Friday Five 033: Improving Your Ad Strategy

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: “Generating traffic to all other social media platforms except FB, limited marketing budget.” – Krista, Master Provisions

Our Solution: To do well on social we have to have quality content and then we have to shape that content for each channel because the way users use the channels differs. People act very differently on Twitter than on Instagram. First start with a content audit. One thing we suggest doing is to run a sprint where you bring in your potential supporters, people that represent your audience, and get real-life real-time feedback from them. What do they think? You can even just ask your friends and family. And then from there, it’s about engagement. A lot of the low-hanging fruit often comes from quick conversation, comments, and tagging people, but you just have to stay on it. If you don’t have dedicated resources, that’s an issue. You know, they don’t have to be full time, but really focus on accountability. Most organizations struggle cause they try to have too many cooks in the kitchen on their social to give ownership to someone. And really focus on documenting the journey of your organization. It’s less about your content being this perfect gem and more about getting it out there.

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Knowing the best practices, so I don’t have to recreate the wheel. Thank you for the webinar today.” – Shonna, Museum of Art – DeLand

Our Solution: When it comes to knowing best practices, there are two things that come to mind. Obviously, you can continue to study. There’s a lot to learn from the for-profit space, especially when it comes to digital channels like Facebook ads. Second is that you do have to be a practitioner. You want to document the different things you’re trying, the different things you’re testing and the key learnings. By doing this you’re always getting incrementally better. And that’s really how you improve longterm and A/B test. 

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Getting buy-in from management. Having the time to do the pre-work (targeting, budgeting, segmentation) right before doing the creative.” – Lisa, Jewish Family & Career Services Louisville

Our Solution: For the pre-work, you definitely want to have your audience in mind. Think about those sub-segments and how you’re going to get in front of them. Then set budgets based on the goals you’re looking to achieve in your past data if you have it. In terms of getting buy-in from management, people see things differently, but you have to push for it. You have to pre-wire people for it. It’s important to explain why we need what we need to do. The digital world is really fast-moving and you have to continue to iterate quickly, try new audiences faster.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Figuring out which option to choose when setting up Ad Sets, i.e. Optimization for Ad Delivery and Bid Strategy; and also using data effectively to improve ad strategy.” – Sophia, ActionAid USA

Our Solution: You want to start out with the lowest cost bid strategy. When you go into the Facebook ad dashboard, you can really create breakdowns of delivery by age, gender placement, ad placement, etc. Then use that data. For example, maybe women are converting more than men or everyone is converting on mobile. If those are working for you, use that in your strategy. You can also throw your donor data in order to segment those demographics. It comes down to what you’re looking to most optimize for your organization.

Cameron Ripley