Guest post by Anne Stefanyk, Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios
For both businesses and nonprofits, modern marketing thrives through multiple channels. A prospective donor sees an ad for your nonprofit’s campaign on social media, clicks the link to your website, then signs up for your email newsletter, eventually leading them to donate. This is a common example of how nonprofit organizations leverage multichannel marketing to raise funds and serve their communities.
To use multichannel marketing successfully, however, you need to take the time to align your strategies for each channel. Specifically, as popular places where new supporters learn about your organization, pay attention to your web design and social media strategy. If you need help aligning your web content with your social, use these six tips:
- Keep branding consistent throughout all content
- Use hashtags in website copy
- Embed social media connections directly into your website
- Promote your website in educational posts
- Repurpose content on other channels
- Use data to improve your strategy
The best nonprofit websites work in conjunction with other digital marketing channels, especially social media content. Focus on maintaining consistent messaging, staying on trend, and making sure your outflow content matches your social sharing needs. We’ll dive into how with these tips.
1. Keep branding consistent throughout all content
The first step to bringing your website and social media content together is to create a consistent brand. When your nonprofit’s brand is cohesive and well-defined, you’ll ensure both long-standing and new supporters immediately recognize content on your organization’s social media, blog, and email.
Start by defining your brand voice and brand aesthetic, which need to work to support each other:
- Brand voice: Voice refers to your writing style, tone, and specific words you use frequently within your marketing copy. To ensure consistency, establish brand voice guidelines for all communications, including social media posts, your mission statement, and even fundraising event descriptions.
- Brand aesthetic: Your aesthetic is the look and feel of your marketing content, made up of color choices, website layout, graphic style, and more. Having a cohesive aesthetic across all digital channels is critical for increasing your nonprofit’s brand recognition and building donors’ relationships with your brand.
If you’re unsure of how to define your brand voice and aesthetic, consider your audience and the causes you support. For instance, if your nonprofit focuses on helping children, you might have a more exuberant and friendly tone or use bright colors as opposed to neutral ones.
2. Use hashtags in website copy
A simple way to align your web design and social media content is to consider the hashtags you use on social media and determine which would be relevant to add to the content on your website.
For instance, let’s say your organization often uses the hashtag #FoodForAll to represent your mission of providing equal access to food within your community. You use this hashtag whenever you post on Instagram, send a Tweet, or tag a supporter in a status. Your supporters use it within their own content about your organization. You might even sell merchandise sporting the hashtag.
If it makes sense for your brand, using this hashtag in your website copy can be compelling. Not only does it connect your social media supporters to another platform, but incorporating key hashtags can:
- Re-emphasize your organization’s mission
- Provide new supporters with an easy way to find your other online content
- Show current supporters a convenient way to refer to your nonprofit on social media
You can also align your brand with widespread hashtags like #GivingTuesday or #NationalPetDay to join broader online conversations. Just make sure that your content is still relevant to your audience. Don’t try to force your organization to capitalize on #DonutDay if it isn’t applicable to your brand.
3. Embed social media connections directly into your website
One of the most straightforward ways to lead your website visitors to your social media content is to provide connections directly by embedding links in your website. In your nonprofit’s CMS, consider adding:
- Button icons within your website menu, header, or footer. As soon as a user clicks on a social media icon, they’ll be taken to your nonprofit’s profile on the appropriate web page or app.
- Social media feeds displaying real-time content from your nonprofit’s accounts. For example, you might embed your Twitter feed into your website’s homepage to show your latest posts and tweets directly to your site visitors. If they click on a particular tweet to engage with it, it’ll send them to the right web page or app.
- CTAs in high-engagement website areas. Use text and button CTAs that link to your social media accounts in areas where you think that users are most motivated to click through. For instance, include a CTA to share a donation on Facebook right after a donor makes a gift.
To make this process easier, use an intuitive CMS that makes embedding social media links simple. If you’re considering choosing a new CMS, research options that best fit your nonprofit’s budget and design needs. Consult resources like Kanopi’s comparison of Drupal and WordPress, which provides an analysis of two popular options in terms of accessibility, ease of use, and other important factors.
4. Promote your website in educational posts
It’s critical for cohesion that you make it easy for both site visitors and social media followers to find links to the other platform.
On the social media side, this doesn’t mean just posting a story asking people to visit your site. Constantly posting ads can work against you. Instead, find a balance between promotional and non-promotional content by following the 80/20 rule: 80% of your social content should be informative, and only 20% should be promotional.
To avoid directly promoting your website, include it within educational social media content. For example, you can:
- Post informational content and point users to your website for additional information.
- Ask social media followers to perform actions on your website like filling out a survey.
- Share blog posts from your website that discuss current events relevant to your cause.
If you want to convert your social media followers into lifelong donors, you need to provide informational resources that matter to them. Ensure content on your website is relevant and useful for supporters before promoting it on social media.
5. Repurpose content on other channels
Did you know you can connect your marketing channels and gain more value from the work you’ve put into content creation by repurposing content from one platform to another?
This doesn’t mean posting entire articles from your blog on Facebook or Instagram. Rather, it means pulling especially valuable parts of your content from one platform and highlighting them on another to increase visibility and engagement. Here are just a few of the creative ways you can do this:
- Include actionable tips from blog articles in text-based social media posts.
- Make a particularly powerful statistic or quote from a blog post into a branded graphic to share on social media.
- Turn a blog post into a branded downloadable resource and promote this link within your social media posts.
- Create an infographic to visually outline content from a blog post.
- Turn a popular series of blog posts into a video series that you post periodically on your stories.
To successfully reach your online donors, save time, and better align your different channels’ strategies, keep each outlet’s specific medium nuances in mind when repurposing content. Longer, text-based content is typically more suited to Facebook, while short-form videos perform better on TikTok and Instagram.
6. Use data to improve your strategy
Once you’ve implemented various strategies to align your social media and website content, the final, ongoing step is to consistently evaluate their success.
Data from your website and social media analytics can help you measure effectiveness, optimize future content, and create a more cohesive digital strategy. To capture and learn from the right data, choose key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your success on each platform. Some good KPI options for marketing include:
- Website total sessions
- Average site session duration
- Website pageviews
- Website organic and referral traffic
- Social media total engagements
- New social media leads
If you notice that a KPI is faltering, it’s a good indicator that the strategy needs improving. For example, if an important landing page’s pageviews are low, Double the Donation’s marketing guide suggests refreshing the page with new content to ensure it’s relevant to your audience.
Paying attention to different KPIs for each platform will also help you align your content. Your Twitter audience might be interested in topics that your website audience isn’t. With concrete data, you can better determine how supporters engage with your nonprofit’s content on different platforms and pivot strategies accordingly.
Your nonprofit’s marketing strategy has multiple moving parts that can be difficult to juggle the larger your engagements become. Creating a cohesive digital strategy across channels can help you better target key audiences and create engaging content that holds supporters’ attention in the long run.
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions. Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.