Inbound marketing, a methodology that seeks to attract constituents through generating valuable content and experiences, is a powerful tool for growing your organization. Inbound marketing helps audiences find your cause while utilizing "pull" tactics that draw in potential supporters to create brand awareness. Such tactics include content creation, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media.
Inbound marketing solves the problem of audiences being overwhelmed and oversaturated with marketing and sales messaging and in turn builds longer-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. Instead of causing audiences to feel that they are being pressured or "sold to," inbound marketing is educational and entertaining and gives value to your constituents.
Inbound marketing effectively supports nonprofit organizations because it increases your online presence and drives awareness of your organization and its mission. And it does this without the high cost of traditional marketing methods such as advertising, public relations, or even events.
You can implement the inbound framework at your organization by defining and strategizing your marketing and communications around these four key components.
The messaging, platforms, campaigns, and initiatives that fall into these four buckets are all shaped around one critical aspect: your target audience, or target personas. Every organization has a target audience, but not all organizations have their audiences clearly defined. In order to have an effective marketing and communications strategy, your organization needs a road map for who it is trying to attract, what they need to know to connect, the desires and drives behind their decision to engage, and how to inspire them in a personalized way.
To start building your target personas, check out this free tool to learn more and visually define who you are trying to reach. Did you know that TechSoup's Digital Marketing Services offers full-funnel marketing audits to define your personas, the messaging to use, and how to turn them from strangers to promoters?
Creating engaging content, using SEO best practices, and implementing user-first design will increase traffic to your site organically. It is important that content created on this stage is easily shareable and developed in a way that viewers will actually want to share it! What do your constituents already look for online? What problems are they trying to solve? What information do they need? Answer these questions through your content.
Read more about improving SEO for your organization.
Generating traffic and an appropriate audience is just the first step in growing and engaging your constituents. Once contacts are on your site or interacting with your organization, you'll want to give them clear incentives and directions on how to get involved or connect.
Create conversion goals such as newsletter sign-ups, donation requests, or volunteer registrations. Offer the visitor something of value to encourage engagement. Leverage your mission, values, and impact. Audiences who care about your work should be easily converted through clearly stated information and clear next steps.
Engagement is about maintaining and nurturing the relationships you've formed through the attract and connect phase. At this point, the constituents in your database have shown interest in your organization or your mission, but they need convincing in order to take the next step. Typically, constituents at this phase believe that your organization is doing good work, serving an important purpose, or making a difference. Now you just need to convince them that their involvement — through donations, membership, or volunteering — helps your organization drive change.
Inbound marketing is not just about building new relationships, but also about maintaining and leveraging existing relationships. Continuing to provide remarkable content to your audiences encourages deeper involvement in your organization.
Here you will turn one-time donors into recurring donors; a volunteer from a single event into a contributing member of the organization; an interested constituent into a board member. Leverage deeper reasons into "why" while instituting personalization into the pitch.
The migration to digital-based outreach for nonprofits has been sped up over the last few years. While this can expand your reach and attract a larger audience, it also means there is greater competition for resources. TechSoup's Digital Marketing Services can help you stand out from the crowd with branding, strategy, email marketing, fundraising, event planning and management, and more. Contact us today to start preparing for the busy end-of-year giving season.
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