Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Nonprofit marketers are using more content marketing tactics, social media platforms, and paid methods of content promotion than last year – and, generally speaking, they’re becoming more effective in many of these areas, and in particular, with how effectively they use tactics.

Yet, in terms of overall effectiveness, only 26% say they’re effective – a drop from last year when about one-third of marketers said they were effective. Our new report, Nonprofit Content Marketing 2016: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America, produced in association with Blackbaud and sponsored by FusionSpark Media, reveals this insight and much more.

And then, late one night in January, my colleagues Kieran and Joe had a Twitter conversation with Rand Fishkin about the HubSpot Blog's editorial strategy. It got me thinking: With all these new tools and resources at our disposal, was the Marketing Blog's current high volume strategy still best for our readers, thus best for us?

Keeping our headcount and resources constant, what kind of posts should we be publishing -- and at what frequency -- to grow faster?

Funny enough, we weren't the only ones interested in finding out this answer. After Joe and Kieran chatted with Rand on Twitter, we reached out to Trevor Klein at Moz to see if he wanted to run a similar experiment with their audience. He did -- and you can head over to their blog to read their findings.

Six months after starting this experiment on the Marketing Blog, we've uncovered some compelling insights that will transform how our section operates. Here's what we did to figure out our optimal editorial strategy -- and what we're going to do about it.  ...