Staying relevant in a fast-paced online world can be a challenge for any company or brand, and it’s even more difficult for an NGO. The social sector has plenty of causes looking for help and positioning your NGO over the rest can take a lot of planning and time in executing a strategy that brings results.
Here is a list of five tips that you can use to improve the reach of your content, decrease your learning curve, and get the results you want from your campaigns.
#1 Take Note of Trends
Staying relevant in the social space is all about watching what your target audience is talking about and then engaging in the conversation. You should be well aware of building trends in your niche and how you can take advantage of them to further your message and cause of your organization. Rather than try to create your hashtags, ride out the current trending hashtags and capture more attention for your content. You can use tools like ‘Websta’ to check for trending hashtags in your niche and then create your content around those tags.
#2 Improve Reach with the Shock Factor
The use of the shock factor in content for NGO social platforms is a hot debate. There are those that say that it reduces the overall impact of the message, desensitizes the audience to the message, and creates a negative image and persona around the NGO. At the same time, using shocking imagery in your content can be very effective if used sparingly. Throwing in a shocking image to increase the impact of your message and drive higher engagement rates is acceptable every now and again.
#3 Understand Your Audience
You need to know your audience. Start this exercise by doing a full audit of who is following you on your social platforms. Make sure that you are following all the top industry influencers and identify them by using a tool like ‘Buzzsumo’ to identify them and the most shared content online. Once you understand what your audience is talking about and what they enjoy consuming, you are ready to create your content based on the context of the conversation.
#4 Create Impact with Infographics
Increase the visual impact of your content through the use of infographics in your posts to your social accounts. Infographics are an excellent way to tie together interesting statistics and facts with visually compelling images to create outstanding content about topics you need to discuss such as the benefits of monthly giving to charity. Instead of droning on in a long post filled with bullet points and paragraphs of words, an infographic ties the important points to pictures that are relevant to the topics discussed. Infographics work well on all of the social platforms, and they drive high rates of user engagement.
#5 Increase Your Online Presence
Search engines place a lot of value on your social media presence. Social media marketing should be used alongside traditional SEO tactics to increase the visibility of your company or brand online and drive user conversion to your website. If you do not have the time to execute the strategy yourself, then consider working with professionals that understand the nature of the social environment and have experience in conducting successful online marketing campaigns. They should be able to provide you with a comprehensive strategy and plan, complete with milestones and targets that they intend to meet.
In Closing
Creating an effective marketing strategy for your NGO is not as challenging as you think. With an understanding of your audience and their habits of consuming content, you can make interesting posts that drive engagement across all of your platforms. Use the tools and software you need to automate your scheduling and research and then work with professionals to bring the whole strategy together and execute it.
The success of your strategy depends on your ability to engage with the buzz that you create and keep the conversation going for as long as possible. Every post you make should always carry through the theme of your NGO’s mission. When your posting is consistent with the values and mission of your cause, you will create compelling content that is more likely to be shared and have the chance of going viral, where millions of targeted prospects could see it.