8 Ways Content Can Support Your Marketing

Content is essential to support your marketing. When you create content consistently it helps you generate leads, reinforce yourself as a knowledge expert, support your fundraising efforts and more.  Understanding all the benefits of content can make it easier to prioritize it as a marketing activity.

What is content anyways?

There are really two forms of content that you’ll create, short form and long form.

Long form content includes things like YouTube videos, podcast episodes, blog posts. Short form content includes social media posts, video clips, email newsletters, infographics.

Having a content strategy doesn’t mean you have to make use of all the different types of content. Instead, think about what you can create consistently. You might feel more comfortable writing or recoding audio. Maybe you feel your best on video! Then utilize the short form content to promote on all the channels you are active on.

If you’re on the fence about how a content strategy could help your business than this blog post is for you!

Reinforcing Your Brand

Your content can showcase your organizations values, goals and reinforce messaging. It allows you to connect with your audience in a way that can distinguish you from your competitor and share your unique voice.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • updates on your impact.
  • staff announcements or behind the scenes content.

Increase your Visibility

The more content you create the better idea search engines have about your organization and who you serve. This helps them figure out what results are best suited for the searches people make. The more information on your website the easier it is and the better it is. 

It all starts with creating an search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that is alignment with your content strategy. It doesn’t have complex, just get started.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • content ideas you get from keyword research.
  • basic information on what your organization does.

Building Credibility

Sharing content regularly shows people that you are an authority in your space. It allows people to get to know you and why you are the person they should trust to do this work. By sharing different elements of what you do you’ll allow people to dive deeper into your organization and truly understand your area of expertise.

Building credibility helps you build trust with those that might need to utilize your services and/or people that are thinking about donating to your organization.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • articles written by the experts on your staff.
  • content from your community on what it’s like to work with you.

Generating Leads

A lead can be a lot of different things. It could be someone reaching out to have a conversation about being a donor, a new vendor to help you lower your prices, someone utilizing your services, email newsletter signups, etc. Think about the leads you need to generate and create content around that.

How you capture those leads comes from the calls-to-action you include on that post as well as the content topics.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • donor spotlights.
  • impact stories.

Nurturing Leads

Building relationships is the cornerstone of fundraising. While the bulk of it happens offline in personal conversations, your content can be a big support in this.

People will often go to your website to dive deeper and get more information. They will also go there to get additional questions answered that they maybe forgot to ask when they were with you. Having information there for your leads to consume can help you close more deals.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • responses to your most commonly asked questions.
  • responses to your most common objections.

Supporting Donor Retention

Once someone has given to you the next step is to get that second (and third and fourth) gift. Your content can reinforce the reasons why they gave in the first place. Because you’ll use that content to share on all your social channels and your email marketing, this content will show up for your donors regularly and keep you top of mind.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

  • stories from your community and testimonials.
  • impact that your donors have inspired.

Encouraging Social Sharing

You go through a lot of effort to create your content. So let’s make it sharable and easy for people to do so. That will increase your visibility and exposure. All of the topics listed above are great for social sharing. There are lots of ways you can encourage this. 

  • make it easy with social share buttons on your posts.
  • use calls-to-action to encourage sharing – you get what you ask for!
  • create infographics that provide value.

Provide More Information About Your Audience

The more content you create, the more information you’ll gather. You’ll be able to see what topics your audience likes the most, what gets them to convert, and who they are. Make sure you have Google Analytics and other data trackers on your website so you can glean the info you need to make future decision.

Conclusion

Content can help support all areas of your organization with a little thought and care! By thinking about what you need your content to do first and then creating it can really make all the difference.

 

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