How zero-click content can help you reach new supporters
If your focus has been exclusively on asking for donations via your organic and paid social media, you might have overlooked the important role that zero-click content plays. Here's why you should think about including it in your marketing strategy.
Zero-click content is content that doesn't seek to drive your audience to your website (or anywhere else) to find out more. It's content that offers up a titbit of information, a fact or a story in its entirety, leaving the reader with value or a message but with very minimal effort having been expended on their part. Not taking people off the social channel you're using is key here - if the viewer started on Facebook, for instance, they must remain on Facebook throughout the interaction.
In practice, this can be any format of social media content, it just shouldn't ask the viewer to do anything other than watch or read it. In terms of paid social media, these are the ads you run top-of-funnel to start introducing yourself to new audiences and building up pots of people to retarget.
What use is that? you may ask, no-one will donate without getting to my website. I should send them there straight away!
Well, zero-click content serves a couple of purposes:
It increases brand awareness, which is especially important if you're looking to reach new audiences. There are instances where people who've never engaged with you previously will donate - like disaster relief campaigns where a broad awareness of the situation already exists - but in general the public need to get to know, like and trust you before they will feel compelled to support you financially. Feeding them little snippets of what you do and why it matters so much gently starts that know, like, trust process.
It keeps you front of mind. Even your most ardent supporters have busy, distracting lives. Regularly seeing updates from your non profit without needing to click anywhere to find out more is a low-impact way of reminding them why they care.
It increases your reach. As you can see from this breakdown from SparkToro, 82% of the major web platforms have algorithms that favour native content - which means that they are likely to show your content to more people if you're not trying to take those people away from their platforms, and therefore from consuming more content.
So, if your goal for 2023 is reaching new audiences and converting them into supporters, zero-click content has its part to play in both your organic and paid media strategies.