If you’re a nonprofit marketer, maintaining a marketing strategy can be overwhelming. Focusing more resources on content marketing is a great way to attract new fans, engage your patrons, and connect with donors.
Why does my arts organization need content marketing?
First, let’s define content marketing. Here’s a great definition directly from HubSpot: “Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.”
Content marketing is valuable for most businesses, but especially nonprofit organizations. Here’s why:
- Content educates your audiences about everything from your mission and cause to industry news and upcoming events.
- Content brings new visitors (i.e. potential donors and leads) to your website by improving SEO (search engine optimization).
- Content is easily shareable and serves as a digital form of word-of-mouth advertising.
- Content creates a sense of community around your organization or cause.
- Content is often evergreen and can be repurposed and used for different marketing initiatives, saving your team time.
You’re probably thinking that you’re already marketing your content; after all, announcements about your concerts or performances are generating content, right? Well, yes, that’s true, but take a minute to think not about content that promotes your organization’s next big thing, but instead serves to inform or educate your audiences about the art that you are already making— whether it’s in the repertoire for this season or not.
For example, a symphony orchestra might consider writing a blog post about the works of Beethoven. Using SEO best practices, that article about Beethoven could emerge in search results and direct completely new audiences to your website and introduce them to your organization in the process.
You are also probably thinking that you don’t have time to create all this new collateral. We recommend asking your education team or your volunteers for help. These folks probably have ready access to these types of educational materials and/or years of knowledge that they can put in draft form. Once you have those drafts, it’s good to run them by an editor who understands the use of keywords and how they drive traffic to your blog or website.
Resources For Getting Started
- HubSpot offers a free Content Marketing Certification course. Throughout this course, you’ll learn a content creation framework for consistently producing effective content, how to create and repurpose great content, and how to become a more strategic content marketer.
- The Content Marketing Institute shared A 30-Minute Hack for Nonprofits to Improve Their Content Marketing. This guide will help you rethink your current content marketing strategies, helping you improve your content creation and distribution.
- Whether you’re thinking about launching a blog or just want to improve your existing blog, these 10 Best Practices For Your Nonprofit’s Blog from The Modern Nonprofit will help!
You’re already generating content, so why not ensure that content has the greatest opportunity to drive traffic to your organization. Content marketing can help you increase your organization’s brand awareness, build relationships with your audience, and gain new patrons. If you want some help thinking this through, or you’d like to have some of this content prepared for you, contact us!