Ask Us ANYTHING: Love is Blind! 😂 Secrets to Nonprofit, Business, & Consumer Marketing! | Ep. 435

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are here for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast. This is our short episode where all week long we get in questions, we get in work questions, we get in ridiculous questions. We try to tackle one of each, and if you want to submit a question, it's really easy. Just go to jschwedelson.com. There's a button that says podcast. another one that says ask us anything and we love getting questions how we do the show and so today we got in some audio questions so let's go to the work question first what do we got hi this is Haley I'm from Fort Lauderdale Florida and I help run a non-profit called the verb kind where we mentor incarcerated youth and juvenile detention centers so my question is What's the best way to market a nonprofit?

0:59What's the best way to get new volunteers to raise awareness and to kind of spread the word when it comes to social media and digital marketing? Thank you. All right, Haley, that is, first of all, amazing. I think anybody that is spending their career in the nonprofit sector that's helping other people, especially what you're doing, I just can't say enough amazing things about you. You are way better human than I am. I want to live vicariously through you, and I hope you are crushing it because we need people like you to crush it out there. But back to your question. Now, your question is really interesting because I think that it doesn't just apply to people in the nonprofit sector.

1:48Certainly, I think it's even more so in the nonprofit sector. But these tactics I'm going to share with you, they really do apply across almost any type of marketing, business, consumer, you name it. So let's first talk about simple, quick tip things. Your call to action, whether it's on a social media post, it's on a landing page, a button, it's in an email, those rectangular buttons, your call to action buttons. So often they say things, especially in the nonprofit world, they'll say things like donate now or give now. Or if you're not in the nonprofit sector and you're listening, you may say buy now or download now or register now.

2:27In general, what we always want to be thinking about with our marketing is not what's in it for me, the person that's running the nonprofit marketing or the brand marketing or whatever, but always what's in it for the person that's seeing this messaging on social media, on email, whatever it is. And when you write your call to action buttons anywhere, social media, website, email, whatever, when you write them in first person, we see click-through rates go up by over 20%. So instead of donate now, it would say, yes, I want to help. I mean, imagine somebody opens up that email, instead of it saying, donate now, it says, count me in.

3:07How can I support? Right. Or instead of donate now, it says, yes, I can't wait to help. Right. All of a sudden, the person is active and they're engaged. And it's the same thing with volunteers. It's not like, hi, we need volunteers. It needs to reverse the messaging where it says, I want to be part of the team. Right. And so this whole idea of flipping the script to first person in all of your marketing, when they're at the point of really taking that next step, you will see click-through rates rise quite a bit. The other thing is the biggest mistake I see in nonprofit marketing, whether it is an email and social, whatever.

3:43And by the way, this is the case for consumer marketing, for business marketing, is we all have a lot to say, right? We'll send out an email and there'll be these lots of words in the emails. Okay, here's the reality of it. When you are marketing to a prospect, it does not matter if it is someone that you're trying to get to donate or to buy or to download a B2B piece of content. The secret sauce thing for prospects is 75 words or less in a single paragraph. You cannot have more than 75 words in a single paragraph. When you do, we actually see click-through rates drop off massively. When you are communicating to existing customers, somebody that actually cares about you or existing people that are already donating to your cause, you could be more verbose, 100 words, 150 words, because they're in it with you.

4:34But if you are using the same copy and the same length of copy for your prospects as you are your existing customer base, you're making an epic mistake. Those are two very different populations, and prospects really barely care about what you have to say. And the last one is something I hope that we all realize at this point, which I think we do, which is using real humanity. I'm so happy that there's like this massive pushback on a lot of the AI generated imagery as it relates to human beings. A lot of people are saying, wait a minute, I don't want to see AI generated humans in an ad or in an image, whatever.

5:17We want to see real people. And we see that even though it's hard to tell what's real, what's not real, we do see that. When you see posts, social media posts, for example, across any platform, and it doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C or nonprofit, when posts include real human faces, okay, and the faces are not in some sort of green screen, whatever, real human faces in a post, we see a 38 % higher engagement rate. and that's from World Data Research. And this is this idea of adding humanity to everything that we're doing. And as we head into 2026, that is it. Humanity is going to be the algorithm, period, end of story.

5:59You're going to need to get really comfortable. Your team's going to need to get comfortable. Your brand marketing is going to need to get comfortable inserting real humans, your team out there doing stuff, eating pizza together, showing your pets, doing whatever, showing customers using your stuff in a real place okay showing people that are volunteering doing real stuff humanity is going to be the algorithm as we head into next year um so that's what i would be thinking about across the board and and keep on doing what you're doing because it's super important um so let's jump into the ridiculous question what do we got hey jay this is Alexis.

6:40I'm from Dayton, Ohio, and I just wanted to know what is your favorite reality TV show and why? And specifically, if you could include the seasons, that would be incredible. Thanks. All right, Alexis, this is good stuff. Because as you know, I have horrendous taste in TV. But on this one particular topic, what is the best reality show? I happen to have incredible taste. um now my problem with judging reality shows what's the best and what's the best season i've come to the conclusion about something i don't like going back and watching old seasons of reality shows i don't know why but it's not entertaining to me it's like that happened three years ago i know they broke up or whatever i don't know it just doesn't do it for me so when somebody's like hey what's the best whatever it's always the most recent one um i'm like a goldfish and so the answer to that question right now is clearly without question love is blind season nine i am fully caught up uh i haven't i mean the wedding stuff has not happened yet whatever and i will tell you if you've never watched love is blind you're a loser you are you are i'm sorry you're like no i'm not no you are actually it's true i'm so sorry you are and this season in particular is the best season of all time, mostly because 90 % of the people that they cast are out of their minds.

8:12Okay. The, there's no, there is nobody on that show that should have gotten through all the checks and balances of going on national TV. They're all some version of what is going on with them for real. Okay. So I cannot wait for the season to fully end so I can do my full recap, but if you've never watched Love is a Blind season nine, watch it, enjoy it. Stop watching these, you know, murder mysteries. Stop watching these true crime. Why is true crime so popular? What is going on? What is going on with me? I don't know. Anyway, I appreciate you being here. Guru Conference right around the corner.

8:49Check it out. GuruConference.com. It's free. It's virtual. November 6th and 7th. You are going to miss it. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You could find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on.

9:26Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.