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Outbound marketing includes cold calls, print advertisements, and even email blasts. This type of marketing is more intrusive and pushes out a message without considering the consumer. While it is relational, it resembles its cousin “advertising” more closely than true marketing.
On the other hand, inbound marketing puts the ball in the consumer’s court. This type of marketing consists of 3 main characteristic steps: attract, engage, and delight.
Instead of cattle-calling, this type of marketing focuses on creating marketing content to draw in the consumer. Once they are invited in, they are engaged through conversation and interaction. And once engaged, they are continued to be impressed by your organization’s insight and personability.
For non-profit organizations especially, inbound marketing is the key to success. This genre is highly relationship-oriented and ensures relationship cultivation — not customer creation.
While there was a time when marketing had its delivery method limitations, there are now countless ways you can share inbound marketing messages. Here are just a few options available for you to use:
The possibilities are endless, and they don’t have to be as expensive to execute as you may think either. So let's get to it! Here’s how you can best maximize your non-profit's marketing resources and create relationships with your audience.
Odds are, you've already done some solid marketing without even realizing it! You actually take part in marketing every time you communicate something about your non-profit to your audience.
You may find yourself feeling a bit of pressure to be posting unique content every single day on every single marketing channel available to you. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel!
The beauty of having multiple marketing channels is that your audience differs from channel to channel. For example, your email newsletter list may not be the same as your Instagram page following.
In addition, each channel serves a different purpose. Your email newsletter will be far more information-heavy than your Tuesday evening Instagram post will be.
Take advantage of the different purposes of your marketing method! Instead of needing to conceive a brand new message on each channel, simply repurpose your pre-existing assets. A quote from a blog post can become a social media post. A promotional video can spruce up your email newsletter.
The marketing materials you put your blood, sweat, and tears into don’t have to be a “one and done.” Take advantage of these assets and repurpose the content elsewhere. No one will even notice you used it again, we promise.
As the saying goes, time is money. While you are already focused on best utilizing your finances as a non-profit, you must not forget to best use your time too.
One way to use your time wisely is to recognize possible overlaps in the work you are doing on the marketing end.
For example, say you send out a newsletter every single month that recaps your work that month. Instead of building the email from the ground up every single time, you can save time and effort by creating a template email. You could even create a section of your website with this information and update the information every month.
This example may seem trivial, but often we waste valuable time with marketing efforts that could be made much simpler with a little planning and innovation.
Another example is in social media marketing. Instead of scrambling every other day trying to figure out what to post, it would serve you better to plan through a content calendar. While time-wise it may break even, the stress of planning social posts will be greatly reduced if you
1. Plan them out ahead of time, and
2. Enable automatic, scheduled posting.
We would all love a little more time in our day to get everything done we need to do. While the odds of there being 25 hours are pretty slim, we do have the ability to use our time wisely through recognizing overlaps, time management, and planning ahead of time.
We mentioned earlier that there is great value in paid marketing/advertising strategies, but the main reason non-profits don’t opt for this type of marketing is strictly due to the excess cost. But, did you know that you can still take advantage of paid ads without paying a cent? At the risk of that sounding like a cheap car salesman pitch, let us explain.
Non-profit organizations are eligible to receive special grants that go toward paid advertising online. For qualified non-profits, you can receive up to $10,000 per month in search ads via Google Ad Grants. Through Google Ads, you can attract donors, raise organizational awareness, and recruit volunteers with in-kind advertising on Google Search.
Outside of Google Ad Grants, there are many other grants and offers available for non-profits for free or discounted advertising rates. Your local newspaper more than likely has a non-profit advertising rate which lowers your cost for print and digital advertising. Taking advantage of these special discounts and offers can help you dive into paid advertising without breaking the bank.
For all you type A people, this point is music to your ears!
Developing and nourishing your list of non-profit partners is essential. Keeping good tabs on this list will help you out when it comes time to contact your partners about future donor opportunities, updates, and other reasons.
This database of contacts is one of the most important things you need to maximize your non-profit’s marketing resources. Without this collection, it will be very difficult to reach your target audience well.
What all should you include in your database? In general, you should include:
A simple way to organize this information is through a simple Excel spreadsheet. You can organize each category on the sheet and quickly identify your donors and access their information. There are also several different donor management software you can utilize too!
While your database is not necessarily a marketing method, it is essential in helping you market to your audience members.
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When it comes down to it, marketing as a non-profit still may be one of the last things on your priority list. But, it can be difficult to maximize your resources when you aren’t trained in marketing and don’t have the time to figure it out for yourself.
This is precisely why marketing experts exist! Our team at Pro MediaFire is perfectly equipped to help your non-profit ignite its presence online. Our mission is to help those who do good do more. So while you take time developing relationships and doing your organization's work, we will do the heavy lifting in marketing your organization well.
Our team is skilled in video, design, social media, and web! Let us help you out and ignite growth for your non-profit organization! Reach out to our team today to get started.
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