Inbound marketing : :
marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.
Inbound marketing is a great way for non-profit organizations to add value to their donor’s life, along with attracting new donors. It adds a component of storytelling, which can drive the message of a non-profit organization home to it’s audience in a simple and compelling way.
This week, let’s look at some major themes of inbound marketing and the overarching ideas that every organization must adopt into its ideology and culture for a successful implementation and operation of this strategy.
Here are HubSpot’s five major themes of inbound marketing:
- Content Creation And Distribution
Creating targeted content that answers the basic questions of donors is a must for your organization. After, your organization should then share that content far and wide across the Internet. - Lifecycle Marketing
Promoters don’t come easily. Every individual starts their journey as a stranger, a website visitor, and an inquisitor. Once you understand this, your organization can tailor marketing actions and tools to help guide these individuals to become supporters and promoters of your organization. - Personalization
It is important for your organization to tailor its published content to suit its readers. As you analyze your leads, and learn more about their preferences and needs over time, you can tweak your publications to better personalize your content. - Multi-channel Marketing
A critical component with inbound marketing is a multi-channel approach to marketing. By nature, inbound marketing approaches individuals on the terms of the consumer; communicating how they want and where they want. - Integration
Similar to multi-channel, inbound marketing is characterized by integrating different components of marketing in order to create a unified process. As operational tools, content creation, publishing and analytics all work together like a well-oiled machine, they allow your organization to focus on creating the right content and sharing it in the right place at the right time.
By publishing the best content in the proper place at the opportune time, your organization can create and share content that is relevant, useful and helpful to its donors. This marketing is not a nuisance; it is marketing that people can love and feel drawn too. If you don’t already have an inbound marketing strategy in place, it’s likely time to have that conversation now!
An unique example of Inbound Marketing
Did anyone see the World Humanitarian Day campaign? People had the option of donating their feed to the campaign, and in doing so, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund posted various stories on people’s walls or on their twitter feeds over a 24 hour period. It was a compelling way to spread and share stories from the fields and I can guarantee it caught a lot of attention of prospective donors and turned their eyes towards UNCERF.
Tell your organization’s stories through inbound marketing and you can begin to create donor relationships that last a lifetime.