There's an almost unlimited amount of competition for audience’s attention. Your audience needs to be able to recall or recognize your brand when the competition becomes fierce. A strong brand awareness will serve your nonprofit organization well in retaining stakeholders and clients as well as attracting new ones. Consider innovative ways to grab their attention and align their thought process with yours to achieve this.
Often, building brand awareness is a struggle for nonprofits. Brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. It requires time and takes work. It’s an ongoing effort of consistently building your nonprofit’s brand and strengthening its associations in the minds of your target audience. There are ways to improve and achieve better brand awareness among target audience.
Here are ways your organization can build awareness and enjoy the benefits of an enhanced community profile.
Leverage Word of Mouth Marketing
Firstly, identify your target audience and pinpoint why they should care about your organization. Once this is done, you can proceed with creating brand awareness. Start with word of mouth. There has to be something about your organization that people will remember. It needs to offer something unique that people will want to talk about. Create emotionally moving, compelling stories that connect deeply with users which are worth sharing.
Use SEO to Raise Awareness
Though powerful, word of mouth is simply not enough to grow awareness for your organization. Your website is one of the most effective places to spread brand awareness. Make your websites search engine–friendly. SEO is one of the best ways to give your brand a boost in the search engines, if done right. Once you’ve uncovered the terms that targeted audience are searching for, you can develop content that is optimized with these terms. SEO content is any content created with the goal of attracting search engine traffic, which creates brand awareness. Provide readers with high quality content that’s useful and relevant. This will help drive your SEO to the top of search rankings and help increase awareness for your brand. SEO helps raise awareness of your organization’s mission, work, and stories. People who care about a social issue or a cause are very likely to use search engines to find relevant information about it. Having your site listed within the top results can increase the visibility of your site and drive in relevant, high-quality traffic.
Leverage Internet Marketing to Increase Brand Awareness
In addition to word of mouth and online presence, your organization can leverage content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. These are forms of internet marketing. If budget permits, leverage social media advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and on search engines.
Content marketing is an incredibly effective way to raise brand awareness. A solid brand awareness strategy takes planning and is sustained by good content. Content marketing efforts rely on social media or email to get the message out there. Social media is one of the single most powerful tools available to any company and that includes the nonprofit sector. Publish amazing and relevant content consistently and let the world know about it through the tools of social media. A steady flow of quality content builds a community whose members continually return for more and in turn, reciprocate the collaborative relationship by passing it on to others. Email is a great way to disseminate the content.
Use blogging to boost your brand power. Create high-quality, content-driven blog posts and keep it updated with fresh content. Blogging means consistently improving your content to match exactly what your readers want to see.
Brand Awareness is a Must for Nonprofit Organizations
For an organization to survive and be successful, it must do all it can to remain relevant to its audience. It’s important to get the audience to believe that your organization’s services are important, and that they deliver a better value than the competitor. This is why a strong brand awareness is crucial to your organization since it is vital for long-term survival.
About The CLASS Consulting Group:
The CLASS Consulting Group is a trusted advisor to the Board of Directors and Senior Leadership of Nonprofits. It is a boutique management consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco Bay Area that provides consulting services to senior management and Board of Directors of nonprofit organizations and offers community leadership opportunities to professionals.
Since 2002 CLASS’ volunteers have been assisting nonprofit organizations in the SF Bay Area and supporting the communities in which, we all live and work.
Interested? Simply Request A Meeting and we’ll get in touch to tell you all about this opportunity and how our volunteer-run teams are helping nonprofits make the bay area a better place; one community at a time.