3 Ways our Non-Profit Organization Benefited from Digital Marketing

Recently, we asked our client Health World Education for a StringCan Interactive testimonial video and guest blog post. In their video, Health World's Executive Director Peter Rusin talks about how much digital marketing has benefited his non-profit organization. In his guest blog, Peter explains how digital marketing could benefit your organization too!

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In hopes of promoting our mission to educate children, our team at Health World Education has invested in various types of marketing efforts over the years. At first we started with traditional means of marketing, such as buying ads in the newspapers and writing columns for local papers for free ad space. But as we grew to a national level, we knew we couldn't afford the time or money required for these traditional marketing efforts anymore.

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We always knew we should invest in digital marketing tactics, but we lacked the knowledge to make this change on our own. My team at Health World felt like it would be like jumping into an ocean where you can't see the bottom, which can obviously generate a lot of concern. But once we finally took a leap of faith and reached out to digital marketing firms like StringCan Interactive, the decision became much easier. The CEO of the company, Jay Feitlinger, helped us understand the complex process of digital marketing and made us feel comfortable with pursuing it.

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After a few months of working with StringCan, they really opened our eyes to things we never knew about our company and our audience. Their marketing team also introduced us to various tactics and tools, which ended up providing us with immense benefits and value.

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Here are three of our favorite digital marketing tactics that your non-profit could also find valuable:

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Creating Buyer Personas

When we first started working with StringCan, one of the first steps involved creating buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target market based on market research. This process really helped simplify and narrow our ideal audience so that we could better understand who we're targeting.

Once our digital marketing team helped us create our personas, they figured out how to best reach them and connect with them--including in ways we didn't even know existed. I think this is one of the most beneficial marketing tactics for non-profits because often times you are so focused on delivering your mission that you sometimes lose sight on how to market to your audience.. When you create personas, it forces you to take a step back and evaluate whether or not your efforts are appealing to your target market.

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Applying for The Google Ad Grant

If you want your non-profit to appear on Google searches more often and easily, you should apply for the Google Ad Grant! The grant provides non-profits with $10,000 a month in AdWords advertising so that their organization appears on more Google search result pages.

We were shocked and excited once StringCan helped us maximize our grant spending, and even more surprised with the results! Once we realized that our campaign, due to its month-over-month improvements from StringCan, qualified for the Grantspro program, StringCan provided a plan to aid us in applying for the program. Soon afterward, Health World was approved to increase our AdWords budget from $10K to $40K! Gaining so much free advertising money helped us enhance our online presence, reach more consumers, and increase awareness for our cause.

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Optimizing Your Website

We recently learned from StringCan that if your website isn't designed strategically, your website visitors will be less likely to contact you. Also, if you don't optimize your website for search engines, nobody will even find your website! Not too long ago, this was the case with our website.

Once we hired StringCan, they used Google Analytics to show us that our website wasn't getting any views or engagement. They explained to us that it's not enough to just have a website; we need to make it attractive to our audience and optimize it online to get website visitors. Once we gave them the okay to do so, our marketing team completely redesigned our website and found creative ways to drive traffic to it. Now we get hundreds of visits a day, along with quality leads!

I'm sure that most non-profits are hesitant to leverage digital marketing just like Health World was. But honestly, we couldn't be happier that we decided to leap into the unknown. We might not understand digital marketing completely, but StringCan Interactive does--and they care about promoting non-profits and their missions to change the world. So if you're still hesitant about hiring a digital marketing team, don't let your doubt hold you back!

The most important part is finding a team that understands your business model and that's passionate about pursuing and developing your target audience. Once you find your perfect marketing partner like we did, your non-profit organization can accomplish even bigger and better things.

Image by Denise Reis via Flickr CC