How do you know when your non profit is ready to run paid ads?
Paid ads are sometimes approached as a bit of a fix-all solution when you feel like nothing else is working. But without getting your foundations in a good place first, paid campaigns can end up costing you a lot of money without much to show for it. Make sure you've sorted out these five areas before you start putting your precious budget behind a paid campaign...
Your brand identity. Being really clear on who you are, why you do what you do, and what sets you apart (and making all those things clear through your comms) is absolutely key to being able to talk to and convert more people to supporting your cause. If you look and sound like everyone else, you won't attract the people who would benefit from a relationship with your non profit.
Your ideal supporter. Remember, if you try to talk to everyone, you end up talking to no-one! Really getting to grips with who your ideal supporter is - not just their age, gender and location but what drives them, the challenges they face and why they would benefit from knowing more about you - means that whenever you're creating social content, blogs, newsletters etc, you can write with that one person in mind, and draw on all the things you already know they value and are interested in. This means that when it comes to paid ads, your targeting and messaging become 100% easier because you know exactly who you want to talk to.
Your organic social media. The channels you focus on should be determined by your ideal supporter and where they spend their time. For instance, if they are predominantly on Instagram, spending loads of your time trying to reach them on LinkedIn isn't the best use of that time (although I do think non profit marketers should spend more time on LinkedIn as themselves, and here's why). Your organic activities help your non profit to reach new audiences and to nurture your existing community, and it's also a great place to test messaging, topics and creative formats. Once you have a clear idea of what your audience responds best to, you're then ahead of the game when it comes to putting budget behind that winning formula.
Your path to donation. You can run a brilliant campaign with a high click through rate, but if people looking to donate hit a website that's hard to navigate and takes ages to load, a payment system that's glitchy and a form with a bunch of unnecessary fields to fill in, you're going to lose them. Ironing out all these creases ahead of time will save you money in the long run. Testing this can be as simple as asking a few people outside your organisation to visit your website and try to make a donation, and talking to them about any stumbling blocks they came across.
Your best converting asset. Paid ads amplify what is already working well, so being really clear on what you already have that's converting prospects into supporters efficiently will come in extremely useful. If, for instance, your newsletter has a high conversion rate, running a paid ad campaign to increase subscriber numbers will help you make the most of something that is already delivering. Similarly, if your organic channels have great engagement and that engagement is translating well into donations, a follower campaign would help you boost those numbers.
Being really clear on these five will save you a lot of time and money in the long-run, so make sure you're feeling confident in all of these before you start putting money behind your campaigns. I'd love to hear how you get on so do drop me a message on LinkedIn if you hit any stumbling blocks (or if you're smashing it - I love hearing that too!).