Top 5 Marketing Tips for Building Momentum During Summer

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Guest Post Written By: William Henry, Feathr Content Marketing Manager

Summer is creeping up on us fast. I hope you’ve set aside time for some well-deserved R&R. But with those upcoming vacations, you don’t want your marketing initiatives to unplug too. What are the top five marketing tips for building momentum during the summer, even while you’re sitting at the beach? Keep reading to find out.

Aidan Augustin, the president and co-founder of Feathr, joined Dana for a webinar on this exact question. If you weren’t able to join us, no worries, you can check out the replay below. It’s an hour well spent.

But if you’re looking for a quick recap, just keep reading. Be warned though, we had some amazing, hard-hitting questions pop up during the conversation that we won’t dive into here.

 

0: Start advertising (online)

I know this makes it six tips, but let’s think of this one as a freebie! “If you haven’t started advertising online, I highly recommend you start today,” says Aidan. Organic reach has been decreasing over the past few years, so it’s prime time to supplement your organic social and email marketing campaigns with digital advertising. 

Adults in the U.S. spend about eight hours online every day. To get in front of new donors, you need to bring your marketing campaigns to where your future supporters, volunteers, and donors are.

And if that isn’t enough of a reason, online giving grew 10x faster than any other form of giving. So it’s the perfect time to promote your organization’s presence through digital advertising!

1: Nurture your website visitors with retargeting ads

When people visit your website, you have the opportunity to follow up with them through retargeting ads. With the right software tools, you can know who landed on your page when, and there’s no guesswork involved in who you should show ads to.

You can have ads highlighting your next event for visitors who landed on your event page or who attended the previous year. Another set of ads can talk about volunteering to people who went to the volunteer page or for anyone at your local college (this is called geofencing, and we’ll talk about it more later). 

It’s amazing how much information you have just from looking at website visitors’ behaviors. Don’t let that precious data go to waste!

2: Retarget ads to your “shopping cart abandoners”

There’s a reason why this is the first type of retargeting campaign Aidan highlighted: “By far the most bang for your buck” he says.

This is mostly borrowed from the retail world. Someone gets all the way to the payment page, but they end up bouncing. They definitely want that dress or book or pair of shoes, but something kept them from clicking the order button.

The equivalent for nonprofits is a donor abandonment campaign. This person cares about your mission enough to get all the way to the donation page, but something kept them from clicking submit. It could be that the phone rang or maybe they left their wallet in another room. Either way, all they need is a simple reminder of where they left off.

Dana agrees and shared via the chat: “THIS is a massive opportunity for nonprofits.” 

3: Use “CRM retargeting” to reach your email lists with ads

This is a newer technology that allows you to link lists of emails to IP addresses, serving ads to specific lists of contacts. Because this is a newer type of ad campaign, different platforms call it different things: customer match, matched audiences, custom audiences. But you’ll usually hear us call it email mapping. 

You may have a list of newsletter unsubscribers, and you had no idea that there was anything you could do with it still. I really hope I’m not mentioning this after you already tossed it out. But even though that group asked you not to send emails, it doesn’t mean they don’t care about your mission — they just asked to stop receiving emails. This is a particularly good group to follow up with ads with.

Again, even though email is in the name, don’t be deceived, there isn’t a single email sent! But this can be a great one-two punch if you run it parallel with a direct email campaign. Email open rates skyrocketed early in the pandemic, but they’ve been in a steady decline since.

4: Geofence ads to the places your donors live, work, and play

This is another relatively new technology. We’ve all become accustomed to GPS, and I know that I couldn’t get anywhere without Google Maps, but now that same technology can be used in your next ad campaign.

Geofencing campaigns target people based on their location. GPS, RFID, and Wi-Fi gives location data that can then be used to find new audiences for your nonprofit. Though this sounds a little frightening, all of this data is anonymized, so you won’t have lists of names and emails, but you can send ads to people who have been in the places you want to advertise.

If you’re a nonprofit looking for volunteers, the local college may be a good place to target. If you’re looking for high-income individuals, the nicest neighborhood or the local country club might be where you want to begin. Below are some possible locations where you can find your next volunteer or donor:

• Country clubs, yacht clubs, golf courses
• Expensive neighborhoods
• Churches and places of worship
• Festivals, concerts, sporting events
• University campuses
• Other nonprofits’ fundraisers!

5: Arrange campaigns in a marketing funnel

Last but not least, make sure that all of your campaigns are aligned with your overall goals. The proverbial line, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” is especially true when it comes to marketing campaigns.

If your goal is more conversions, you don’t want to primarily run geofencing or lookalike campaigns. 

And timing is key too. Don’t run a geofencing campaign after your cart abandonment campaigns; you’ll end up with people picking up interest too little too late. Rather, use the geofencing to find new people who are interested and then follow up with those people later with a donation abandonment campaign — that is if they make it that far without donating.

Learn more about advertising solutions for your nonprofit

One of the best parts about these campaigns is that you can set these up and have them running while you’re far away at the beach. If this is the first time hearing about nonprofit ad campaigns, we understand that it takes time to find the right solution for you. Not every organization is the same, so every marketing campaign shouldn’t look the same either.

Please stay tuned to Dana’s newsletter where she gives nonprofits the information they need to transform their online experience and gain new donors. And check out Feathr’s marketing software solutions for nonprofits if you’re ready to jump in today!