Source: Mashable Business by Frank Barry
These days, non-profits are strategizing online content to help connect with the right web audiences. The concept of creating content to engage with your audience isn’t new, especially in the non-profit world, but it is becoming more critical to creating online success.
Essentially, great content gets into people’s hearts and inspires action, says content marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi in a blog post.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), “content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
A report by industry analyst Rebecca Lieb for Altimeter states that content marketing is the up and coming way to grab people’s attention online — something every non-profit and for-profit organization is trying to accomplish.
CMI research backs Altimeter’s findings: 60% of businesses plan to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months — up from roughly 50% in the previous year.
Content Marketing and Your Non-Profit
If you think about it, you’ll quickly realize that non-profits have been using this type of marketing for years.
Content marketing products take the form of annual reports, custom magazines, print or online newsletters, blog posts, articles, success stories, whitepapers, webcasts/webinars, podcasts, video, in-person events, ebooks, research reports and email.
If you’re involved in a non-profit, you likely just said to yourself “we do that” at least three or four times, right? But it’s not just about doing content marketing; it’s about doing it well.
Why Should My Non-Profit Care About Content Marketing?
To help answer that question, let’s look at what’s happening in the business world, according to CMI.
- Nine out of ten organizations use content marketing.
- Marketers, on average, spend over a quarter of their marketing budgets on content marketing.
- 60% of businesses indicate they plan to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months – up 9% from the previous year.
On average, B2B marketers employ eight different content marketing tactics to achieve their goals.
When you boil it all down, you should care about content marketing because your partners and potential constituents demand that you do — it’s how they’ll connect with you online. If you want to reach people in this ever-changing, online and social world, you’ll need great content.
5 Ideas to Help Your Non-Profit Get Started With Content Marketing