Many nonprofits neglect their marketing altogether because they believe their budget is too limited. In order to operate, thrive, and raise awareness for their cause, they’d need a strategy to get results without spending a substantial amount of money. Nonprofit marketing should be a priority.
In this post, you’ll learn some budget-friendly digital marketing strategies that will help your nonprofit show up in Google searches, getting the word out without spending every penny. That way, your nonprofit can prioritize its mission with a decent budget.
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1. Use Google Ad Grants! (definitely the most important for nonprofit marketing)
Google Ad Grants can help nonprofits drive awareness, attract donations, and recruit volunteers. It’s free to sign up and basically gives away free money for marketing! Google Grants is the nonprofit edition of AdWords, which is Google’s online advertising tool. Google Grants empowers nonprofit organizations with in-kind AdWords advertising, to promote the nonprofit’s missions and initiatives on Google.
Learn more about Google Ad Grants and how it can power your nonprofit marketing.
2. Make some videos to promote your nonprofit’s mission
The majority of your target audience is watching video; in fact, many of them prefer it. Nearly 75% of executives report watching video at least once a week as a content marketing tactic and given the choice, 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read an article.
Video content is a great way to grab attention and impress your target market.
Videos are naturally engaging and, in an age of information overload, it’s vital for nonprofits to offer content that is easy to digest; if they don’t, donors and volunteers will simply move on. Video content does this very well. If a picture paints 1,000 words, then one minute of video is worth 1.8 million, so say Forrester’s researchers.
A strategically-placed video can make the difference when trying to stand out from the competition.
You should know organic reach on major social networks has declined significantly over the years. According to research, the average organic reach on Facebook lies somewhere around 5.2%.
There’s really no such thing as a social feed anymore. When you log onto Facebook or Twitter, you no longer see the most recent content at the top. Instead, you see a stream of content served to you by an algorithm.
However, organic social reach isn’t dead. It’s dormant, temporarily slowed down for the time. Eventually, the same thing will happen on other social media channels.
You can advertise successfully on Facebook for just $5 a day. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have insanely granular targeting options that you can use to go after the people who are most likely to care about your cause. Without a little dip into your own wallet, your efforts have a very slim chance of reaching your audience on Facebook.
In August of 2015, Facebook is allowing selected nonprofits to add a “Donate Now” call-to-action button to their Facebook page encouraging users to act, right on the Facebook profile.
To utilize this feature, your page’s category must be set to “NonProfit Organization.” You can add the Donate button to your page the same way you add other call-to-action options. And before you know it, you could be getting donations right from Facebook.
Try these marketing strategies to promote your nonprofit at minimal cost to you
Using just one or even all of these four strategies should help your nonprofit marketing campaigns get noticed and make a difference. Be willing to test each strategy and note what works and what doesn’t work with your target audience. And remember, just because one strategy doesn’t work right now, doesn’t mean it won’t in the future.
Please share this if you think a nonprofit you support could benefit from marketing!
