Friday Five 010: Maximize 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:  I’ve recently been asked to take on some responsibilities with regard to social media and increasing our visibility. I’m new to this and found your Facebook through the Community Boost website.” – Jonathan, Lake Family Resource Center. 

Our Solution:  The best way to approach this for your organization is to start with the website. WordPress and Squarespace are great tools for creating or recreating websites. Once that is up and running, you want to focus on your audience. Who are the people your organization is trying to reach?

Next, figure out which social media platforms your audiences are on. Where is their attention and where does it make the most sense to reach them? Whether you’re using Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin, all these platforms require you to continuously be active and engaged with your audience. It’s important to keep at it until you become a practitioner.

For more about social media, check out one of our previous Friday Five episodes, where we discuss The Untapped Potential Of Social Media

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “I’m the only person on the digital marketing team, so my biggest challenge is maximizing my time on efforts that actually have results.” – Nicki, Jewish Colorado

Our Solution: There are many digital marketing channels a nonprofit can take advantage of and really gain traction from. Our Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising Traction Channels Guide is really helpful for nonprofits who are really looking to grow their digital footprint. There are tons of digital marketing channels, so it is important to focus your time on the ones you feel will give your organization the most traction. The best way to do that is by setting goals, working through a strategy, and understanding which channel will allow you to reach those goals. This will definitely allow you to maximize your efforts on channels that are generating results and conversions.

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We are just getting started with paid ads, so getting a strategy together and a plan in place.” – Ellen, Little Bit Foundation

Our Solution: Before diving into paid ads, as a nonprofit you want to make sure you are taking full advantage of the $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant and squeezing the most out of that. Then, when setting a strategy for paid ads, it is important to define your objectives, audiences, and a tactic for how you are going to reach that audience. It’s important to think about the desired outcome; are you trying to increase, traffic, visibility, or engagement? Are you looking to generate leads, donations, or sales? Whichever goal your organization is striving for, it’s important to know what your nonprofit is trying to accomplish. This perspective will help you measure the overall success of your paid ad strategy.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Getting the overall digital marketing funnel set up to work most effectively.” – Mark, Trinity Habitat For Humanity

Our Solution: The key to building a strong marketing funnel is to identify the weakest points within your funnel, and focus on refining them. Email automation is a weakness that is often overlooked. When it comes down to abandoned donation emails or abandoned volunteer forms, email automation is an important tactic as it allows you to reach back out to those people and get them to complete their action. . Once the email systems are good, you can then focus on the top of funnel tactics and see how you can drive results from there as well.

Cameron Ripley