It’s time again to reassess your organization’s marketing wins and learnings for 2023, and chart a course for your marketing in 2024. If you’re a social enterprise organization and not including inbound marketing strategies in those plans, you are likely missing out on opportunities to scale your revenue and impact.

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Inbound Marketing: What & Why

The premise behind inbound marketing is that content that your target market resonates with will drive them to you, where you can convert them from “warm” leads (i.e. engaged and interested) into clients.  Building brand trust through content is an effective and efficient way to direct leads to your website, where they will be nurtured down the funnel toward the action you’re seeking to achieve. 

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Need a primer on how marketing funnels drive social impact? Read this article.

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Inbound marketing has proven to be hugely successful as B2C and B2B customers become more dependent on digital resources when making decisions. Traditional marketing such as billboards, print ads in newspapers and magazines, and TV commercials have become less influential over time. Instead, decision makers are relying on search results and recommendations from digital channels – such as social media, e-newsletters, blogs, and podcasts – they know and trust. 

As technology and marketing rapidly evolve it’s also become increasingly difficult to attract new business via display advertising, thanks to “banner blindness.” After nearly a generation of conditioning, it’s now all but reflexive, especially for millennials and Gen Z, to skip over website ads. Still, there are a couple types of digital advertising that continue to deliver results in the new landscape. We’re sharing all the best methods to drive organic inbound traffic for social enterprises, as we at Mustard & Moxie prepare our digital marketing plans for 2024.

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Click here to download our white paper about impact assessment and KPIs for social enterprises.

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Invest in Content Marketing

Content marketing is an essential aspect of a successful inbound marketing strategy for any business type. This is especially true for social impact-focused organizations, since the story behind your mission and purpose is often the most effective messaging tool in your arsenal. There are quite a few different types of content that can contribute to inbound marketing, including: 

• ‍Social media‍
• Blog posts
• Videos
• White papers‍
• Case studies‍
• Infographics‍
• Email newsletters and eblasts

One thing all of the above have in common is that you don’t need to pay to get in front of your target audience. The costs to consider include only content creation (writing and design,) hosting (on your website,) and distribution (via socials or an email platform.) 

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Repurpose Your Content  

None of your content should exist all by itself, on an island: a lot of it can and should be restructured and repurposed for different channels and content types. This extends the usefulness of each of your efforts, while providing you more ways to engage with your audience and make an impression. 

Take this example. If you write a white paper, you should also write two or three blog posts that each touch on a different point of that white paper. Publish the blog posts with links to the white paper as a download. Create eblasts that go out to the segments that would be interested in those blog posts with condensed notes from the blog posts. You can even use some of the blog post copy in the eblast itself and encourage readers to click through to the blog post. Pare the same topics down to one-liner hooks for social posts and use a “link in bio” tool to direct from your social media accounts to your blog posts. 

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Are blogs still relevant? We think so! Read about it here.

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Everything should have a clear Call To Action (CTA): give your audience clear instructions on what action to take next, whether it be “Read More” or “Subscribe Now.” Every piece of content you create should connect with other kinds of content and work together to achieve conversions.

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Improve Your Website

Because all of this marketing content should be designed to drive traffic to your website and towards conversion, it goes without saying that the website should offer a great user experience. It should be easy to navigate, visually interesting, and representative of your brand, both in its messaging and its design. We recommend you work with an experienced web designer who will know how to incorporate your values into the look and feel of the site.  A website that is dated or confusing will cause you to lose credibility quickly – think of the times you’ve Googled a business and been discouraged by a subpar website. Also make sure that your website is optimized for mobile and not just desktop, since much of your web traffic will be from smartphones, and your search rankings will be impacted by mobile-first usability.

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Need Some Help?

Mustard & Moxie are experts in social enterprise marketing. We can help you create and manage an inbound marketing strategy that speaks to your mission as much as your audiences. Get the conversation started today!

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Image credit: Lance Anderson via Unsplash

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