2016 Nonprofit Marketing: Blueprint Your Content Strategy

A major issue with digital marketing?

When putting all your nonprofit’s energy into pushing out new content and improving SEO, it can be a challenge to see the bigger picture. Unlike with easily-measurable factors like your nonprofit budget or numbers of volunteers and donors, with digital marketing it can be hard to measure how much your nonprofit’s online efforts are contributing to your nonprofit’s success. When your assessment tools are limited to number of social media “likes” or blog views, it means there aren’t as many means to measure your ROI.

The temptation is to just keep pushing out more and more content until you see a major improvement. However, you don’t want to keep moving forward without knowing what the work is contributing to.

Take our piece of advice for 2016 Nonprofit Marketing: fully assess your marketing efforts now, so you can more fully focus your efforts. There may not be as many ways to get a concrete number for your digital marketing success, but there are more ways than you think to assessing your efforts.

Where should you start? With what we call a Marketing “Blueprint.”

At ArcStone we call a marketing assessment a blueprint, as it works to provide a map of your next campaigns. Initial steps might include:

• Determine your audiences – who are you trying to reach? Map out these into specific segments (donors, volunteers, those in need), then build a audience personas for each.

• Question what these audiences would think of your current efforts. Do they like what you’re doing? Is your content actually helping them? One way we process this is by interviewing audiences.

• Analyze your data regarding how these audiences are interacting with your content. Rather than just looking at a couple of the numbers on your Google AdWords or Analytics account once a month, take time to create an overview of the numbers from the entire year. Dive deeper with Essential Analytics: Event Tracking & Virtual Page Views.

• Sit down with your team and talk through what steps each of your audiences would ideally take. Since it’s a new year, you can dream bigger than last year. Just make sure you have actionable steps to take towards making these goals happen.

If you’d like a professional to do this with you, give ArcStone a call for a consultation.