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As we head further into the new year, our nonprofit is focused on the digital marketing trends we’ve identified as influential this year. If you’re not sure where to start, these digital marketing trends can help your nonprofit respond to the need to move closer to the digital environment where donors and volunteers tend to spend most of their time.
1. Mobile Clarity
To connect with more of your target audience, it’s imperative to optimize everything for mobile use. That means that any content you create for mobile channels, including a mobile version of your website, must look good on a smaller screen. If your audience cannot enjoy the experience, they will go elsewhere.
For instance, we test all of our content, email marketing, visuals and website regularly to ensure they are mobile-ready. User testing tools are an effective way to make sure audiences like what they see on their mobile devices.
2. Visual Search
Text search may take a back seat to new types of searches. The first digital search trend gaining ground involves visual search. With this type of search, someone can take a picture and then use that picture to find more information.
This offers an opportunity for nonprofits to incorporate and optimize more visual content. For instance, you could incorporate storytelling through visuals and let the pictures do the talking for you. With the ability to optimize each visual, it may help nonprofits be discovered by people who are using visual search tools.
3. AI Voice Search
The other type of search that is set to grow in popularity is artificial intelligence voice search through smartphone tools like Siri as well as through virtual assistants from Amazon, including Echo, and Google’s Home device, which are appearing in more homes and businesses.
With this search preference, you may have to change your search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and optimization strategies. That’s because people tend to use different words when they speak versus typing out a query. For example, voice queries tend to be longer and use more natural language. SEO strategies that address these unique voice search characteristics should be added to a nonprofit’s search marketing efforts.
4. AI For Audience Targeting And Personalization
You may already be focused on personalizing your outreach to targeted and existing donors. Everything involves creating a personal experience where the audience feels like you are individually reaching out to them to help make a difference in the world.
However, AI can help you better understand who’s out there in the digital world, what they want and what’s important to them. Thanks to the power of AI and speed in data processing and analysis, leveraging this technology can deliver better insights and direction on where, when and what to send to various audience segments.
This includes AI’s ability to gauge how your audience already feels about what you have delivered to them. Known as sentiment analysis, this additional AI feature can help you understand how people engage with your nonprofit and the social issue you are trying to address. Knowing more about how your audience views what you publish can help you improve your personalization and engagement efforts.
5. Private Messaging And Chatbots
As more nonprofits focus on personalization, another trend is direct engagement with individual donors, volunteers and prospects. With the information gained through sentiment analysis and AI interaction via chatbots, nonprofits can deepen these burgeoning relationships and attract new donors and volunteers.
Private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger open up direct individual dialogue to share information about upcoming events or results from that donor’s time or monetary contributions, ask questions, exchange ideas, and build trust in this digital world.
As a result of the direct and always-open channel, donors and volunteers may feel more involved and connected to your nonprofit. These audience members know they can reach you directly and get specific responses. As a nonprofit, you also can understand the unique aspects that make up your overall audience to improve your overall digital marketing strategy.
Stay AlertÂ
These are just some of the digital marketing trends we’ve seen as a nonprofit and are personally preparing for. However, there may be other digital marketing trends that are more applicable to your nonprofit segment. Also, with the continued digital adoption, more trends are destined to appear throughout the year. That means staying alert and aware of shifting trends as well as remaining flexible to change with them.
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