The dust has cleared and 2020 is upon us. For years, transformative marketing tools and technologies have been making the leap from the business sector to the nonprofit space. But growing your brand awareness, gaining new followers, driving impact, and accelerating funding, all with a bite-sized budget, can be challenging.
Below, you'll find a collection of marketing trends you can capitalize upon today, along with some key takeaways to help you along the way.
Gen Z, also known as PhilanthroTeens, refers to a cohort of young people born in the late 1990s and later. They will be on the rise in 2020 and today make up over 27 percent of the U.S. population.
Gen Z is more hyperaware of the world's challenges than millennials. This hyperawareness and technology immersion empowers many Gen Zers to engage with nonprofits and make a difference in the world at a very early age.
Here are some key Gen Z trends that showcase their highly charitable habits:
In 2020, nonprofits will move beyond the narrow definition of an "influencer" as a celebrity personality with millions of followers and come to the realization that they can just as easily compete with the big brands for a fraction of the cost by leveraging micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers are online personalities with between 1,000 and 100,000 followers, operating in a specific niche. This could be a Gen Z skateboarder with 2,000 YouTube followers or a baby boomer yoga instructor with 10,000 Instagram followers.
Micro-influencers exist in nearly every niche online, and your job is to recruit the ones that most represent your mission to support your volunteer recruitment, event attendance, and fundraising, online and off.
In recent years, new social media platforms have exploded on the scene. TikTok is one such platform. It started in 2016 and immediately gained popularity among youth and now adults, surpassing Twitter and Reddit in downloads. It is quickly becoming a powerful nonprofit social media marketing tool.
Facebook and Instagram are aiming to keep pace with their "story" tools with limited lifespans to drive immediate engagement. Marketers have taken notice of this trend and will continue to leverage it to their advantage. According to a recent report by Hootsuite, 64 percent of marketers have either already incorporated Instagram stories into their strategies or plan to do so in the near future.
Email personalization is when organizations use member data within their email communications to make the information feel tailored specifically for the recipient. It is proven to increase open rates and drive outcomes because it helps nonprofit marketers give their subscribers more useful content. Here are a few interesting statistics:
By capturing subscriber data (like a first name, business, interest, etc), and segmenting their email database into more detailed lists, nonprofits are now able to break away from mass email blasts and to instead make their supporters feel like superstars.
Your nonprofit's supporters may be flooded with marketing messages from multiple channels to the point where they have started to tune them out. Traditional advertising and email blasts are losing their effectiveness. Personalization and automation go hand in hand to accelerate the sales cycle when you are seeking to increase volunteers, funders, and advocates.
Intrigued? Ask TechSoup for a consultation to review the latest automation and personalization tools on the market that meet your budget.
The year 2020 will be the year of automation for many nonprofits. Marketing automation helps nonprofits streamline their lead generation, member segmentation, prospect lead nurturing, supporter life cycle marketing, up-selling, funder retention, and overall marketing return on investment (ROI).
Marketing automation software has traditionally been too expensive for small to midsize nonprofits. Recent advances in technology have made marketing automation accessible and affordable for nonprofits seeking to scale their marketing efforts. Today, all-in-one marketing automation platforms start as low as a few hundred dollars a month. HubSpot even offers a free version to dip your toe in the water.
If this is your first foray into marketing automation, here are some key implementation steps that a skilled marketing automation consultant should walk you through.
Once it is implemented, managing a marketing automation platform is relatively easy, and your staff can be trained within a week. This will then enable a team member to manage all of your nonprofits marketing from a single platform. This includes SEO, email marketing, social media calendars, list management, fundraising, event marketing, and more. If you're interested in learning more, contact TechSoup for a digital marketing consultation today.
Have you ever wondered how your digital marketing stacks up to your nonprofit peers'? TechSoup is seeking nonprofits to participate in its inaugural digital marketing benchmark study. The 5-minute survey is safe, secure, and easy. Shape your nonprofit's digital marketing future and take the survey today.