One way to connect prospects to your cause is to incorporate storytelling into your nonprofit content strategy.
One of the most effective forms of digital marketing in the nonprofit space today is storytelling. Storytelling is the process of creating brand awareness through the use of a narrative. For nonprofits to leverage storytelling to full capacity, it is key that the stories being shared are authentic and fully represent the mission, values, and goals of your nonprofit organization. Telling authentic stories online about your nonprofit can create a buzz, and add value to your nonprofit's online campaigns. Incorporating storytelling into your nonprofit content strategy can take your online reachability to new heights. Here are five tips for creating an effective content marketing campaign that incorporates storytelling.
Leverage Content Marketing to Share Stories that Bring People Together
For storytelling to be effective your nonprofit needs to create content that people want to engage with, stand behind, and share with their online communities. Content should aim to spark an emotional connection with your nonprofit's target audience. There are many ways that your organization can create this type of connection. Here are just a few.
Incorporate Imagery into Your Nonprofit Content Strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute content with visuals gets 94% more views than content without visuals. This statistic alone makes it easy to understand that effective visuals are vital to the success of your storytelling campaign.
Create Compelling Taglines to Drive Content Engagement
One of the easiest ways to increase engagement, spark curiosity, and optimize campaign success is by creating a compelling content tagline. Your content tagline should truthfully deliver a clear, and concise brand message to your target audience. Keep in mind that the optimal tagline should be seven words or fewer so it is important to brainstorm what snippet of information will make the biggest impact. Here are a few additional tips for creating an effective tagline to enhance your nonprofit content strategy:
- Test the success rate of different taglines throughout a content piece lifecycle
- Understand your target audience fully, and see what content they have shared in the past
- Understand the objective when brainstorming taglines for storytelling content
- Demonstrate value to your target audience
Develop and Share Content that Inspires
Everyone enjoys reading, engaging with, and sharing content that inspires them. Nonprofits have the unique ability to create inspiration daily through the people they serve, and the individuals who serve them. Make sure that your nonprofit is leveraging success stories online. Focus some of your content strategy on case studies that demonstrate community impact. By doing so you have instantly created content that individuals within the community can relate with.
Here is an example of a case study we recently did on Habitat for Humanity’s impact in Collier County.
Content Should Initiate an Action
Your nonprofit content should initiate some kind of action from your target audience, and serve a purpose in the overall goal of your organization’s marketing strategy. Understanding what the goal is of your content will help you create better and more strategic calls to action. A few things to remember when creating your content call to action are:
- Your call to action should be action-oriented
- Make your call to action brief and the point
- Call to action should be easy to find and stand out from the content copy
- Your call to action should be easy to understand
- Make your call to action unique to stand out from the crowd
- Create a sense of urgency in your call to action
Share, Share, and Share Some more!
As I mentioned earlier in this blog post your nonprofit’s impact on the community should be the primary focus of your content marketing strategy. Sharing stories that reach the emotions of your target audience will inspire them to connect, engage, share, and become involved in your organization’s mission. Take your time to create compelling content, optimize taglines, and ad imagery that draws attention. Don’t forget to stretch your content across platforms. Here are a few great places you may want to share content:
- Medium
- Google Plus
- inbound.org
- Slideshare
Takeaways
The right storytelling can positively impact your nonprofit content strategy. Focusing on messaging that inspires your target audience will help your nonprofit organization increase the reachability of your content.
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