Kayla Matthews is a guest contributor for Nonprofit Hub. She is a writer and blogger with a passion for self-improvement and helping others. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter to read all of her latest posts.
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The past twenty years have completely changed the world of marketing, mostly for the better. Still, as more systems come into play and more forms of data become available to marketing professionals, the steady stream of information can feel more like a tidal wave.
Nonprofits must take advantage of the resources at their disposal, but knowing what sources to prioritize and why can make the difference between swimming and drowning in the resultant monsoon.
Check out these five types of data your nonprofit should prioritize to achieve marketing success.
Google Analytics
This service is over ten years old now, and in those ten years, it has become so essential to the marketing world that failing to use it is like shooting yourself in the foot.
At its core, Google Analytics tells you what every web manager wants to know: How many people see our site and how often? How long do they stay? Improving the results of your online marketing depends a great deal on how you use the rest of the data in this list, but first you have to know where you most need to improve.
Microblogging Data
Now more than ever, social media is joining the private and public spheres of the digital world. With the right planning, social interaction can be vastly beneficial to your nonprofit. The temptation of an easy and free interactive web presence can be powerful, but getting good data requires a surprising amount of time and effort. More critically, the data returns can be especially difficult to organize and integrate.
Be sure to keep sites like Twitter and Facebook at the front of your web presence, but don’t forget to update them consistently and often, or you’ll be losing more than you gain.
Multimedia Content-Sharing Data
Videos, photos and other multimedia content are extremely attractive and give a more personal feel than bare text. As a result, they can offer a very different look at your audience and its interests. Many of them, like YouTube, track many basic statistics for you. They also allow you to give something back in the form of thank you videos and similar audience-directed content.
However, multimedia platforms can be more complicated to use than other marketing strategies. They require a bigger investment of time and attention from both you and your intended audience, and they may require more of a financial investment. Therefore, it’s important to be strategic about how you incorporate multimedia platforms into your marketing plans.
Mobile Data
This isn’t just about the Internet, either. Cell phones—especially smartphones—have had a similarly massive impact on marketing. People can call or text from anywhere and at any time, and you want to track that data. Other details, like how long a phone call lasts, are also vital to know and have available for your research.
Combining data from phones and online media networks allows your nonprofit to respond to its audience and environment in real-time, giving you a significant advantage in today’s markets.
Failure Data
Maybe you don’t want to think about where your data doesn’t look great, or maybe you tend to look at what works instead of what doesn’t. However, tracking your failures can be just as valuable to running a successful nonprofit as tracking your successes.
Collecting data helps you identify what you need to change and improve. If you’re only looking at your successes, you won’t know what you need to do better.
The key to using integrated data more effectively is good planning. Take advantage of free opportunities to develop a social media presence or establish a traffic history, but don’t forget to use the data you’ve collected along the way to make your online presence memorable and consistent.
