How to Use Video Content Marketing to Promote a Non-Profit

Video marketing has been fast evolving over a decade lately, and it’s still going ever stronger. Whether you are operating a non-profit (or volunteering to help one which is always a good idea), here are a few tips to use video marketing.

If we want to really see how valuable video marketing is, we should look at some statistics:

Let’s not forget that video marketing opens up more channels for you, including:

It also allows you to create more engaging content (like podcasting).

As you can see, video content is worth creating. You may still worry that it is too expensive or too difficult. Luckily, neither have to be the case!

Here are the most common challenges (nonprofit) brands tend to face when it comes to video marketing:

While it seems overwhelming, all it takes to start is a subject that you want to record. What would be most effective at telling the story of your cause? Every video should start out with this question, because you are going to be answering it every time you pick up your camera.

Next, you need to ask yourself what style you are looking for. Are you going to sit in front of the camera and talk? Do a live shoot with something going on right then? Do a story time style video with clips, footage, voiceover and music? You are in control and so you will be deciding what your audience most needs to see and how.

High Jump is a non-profit that creates educational programs meant to help seventh and eighth grade students increase their knowledge in multiple categories, such as art and science. This video campaign netted them $215,000 donations from viewers.

Lifebuoy launched a campaign that followed Sangrah, an expecting mother. The purpose was to illustrate their efforts to help with prenatal and postnatal care.

Their mission is to help children live to the age of five, which 6 million children per year never reach. Handwashing was the primary focus on this particular experiment, which can help to strengthen the health of the fetus, as well as the mother. The video is incredibly well made and tells a story that makes you really care about the subject of the film.

Do you see how each of these videos uses a different storytelling style that still gets the message across? They also appealed to the emotional response of the viewer. Each was touching in its own way, but they both target different emotions. You should be asking yourself what emotion each video you create is trying to convey.

If you are looking for ideas on where to start, micro-videos (those 1-3 minutes long) make perfect nonprofit promotional assets. They are also easy to create and require no special skills or expensive software.

You can put inspiring videos together easily using tools like InVideo. Simply pick a video template, upload your own images and videos and put together a video using an easy visual editor:

Invideo can help you create an inspiring video which will take you just a few minutes to put together!

Well, this one isn’t far from the truth, I’ll grant you that. Video content competition is huge: It’s getting harder and harder to stand out and get noticed.

There’s one shortcut for growing video views though: Drive views from Google.

Thanks to Google’s carousels, ranking videos in Google isn’t hard. Plus this strategy is not as popular yet, so it is still pretty doable.

[Google’s video carousels are low-hanging-fruit opportunity for driving video views and brand exposure]

All you need to do is to follow basic SEO steps (those are universal for text and video content):

You are pretty much done.

If you have trouble identifying searchable angles (this is something many nonprofits are struggling with), use Text Optimizer to identify what Google may be associating your niche with:

This is another hard one. It is hard to put a price tag on things like brand exposure and trust building.

Consequently, video marketing may be very hard to “sell” to the brand’s CEO or your manager.

Since executives are usually looking for “measurable” results, you will need to track metrics like clicks and conversions religiously to justify a video marketing campaign.

Tools like Finteza are great for that, as it requires no technical skill to set up. It’s also conversion-oriented allowing you to monitor your sales funnel and compare effectiveness of several traffic sources.

Video marketing can be overwhelming. But thanks to modern tools, it is quite doable. Videos work best for building empathy and spreading awareness which make them perfect for marketing non-profit projects. I hope the above ideas will inspire and motivate you to get started!

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