If you are a nonprofit organization, here are three important marketing trends you should include in your 2019 planning.

1. The Revival of Email

As the reach on social media channels like Facebook declines through stricter algorithms and policies, nonprofits should ramp up email communications.  By 2021, 7.7 billion email accounts are expected worldwide.  Smartphone users check emails 81% of the time on their device.  And with 59% of email opens occurring on mobile, you need to ensure any landing page click thru’s are mobile optimized as well.

As a marketer, you know it’s essential to keep your website content fresh by updating it frequently, often in the form of blogs. Most likely, you’re aware that the digital world of 280-character tweets, abbreviated text messages and emoji conversations is shortening our attention spans. Medical Daily writes that the human attention span has shortened from 12 seconds to eight seconds in recent years. Therefore, it makes sense to fill your marketing content strategy with shorter pieces of content that are easy for you to write and easy for your readers to digest.

However, data has shown that long-form content (pages that have a word count of up to 3,000 words) increase time on page − an important metric for SEO − and can garner more page views than a short blog post.

Google has always seen itself as more than a search bar.  In fact, if you saw the news last week, Google is committing itself to the healthcare space from a variety of angles. 

Google announced last Friday that Geisinger Health CEO David Feinberg has been hired to head up their healthcare initiatives.  Feinberg will work to coordinate Google’s move into the $3 trillion healthcare market across many groups including Google Brain (the artificial intelligence team), Nest home automation group and Google Fit wearables team.

On November 9, 2018, we welcomed divided government back to Washington.

I had a conversation with a recent college graduate last week and I asked him if he used LinkedIn to prep for a meeting. His response surprised me. “I already have a job. I don’t need LinkedIn.” Really? In this time of big-data, constant networking and social media driven everything, LinkedIn still is thought of as just a place to find a job?

LinkedIn is so much more. And if you’re not using it as part of your organizations digital marketing strategy you are missing out.

Learning the Ropes of Social Media

Connecting Kids to Meals (CKM) is one of the largest hunger-relief organizations in Northwest Ohio, having served more than 5 million nutritious meals to children in over 15 years in operation.  Thread Marketing Group started working with this community organization in 2017.  In fact, Whitney Rofkar, one of our team members is a CKM board member and helps keep this important issue and organization front and center in Northwest Ohio.

Lead generation is at the heart of most marketing teams’ goals. And it’s a challenge for nearly everyone. We regularly assist our clients with building effective lead generation strategies, and we regularly hear the same challenges presented.

Here are the top three lead gen challenges we see and suggestions on how to solve them.

A strategic partnership with a marketing agency can be a great investment, but evaluating and selecting the best marketing agency for your specific organization and its goals is a challenge many marketing and sales leaders face.

With so many marketing agencies out there, in order to find the one that’s best for you, you’ll need to know exactly what you’re looking for and how to find it.

Below are six steps to help you evaluate and select the best marketing agency for you.

The Midwest is full of world-class marketing events this summer. With warmer weather finally here, it’s a great time to feel refreshed, get inspired and expand your marketing knowledge at some upcoming can’t-miss marketing conferences.

Below are Thread’s picks for the top five marketing conferences in the Midwest this summer.