This week I attended the Digital Summit, a digital marketing conference that draws participants from across many sectors. Because I work almost exclusively with non-profits, and most of the events I attend are nonprofit-focused, I find it energizing and often fascinating to attend conferences where many of the participants are from large companies and agencies. It can provide interesting insights to see what the “big brands” are thinking about: some of which is new for the nonprofit sector, too, and some of which isn’t relevant to our work… and some of which we’ve already been doing for a long, long time.
Here are a few of my top takeaways from this year’s Digital Summit in DC:
Content Marketing: Companies are talking about how to create authentic, meaningful content that connects with their target audiences. Nonprofits have a leg up here, since our content has built-in meaning, but it’s still important to keep our audiences’ priorities in mind. Just because our work is critically important doesn’t mean it feels relevant to people’s lives. If we want people to engage in our campaigns, it’s our job to make them relevant – to make people care.
Audience Research: We tend to assume we know our audiences – but do we really? On one hand, I think nonprofit marketers and communicators have better connections with our audiences on average, because we’re working with them regularly, but we nonprofit marketers are just as susceptible as corporate folks to getting swept away in our work and forgetting that we, like our audiences, are actual humans. We should always be reminding ourselves what real humans find appealing. From surveying our audiences, to exploring their interests through social listening, to engaging in authentic conversations, it’s invaluable to spend time connecting with their wants, needs, and views of the world.
SEO: SEO today remains a beast that requires a lot of specific expertise to do well, but the basics remain simple: create great content that’s relevant both to your mission and to keywords people are searching for. If you don’t have a big budget for SEO, little extra attention to aligning your blog content with your target keywords can have big results. Don’t be afraid to expand your blog topics to focus more on content your audience is looking for, and then make the connection to your priority issues.
Display Ads: Consistency matters when you’re doing display advertising. Depending on your ask, it can take dozens of touches across multiple channels before an individual converts, so running long-term campaigns that stay in front of people can build connections over time. (This doesn’t mean spending huge amounts of money, necessarily – careful targeting can help keep your budget small.) Last-click attribution, where a person’s last interaction before converting is considered the source of the conversion, is becoming a thing of the past: we need to be looking at all the touches that move someone gradually toward conversion.
Doing Work Better: My favorite session was from author Daniel Pink, about his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The time of day (or week, or year) can have a huge impact on our moods and energy levels, and thus our productivity. He gave some specific and shocking examples of this, like the fact that quarterly earnings meetings, when held in the afternoon, are received so much worse than the same news in morning meetings that it has a measurable impact on a company’s stocks. Top takeaway: if you want people in your meeting to be fully engaged, schedule meetings in the mornings.