As two of the biggest social media platforms, both Facebook and Instagram are a major way to grow your audience as a nonprofit through advertising. With Facebook being the first social media platform to surpass 1 billion registered accounts, advertising on these platforms is an important way for nonprofits to find their next donors. With that in mind, here are some brand awareness campaign ideas to help you do just that.
Be Realistic
No matter which social media platform you are advertising your organization on, you have to be realistic in terms of your expectations. For instance, although these ads may help you drive traffic and gain new followers, this may not necessarily translate into an immediate spike in donations. Rather, these people will most likely subscribe to your email newsletter or follow you on your various social media pages. This will allow you to promote your brand and mission to them in order to secure more donations in the future.
How to Increase Brand Awareness for Service
Given that Instagram is now owned by Facebook, the methods of growing your following on both of these sites are one and the same. Moreover, each of these sites also offers a brand awareness tool that can be used across both platforms. In terms of growing your nonprofit’s audience using Facebook, and Instagram, you need to complete the following steps:
- Sign up for Facebook for Nonprofits: A useful program that Facebook offers to qualified nonprofit organizations, Facebook for nonprofits is a program that allows Facebook users to create fundraisers on your behalf. Additionally, on Giving Tuesday, these donations can be matched dollar for dollar, some restrictions do apply.
- Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Website: By adding the Facebook pixel to your website, you will be able to retarget your past website visitors.
- Set Up Conversion Tracking: Lastly, you need to set up conversion tracking. This will allow you to track things such as email captures, donations, etc.
In terms of awareness campaign examples, you would simply create a Facebook ad campaign that spreads your brand mission. This will enable you to gain new subscribers, emails and hopefully some donations. For brand awareness you consider running ‘like’ campaigns, boost select posts and run generic campaigns on your mission. Your goal here is to increase your followers and your website traffic. The next step would be to run email capture campaigns using Facebook’s lead form ad type. Try targeting your Facebook fans, Instagram followers and past website visitors.
Instagram Specific Tips
On the other hand, although the two websites are intertwined, there are some things to be aware of in terms of using Instagram to grow your nonprofit’s audience. In particular, all of these tips can be used on Instagram, besides signing up for Facebook for nonprofits as it is exclusive to the Facebook platform. Nevertheless, the same ads that you create on Facebook can also be run on Instagram. Moreover, no matter which platform you are using, you need to make sure that you are taking advantage of the lead form campaign in order to capture emails. This is one of the most effective methods of growing your non-profit audience as people are typically more than willing to give their email addresses. These can be used for all types of marketing methods in the future.
Key Takeaways
- Instagram and Facebook are two massive programs that can be used to grow audiences for businesses and organizations of all kinds.
- Given that Instagram and Facebook have been integrated, you can use the same approach to help with lead generation and to gain new followers and subscribers on both sites.
- Although these ads can provide you with more subscribers, you will then need to market to your new followers in other ways to secure donations.
Overall, if you are interested in using Facebook or Instagram to create a marketing strategy for your non-profit organization, it is an excellent idea. You need to be mindful of the fact that the emails and followers you gain are just the first steps in securing more donors for your organization.If you’re looking for a marketing agency to help with ads, or anything else, please contact our team of experts here at Ballantine.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
