Some Personal News

#4 Simple Scales, Complicated Fails

Happy Sunday!

This week I’m leading with the Interesting Reads section because it’s content that excites me! It includes an unmissable article about how to evolve your marketing with data-led creative and how technology’s role is evolving in the creative process.

We also explore how I freed up 50% of a non-profits paid media budget to create demand elsewhere, some positive signals to watch for as you build a performance marketing engine and why your ads should focus on educating.

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Let’s dig in!

Interesting Reads This Week:

• In conversation I was reminded of this article published a couple of months ago - How brands can adapt to change with data-led creative - it’s an excellent, must-read.  This is a subject that smart digital fundraisers should be focused on. There’s so much potential to change the economics of advertising. With rich new opportunities (see Uber/Lyft ad unit creation below, Apple’s burgeoning demand side play I mentioned last week, possible inventory to snap up in the new Tesco or Walmart app) non-profits can pioneer next generation marketing, with creative enhanced by data.

• …And technology enables us to do this at scale. Kantar consider when to use AI to guide creative decisions in this article arguing that despite the existence of automated tools able to predict a digital ad’s in-market performance in as few as 15 minutes, there is still a role for Humans.

• Watch this expert advice on how to blend automation with advertising privacy strategies to engage qualified donors by matching their needs.

1. Positive Signals

The phrase “positive signal” is going to become your new best friend.

Especially if you are helping your organization make the switch into data-driven marketing. This phrase helped me get through the early months of building a demand-centric mentality with stakeholders. Effective demand gen takes time and results aren't immediate.

But you will see positive signals.

These are the data points you'll want to be hyper-focused on sharing early and often as you get your program off the ground. 

Signals like:

- Comments/Likes/Shares from key/ideal donor profiles (IDP)

- Ad/post engagement rate percentages

- Clicks to your organization's page from ads

- Brand awareness growth

- IDP profiles that follow your organization's page

- Time on-site from demand create channel visitors

- Pages/session from demand create channel visitors

- 50%+ video watch rate metrics

Buried in the above list is my favorite positive signal: Brand Awareness Growth. Brand and Performance can and should work hand-in-hand. They can't sit in silos.

Brand Awareness Growth is an aggregated view of branded paid search, branded organic search and direct traffic coming to your website over a period of time.

This metric is a staple of my monthly/quarterly reporting. It helps the Executive Team make positive correlations between their investment in our strategy, while further supporting the internal change management efforts required to drive a scaleable, predictable, repeatable, digital fundraising engine. 

With September right around the corner, many of us will be working on Quarterly Performance Reviews. If you add Brand Awareness Growth to your report - let me know how it was received!

2. Search: Simple Scales, Complicated Fails

Google Search Ads strategies for non-profits don't have to be complicated.

In reality, they fall into 3 main buckets:
1) Branded campaigns
2) Non-branded campaigns
3) Competitor campaigns

Depending on where you're at in maturity of your paid search program, you may be using none of these or all 3 of these.

1) Branded campaigns
This is what almost everybody starts with. These make a lot of sense to stand-up if you have competitors bidding on your brand name (most organizations do). And if you don't have orgs bidding on you yet, they likely will be. I usually recommend people set this up.

2) Non-branded campaigns
This is where things can get interesting. If you're in a well-established category within the non-profit space, non-branded can be really good for driving qualified prospects or a huge money waster. For example, if somebody is searching for "donate to Ukraine" and you have a program running that directly supports Ukraine, you probably want to show up for that... That's a high-intent search.

In an ideal world they're searching for your brand name, but the next best thing is to show up when they're searching for something that you have an offering for. This is something to experiment with and closely track the return on your ad spend through a tool like Hubspot or integrating them with SFDC.

3) Competitor campaigns
This can be very hit or miss in my experience. Depending on how saturated your category is and the type of solution your mission serves, it can work.

Successful campaigns look a little like B2B where there's an informative comparisons page with true differentiators outlined. Experiment with this last, behind branded and non-branded campaigns.

Regardless of the type of campaigns that you run, you need to have a clear sense of how well they are performing over a few months/quarters of data. You should be able to say with confidence how much money you spent on paid search, the funnel activity and the fundraising revenue you generated from it. If you don't know these numbers, pull them sometime this week and you might be surprised at the result.

I recently was in an account where we pulled back 50% of the spend from the non-revenue generating keywords, and have seen zero drop in paid search performance in the nearly 2 months since. This one move freed up 50% of the paid media budget to go test into an entirely new channel.

3. Test Using UGC in Creative

Insight from Nik Sharma.

Before Apple’s recent update, you could focus your ad efforts on targeted, bottom-funnel creative. Low-hanging fruit.

But that doesn’t fly anymore. Ads should focus on educating.

Marketers can no longer pinpoint the funnel stage where prospective donors might see specific creative. To work around this, your creative needs to educate and sell.

Each piece needs to answer:

• What is the problem that your mission is solving?

• What is the brand and intended outcome?

• Why do I need this and how will the intended outcome improve my world?

• How can I trust you to be the best option?

• How do I get it right now?

This is why UGC does so well for donor acquisition - a satisfied donor naturally addresses all those questions above, and the content itself is social proof.

These ads efficiently build brand equity on the back of the performance media dollars.

The best ads don’t feel like ads at all.

News to Peruse

• Google is offering more connected TV ad buying options in Display & Video 360. Beginning as early as today, you can expect a major algorithm update called the “helpful content update.” This week, product reviews get their turn with an update.

• Uber & Lyft have a captive audience on their back seat and are building their own Ads businesses.

• Twitter has expanded its focus on audio content rolling out podcasts in the Spaces tab.

Digital Fundraising and Marketing Job Opportunities

American Heart Association: Senior Vice President, Digital Marketing

American Heart Association: Digital Fundraising Manager/ Direct Response

Friends of UNFPA: Director of Digital Fundraising and Engagement

Plan International USA: Director, Digital Marketing & Fundraising

UNICEF: User Acceptance Testing Specialist (EAPR & LACR), Supporter Engagement Strategy Fundraising

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See you next week!