Friday Five 009: How To Prioritize Your Digital Marketing Efforts

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:  Helping the organization become more strategic in all our marketing when the day-to-day flow is already so fast and urgent.” – Natasha, Alive Hospice. 

Our Solution:  The best way to approach this is through a framework we like to call the P.O.S.T Method. Where first you start with your P, which is your people and key audiences. You want to tackle the important questions when it comes to addressing your audience. You have to determine what their needs are and how you can provide the most value in order to drive engagement and support from them. Then you move onto O, your objective. Here, you want to identify what your goals and objectives are for your marketing efforts. Next, you come up with a strategy, which is your S. This is where you want to come up with a game plan and determine how you are going to accomplish those key objectives you set. Finally, once you define your strategy you can move onto your T, which is your tactic. What tactics are you going to use to accomplish your goals? Whether that is assigning different team members to execute on a certain strategy or pooling your resources to make sure you’re hitting your main objectives, the important thing here is really setting that objective and figuring how to prioritize in order to meet those macro goals.

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Getting off the ground with running Facebook ads and using our digital channels to convert followers.” – Amelia, Reporters Committee For Freedom

Our Solution: The best way to leverage Facebook ads and see followers convert is by focusing on your ad creative and targeting. Each creative is going to be different depending on what compels your audience. Not every audience is the same, so that is why it is important your targeting is on point. It takes a lot of practice and trial and error, however Facebook is one of the most scalable channels for nonprofits, so you just have to keep at it!

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Handling all the options and all the initiatives that everyone wants to cover” – John, Military Warrior Support Foundation

Our Solution: This comes down to training your team to prioritize their marketing efforts. You can do this through setting different objectives for each quarter. Identify which objectives are the highest priority and which ones are not. It is important that someone is designated to take the lead on this because when there are too many heads in one thing, it can really things slow down. Once that is done, this will really get your organization’s marketing efforts moving along.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Google Analytics.” – Tamra, Whole Kids Foundation

Our Solution: Google Analytics is very important, especially if you’re a marketer. Google Analytics is an important tool because it helps you measure key goals and conversions. Most of the time, we cannot improve what we’re not measuring. So, this platform really helps you measure these goals and allows you to see where improvements can be made. Google Analytics allows you to measure many different things such as how your keywords are performing on your Google Ad Grant or how many donations or email subscribers you are receiving.

Analytics can be overwhelming. However, Google does offer a free analytics certification – which is a great start to learning about the reporting platform. Another resource that can be helpful when utilizing analytics is Data Studio Reports, which is another free resource that Google offers. In Data Studio, you are able to create and breakdown all your analytics data on a dashboard. From there you can create different pages for different key metrics and really see how things are performing. Either platform, Google Analytics or Data Studio, will help your organization’s marketing efforts; and while it may seem overwhelming to start, we definitely recommend taking the free e-classes for the Google Analytics Certification.

Cameron Ripley