So by now we should have all heard about Inbound Marketing!
If you haven’t and you are a brand or an NGO you really should be getting on the buzzword band wagon now. In fact the wagon has left the station and left you behind.
According to Wikipedia: Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
For Inbound to work well it needs certain steps in place that once implemented properly can provide NGO’s or brand with a huge advantage compared to traditional digital marketing in silos. The four main steps are as follows: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight which you can read about here
So basically its all about creating kick ass content that is relevant to your audience so that they can become your biggest advocates, we wrote a blog a couple months ago about the Power of a good Story – using quality of the content to drive users to your digital assets – website, social media, email – database building etc with the intention of bringing the users into “your world” and dazzlingly them with content that works for them so they stay, engage and convert into some sort of action and then of course become your best supporter, telling everyone how awesome “your world” is.
So why is this so important for NGO’s?
Simple. They need money and funding more than anyone. They are in the job of helping people for no money so every opportunity that they have to convert a potential lead/donor is critical because they generally lack infrastructure and resources so investing in creating an Inbound Marketing super highway is like I always say is a “no brainer” and it all starts with the story which NGO’s have lots of and if told in the right way and used to create quality content the world could be their oyster. There is no shortage of rich, real and authentic content and if you add to it the human factor and you should be styling.
The trick is to create content that makes their audience want to either do one of the following things which comes from a really good book called Going Viral by Brent Coker:
- Power of the Share – Exchange in value motivates sharing behaviour – designing content to achieve this.
- Self enhancement – Social factors that influence people’s decision to share – people seeking approval from others affects decisions to share.
- Emotion – How do we evoke an emotional response that cause people to share – transfer emotions most effectively.
- Anticipation – Creating content that is wired for mental attentiveness and a physiological response – biological response mechanic through memorable content created.
- Affinity – Creating content that is more than just relevant – feeling of warmth and deep appreciation. People want to be associated if it makes them look good.
- Justice – Content that supports efforts over ability – earn underdog support through unfair disadvantage – peoples sense of justice influences their motivation to share. Users want IT to win.
- Herding – seeding content to give it the best chance of spreading – networks, influences and social proof – follow the crowd to reduce their uncertainty.
- Groups – group based sharing – contentiousness and loyalty drive social buzz
- Bump (BVMP – Branded Viral Movie Production) – Power of story telling – structuring content to maximise emotional transfer and sharing – Transformative structure – viewer imagines experience
The above points is something that we have been doing for sometime now within the “For Good” sector. The content we create always looks to draw or attract users/donors etc into our clients world however referring to what Brent Coker talks about has helped us very much.
Creating good content is one thing but you need a solid plan in terms of what the user journey looks like and the touch points used to make sure you not letting any of the fish out of the net.
This is what your inbound marketing digital funnel should look like.
The above framework works really well and has helped us plan many future concepts, campaigns and strategies with this is the back of our mind.
Inbound Marketing can seem like a really complicated thing to achieve however it really is using the very simple logic behind why marketing is created in the first place and adapting to the digital age that we find ourselves in.
