In response to a request for #NPMC Twitter chat topics this month, our friends at the Community Media Workshop suggested content marketing. And when I asked community members on Twitter for their content marketing questions, what emerged was a need to discuss content marketing strategy.

It seems safe to say that content marketing has moved past the ‘buzzword’ status. In fact, as Suzanne Hallsworth highlighted in her research review earlier this year, the majority of nonprofits are using content marketing, and most nonprofits are producing more content than they were a year ago.

If content marketing is becoming an accepted practice, we need to move past trial and experimentation and look at it more strategically. According to the same research mentioned above from Blackbaud and the Content Marketing Institute, nonprofits using content marketing effectively have a content marketing strategy in place and spend 30% of their budget on content marketing.

 

Building a nonprofit content marketing strategy: the questions

What questions should we answer about our content marketing in order to proceed strategically? Here are some examples to start:

  • For whom are you designing and creating the content?
  • What stories will you tell? What information will you provide?
  • Who will lead content development?
  • How will you write, design and otherwise produce content? What resources and tools are available for your content marketing?

What are your content marketing goals? For example:

  • Brand awareness
  • Fundraising
  • Volunteer recruitment
  • Community engagement
  • Website traffic
  • Constituent loyalty or retention

How do you choose your media or vehicles for delivering content? For example:

  • Blogs
  • Video
  • Audio/podcasts
  • Social media
  • Infographics
  • Graphics and photography
  • Webinars

How are you measuring impact/effectiveness/success? For example:

  • Increased fundraising
  • Website traffic
  • Social media engagement
  • Increased volunteerism
  • More email subscribers
  • Increased number of program participants

 

Join the content marketing conversation during the April #NPMC Chat

Have you been asking these questions in your own nonprofit content marketing work? Let’s explore some of them together to exchange ideas, insights and inspire each other to start building our content marketing strategies.

Bring your content marketing questions and experiences to the #NPMC chat on Thursday, April 24, 2014 at 1:00 p.m. ET.

 

Note: we had such immense interest in the subject of content marketing, we’re going to revisit the topic again in May. This month, we’ll focus on strategy, in May, we’ll chat about keeping up with content production.

 

Marlene Oliveira

Marlene Oliveira

Communications advisor and copywriter at moflow
Marlene Oliveira is communications consultant and copywriter at moflow and founder of the Nonprofit MarCommunity blog. Having worked in the nonprofit sector since 1999, Marlene specializes in working with capacity building and grant-making organizations, advising on communications strategy, and writing stories and other content.
Marlene Oliveira

@mo_flow

Marlene Oliveira