Nonprofit Marketing Trends 2022
Excerpt
If you're not doing at least three of these marketing activities in 2022, you run the risk of being left behind. In this episode, leawrn the five top marketing trends for nonprofits and how to use them to grow your donor base and inspire new volunteers so that you can focus on your mission.
Summary
“Video is the foundation of a modern marketing strategy.”
Your nonprofit’s ability to reach new people and inspire those who are already part of your circle of support hinges on using modern marketing tactics that work. Before you continue with the marketing strategy you’ve been using for years, take time to learn how to implement these five important trends that can help you reach more people and inspire them to action (without wasting time or money!).
“My clients who have the best, most engaged social following still only get less than 20% of their website visitors from social. The rest of their traffic is from search engines and their URL.”
In this episode, learn how to leverage video and transform it into tons of content for your other channels, the basics of email marketing, and the one thing you MUST be doing to attract visitors to your website.
Watch the video to get the full training.
If you’ve learned something from this episode, take a screenshot or post and use the hashtag #marketyourmission so I can celebrate you on social media!
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If you’ve learned something from this episode, take a screenshot or post and use the hashtag #marketyourmission so I can celebrate you on social media!
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Transcript
If you're not doing at least three of these marketing activities in 2022, you run the risk of being left behind. That's right, today I'm talking about nonprofit marketing trends for 2022. Hey everyone, I'm Ricardo Ibarra. I've got 15 plus years of experience in the design and marketing field. And I am here to help you grow your donor base, share your story and ignite a movement around your mission. So let's get into the top nonprofit marketing trends of 2022.
#1: Nonprofit Video Marketing
Number one. Probably no surprise to you at all, the top trend is video. Video is everywhere and why? because it helps us connect over the distances from one screen to another.
Photos were great, text-based posts in the O.G. Days of social media, remember when we could only post text? Those were fine, but now with modern technology, we've been able to capture video and transmit it anywhere in the world. And that's why video will continue to be the leading trend for nonprofit marketing in 2202. In fact, it's the number one market trend, full stop. Any industry, government, business, nonprofit, labor, education, wherever you're at, video is the hit. And it's because we're social creatures. We want to connect with other folks. We want to see their smiling faces, the whites of their eyes. That's why when you get on a Zoom call and nobody's got their video turned on, it's kind of a bummer because you get this disambiguated person. There's just an, you know, a black box with a name in it. Don't do that. Video is here to stay and it doesn't have to be crazy scary. I know I'm coming to you from my office. I've got a DSLR. I've got a microphone on, I've got two lights over here. I got my little notes, right under the camera lens (don't tell anybody), but you can make this really easy because...
Most folks have one of these [holds up smartphone]. And in fact, this video camera, this is the, the, the new, the iPhone that just came out. This video camera is actually the better than the camera I'm recording this on, but of course I can't plug a microphone into my phone and I don't have as much control over it, but shoot video with your phone, make it really easy and super simple. There are tons of different types of video that you can use to promote your mission, to share what you're doing in the world, to tell the stories that are gonna draw people into your nonprofit work. Couple of types that I absolutely love, of course, live video. Live video is so great because it provides realtime one-to-many connection with the folks who are following you on whatever social channel you're at. And depending on the channel you're at, I'm looking at you, Facebook, it's imminently shareable.
If you're on Instagram, you could bring someone else on to an Instagram Live to share their perspective, or do a mini interview or a training or tell the story of one of the people that you serve and the transformation that they enjoyed in their life thanks to your nonprofit work. Live video, hands down my absolute favorite. And of course, if you want to follow me @marketyourmission on Instagram or on Facebook, I will be going live every week. So check there to hang out with me and see what I am sharing. Prerecorded video like this one is also a fantastic type if you're not super comfortable going live yet, that's okay. Prerecorded video is also a great way for you to share stories. I often find prerecorded video most valuable as part of presentations, as part of marketing campaigns say leading up to an annual campaign or a big fundraiser or an event. It's also great for reporting.
Again, whip out your smartphone, get the consent of course, of the folks who are going to be on camera and capture some video footage of what's happening in your day to day life, not only what your staff are doing, but also what's happening. You know, if you're doing a clothing drive or if you're doing a river cleanup, get folks to sign a simple release form saying that, "Yes, I'm okay being videotaped and I'm okay [with] you sharing this on your social channels, splice that together with a simple video editor like Adobe Creative Cloud Express, which has, uh, excuse me, Adobe Premiere Pro Rush, which is a video editing app. If you have iMovie on your phone, you have, uh, I think it's Camtasia for Android. You can edit a prerecorded video in no time, keep it super simple, post it to your YouTube channel, put it on your website, there you've got some great prerecorded video.
So live, prerecorded, hey, you don't have to do long form video. If you're not quite comfortable with it, get on your Instagram stories. Do your Snapchat stories, create a TikTok or a Reel. Video is here to stay. And I want to encourage you to explore it, have fun. Don't worry about it. If you're worried about what you look or how you sound or that you're not super comfortable on camera, or you use a bunch of filler words of saying, um, and ah, and, uh, okay. Nobody says, uh, as a filler word, but I'm here to encourage you because it's 2022, we've all been fairly isolated through the COVID-19 pandemic. And a lot of the polish, excuse me. The, the glossiness of the internet is starting to wear down because people are tired of folks putting on airs. We're hungry for real human connection. We're hungry for real human stories. So capitalize on that and start playing with video, set a schedule reminder, set a goal for yourself. What are you going to record and share this coming week? What are you going to share in the, the next month? How, how are you going to use video in the amazing stories and people that you are interacting with, that your staff, your volunteers, your donors, the folks you serve, how can you highlight them? Maybe it's just a 15-second Reel or a TikTok. That's okay. Maybe it's a longer interview.
The reason why I'm encouraging you to use video way more than you have been. Not only because the data shows that video views are up, up, up, everybody's watching video on the internet, but also it's the foundation of a modern marketing strategy. Let me say that again. Video is the foundation of a modern marketing strategy. If you're not doing video, you're not marketing in the modern age. And I'm so sorry to say that because I know there's gonna be some folks going, ah, I wanna do this thing. I don't wanna do video. I don't want to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hey, this is the world we're living in, video is king and you have what it takes to put together. Some really great, some really fun, really inspiring videos.
The other reason why I want you to do more video this year than ever before is, video is the most leveragable type of content there is. And what I mean by that is you can shoot a video like I'm doing right now. You can shoot a video. Now you don't have to do it direct to camera like me with just a little cue card. It's okay. You can use a teleprompter or you can do an interview, but you can shoot a long form video like this. And then you can get a transcript of that video created by AI for very cheap. My preference is to use temi.com T-E-M-I-dot-com, AI transcripts for a great price. You can get that transcribed. You can edit it a little bit, post it as a blog. You can take the audio from your video. Maybe you edit it a little bit, or maybe you not, and you post it as a podcast. You can chop up that longer video into little short segments, maybe a little 90-second clip for Instagram or a three minute Reel, or just a little quick excerpt post on your Instagram feed or on Twitter.
You can't do that with a blog post.
Well, you can, but it just takes more time. See if you write a text blog post, great, love it. But then if you wanted to turn it into a podcast, you'd have to read that blog post. If you wanted to turn it into a video, you'd have to read the text that you wrote. So by starting with video, as the foundation of your modern marketing strategy, you are setting yourself up to leverage that asset all over the internet. And it's a heck of a lot easier than you think it is.
Download the Content Multiplier Guide
In fact, I already put together my content multiplier guide, and I want to give it to you for free click the link below for the content multiplier guide. It walks you step by step by step through how the workflow goes for taking a longer video of 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes long, and converting it into something that you can use for your email marketing, for your social media marketing, on your website, for your blog, all your social channels, step by step, including the tools that I love to use that make it so much easier. This is the way that you can ensure that your nonprofit is operating on all cylinders and in the modern 2022 era of video. This is the way to go.
FREE: Content Multiplier Guide
Learn a step-by-step plan to leverage the content you create to reach new nonprofit donors, volunteers, and supporters.
#2: Nonprofit Email Marketing
Number two, the next marketing trend that you need to be thinking about for 2022 is email.
Now I can hear you going well. Yeah, I already an email newsletter. Great. And if you don't that's okay. Too. Email is so easy to set up. Some of my favorite tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor. There's so many different email providers. My favorite is MailChimp because I think it's supremely easy and, and they have a free tier. So if you're a smaller nonprofit, if you're one of those warriors out there, who's doing it all. If you're the only person on your team, MailChimp is so great because with a little MailChimp branding at the bottom, you can send emails for free and they give you all the same insights. If you've got a little bit of money to spend on email, all the better. Email marketing is so critical because out of all the marketing channels, out of social media, out of your website, out of print ads, uh, radio ads, TV, all the stuff, all the ways of reaching the people that you want to care about, your mission email has the highest return on investment.
I've seen statistics all over the board, but by and large, the vast majority of them report that for every dollar or so you spend on email marketing, you can expect a 400% return. So that's a 4x of your marketing money. And the reason for that is email is personal and it's permission based. Most nonprofits under a million dollars, don't have the money for traditional media advertising. That's why you've got to focus on growing and engaging with your email list throughout 2022. And I'm not just talking about emailing them once a month or once a quarter, when you have a big program or you have a need for fundraising or an annual campaign or a gala coming up, no, your email, you need to be emailing your list every single week. What do you say? Give 'em a look behind the curtain, tell 'em what's going on, what challenges you're facing, what triumphs you're experiencing, and always connect to the human story of the people who are being impacted by your work.
Even if you're working to reduce plastic waste in the ocean. Talk about the folks in beachside communities who are able to continue enjoying their natural environment, because there isn't plastic washing up, or the impacts of plastic waste on the fishermen who are struggling with catches, uh, and getting enough fish out of their nets because there's so much plastic waste, always talk about the human element. How do you get somebody on your email list? You offer them something valuable in return. Most folks call this a lead magnet or a freebie or a signup gift, whatever you want, make it something fun and personal for your organization. I've seen folks, uh, give out coloring books or digital coloring books. Of course I've seen folks send out, um, sheet music I've seen that was obviously a nonprofit in the music space. I've seen folks send out, uh, student activity guides, craft projects, 10 tips to save water at home.
Um, the best ways to upcycle plastic, um, how to support native pollinators in your garden. All of these are digital guides, digital little freebies that say, hey, thank you so much for caring about our nonprofit. Thank you for giving us your email address. Here's something that's interesting to you that is related to our mission. If you're all about reducing food waste, hey, how about a guide to composting and how to use, uh, compost from your local composting place or creative ways of storing or reusing food to reduce waste, or maybe you, uh, send them a recipe guide for, uh, that feature foods that folks commonly throw away that don't need to be thrown away yet. All of these are ways of incentivizing folks to get on your email, but the first step of course, sign up for an email marketing provider. I love MailChimp.
Next step, create some sort of freebie to offer folks who do sign up to your list and then put that sign up form on your website, link to it in your email signature, share it far and wide. And before you know it, you'll start developing an email list and you'll be well on your way to using one of these top marketing trends for nonprofits in 2022.
#3: Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits
Number three, it's not social media, but it starts with an S, it's search engine optimization. Now you notice I distinguish this by saying not social, because you're not gonna find social media on this list at all. And that's because that pe- those pesky algorithms, the social media sites really want to keep you on their site because they want to be able to sell you ads. They want to use your data to track you around the internet and show you those shoes that you saw on Amazon, or try and get you to buy a dancing cactus from TikTok.
I actually have one of those, long story, but what I want you to focus on in 2022 is search engine optimization. And why is that? Because the intent of users, when they go to search on Google or Bing, or Yahoo! or any other search engine, is they want to find something. And the intent of the search engine is to help folks find websites and content on the internet. Now, I can speak to this from a very practical standpoint, in that all of my clients get way more traffic to their websites from search engines than they do from social media. In fact, some of my clients who have the best, most engaged social following still only get five to 10 to 20% of their website, visitors from social. The remaining, 80%, 80 or more 80 plus percent of their website visitors either come through email marketing, people typing directly their URL directly into the, the address bar of their browser, or search engines. They're constantly, constantly getting new visitors to their website simply because the search engines say, oh, I think you're gonna, you're gonna find this website interesting. And if search engine optimization sounds scary, at its core premise, it's a very simple thing. You want to use the words and phrases that your ideal donors, volunteers, and supporters and clients are using to describe their problems,
the problems that your nonprofit is solving. SEO at its core is using the words and phrases that your circle of support—your donors, your volunteers, your stakeholders, and your clients, those words and phrases that those people are using to describe the problem that you solve.
So if you're providing education opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas, you'll use keywords like education opportunities, helping kids, helping kids learn to read, backpacks for kids, promoting literacy, all sorts of things. And there's a really great free tool that will help you find other related keywords. It's called Ubersuggest it's at Ubersuggest.com. That's U-B-E-R-suggest-dot-com. It's run by a fantastic marketer, Neil Patel. And I use this tool. I use the pro version for my clients. All you go is, all, all you do is go to Ubersuggest.com. And there's a search bar right there, type in what your nonprofit mission is. What do you do? Are you in the clean water space? Are you in education? Are you in healthcare, environmental, whatever. If you're working to provide clean drinking water, just type in clean drinking water, and Ubersuggest will give you all sorts of keywords that are related to that. The next step is one, make sure that the content on your website includes those keywords naturally in the text, on your site. Search engines still can't see images very well, and they can can't watch a video. So text is really important.
So put your keywords, using natural language, throughout your site. Next, identify keywords that you can write or create content around. The best types of keywords you're looking for are low competition and high volume. And Ubersuggest will tell you what their estimated competition is, how much people are willing to pay, to run an ad for that keyword, and about how many folks are searching for that keyword. Now in the nonprofit space, you're gonna see some fairly small numbers, depending on what you're doing, if you're in a really niche market, you might see very low numbers. That's okay. We still need to get you on the map and saying, hey, search engines, pay attention over here because I'm doing stuff! Next, is once you figured out those keywords, think about how you can organize them logically into some sort of content that you can post on your blog.
I've talked a little bit about email marketing and content creation, and more of that will be coming up soon. But for now just think about, okay, if I'm my nonprofit is in the clean water space, maybe some of the keywords are talking about lead and particulates and pipes and plumbing and clean water for kids and water's effect on our health and all these things. Think about what those keywords are in relation to your mission and think of how you can group them in logical ways as a structure, maybe an outline for your content. Then if you're following step number one or idea number one, sit down and film a video. Maybe you get, uh, a nutritionist to sit down with you on Instagram Live and answer all the questions that you have on water's effects on our health. And then you can follow the content multiplier guide and use that video content to distribute this message all over the internet, pointing back to your website.
And in the meantime, the transcript, the text of your video goes on your website, goes on your blog, and Google goes, "Oh, wow, there's a new article here all about clean water. It happens to be on this website for a nonprofit that's working to promote and ensure clean water for everyone. So the next time somebody searches for clean water or any sort of related keyword, I'll point them to that blog post." This is a long term game. SEO doesn't happen overnight. Sometimes it can take a quarter, you know, three months. Sometimes it can take six months. Sometimes it can take even a year before some of these posts and pieces of content catch significant traction, but it's kind of a snowball effect. And the great thing is search engines are always looking for new content. So if you can follow my advice and be super consistent and share your content weekly, you will be at a much greater advantage than a lot of other nonprofits who aren't investing in marketing like you are, who aren't paying attention to these trends and these new topics and these ways of reaching folks and expanding and amplifying your impact.
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#4: Nonprofit Supporter Challenges
One of the other great marketing trends that will help you be more successful in 2022 are challenges. Now, I'm sure you saw the ice bucket challenge to promote awareness of ALS. I think that was back in 2019, or maybe even earlier, you don't need to do anything crazy like that. A challenge is simply rallying your circle of support and teaching them, or checking in with them and helping them accomplish a mutual goal in realtime. The great thing about these challenges is they can happen completely virtually, more on that later.
And the key with the challenge is you get folks excited about the challenge. You get them enrolled in the challenge through an email signup, and then you do something for ideally five days in a row. You offer them tips and strategies, tasks, fun activities, whatever's aligned with your mission. You give them something to do all those five days with the goal of achieving a larger objective. Challenges are a powerful way of developing community and a shared understanding of the world and a shared belief in the vision of your organization. One of my clients did a cha- a slightly longer challenge than what I'm describing, and they called it the Civility Pledge. This nonprofit is at one of the local universities here in Seattle, and they just do fantastic work serving historically underrepresented transfer students from community colleges and helping them get their four year degree at a university.
The Civility Pledge was all about inspiring folks to wear their masks in public and getting their COVID-19 vaccine. And they held it on the campus at which they're housed, their partner organization, and they got the, the associated student body group involved. They got the different honor societies and student affinity groups on campus involved. And it was all about signing the Civility Pledge and going out and being a positive role model. So from the time they opened to the time they ended, there was a sequence of emails and social media posts and video, and all sorts of fun content that the, that the student leaders were doing to inspire their fellow students, to go back to their communities, to their homes and be a positive role model to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a example of a challenge. Like I was mentioning earlier, you can do challenges, a little bit of a shorter timeframe. You can do a five day challenge. You can do a seven day challenge. You've probably seen some of these online with weight loss challenges or fitness challenges. Now, imagine if you created a challenge to accomplish something that aligned with your mission.
Maybe it's a litter challenge or a reading challenge, or a empty your pantry donation to the food bank challenge, whatever it is you'll want to create a community space. A Facebook group is really great for this. You could also create a different type of space. You could do we- daily Zoom calls, whatever it is, create a space where folks can come together, cheer each other on and receive encouragement and guidance from you and your organization. Remember the whole point of this challenge is get everyone pulling together, get them having this cohesive sense of identity of community and of accomplishment, and make sure that it's closely aligned with what your mission is doing.
#5: Create Nonprofit Virtual Experiences
Number five, my last marketing trend for 2022, although there's more, I think this one is also going to be key to nonprofit success and that's creating virtual experiences. Creating virtual experiences was on the rise before the COVID-19 pandemic. But of course, the fact that so many of us are still, uh, isolating or not seeing nearly as many folks. We're not going to in-person events as often, has made the availability and the imperative for virtual experiences so much more popular and pressing in these times. So I'm encouraging you think of what can you do to create virtual experiences. On one hand, you could turn your in-person live experiences to something virtual. One of my clients created a virtual gala complete with little tables on the screen where you could click and sit to connect with the folks who were also sitting at that table. It was kind of like little Zoom rooms.
They even had had a cocktail kit and a meal kit that you could order to have food delivered to your house to enjoy with the other event attendees, there was of course, an online silent auction. They had video presentations. It was fantastic. And I'm not just saying that because I helped produce it. That's a great example of turning an in person experience into a virtual virtual experience. Another example from a client is they support international students and they converted their in-person language salons that were [where] international students have an opportunity to practice their English proficiency and the domestics students, or, uh, English as a first language speakers have an opportunity to practice the language that they're trying to learn that the international student is fluent in. They converted them into simple Zoom rooms, and of course they upgraded their Zoom account so they could have multiple concurrent rooms going, but they converted these live in person events into virtual experiences.
What virtual experiences can you create? What live, in-person experiences have you already turned into virtual experiences? Keep thinking that way and also keep thinking, what else can we do? What can we do to make things really unique and really interesting for the folks who are following us on social or on our email list, you might do digital scavenger hunts. You might do game nights or, uh, digital escape rooms. Those are all fun things for bringing folks together and giving them a common purpose. I talked about creating an online challenge where you can bring folks together for five days or seven days to work towards a strategic objective that will help your mission. It's another great virtual experience. There's so many that you can create. Think of augmented reality, right? Look at all the new technology and the games. Uh, I play Pokémon GO so I can see a little Pokémon in my house.
If I wanted to, if I'm looking at furniture, I can scan the room with my phone and see where that new nightstand is gonna go through my camera. How can you leverage new technology and tools? There's all sorts of new opportunities coming online every month, every week, thanks to the explosion of digital technology and the desire for everyone to still remain connected. So that's my challenge to you, which of these marketing trends are you going to use in 2022? Let me know in the comments below, don't forget to click and get your free content multiplier guide. These five trends that I talked about today were video, email, search engine optimization, challenges, and virtual experiences. I hope you found this helpful. Remember, every day is a great day to SHINE. Go out and serve with heart integrity, nerve and excellence. I'll see you in the next video.