Friday Five 027: Seeing the Results from Digital Marketing

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: “It’s a fast-growing field and best practices are forever shifting, so my biggest challenge is staying on top of the trends. This is especially true of newer platforms that target a younger audience and knowing if they belong in a marketing plan.” – Brooke, Brooke’s2cents

Our Solution: It’s about having passion for the space and being really excited for it, and then finding how you best learn. Is that audiobooks, podcasts or is it from written blogs? Then be sure to always protect some time to study. As far as what should be in your marketing plan, you really have to think about your audience, but our advice is to try new things as often as possible because when it comes to digital marketing, the wins go to the early adopters. To be successful on newer platforms, it’s about diving in and practicing. You have to be constantly testing different things to see what works and what doesn’t. Another thing you can do if you’re not quite sure yet is to download the most popular apps. Engage and interact with them to see if there is potential for results. 

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We’re not very active on social media yet.” – Cinthya, Prospera

Our Solution: This is something that needs to be changed as soon as possible and the best place to start is by delegating your nonprofit’s social media to someone on your team who will take responsibility for it. People spend so much time every single day on social media, so there is no reason for you to be posting as often as possible to get your nonprofit in front of everyone. It takes time to grow, but it is worth it for the huge reach that social media has. 

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Tracking results.” – Mark, CURE Childhood Cancer

Our Solution: Tracking results should be a crucial part of anyone’s digital marketing plan, so what’s important is setting up your analytics properly, not just for your site, but also for your conversion goals. Google Data Studio can be a great resource to streamline analytics and reporting into an easy-to-read report. We go over the different areas that you can report on in this recent blog post. We are also happy to do a complimentary analytics audit to help get you to where you want to be in terms of tracking.  

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We are a very small organization working in a very crowded marketplace. We need to be more visible.” – Deena, Forever Chai Foundation of Canada

Our Solution: This comes down to marketing in new channels. The Google Ad Grant is amazing. It gives nonprofits $10,000 per month in Google ads and is a great way to bring non-branded traffic to your website, meaning that they searched something related to your mission and your nonprofit came up in the results. The Ad Grant can drive hundreds, if not thousands of visitors per month. Facebook is another powerful channel and it’s about producing content. Figure out what works for your nonprofit whether that’s written, video, imagery or a combination and then find your voice. Once you’re putting out consistent content on a regular basis, people will start to recognize you and your following will build over time.

Cameron Ripley