{Video} Top 3 Reasons Your Nonprofit Should Create and Market Content

Good afternoon, everybody. James Hutto here and I want to talk to you about content marketing. Specifically the top three reasons your nonprofit needs to create and market content like it’s going out of style. Now, if you keep up with any of the blogs in our space, content marketing is absolutely getting worn out as a term but there’s a reason for that. The reason is it works. Period. That’s all you need to know. So, let’s talk about the top three reasons why your nonprofit needs to create and market content.

1. Creating great content is a fantastic way to increase awareness. The more content you put on your site, mainly through the blog, the more you can create awareness around the issues you’re facing or progress, setbacks, and events you’re hosting. Marketing and building awareness is just telling a good story; You need a vehicle to do that. Getting that content onto your site is brilliant for raising awareness, on top of the other ancillary benefits you achieve by creating great content.

Blogging aggressively can bring in traffic. This allows you to reach your end-goal of converting traffic into your audience, who then becomes either a member, a donor, or a volunteer. Increasing awareness is just crucial. You need a vehicle and that vehicle must be your blog.

2. Content marketing, when done correctly, equals great SEO. SEO is not just black art. There are no tricks. There are no secret tactics that we know. If you want to be successful on search engines, it’s simple as can be: Create great content that people want to link to and you will be successful at SEO. That’s where content marketing is huge. The reason you may be hearing so much about content marketing now is because, in a lot of ways, it is the new SEO. All the old link-building tactics that worked four or five years ago (even recently) Google is aggressively penalizing.

Don’t obsess about SEO for your nonprofit. Content marketing can service both of those needs, such as giving you a terrific SEO boost and helping you rank for some of these keywords that are extremely relevant to your audience. Plus, you’re increasing awareness and informing. That’s why content marketing as a whole is so beneficial. It “feeds the beast” so to speak. Content is the name of the game when it comes to telling a good story. That’s all it is. It’s all marketing, it’s telling a good story. A way you can push that out there is through your blog and ultimately the side benefit is great SEO.

3. Content marketing is fantastic because it gives you something to talk about. You’re creating content and you’re telling your story. The challenge with a lot of social media channels is you have to have something to say. What could be more interesting than telling your story or talking about the issues, successes, and setbacks you’ve had. Whatever that challenge happens to be, tell the story and push it out through all your social channels because content marketing is time intensive.

Don’t get me wrong. With all these things that we’ve talked about, it’s simple to say that content marketing is great for SEO. It’s very difficult to do because writing is tough and it takes time to produce great content. You want to leverage it as much as you possibly can through the blog to increase awareness. You’re going to get that SEO bump, then push it out through your social channels to get more eyeballs on this great content you’ve created. Do these three things and you can rock some content marketing. You don’t even need a consultant like us. Well, maybe you do. Anyway, we’ll talk more about content marketing in the future. Stay tuned.