If you’re a leader of a nonprofit or social enterprise, it’s not too early to start anticipating what’s ahead for 2018. The organizations that grow steadily are those that look through the windshield and not the rearview mirror.
At this point, you are aware that technology and social media are developing and changing at an extremely rapid rate. I also think you now understand that it is essential for sustainability to maintain a relentless focus on what is developing in the digital age because it does indeed affect the way we work.
So what are some of the trends to watch out for in 2018 that can help you stay ahead of the competition when it comes to brand awareness and fundraising dollars?
- Growth hack: All business leaders, including nonprofit executives, understand that converting and driving revenue is essential to the soul of an organization. It means more and more that it is essential for you to be where your donors and potential supporters congregate. That is, you have to be in the online and offline worlds, and you have to make sure that everything is coordinated. You have to create content that keeps followers and other people looking back at where you need them to pay attention, like your website. It also means that you need to make sure you have SEO experts on hand to ensure that people searching for your cause or organization visit your website. In other words, if you’re not investing in SEO expertise, you’re behind the eight ball.
- social listening: Social listening extends beyond simply tracking your mentions and comments in the digital world. Social listening means you understand the context of your engagements with your followers and audience, and you’re also digging deeper than just providing them with automated or canned responses. It’s important to have someone on your team (live people) who “fully” understands the organization, and when someone approaches you, treats them as they would in the non-digital world. The easiest way to see social listening is to treat everyone as if they were standing in front of you in your office. No matter where or how they interact with you and your organization
- artificial intelligence: Bearing in mind my earlier point about having humans involved in marketing who can understand the context that may be happening with your followers between the digital and real world, artificial intelligence (AI) will drive your marketing efforts further. Although we are at the dawn of the AI era, we already have AI that is infinitely more powerful and can do more than entire teams of marketers. AI will help you segment or personalize your content delivery. In other words, one group of your followers will see Content A while another group will see Content B, based on the criteria you set. AI will drive all of this, and you will need to be aware of its presence in order to harness and use it effectively.
- video content: You are aware that video content is essential to today’s content marketing strategy. As AI improves on digital platforms, preference will be given to content that includes video. One of the easiest things you can do to start increasing your engagement is to create live streams and incorporate video into your content. You can track and compare your engagement, for example, on your Facebook page on posts that contain video versus just photo and text copy. You will most likely see the same data that we see in our social marketing: video content gets more engagement and traction.
- micro-influencers: Influencer marketing is important to spread brand awareness and also help generate revenue. If you gain influence to support your cause or organization, that’s gold. But there is also an area that you should not miss: micro-influencers. Each micro-influencer has an audience of between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. As this Hubspot article points out, this is the value of partnering with micro-influencers on a platform like Instagram:
- Instagram users with less than 1,000 followers generated likes 8% of the time
- Users with 1,000-10,000 followers got likes at a rate of 4%
- Users with 10,000-100,000 followers achieved a 2.4% like rate
- Users with 1-10 million followers got likes only 1.7% of the time.
As you begin to consider your planning for 2018, stay ahead of the curve to ensure you’re marketing as efficiently as possible. I know that some of these items require money (as well as time). Many nonprofits need financial resources, which is why if you were still the CEO of a nonprofit, you would consider applying for a major gift or institutional capacity building grant. Marketing is essential to brand recognition and success, and activities like SEO expertise require money. If you don’t have a big marketing budget, consider requesting a restricted gift to get you where your group needs to be in the digital age.
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