upcoming quarter there should be x amount of money allocated for social posts.

Cameron Ripley