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Running a marketing team at a nonprofit is tough because you’re dealing with two of the toughest challenges to tackle: achieving big goals and operating on a shoestring budget. It’s not uncommon to hear about budgets that are pushing $0, outdated systems and tactics, and ‘big ideas’ that never make their way to the market.

At face value, it may seem like nonprofits have an uphill battle to fight. In a world where big CPG brands have infinite dollars to spend on marketing, how can the smaller players keep up and compete for attention spans that are already spread thin? How can nonprofits afford marketing when their organizations are, by definition, not structured around ROI?

Fortunately, the solutions to these questions may be simpler than you think. Instead of looking at your nonprofit’s marketing resources (or lack thereof) as constraints, keep your eyes peeled for new opportunities for creativity. Make your valuable time and dollars count more by focusing on the following, simple steps.

Be a Curator, not a Writer

Can’t afford to produce original content? Can’t write? No problem. There’s a lot of great content floating around the Internet already that your audiences would likely be excited to read about.

Rather than reinventing the wheel and spending your valuable time and resources on writing blog posts (they’re expensive and can take a long time to produce), focus on sourcing and bundling together great resources that are already out there.

There are plenty of copyright and SEO friendly ways to do this as well—after all, you can’t just re-publish someone else’s content word for word on your own site: even if you cite the original author, you still risk copyright infringement (and getting dinged for duplicate content in Google Search). Here are some examples:

• Create a regular newsletter with curated content
• Publish monthly roundups of ‘news clips’ about your industry
• Write short blog posts that link to industry stats and studies
• Round up interesting infographics, share them on your blog, and link back to the original source (remember that infographics are designed, inherently, for sharing!)

 When it comes to success with content creation, efficiency is everything. If you’re looking for additional tips, check out this list of 5 tips to help you build your process from scratch.

Repurpose Your Assets 

If you do decide to create an ebook or series of blog posts, make sure to make the most out of your investment. Turn an ebook into 5 blog posts and 5 blog posts into an ebook. Use templates wherever possible (i.e. if you’re hiring a designer, create layouts that you can reuse for multiple assets).

You can also repurpose your content across different marketing channels: in lead nurturing campaigns, through PPC ads, and even top-of-funnel on your blog.

At the end of the day, repurposing works for one reason and one reason alone: your audiences don’t have insight into your organization as you do, so their attention spans are fleeting. When you repurpose your content, you increase the chances of it becoming seen to a wider audience, in more marketing contexts. 

Looking for ideas for how to repurpose your content? Here are a few ideas that can help: 

• This article breaks down 5 creative ways to repurpose one piece of content
• This roundup explains how to promote the same piece of content across 50 different channels
• This piece breaks down 9 ways to recycle blog posts into other content formats

If you’re still stuck on ways to get started, bring in a few team members within your organization to help. Do what you do best: brainstorm and plan together. Come up with as many creative (and free) ideas that you can. The end result will be #genius. 

Keep Admin to a Minimum

 One of the biggest barriers to success with content marketing is all the administrative work. If you’re running a blog, campaigns on social media, and email newsletters, you’re likely managing multiple moving parts—many of which can quickly become unwieldy. 

When you’re just getting started, you’ll likely feel comfortable spending a few extra hours in WordPress or in your email marketing software. But as your marketing efforts increase in frequency, intensity, and volume, you’ll risk spreading yourself too thin. Here are some steps that you can take to make your planning process easier and streamline your marketing budget as a result.

• Plan and schedule your content ahead of time (like, weeks or months in advance)
• Put parameters around your ideation and brainstorming process
• Use a project tracker to monitor your content production (here’s a free blog editorial calendar that you can use).

Keep your marketing headache-free and low-key. Planning in advance will help you minimize admin, control costs, and ensure that you’re only investing in resources that make an impact among your audience. When it comes to success with marketing, don’t underestimate the power of time. 

Find Overlaps

Have you written the same email 5 times to answer a common question?

Chances are, you’ll write that email again and again. Stop yourself now, and turn that content into a blog post that you can easily publicize. Your audiences will be thrilled because they’ll have a resource that they can easily access. You’ll be thrilled because you’ll have saved yourself some time.

 Fortunately, these blog posts are also relatively straightforward to write. Here’s a simple process to follow:

• Title your blog post based on the question you’re asked (i.e. “How does nonprofit X find members?”)
• Sketch out a 3-part outline that addresses the topics that you want to cover
• Take your email content and adapt it to the outline you’ve created

There are plenty of additional ways to find overlaps. For instance, if you’re conducting customer interviews, consider recording and transcribing your conversations: this rich, raw data can be repurposed into interview materials for developing audience personas, and it can also serve a dual-purpose as interview material for a blog post. 

Try to see your marketing from multiple dimensions. Find ways to tackle multiple goals with one bat swing.

Last But Not Least

Keep your reporting in one place, and be diligent about quantifying the results of your marketing. The success you need won’t happen overnight: it will materialize from a long-continuous journey. Your stakeholders, board, and teammates will want to be informed along the way—to learn and grow alongside you. By having a central repository for your reporting and keeping close watch over your analytics, you’ll be in a great position to study and report upon the results of your efforts. Slow and steady is the path to sustainable growth.

It’s one thing to write great content, but it’s another thing to get it read and ranked — which is where nailing the title comes in. 

Titles are what sell the content. They represent it in search engines, in email, and on social media. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common questions we get is around crafting titles.

Download this free report to get even more data-backed tips on writing catchy titles and headlines.

How long should my headline be? What words should I use? What words should I avoid? Should I optimize it for search or social? Or both? 

Luckily, we’ve come up with a simple formula for writing catchy headlines and blog titles that you can reference from here on out. So let’s just dive right in, shall we? 

A Foolproof Method for Writing Catchy Titles and Headlines 

1) Start with a working title.

Before you get into the nitty-gritty of coming up with a perfect title, start with a rough draft: your working title.

What’s a working title, exactly? A lot of people confuse working titles with topics. Let’s clear that up:

Topics are very general and could yield several different blog posts. Think “raising healthy kids” and “kitchen storage.” A writer might look at either of those topics and choose to take them in very, very different directions.

A working title, on the other hand, is very specific and guides the creation of a single blog post. For example, from the topic “raising healthy kids,” you could derive the following working titles:

• “How the Right Nutrition Can Strengthen Your Kids’ Bones”
• “A Parent’s Guide to Promoting Your Child’s Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Well-Being”
• “X Recipes for Quick & Healthy Dinners Your Teenagers Will Gobble Up”

See how different and specific each of those is? That’s what makes them working titles instead of overarching topics. It’s also worth noting that none of those titles are perfect — they should just be specific enough to guide your blog post. (We’ll worry about making it clickable and search-friendly later.)

2) Stay accurate.

Accuracy is critical when trying to finesse a title because it sets clear expectations for your readers. While I’m sure lots of people would love to click into a post that said “10 B2B Companies Killing Facebook So Freaking Hard They Don’t Need Any Other Marketing Channel” … it’s a little bombastic, no?

Unless, of course, you truly did find 10 B2B companies rocking Facebook that hard. And you could confirm that all 10 of them had stopped using other marketing channels. First and foremost, your title needs to accurately reflect the content that follows.

One way to ensure accuracy? Add bracketed clarification to your headline, like we did in this blog post:

In a study of over 3.3 million paid link headlines, we found that headlines with this type of clarification — [Interview], [Podcast], [Infographic], etc. — performed 38% better than headlines without clarification. Again, it’s all about setting clear expectations. Thanks to the brackets, these readers knew exactly what they were getting themselves into before they even clicked. 

So if you remember nothing else from this blog post, let it be this: The most important rule of titles is to respect the reader experience.

If you set high expectations in your title that you can’t fulfill in the content, you’ll lose readers’ trust. 

Accuracy encompasses more than just hyperbole, though. With the example working title above, you’d also want to confirm all of the examples are, indeed, B2B. Or even that they’re all companies — instead of, say, individual bloggers that target B2B audiences. See what I mean?

3) Make it sexy.

Just because you have to be accurate doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to make your title pop. There are a lot of ways to make a title sexier. 

Of course, all of this hinges on understanding your core buyer persona. You need to find language that resonates with them, and know what they find valuable. (Haven’t created or refined your buyer personas yet? Download this free template to create your own buyer personas for your business.)

Once you’re armed with knowledge of your buyer persona’s preferred style, try testing out some of these tips for making your headlines a little sexier:

• Have some fun with alliteration. The title and header in this blog post, for instance, play with alliteration: “Foolproof Formula” and “Writing Wonderful.” It’s a device that makes something a little lovelier to read, and that can have a subtle but strong impact on your reader.
• Use strong language. Strong phrases (and, frankly, often negative ones) like “Things People Hate,” or “Brilliant” pack quite a punch. However, these must be used in moderation. As one of my coworkers likes to say, “If everything is bold, nothing is bold.”
• Make the value clear. As we mentioned above, presenting the format and/or contents to a reader helps make your content a little sexier. According to our research, templates tend to be particularly powerful for CTR: We found that adding “[Template]” to our titles got the most average views of all bracketed terms.
• Make it visual. Is there an opportunity to include visuals within your post? Make that clear in the title. Our research revealed that headlines featuring the word “photo(s)” performed 37% better than headlines without this word. 
• Focus on the “whos,” not the “whys”. Want to intrigue your audience? Focus on the “who”: Headlines including the word “who” generated a 22% higher CTR than headlines without it.

Let’s try an example: Let’s say you’re writing a post titled, “15 of Our Favorite Brands on Snapchat.” How might we punch up our accurate-but-boring working title? Here are some options:

• 15 Brilliant Brands Who Are Killing It on Snapchat
• Snapchat Success: 15 Inspiring Brands Who Just Get It
• 15 Must-Follow Brands That Are Seeing Snapchat Success

4) Keep it short.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how long or short your title should be. It depends what your goals are and where your headline will appear.

Do you want this post to rank really well in search? Focus on keeping the title under 70 characters so it doesn’t get cut off in search engine results. Are you trying to optimize your title for social sharing? Check out this handy character count guide for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

However, according to our own analysis at HubSpot, headlines between 8–12 words in length got the most Twitter shares on average. As for Facebook, headlines with either 12 or 14 words received the most Likes.

Additionally, headlines with eight words had a 21% higher clickthrough rate than the average title, according to the folks at Outbrain. 

The lesson? It’s always a good idea to run a few tests to see what works best for your particular audience. 

Let’s say I was writing this blog post: “Think Social Media Is Just for Kids? Here Are 10 Statistics Guaranteed to Prove You Wrong.” To shorten it, I would simply try to rephrase it and cut out extraneous words. For instance, I might do something like this:

• Before: Think Social Media Is Just for Kids? Here Are 10 Statistics Guaranteed to Prove You Wrong
• After: 10 Stats That Prove Social Media Isn’t Just for Kids

See? It’s that easy. Try sounding out the title in your head to make sure it’s easily digestible for your readers. The less of a mouthful you can make your titles, the better.

5) Try to optimize for search and social.

I say “try” because sometimes, trying too hard to optimize for these things can make your title sound strange. Remember: You want to optimize your title for your audience above all else, but if you can optimize for both search and social, then that’s great.

The secret to thinking about all three at once? Focus on keywords that you know your audience is already searching for, then look into the search volume for those keywords. (Read this blog post to learn how to compare search volume on keywords.)

Once you have a keyword in mind, you’ll want to be sure to place it as closely as possible to the beginning of your headline to catch your reader’s attention. (Again, you should keep your headline under 70 characters so it doesn’t get cut off in search engine results.)

Another important consideration? Make sure you’re headlines are tweetable: “The 120-130-character range is the sweet spot for high clickthrough rate, according to an analysis of 200,000 tweets with links. This leaves enough space for people to include a short comment if they choose to manually retweet you,” explains my colleague Lindsay Kolowich.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I’m writing a post titled, “X B2B Companies Using Facebook in Cool Ways.” Looks like there’s some wiggle room to optimize it without compromising clarity, right?

If the goal is to rank for the term, “Facebook Marketing,” I’d recommend something like this:

“New to Facebook Marketing? Here Are 10 B2B Companies Doing It Right”

This new title works for a few reasons:

• It’s 56 characters long. This means that it’s short enough to not be cut off in search engines and it’s short enough to be retweeted.
• The keyword is in the beginning. By moving “Facebook Marketing” to the beginning of the title, we’re ultimately increasing the odds that we’ll grab our audience’s attention.
• It’s human. I wasn’t kidding when I said you should focus on optimizing for your audience first. This title presents both a pain point and a solution all wrapped up in one.

(Read this blog post for more on optimizing your content for SEO.)

6) Brainstorm with someone else.

Once you’ve refined your title using the tips above, it’s time to come up for air and connect with another human. Title brainstorming is an essential part of the process.

Here at HubSpot, we spend a decent amount of time and brainpower coming up with our titles. The final step before scheduling a blog post is pulling another member of our team into a back-and-forth title brainstorm in a chat room. One member of the duo will post the title they recommend into the chat pane window. The other person will then refine that title even further, or suggest other title angles. After several back-and-forths, the duo will agree on the title that’s accurate, sexy, concise, and SEO-friendly.

Only when both parties agree on a title do we schedule our post for publishing — which can take as little as five seconds and as long as ten or so minutes. While that seems like a long time, it’s essential to putting our best foot forward with each post we publish.

(Check out this article for even more helpful group brainstorming tips.)

I hope this has been a helpful walkthrough on crafting titles. Share your tips in the comments, won’t you?

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2013 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Setting aside time to brainstorm blog topics, structure posts around relevant keywords, optimize calls-to-action and social sharing buttons, and strategically place relevant internal links can sound daunting to many marketers.

This is especially true for those marketers who are just starting to ramp up their business blogging efforts and don’t have much bandwidth.

But what if I were to tell you that, along with writing a few more blog posts per week, optimizing those blog posts and following promotion best practices could increase your blog traffic by over 2,500% in as little as one year?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to a technology provider called Marco.

Looking to bring in more leads and customers to their website, the folks at Marco teamed up with HubSpot Partner Leighton Interactive to explore the possibilities of inbound marketing. And after some thoughtful strategizing and hard work, they were able to start a new blog and  increase the traffic to that blog by 2,512.5% in a year — from 88 visits in its first month to 2,299 visits per month a year later.

As part of HubSpot’s 2015 Year in Review, we wanted to celebrate the success of our partners and the impact they’ve had on their clients businesses. So I caught up with two folks at Leighton —  Inbound Marketing Manager Simone Haider and Creative Director Brandon Philbrick — to get the inside scoop on how they set up Marco’s new blogging strategy, how they implemented it, and how it impacted their results. 

Setting Up a Blog Strategy

Before hiring Leighton Interactive in the summer of 2013, marketers over at Marco had a handful of inbound marketing assets. More specifically, they’d already set up two blogs  — a leadership blog authored by their CEO, and a “CTO Insider” blog authored by their CTO — on each of which they were publishing one blog post every two weeks.

Aside from these blogs, they also did a little bit of email marketing, created a Facebook account, and used Google Analytics to keep track of it all. The trouble was, none of these pieces were working together — that is, until the team at Leighton stepped in.

In an effort to help Marco increase traffic to their website, the inbound marketing experts at Leighton recognized that they’d have to start by increasing blog traffic. 

Why start there? Because the more webpages a website has, the more likely those webpages are to rank in search — and the more likely the website is to attract visitors who are actually interested in what they offer. 

More often than not, the difference between a 50-page website and a 500-page website is a blog, making blogging an absolutely essential practice for traffic-building and search engine optimization. (Read this blog post to learn more about the benefits of business blogging.)

So to build out Marco’s blog, the folks at Leighton helped Marco do the following:

• Research and create buyer personas
• Create a new blog section on the HubSpot platform with blog posts catered to those buyer personas
• Write blog posts regularly for that new blog
• Conduct keyword research to help make those blog posts more search-friendly
• Add calls-to-action to the blog pages to convert readers into leads
• Redesign the blog pages to optimize it for search, as well as to merge the two preexisting onto the HubSpot platform
• Promote blog posts on other marketing channels, like social and email

To measure the success of this new strategy, they focused on tracking monthly blog traffic — i.e. overall blog visits — using HubSpot’s Sources tool to give them a good sense of whether and how much they were growing traffic to their blog over time. (For non-HubSpot users, Google Analytics is a good option for measuring blog traffic over time.)

Later, they would focus more on the blog’s conversion rate, meaning how many people download an offer from one of the calls-to-action after reading a blog post.

Implementing the Blog Strategy

While Marco already had those two blogs authored by their executives, the topics those blogs covered weren’t necessarily what the company’s main target customers were searching for or looking to read about. Instead, they were more for executives and chief technology officers, whereas Marco’s target buyers were “complaint fielders,” which included folks like facilities managers, IT managers, and office managers.

Step 1: Creating Buyer Personas

The team at Leighton knew they wanted to build out a new blog to help Marco increase their traffic — but they weren’t exactly sure what the blog should be about. To get some initial guidance on topic generation and keyword research for the blog, they needed to first research and create buyer personas.

What does that mean, exactly? Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on market research and real data about your existing customers. To research these personas, the folks at Leighton did a lot of interviews and brainstorming sessions with Marco’s sales team — i.e. the people who were actually talking to the company’s customers.

“In hindsight, we wish we’d gotten a test group of people similar to our customers together for interviews to get input outside the actual company,” said Haider. But they made it work by talking to the sales team and filling in buyer persona templates, which you can download for free here. 

Step 2: Rethinking Blog Content

Once Haider and her team had helped Marco create buyer personas, they had a much better idea of what types of content they wanted to cover on the new blog. Marco’s main buyer persona was that facilities manager/IT manager/office manager, so they decided the topic of the new blog would be “general technology,” where they’d write blog posts focusing on advice and techniques for using technology in the workplace.

They started by creating the blog, which they did using HubSpot. (Read this blog post for a checklist on setting up a new blog, whether you’re using HubSpot or another blogging tool.)

Then, they built out an initial editorial calendar by downloading this blog editorial calendar template and deciding how many posts they could write per week.

Deciding how many blog posts to commit to writing is a common question for content marketers. Research shows that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more inbound traffic than companies that published between 0–4 monthly posts.

To start out, Leighton was able to commit to writing three new posts per week for the new blog, with the goal of increasing that number to four or five posts per week within a year if they were seeing a solid traffic increase to the blog.

Step 3: Creating Calls-to-Action

As any practiced inbound marketer knows, call-to-action (CTA) buttons are a critical component of your website’s lead generation process — especially on your blog. Without CTAs, people visiting your blog will have a hard time converting into leads.

Before Leighton stepped in, Marco wasn’t using any calls-to-action on their two existing blogs. Because of that, Philbrick explained, “there was a lot of missed opportunity for converting visitors to leads.”

To create that very first CTA, Leighton didn’t have to create new content to put behind a CTA and a landing page. Instead, they created a bottom-of-the-funnel CTA for a “technology assessment” — i.e. talking to a member of Marco’s sales team about their technology needs. Leighton used HubSpot’s CTA tool to create two versions of that technology CTA with different copy:

1. “Need Technology Advice? Ask a Marco Advisor”: 7.26% conversion rate in the first six months.
2. “Free Assessment”: 18.33% conversion rate in the first six months.

(Don’t know how to create a compelling CTA? Download this free ebook to learn how to create CTAs for your blog.)

About three months after getting the blog started with those bottom-of-the-funnel CTAs, they took their CTAs to the next level by creating a brand new offer. This didn’t require a ton of heavy lifting, as they were able to repurpose a preexisting FAQ document that Marco’s sales team already had on hand. 

The result of the new CTA? A 16.28% conversion rate in the first month it launched.

Step 4: Redesigning the Blog

Six months after jumpstarting the general technology blog, Leighton helped Marco redesign their blog to optimize it using SEO best practices, as well as restructuring the site map. This SEO revamp ended up having a huge impact on blog traffic in that first year.

By using blogging and SEO best practices, Haider and her team ensured the posts they wrote for Marco were helpful, scannable, and search-friendly. More specifically, here are a few things they paid close attention to:

• Focusing each blog post on 1–2 long-tail keywords. They were also sure to include these keywords in the title, URL, and headers. (Read this blog post to learn more about making your blog posts search friendly.) 
• Linking to other blog posts. They linked to 1–2 other, relevant blog posts in each new blog post they wrote, which is a best practice called internal linking. They also used the keywords they were targeting for in that blog post in the anchor text for each link.
• Writing compelling, search-friendly meta descriptions. (Read this blog post to learn more about writing meta descriptions.)

Later, Leighton would help make Marco’s whole website responsive to mobile devices, which was key for creating a great user experience for mobile readers — especially those searching Google on their mobile devices. 

Step 5: Promoting blog posts on other marketing channels.

In an effort to showcase Marco’s new blog design six months after the start of their project, the folks at Leighton helped them organize a launch campaign using multiple marketing channels. The campaign used email marketing and social media marketing and pointed viewers to the blog.

“We shared it out across all of Marco’s social networks, encouraging viewers to read our blog about the redesign and comment about what they liked,” said Philbrick. To promote engagement with these posts, they organized a giveaway for an iPad Mini and a bluetooth speaker for those who commented.

At the same time, they were also helping Marco promote their first annual “Technology Gone Wild” tradeshow, a more traditional marketing effort they used inbound marketing to promote via several marketing channels, including social media, email, and blog posts — which also contributed to an uptick in views.

The Results

From July 2013 — the first month Leighton launched the new blog  — until a year later, the new blog on general technology went from 88 blog visits to 2,249 blog visits a year later in July 2014, resulting in a blog traffic increase of 2,512.5%.

What did that increase in blog visits look like, exactly? The first month the blog was launched, it started at 88 visits. By the second month, it had increased to 250 visits. And by November and December (which tends to be a lower-traffic month thanks to the holidays), they were hovering around 300–400 visits per month.

There was a significant increase in traffic from December (336 visits) to the following month (1,899 visits). That was exactly when Leighton helped Marco launch a redesign of the new, SEO-friendly blog, launched an awareness campaign promoting the newly launched redesign, and promoted their event using blog posts and other marketing channels.

The best part of all of these inbound efforts?

“Marketing became, for the first time in our history, a direct revenue-generating force,” said Jeff Gau, CEO of Marco, about the results of their inbound marketing push.

To increase revenue from your website, companies need to get found online, generate leads, and then convert those leads into sales. Writing blog posts, optimizing those posts for traffic and leads, and promoting those posts on other marketing channels can help you accomplish all three.

“With a concerted and focused effort of all marketing tactics, we were able to get a huge push in blog visits and spike our search rankings, which will continue to compound and build from there,” added Philbrick.

If you master each step, you can turn your blog into a consistent source of leads — and eventually, revenue — for years to come.

Want to see who else in the inbound community has seen success? Check out HubSpot’s 2015 Year in Review. 

On any given day, the average businessperson receives 91 emails, according to a report by The Radicati Group.  This number is expected to rise to 95 emails per person per day by next year, and reach almost 100 by 2018.

That’s a lot of email.

While it’s no secret that we all know how to send email, the newer challenge is figuring out a way to actually receive a response from the people we’re sending these emails to. With all of those emails taking up space in their inbox, how can we reach out in a more meaningful way to ensure our messages are heard?

This is a bit of a loaded question, as there’s a lot to consider when sending a proper outreach email: subject lines, send times, email length … the list goe son.

To help answe rthis question, check out the infographic below from Online Course Report. They’ve detailed everything from what day and time is the best for sending outreach email to how many attempts you can expect to send.