Archives for February 2017

Nonprofit Marketing Tips for 2017

February 27, 2017 by Daniel Laws Leave a Comment

Nonprofits have several challenges in attracting individuals for their causes and converting those individuals into donors. To successfully promote and supply aid to those causes, nonprofits’ marketing efforts need consistent branding, effective use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and efficient use of marketing budgets to grow donations.

Based upon the economic climate and the job market, getting millennials and other individuals to donate to your nonprofit will become increasingly challenging without the following tools.

Build Your Nonprofit Brand

There are so many great nonprofits that it can be difficult for yours to stand out. Building and establishing your brand will help. Start by defining your nonprofit. Clearly state what makes your organization unique:

Why should people donate time and resources to your cause?
How do you emotionally or personally connect with your donors?
How do you directly affect your cause?

Answering these questions will build awareness and credibility for your valuable service and distinguish you to donors, everywhere. Once your brand is built, all parts must be consistent within your disseminated content – your flyers, social media posts, and videos. Live it and show it!

Master Your CRM & Database of Donors & Volunteers

Email marketing continues to be an effective marketing channel for nonprofits. People like to see positive messages from companies that do good work. To get the most out of your email marketing, organize your CRM database to personally reach out to donors and volunteers.

Don’t just send mass emails; make them count by generating unique interactions with individuals through certain segments of your audience. Identify what information resonates with these individuals to provide them with relevant information.

TIP: Personalizing your message to an individual will make her/him feel more connected to your cause.

Direct Mail to Make a Direct Impact

Direct mail isn’t dead! According to Inman, baby boomers have a high direct mail response rate. It’s worth noting that this generation also controls 70% of all disposable income. So, they have the money to donate to your nonprofit – don’t miss this opportunity!

Use your CRM to measure responses and limit direct mail to audiences that are more likely to take action. In other words: target your direct mail to those people that are going to make your nonprofit an effective source of aid for your cause.

Grow Your Online Fundraising

Social media and Google for Nonprofits are great opportunities to increase your online fundraising through awareness and meaningful interactions. You can bring your nonprofit marketing story to life with YouTube, Google One Today, and Google Earth Reach.

These platforms allow you to create valuable relationships with like-minded individuals from anywhere at any time. Share and connect your online fundraising across the globe.

Measure Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Market Smarter

Focus on measuring the ROAS of your marketing and fundraising campaigns. If a campaign didn’t yield results to justify the spending or effort, consider changing the approach or discontinue that campaign in the future.

With continuous shifts in demographics and consumer behavior, you’ll need to make informed decisions on where to allocate your time and money for long-term success. When you consistently measure the performance of your efforts through your ROAS, you will stay alert to those shifts.

What marketing struggles does your nonprofit consistently face? Tell us in the comments, below! While you’re at it, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.

Content Marketing Is Like Being a Parent

February 20, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Content - A General Word for General Stuff

Quite literally: your content is any text (also known as “copy”), imagery, video, or other material that engages consumers. In other words: content is everywhere and on everything. When you engage in any digital marketing – digital branding, paid online advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimization, or web design – you will be creating and using content.

But, that’s just it! Once you create and use your digital content, the job’s not done. The biggest mistake that you can make is believing that your content doesn’t need to grow up.

Congrats! You’re a Proud New Parent

When you create content for your new website or digital campaigns, you basically become a parent to that content. Just like any good mom or dad, you’ll want to give your new baby constant attention. After you actually create and implement content onto web pages, email campaigns, or social media posts, measure your content’s performance.

Identify the areas of growth that you want to see and that define your business’ success. Keep track of how those areas change with your new content being used. If there is any room for improvement or progress, make necessary changes. Increase your business’ generation of leads by always enticing your target audience to click or call.

Your Content’s First Steps

It’s the moment that every parent loves, the most: your baby starts to learn how to walk! In the same way, your digital content needs to learn how to navigate your target audience to where they need to go. Continuously guide your content marketing to include new facts, consider new members of your audience, and feature new copy or visual material.

A recent article from Think with Google stresses the importance of every second in a consumer’s search for your products or services. Your content must always be relevant to what paying customers want at the moment that they search. Keep one eye on the path, ahead, by understanding trends in consumers’ behavior. Keep the other eye on your content to make sure that it’s walking in the right direction – profits.

But, don’t worry if your content falls down a few times. Creating effective and relevant copy, videos, and designs requires time and lots of practice.

Treasure Each Micro-Moment with Your Content

As your content starts to mature, you’ll also notice that the world keeps on changing, too. Technology always advances and consumers’ behavior keeps adapting to it. Your content must do the same.

Consumers searching on mobile devices are often moving around their local areas. Whatever they’re trying to find, they most likely need it, NOW. They want informative, helpful content that solves their problems at that very location. How can your digital content do that if it’s still a baby?

Another article from Think with Google reports that approximately 61% of people on smartphones will probably buy from websites that adjust their content to specific locations (data from Wave 3 & Google/Ipsos). If your content isn’t changing to meet consumers’ spontaneous and local needs, your content is unsuccessful. Protect your content from failure by creating new material that reaches and informs your audience at the right moments.

Before You Know It, They’re All Grown Up

That’s right. Sooner or later: your digital content is going to be a great success:

Your ad copy will inform searchers and emotionally attract your audience.
Your imagery will show consumers what they need in that very moment.
Your videos will answer any question that a potential customer has.

Create and implement effective content throughout your digital marketing campaigns. Measure the results with insightful analytics. Continue to optimize and refine your content to generate the leads and sales that you need. Always adapt your content to reach the right audience at the right time and place.

Your Content Will Always Be Your Baby

Just like parenthood – content marketing is a process that is never truly finished. But, it’s all worth it when your content raises your company’s revenue.

Need help raising your digital content, the right way? Just leave a comment and you’ll hear from us. Or,contact us to chat about your current digital marketing plans.

Hot Web Design Trends of 2017

February 13, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group 3 Comments

Here at DaBrian Marketing, we love to make predictions on hot web design trends you’ll see in the upcoming year. In the past, our own Creative Director, Mark Mapp, has made predictions in both 2015 and 2016. Heading into 2017, it’s time again to see what has survived and died in the past few years of web design.

Web design is always evolving to keep up with the latest technological advancements. What started in 1989 with just text on the screen, has now progressed to complex websites that can auto adjust to any size while also having all sorts of bells and whistles. Today, we are looking towards the future as designers and developers as we begin to create the next great innovation in the web world. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest trends carrying into the new year.

Flat Design

First catching fire in 2010, we haven’t let flat design go since. We ditched the glossy buttons and shadow effects for vector icons and images. In doing so, we went back to our design roots to focus on layout hierarchy and content structure. Some debate has been made that all flat designs look the same, thus killing the creative aspects of web creation. I actually believe that it is simplifying the design-process. In turn this opens up more opportunity to be creative in other areas of web design. Not to mention: looking similar isn’t always a bad thing. As stated by Forbes Steve Widen: “Familiarity creates confidence.” When it comes to websites, familiarity makes users feel that they can trust the site. For examples of the best flat design websites, go to awwwards.com and check out their nominies.

Material Design

If you haven’t heard of material design yet, then it is about time. Material design is Google’s answer to the next step in the evolution of web design. Like most things that Google does, material design is making waves in the web community and everyone is following in the wake. The goal is to “Create a visual language that synthesizes classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.” Material design is a spin-off of flat design that focuses on the fundamentals of design while taking it a step further by adding subtle gradients and motion to provide more meaning within designs. The driving force behind this style of design is an emphasis on user actions. This makes the core functionality immediately apparent and provides waypoints for the user.

Mobile Ready Responsive Design

The most important trend that will continue to carry into 2017 is creating mobile-ready responsive designs. As mobile continues to gain importance, you will see websites increasingly dropping the classic, heavy, top navigation in favor of a slimmed down mobile version. Having mobile at the forefront of your design will not only improve your site’s ease of use, but also increase site speed. When you consider that “Mobile devices now account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online,” it’s no wonder that we are going in the direction that we are.

On the Horizon: Virtual Reality?

Looking back, you can see that many trends we have today have evolved, and continue to do so, as technology advances and new challenges arise. New ideas arrive out of a changing consumer-based, interactive environment. It seems that we have grasped a solid foundation to hold onto in web design and are now beginning to refine our approaches in building and designing. With exciting new innovations like VR (>Virtual Reality) becoming more common, I am thrilled to see what possibilities this will bring to the web. Who knows? Maybe a virtual space to visit “the internet” is right around the corner.

What websites stick out to you? Do you have an example of another well-designed website? Leave a comment, below! Or, if you have hilarious examples of poorly designed websites, we’ll take those too.

Combine Your SEO & Social Media Strategy To Maximize Success

February 6, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

In the past, both social media and SEO were worked on in silos. SEO was primarily focused on technical improvements and on-page optimization while social was (and often still is today) not even considered a part of the strategic marketing plan. To maximize your digital marketing efforts, SEO and social media need to be in a committed, strategic relationship.

1. Social Signals Are A Ranking Factor

As the use of social media continues to grow, so does the influence it has on search visibility (the likeliness of being found within search results). In 2016, Google and Twitter agreed to make a deal that now gives tweets a prominent position within the SERPs (search engine results page). Additionally, Facebook and (especially) Google + both show up within Google’s organic search results. This not only means that you need to be active on these major platforms but also that it’s imperative to optimize your accounts.

Create relevant posts to reflect your strategy (using the same keywords, message, and tying them all together).

The image below shows social media presence amongst Google’s organic search results.

Search engines not only take into account being listed on these social platforms – they also evaluate your authority. A company with millions of followers receives stronger social signals than a company with a few hundred. With that being said, search engines aren’t stupid. Social media metrics can be easily manipulated and search engines know when that happens. For example, search engines can detect the quality of your followers. This means buying 100,000 proxy Twitter followers will not do much.

The best approach is to build your following organically. Keep in mind that this takes time to do it right.

2. People Are Showing Love, Love Them Back

Your business’ digital presence is not limited to your website; it’s throughout the entire internet. People are talking about your business and their conversations have a direct impact on your efforts. You need to be a part of the discussion. This is where both SEO and social media come into play (in holy matrimony).

With SEO, your company will have complete access and control of your local listings, some of which incorporate popular review systems (Google My Business, Yelp, etc). With social, you’ll interact – through comments, likes, shares, and retweets – with the actual people that use those popular review systems. Through proper management, you’ll see when anyone mentions your company’s name (even when you are not directly tagged in the post).

Facebook also has a popular review system. Most of the time, if a consumer is unsatisfied, he or she will immediately go to social media to complain or write a review. 90% Of Customers Say Buying Decisions Are Influenced By Online Reviews. Not monitoring and responding to them is a huge missed opportunity.

3. Social Sharing is Caring

In terms of outreach: The goal of SEO is to acquire more high-quality links and increase visibility for new/existing traffic, lead conversion, and content exposure. The goal of social media is to engage with your community, connect with new audiences, and increase your brand presence.

Now, as social media and SEO have begun to blur the lines of separation, these both have been somewhat combined, naturally.

As opposed to traditional, and often ineffective, outreach methods – emails or contact submissions – a more modern approach is connecting with target audiences via social. By creating these social relationships, you’ll not only know which of your followers to send your content to, but you also enhance the probability of them sharing and reposting it. While social links do not carry the same link juice that highly-reputable sites do, it does increase your content’s overall exposure. This increases the chance of reaching other industry influencers and succeeds in showing you’re a leader in your industry.

Since it was shared by their peers, those influencers are more likely to share it on their site or blog. It also shows that you care when your audience engages with you and you care about building relationships with them.

4. Your Social Audience Helps Shape Your Content

SEO and content marketing are not all about just search trends, volume, and other metrics. It also has to do with actually producing content your audience gives cares about. Sure, you could look at historical data to see what has traditionally performed well (or not so well) to develop your content. But, that will always leave you one step behind if this is the ONLY method you use.

You need NEW content, too.

With social media, you should stay up with the latest trends, events, and news, as well as monitor the type of content your audience is interested in. On top of this, you can evaluate what’s working or not working for your competitors. This information will allow you to craft content that is timely, meaningful, and strategic to your users. In doing so, you’ll see engagement increase (comments, sharing, and contact submissions) and you’ll appear higher in the rankings for producing fresh, relevant content.

One simple way to view trending topics is to see what’s trending on Twitter.

5. Get Engaged To Your Community With Social & Local SEO

Businesses, especially small ones, can not succeed without the support of their community. This applies to the digital landscape, as well. In terms of SEO, the impact of your local area has never been greater. Major search engine’s – such as Google’s and Bing’s – algorithms have shifted towards more personalized results with a heavy emphasis on locality.

Aside from maintaining an accurate profile within the local listings, it is also extremely beneficial for your business to produce both localized content and social posts. Create blogs and other web pages that speak directly to your local audience. Then, utilize social media to disseminate it to local businesses and influencers (news reporters, bloggers, or those active in the community). This will increase not only the local discussion around your business but also the likelihood of earning local links. All of these signals will improve your ranking position within the organic search results.

The image below shows a blog post from a staple restaurant in West Reading, Pa, Say Cheese!, and a fellow DaBrian Marketing client. The blog highlights the restaurant, it’s history, future plans, and the announcement of their new website.

Tying Your Efforts Together

Your SEO and social media efforts need to be tied together to maximize efficiency. But, why stop there? For your digital marketing plan to be truly effective, you need to make sure all of your efforts are tied together. This includes your PPC (Pay per Click) advertising, web design, content marketing, email marketing, strategy, and your overall digital brand, in addition to SEO and social media. Your mindset needs to shift from different departments working independently to your business functioning collectively as a team, allowing to not let anything fall through the cracks.