Digital Marketing for Non-Profits: Lack of Time – Developing your Digital Architecture – Content Distribution
By now your organization has a website, and your social media accounts are set-up. If you don’t have either of these steps complete, then CLICK HERE to go to the beginning to make sure you have all the basics taken care of first.
Ready? Awesome! Let’s continue….
At this point in developing your digital architecture, consider the website to be your home base – your central hub – where the bulk of your information is posted and distributed from, and each social media outlet is like a spoke on a bicycle – reaching out to another audience.
Content distribution is how you share your content in a way that drives traffic to where you want your audience to go to. By the end of this post, the concept of driving traffic will be understood, and the digital architecture will have been set-up.
To recap from where we were….
You’ve created a website, where you want people to go to. You’ve created your social media accounts, where you reach out to let people know what you’re up to.
What’s next? Understanding how you distribute content effectively is just as important as the content that you are actually sharing…
A simple reminder here is that each organization’s efforts in this area may vary, but the elements are about the same… we want the person reading a status update on the social media account to eventually donate to the site (or to take some sort of action to engage with your organization)… In short, we want to drive traffic to your site so people take the action you want them to take.
Allow me to illustrate this as such… and we start with the goal…
First, we need to know what we want people to do… we want people to visit the site, where they learn more about what you are doing, and provide an opportunity for the visitor to donate, sign up for an event or a newsletter, etc…
Understanding content distribution will help put your full Digital Architecture to work FOR YOU, rather than you spending hours reposting on multiple channels getting minimal results.
Here’s how content distribution works to drive traffic to your site… and it will save you hours each week…
Create a blog post and share that link on your social media outlets.
Yep, that’s it. That’s the big secret of this entire article.
When you look at the journey of those you are trying to reach, you have to give them a place to stop and see what you’re doing. This is the blog post.
Once that post has been written, you share it through your social media outlets so they can see that you’ve written the blog post.
When they click on the link in their social media account, they come to your site. Then they’d see that link to donate to your organization – also termed a ‘call-to-action’.
There are volumes of information on how to create blog posts, and to maximize your efforts in driving traffic through this process. We’ll discuss some of the basics in content creation in the next step. This step is about the distribution process.
As an added bonus, you can automate the sharing of content on social media to save you even more time…
Most platforms, like WordPress, allow you to schedule blog posts at a predetermined date and time. Use these features whenever possible to schedule out content well in advance.
For example, if you used WordPress to create your website, you can add the JetPack plugin to automatically share this link on your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts automatically.
If you use another platform to manage your blog, you can also use the RSS feed from your blog to automatically update your social media accounts. When you publish, then your social media accounts are automatically updated.
Another option is to utilize a 3rd party service, such as HootSuite, to schedule your status updates on your social media accounts.
All of these are just time savers, allowing you to take full control of what you are wanting to share on each platform at a time you want them to be shared. Using time savers can allow you to take about an hour or two a week to manage content that would spread out to multiple sites over several days and weeks, thus maximizing your efforts more efficiently.
For example, we may spend 2-3 hours a week scheduling out a week’s worth of content on at least 4 social media outlets. Now at any given moment, we may have over 400 blog posts to go through, so we have a lot of content that has been generated that we are pushing out on an ongoing basis. But we’ve had over 8 years doing this and hundreds of members who contributed content, so we know how much time it will take on an ongoing basis. Many organizations we’ve worked with have developed 1-2 new blog posts a week, and shared and reshared those blog posts on social media – and added many social media status updates to supplement their online efforts.
Once you apply status updates with your blog post URL on your social media accounts, then you have created the ‘funnel’ and provided the pathway where people visit your social media account status update – which goes to your site, thereby driving traffic to where you want them to go.
Your Digital Architecture and Distribution channels should now be set-up. Now onto the next step – using them and optimizing your time and efforts with the right content.
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