It may seem that the way social organizations function, including nonprofits, their projects, and initiatives, is totally different from the business patterns and that everything they use in their activities is also unique. But when it comes to actions it is always a great idea to use the best solutions available. This is why when thinking about speeding up their development, growth, and reaching new social heights it’s the right choice for nonprofits to pick up the best marketing practices and tools and find a way to apply them to their own benefit.
Marketing strategy is the strongest among the tools of marketing. It gives you not only a perspective but also a way to reach that perspective just the way the organization needs. It should not always be used for long-term initiatives because it works well even for a small projects, one-time events, social products, and so on.
What are the things a nonprofit organization could reach with a marketing strategy?
You will find strategic marketing tools extremely useful when you want to reach such things as
- raise brand awareness
- promote your organization, its initiative, product, service, or separate project
- raise some funds
- attract donors
- find supporters
- engage volunteers
- drive a social or political change
How come strategic marketing works so well for nonprofits?
Because marketing knows everything about your audience. What’s your audience, by the way? Volunteers or donors? Workers or supporters? Maybe all at once? Marketing knows how they behave, what they need, how they make decisions, and what they need.
Digital or traditional?
Society grows more and more each day, this way expanding the audience and market for non-profit organizations. To cover all audiences, both local and international, it is better to use the power of modern technologies – the power of digital marketing. It’s true that still nowadays, in the 21st century most sponsors and donors nonprofits achieve through offline activities, using some tools of traditional marketing. This happens not because only offline marketing works for nonprofits but rather because digital tools have not been implemented yet or have been implemented not properly. Moreover, the more you postpone the active integration of digital marketing techniques and start strategically planning your online activities the harder you will feel afterward – today it’s not only an option, it’s a necessity to do it or other organizations will surpass you at no time. Non-profit marketing is already an independent and very powerful part of general marketing.
So what about a strategic approach?
It’s quite common to start with the most traditional digital marketing techniques and channels to further expand your approach, having already some experience and a better understanding of it.
Social Marketing
It is impossible to bypass social marketing when talking about socially oriented nonprofit organizations. You can reach your audience directly on social media where it spends its time and gets new information on absolutely everything. You can reach people who really need your support, motivate them, let them learn about their opportunities with your organization and generally with the social sector, and build a real community around your ideas and/or solutions.
Email Marketing
Another way to reach the audience is to maintain email communication. Using emails you can easily activate those people who are on your contact list, having personalized your approach and letters, including the information included in those letters. The most your mail base grows the more potential donors and supporters you can reach.
Video Marketing
When you chose video as the main type of content you produce and promote for the sake of your nonprofit you are definitely making the right choice. Almost all social organizations, institutions, and brands (and not only social ones) have already chosen video as the top priority content and included video marketing strategy into the main marketing strategy. It’s true that video is going to be the most efficient content type for the next years as it has already grown by more than 40% within the last 6 years.
Video helps people understand even complicated things easier. It drives more traffic to your website and helps you both raise brand awareness and reach your audience for some specific goals (fundraising, for example).
The easiest way to take the best out of content marketing is to create great content. Great today does not mean something extreme. Great content in a marketing way is personalized content. This content is directly aimed at the final recipient so they wouldn’t be able to miss it and thus miss taking an action. When you personalize each piece of content your chances to achieve your marketing goals through these channels are very high.