Two Surprising Ways to Broaden Your Reach Online

Online marketing can take many forms.  Email, web design, user-generated content and paid search are all ways to improve your nonprofit’s reach and increase web traffic.  What you may not have considered, however, is how you can actually impact viral sharing and improve interactive marketing on your website.

Here are two real solutions that get results.

Social Media:  Action Sharing

By now, most of you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account.  Perhaps you’ve even started to feed live posts and tweets to your organization’s homepage.  That’s certainly the first step towards social media nirvana.

What you might be missing is the chance to let your constituents and website visitors do your marketing for you.  We call this action sharing.

You have actions you want people to take on your site – donate, volunteer, write their political leader, sign up for an event, join, sign up for your eNewsletter or even inquire or apply.

So how can these already-engaged users help you spread the word and acquire new supporters?

By sharing the action they just took with their network of friends and followers!  Free (and viral) marketing instigated by you.  Genius!

The easiest option for action sharing is to create a simple hyperlink using action sharing code that allows users to tweet an action (try it out by clicking the link!)

For a bigger impact, and as budget permits, you can work with an agency like GUIDE Creative to create a lightbox that pops up on screen once a user takes action on your site with a visual custom message.  Nothing.org incorporated this type of visual element into their social marketing to allow a user to share their donation with their followers which significantly broadened their reach and helped them find brand new supporters they otherwise did not have access to.

Interactive Maps

How are you highlighting your nonprofit’s impact online?  One of the biggest opportunities to engage users online is to allow them to interact with your website in order to see and feel your mission’s impact.

Schools are a no brainer for Interactive Maps – Kent’s Hill School has done a beautiful job showcasing their campus through a virtual map that allows web users to scroll over the buildings, click to see photos and virtually experience what campus life is like.

However, schools aren’t the only organizations jumping on board with this new marketing technology.  At GUIDE Creative, we’re working with an organization called Kids and Cars on a national map that highlights incidents where children have been injured around vehicles.  It’s designed to educate the public and show the impact their awareness campaigns have on reducing the number of vehicle-related injuries to children in the United States.  Food Banks are another type of organization beginning to utilize maps – to show meals served in the community and the volume of people they’ve helped with the support they receive.

I’d love to hear how you’ve incorporated these ideas into your online marketing strategy!  Please share!