Nonprofit Strategy Series: How to Integrate Social Media Marketing

02/17/20

Social media marketing can be a wonderful addition to your nonprofit marketing. When implemented with a clear plan, you can yield tremendous results, hopefully bringing you more donations. Check out our 5-step solution on how to integrate social media into your overall nonprofit strategy.

Step 1 –– Create a Plan of Action

First, determine what your nonprofit business goals are. When setting goals, make sure they are measurable and achievable. For example, some nonprofit goals might include generating donations, raising cause awareness or recruiting volunteers. Then, determine the KPIs needed to measure those goals. This might include yearly sales revenue, clicks, impressions, and volunteer signups.

Next, think about how you will integrate social media into your overall strategy. Set social media objectives and associated KPIs that closely align with your upper-funnel goals. Following this, make a list of tactics that will assist you in meeting those objectives. Tactics are strategic actions you will take to accomplish desired outcomes. Check out these various social media tactics for nonprofits.

Step 2 –– Identify Core Audiences and Interests

Who is it you’re going after? What type of content do they enjoy? Which platforms are they using regularly? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? You can answer these questions by simply looking at data in Google Analytics, social channel dashboards and/or content monitoring and listening tools like Buzzsumo.

Once you’ve identified your target donor, dig deeper into uncovering their unique characteristics. Consider their age, gender, geographic location, interests and community social groups. All of these will help you make more informed decisions, better segment your audience and create detailed personas. Click here for tips on how to build nonprofit personas.

Step 3 –– Pick Your Social Platforms

As a nonprofit, you don’t have to spread yourself thin onto every platform. When determining the best ones to use, focus on those that closely align with your objectives and target audience.

While Instagram may work better for nonprofits that maintain a more visual demeanor, Twitter could better suit nonprofits with stronger messaging. Stay tuned in our nonprofit strategy series, as we’ll look at different platform pros and cons and how you can utilize each one to your advantage.

Step 4 –– Brainstorm Social Media Content

Content will always be king. Nonprofits should take special note of different content strategies that can significantly boost brand awareness, engagement rate, and even donations.

Make sure your content is brand compliant. It’s important that you consistently highlight your nonprofit’s values, mission and overall messaging. In addition, create content that is engaging, comprehensible and thought-provoking. The greatest outcomes you can generate out of good content marketing are shares and leads. Shares being that free, no-effort-on-your-part promotion that’s naturally triggered by your audience, and leads being that potential donor who you’ll lead down the marketing funnel all the way to conversion.

Lastly, work your way into a rhythm of posting frequently and timely. After you’ve determined the social platforms, create a calendar with the exact days, times and content pieces you’ll want to push out. The more you plan and organize your content, the easier it will be to track and measure results.

Step 5 –– Track and Measure Results

A strategy is useless without a solid framework to measure it by. In this stage of social media marketing, it’s important to constantly capture and sift through results.

Circle back to the objectives and the KPIs you established in step 2. Some things you might look at are: What’s my top-performing post? How much referral traffic am I getting from other channels like my blog or website? How many followers do I generate daily? In the end, you never know what insights you’ll stumble upon that could:

(a) trigger your next big campaign idea
(b) streamline the donor-nonprofit relationship
(c) enhance your overall branding and work processes

The more data you are able to extract and analyze, the better chance you have at making smarter optimizations and achieving real value out of your social marketing campaigns. Click here for free tools to better track and measure social results.