Katy Teson Are you planning to market an upcoming event or campaign using a landing page on your nonprofit’s website? Sounds great! But don’t forget that you’ll also need a plan outlining how to promote your landing page to drive website traffic.
We’ll break down six standard places to leverage your landing page plus six places you probably haven’t thought of yet when it comes to putting your page in the public eye.
How to Promote Your Landing Page: Starting With the Basics
Once your landing page is ready for action, it’s time to start creating clear and compelling paths for people to find it. The easiest places to start are those that are largely in your control: your nonprofit’s website and other “owned” communication channels.
Website navigation
Adding a landing page to your site for a special occasion or short-term campaign doesn’t necessarily mean that it shouldn’t have a home within your site’s existing website structure and navigation. A floating page should rarely be your first choice since it makes it even more difficult for people to find it.
Try to place it where it makes the most logical sense, like with similar content for fundraising or how to get involved. Make sure that it’s included somewhere in your website’s menus so that visitors understand how to get to the page even if they don’t land there originally.
One example of this is Gilda’s Club Madison, which has a section for Fundraising Events in their main navigation. Their annual events and campaigns have a nice home here!
Website homepage
As the page on your site that likely gets the most visitors, be sure to highlight your event or campaign on the homepage with a prominent link or button that directs them to your landing page.
For example, the Holocaust Museum & Learning Center in St. Louis makes it really hard to miss their expansion campaign when visiting the homepage.
Blog posts
Assuming that you’re going to blog about the event or campaign (hint: you should), be sure to include a link to your landing page in each post for people to learn more and take action. It’s a quick and easy win, especially if you already have a process in place for promoting your blog posts, too.
See an example of this with a blog post by the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, which includes a link to a landing page for a related priestly ordination event.
Email marketing
If you’re sending an email with information about the campaign or event, even if it’s a brief mention in a newsletter article, work in a link to your landing page. Every time. It’s that simple! The more consistent you are at directing people to the page, the better your chances are of getting it to stick in peoples’ minds.
Social media posts
You’d be surprised at the number of nonprofits that don’t include website links in their social media posts. When it comes to learning how to promote your landing page on social media, the first rule is to actually paste in the link! Folks are not going to go searching for it. Plus, when someone (hopefully) shares your post with their network, the landing page is just a click away for a whole new audience.
Check out how the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation included their landing page in a Facebook post about their upcoming virtual gala.
Press release and media coverage
Not every event or campaign warrants a press release or news article, but you should definitely be on the lookout for opportunities to link directly to your landing page in either case. (For an online article, you might have to ask the journalist to add it in, but that’s not an unusual request.) First, it makes it easy for readers to go directly to the source. Second, you can score some search engine optimization points for the page and your website as a whole by building quality links.
In a press release for Kathy’s House, the organization does a nice job working in a link to a campaign landing page for the hospice as well as keeping in a link to their homepage in the boilerplate.
Taking Your Promotion to the Next Level
Got those bases covered? Here are six additional tips on how to promote your landing page that goes beyond the status quo.
Facebook Event
Remember when I said that a lot of nonprofits forget to link to their landing page in social media posts? It’s even worse within Facebook Events, where many marketers seemingly forget to post anything at all. Make a note to include your landing page link throughout Facebook Event content, including the event description, discussion posts and even the link for ticket sales.
Forest Park Forever did a good job leveraging the landing page link for their virtual fun run in almost every one of their Facebook Event posts!
Email footers
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that your staff members tend to get and send a lot of emails in the course of your work. Why not include a small plug for your event or campaign in the signature area of your emails? Start small with a single line of text that includes a link to the landing page, like “Have you heard about our _____ campaign? Sign the pledge!”
Online community calendars
Even the smallest towns I know have at least one online calendar hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, local radio station or public library. It’s usually free and easy to get your event listed if you put in the minimal amount of work to submit your information ahead of time. This is a perfect opportunity to link directly to the event landing page (not your homepage!) to RSVP, buy tickets or learn more.
The Double H Ranch listed their virtual gala on several community calendars in the vicinity of their summer camp for kids with serious illnesses. Check out this entry on Saratoga.com.
Partner or sponsor communications
Are your nonprofit’s partners or sponsors advertising for you on their own sites or social media? Or would they consider it, like posting on a company blog or including it in their email newsletter? Make sure that they have the URL to the landing page on your website so that you don’t miss an opportunity to capture the attention of their audiences.
Google Ads
Not all campaigns or events are a good fit for your Google Ad Grant strategy, but for ones that are, it’s crucial to have a well-designed and compelling landing page with content that’s optimized for your target keywords. Shape your ad headlines and copy to align with the core message of your page and the action you want people to take—and, of course, make sure the ads send people directly to the landing page.
Website pop-up
Not everyone loves the interruption of a website pop-up, but they can be an excellent way to push website visitors to your landing page if you follow pop-up best practices. Inexpensive tools like OptinMonster or pop-up plugins make it pretty painless to try out a pop-up on your site and see if people are motivated to click.
The Myositis Association added a temporary website pop-up for their annual conference that helps draw attention to the event and push people to the landing page to register.
3 Bonus Tips to Maximize Results
I’ve written previously about landing page essential elements and management tips, but there are a few more pointers that I’d like to share as you put together your promotion plan.
- If the link for your landing page seems long or complicated, use a URL shortening tool like Bit.ly to make it more memorable and easy to use in your communications. Create a short and snappy vanity URL that redirects people to the right place on your site (e.g., yournonprofit.org/gala).
- Have you heard of the Yoast SEO tool? We love it for optimizing web pages, and it also gives you the option to pre-format how the page shows up on social media when people post and share the link. It’s a fantastic opportunity to create a powerful visual for your event or campaign.
- If possible, add social sharing buttons on your landing page to encourage visitors to spread the word using their own accounts. Having someone post that they’ve registered for your event or participated in your campaign is a powerful endorsement!
Let your landing page shine by giving it the attention it deserves. After all, you’ve done the hard work of wrangling all of the event or campaign content on the page. Now you get to do the fun job of helping people enjoy it.
How else would you drive website traffic to your nonprofit’s landing pages? Any questions about how to promote your landing page for an upcoming event or campaign? See you in the comments.
Comments