free digital marketing tips for nonprofits
free digital marketing tips for nonprofits
by scott robinson
We’ve all heard technology can save time and money, but with so many options, it can be hard to decide where to put your resources. When making decisions on digital marketing tools, it’s important to keep your organization’s strategic vision in mind. Who are you trying to reach, what do you want them to do, and where do you think they spend their time?
Once you can confidently answer these questions you’ll be able to efficiently use the following tools.
Google Analytics
You have a website, great! Now what? It’s vital to understand who is using it and how. Installing a Google Analytics (GA) tracking code on your website is the first step. It allows you to see how people landed on your website, whether by search engine, directly by typing in your URL, by referral from another website or another method. You also can determine their behavior, the pages they visit, how long they browse, as well as their location, age, gender, interests, and more. Google Analytics breaks this information into Audience, Acquisition and Behavior. The simplest way to get familiar with the stats is to spend time cruising your Google Analytics dashboard. It also helps to get a baseline of at least three months of data while 12 months is best. Then, as you implement marketing campaigns to reach your organization’s strategic goals, you’ll have a better idea whether you’re accomplishing them.
Another great tool within Google Analytics lives under the Acquisition section, and is called Campaigns. There are several ways to track campaigns in GA. One of my favorites is UTM links. When you go to Google’s Campaign URL Builder, you can create a unique URL or UTM link for your web page to place in each of the mediums (print, radio, Facebook, television, etc.) you use in your campaign to track how each medium is performing.
Let’s use a “Summer Camp” registration campaign as an example. The campaign would be called “Summer Camp,” and let’s say you choose to market this with Facebook, print ads and a pop-up banner on your website. These would be considered your mediums. Within the mediums your source could be one of several different ads you run on each of the mediums. Now the fun part. Launch, and once you’re 25 to 50 percent through your campaign, look at your GA campaign section and see which unique UTM (medium or source) is providing you quality traffic to your site. Adjust your campaign based on the analytics you’re seeing. You can take it a step further and install code within the software you use for registration to see which of UTM links are generating the most registrations.
Email Marketing
Email is not dead. We check our email multiple times a day and unlike other marketing mediums, your email is guaranteed to reach your customers’ inboxes, unless they decide to unsubscribe. There are hundreds of email marketing platforms available that range in price and features. The most important thing to remember with email is to deliver content that is relevant to your customer. You can learn about your customers based on their past engagement in programs, and some marketing software even lets you track the pages they visit on your website.
Let’s use the “Summer Camp” campaign example from before. You can create a list of customer emails in your software who you know have already visited your “Summer Camp” webpage. You’re making an assumption that because they spent time on your summer camp page, they must have some interest. You’ll see your open and click rates rise once you start delivering relevant content.
While the cost of advertising on Facebook has increased over the past three years, it is still relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing mediums. Just like email, you want to make sure you’re delivering content your customers are interested in. The better you are at delivering relevant content, the more your cost goes down.
Google Adwords
Google offers a grant for 501c3 nonprofits to run ads on Google’s network for free. If you haven’t applied for the grant, that is step one. Once you have the grant you’ll want to ensure you have a staff member who can manage the campaigns as Google reserves the right to revoke the grant if they find you aren’t taking advantage.
Happy Marketing!
Scott Robinson is a long-time nonprofit marketing guru and currently works as the marketing and communications manager for WECMRD.
Interested in learning about how to take your nonprofit’s marketing to the next level through video? High Five Access Media offers free media education workshops each month to valley nonprofits so they can learn about video production, check out video equipment for free, and advocate for their cause on cable television and the web. In addition, HFAM offers video production services at affordable rates to nonprofits. To learn more about the opportunities to get involved, visit www.highfivemedia.org.
High Five Access Media is a nonprofit, noncommercial, grassroots community access media center that is available on Comcast Channel 5 and anywhere, online.