Imagine painting a few single strokes and filling a museum to see your work. Museums are just one of many nonprofits seeking your B2B services. While you may not be the next Rothko, businesses selling their services to NPOs have an opportunity to fill their funnel to capacity by going beyond content marketing.
Nonprofit B2B inbound marketing is here, and prospering. What this means for your business targeting nonprofits is that your executive director level audiences no longer want their attention bought––they want it earned. This means nonprofit lead generation strategies need to be reimagined across the sector to better meet the needs of the nonprofits you are targeting.
Nonprofits need your help and are continuing to outsource services and upgrade their systems to succeed. The time is now to grow your market share as the following services are in ever evolving demand by NPOs.
Leading Nonprofit Sector Business Needs
We have outlined the five key strategies necessary to effectively capture market share amongst nonprofits in your sector.
1) COMPEL EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS WITH CONTENT
Compelling content plays a substantial role in generating nonprofit leads. This includes the tools used to generate traffic, such as your blog, SEO, PPC, and social platforms. Marketers reported that demand for content creation increased by over 70.94% in the past year and has continued doing so. Creating compelling content is your key to establishing yourself as the go-to, educational leader that nonprofit directors are searching for.
This article will focus primarily on the steps necessary to generate awareness, nurture leads and close NPOs. Content is king throughout the NPO sales funnel, but you need to go beyond the basics. As you begin to implement these inbound marketing strategies you will be quick to learn why companies that implement content marketing into their inbound initiatives generate 67% more leads per month than those who simply use content marketing alone.
2) THE ART OF LEAD CAPTURE
Odds are that 50% of your site’s visitors will not return to your website if you do not adequately capture some bit of information from them. A working email address is the best thing a marketer can ask for here, but executive directors are not always willing to give this kind of personal information up. Call-to-action buttons like “Sign up here” have practically become synonymous with “We will senselessly spam you”, which is why marketers targeting nonprofit need to find new ways to obtain this information.
Working with the top nonprofits around the globe, two and a half rules of thumb for obtaining executive director level visitors’ information are:
2.5 as every stage of the marketing funnel must be valuable in and of itself.
Hence, it is time marketers start gradually breaking down the walls that potential NPO buyers have put up to block spamming and cold calling. Buying or renting an email list in itself will not be very effective. You need to nurture your leads down the funnel, not clutter the top of it with unwarranted email blasts.
By leveraging new, mutually-beneficial opt-in methods to acquire information. The best marketing method for this technique of “Giving before the Get” includes using lead magnets, such as “in-depth sector reports” download offerings in the lead capture form embedded in your blog content.
The more useful information you can provide, the more information your nonprofit decision maker will be willing to give up and ultimately ask to be contacted. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and dig a little deeper into lead-gen magnets.
3) CONVERT CAUSES WITH LEAD GENERATION MAGNETS
A successful NP client lifecycle requires optimizing the process for converting your website visitors into leads. Unfortunately, a hole exists between the traffic-gen phase and the lead-gen phase that often results in "once only" visitors who avoid your blatant attempts to hijack their information and never hear from you again.
Lead-Gen magnets are inbound marketing tools that provide value for your visitors (executive directors, board members, and high level NPO decision makers) in exchange for their contact information. Successful businesses targeting nonprofits use lead magnets such as email opt-ins, subscriptions, and social media follows to fish for some sign of interest from their site’s visitors. The goal of this is to receive permission from visitors to follow up. Some examples of lead magnets to inspire nonprofit engagement include free and downloadable:
These free-of-charge educational tools will confide your NP visitors in your offering, allowing you to obtain their email address and educate them on your business through your gated landing pages.
4) CAPTURE CHARITIES WITH GATED LANDING PAGES
Another huge asset to your business when trying to convert NP director level visitors into leads are gated landing pages. This includes any webpage that a visitor lands on after clicking on an ad, social post or other digital marketing elements. It is also important to note that gsted-landing pages exist separately from your company’s site, and typically utilized as a tool for a each markeing workflow campaign.
Gated-Landing pages serve the purpose of both capturing leads and warming-up potential nonprofit customers. Both of these are essential steps before moving an NP customer further down your specific sales funnels. As such, there are two kinds of gated landing pages:
A) Lead Gen Gated Landing Page
Lead generation landing pages are used to capture a user/company’s information in exchange for something. This relates back to the concept discussed earlier, of “giving before we ask”.
B) Click-Thru Gated Landing Page
Click-Thru landing pages are used to attract the visitor to the specific product or service that you are trying to sell. The goal is to educate your visitor with enough information that they proceed to make a purchase.
Landing pages have one primary call-to-action in mind. Instead of overwhelming your audiences with info regarding your business and all the services / products you offer, it is critical that you fine tune the focus to one specific objective/goal in mind. Be sure to get rid of all that excess information that is not really essential to the campaign and your audiences needs, and be sure to include only one form or call-to-action link for the nonprofit decision makers to utilize.
The most important element of your gated landing page is that it delivers on the promise that your ad source or social post made. If your ad says “Nonprofits get 50% off donation software here….”, you need to reassure the audience as soon as possible on your gated landing page that you will deliver that promise.
An effective way to do execute this is to create the call-to-action on your call-to-action, ad source or social post the same as the headline on your landing page. Another option is to make sure the font, coloring, and images used in your ad are duplicated your landing page to some degree.
5) CLOSE NPOs WITH LEAD-GEN SCORING
Lead-Gen scoring is a component of marketing automation software that helps prioritize your nonprofit organization leads according to their levels of engagement with your inbound marketing content and ultimately help you ascertain what directors and decision makers are ready to buy.
It will also help you identify what they are most interested in if setup correctly. This inbound automation technique is used to quantify engagements that your NPO prospects have with your content by assigning points for different types of interactions. An example of the different types of engagements and their point values might look like this:
Amazingly, 79% of B2B marketers have not established a lead scoring strategy. Lead scoring provides your business with real-time feedback on how responsive your nonprofit leads are to your marketing efforts. It can also indicate what nonprofits are ready to purchase from you, but haven’t yet been in contact with you.
This point-based approach to recognizing and analyzing a nonprofit’s hottest leads will save your business time and money when reaching your target NP sector and capitalizing on sales opportunities. With your hottest leads identified, your business can communicate with these leads confidently knowing that these nonprofits are already aware of and interested in your business.
IN CONCUSION- GO INBOUND
Lead generation plays a role in every business’s nonprofit targeting and marketing strategy. Consider the amount of business’s sites you have visited since the genesis of the world wide web that you will never return to again. Not only did those businesses fail to capture your attention at that given time, but they failed to reconnect with you in the future. Nonprofits decision makers have limited time and bandwidth. Don't waste it, earn it.
Start by prioritizing the different elements of your inbound marketing strategy so that a foundation is in place for you to build an efficient and effective approach to targeting foundations. No pun intended.
With your content in place, your business can begin using lead-gen magnets, lead capture, effective gated landing page design, and insightful lead scoring to maximize your nonprofit targeted lead generation rates to close more causes than your competiion.
So what can you do right now to start optimizing your lead generation strategy and gain market-share amongst nonprofits? Stay on top of other trends taking place in the nonprofit industry? Catapult your organization above the clutter of content maketing? then download our free e-book going over inbound marketing trends this year and our predictions for 2016. CLICK HERE
Joe DiGiovanni, a purpose-driven entrepreneur with a background in behavioral science and marketing technology, co-founded Tapp Network, driving digital transformation for government agencies, Fortune 100 brands, and communities seeking to scale social impact through innovation.
