Category: Marketing 101

Before we dig in, I want to introduce you to Roxie the Bird. For the record, she has been around longer than Twitter or Portlandia. She’s a seasoned bird. She can guide you to messaging awesomeness. Sometimes she’s bossy (or, as I like to say “directive”), but she knows her stuff, so pay attention to her when you see her. And, yes, you’ll be seeing her more often.

Now that we’re through introductions…

Many organizations are making due with marketing that’s “good enough”. The problem is “good enough” is often not good enough anymore. You’re competing for the heads and hearts of supporters who are on the receiving end of some pretty fantastic marketing from other organizations.

Sometimes you can look at a pitch and immediately say “Oh boy, that one’s a stinker!” But when it’s your own message–one you live and breathe every day—well, it’s not that easy to tell the difference.

At the risk of going all Sham-Wow on you, I have something that can help.  I created the 1,2,3 Marketing Assessment to help you figure out if what your marketing is hitting the mark and, if not, why.

Using the tool, you quickly score your current efforts against the three elements required for really great marketing.  It’s quick and easy, people, so no excuses not to do it.

Your mission deserves better than “good enough”, does it not?

Download your 1, 2, 3 Marketing Assessment and get started!

The internet has changed how people make purchase decisions. The availability of data (like online reviews) and search algorithms that seem to predict the exact thing you were looking for with only a few keystrokes (you know, right before you delete your search history so your kids can’t see that you were researching boarding schools) can shorten the time between the decision-to-purchase and the actual purchase. Of course, same goes for decisions people make about where to invest in making the world a better place. Interested in advancing adult literacy? You can have information on a number of reading programs on your computer screen in mere seconds.  Want to know who has been helped by those organizations? YouTube will likely bubble up some compelling testimonials.

But remember back in the old days? You know, like the 90s? When marketing was made out of paper and handshakes? Have we changed so much since then that the old way of marketing no longer works at all? Should we completely shun the old for the new?

As much as we hear that newspapers are dead and that people are increasingly engaging with organizations online, there are some “traditional” marketing approaches that have been on the receiving end of a little nip and tuck, but still work. Particularly when looking at activities where someone first gets to know your organization—way before they decide to engage with you—there’s still opportunity to kick it old school…with a little twist of channel integration.

Sponsored events (with a dedicated Twitter hashtag, e.g. “#givingtuesday” ), press interviews (now most likely to be read online and hyperlinked to your website) and speaking engagements (which, if recorded, may generate significant interest on YouTube) are great examples of traditional channels that have gotten a makeover, courtesy of emerging digital channels, and come out looking even better than before.

So as you evaluate your investment in traditional marketing activities, consider the possibility that what’s old is new again with the additional reach that comes from technology.

You’ve probably heard from experts about the “best place” to reach the people that support your mission. There’s lots of talk about where you should be focusing your efforts: events for fundraising, social media for generating engagement, etcetera.

You have more choices than ever before and sometimes it feels like the hits just keep on coming. While you work to bling out your e-newsletter, you start hearing about the cool stuff organizations are doing with video. It feels like a never-ending cycle of just trying to keep up.

And while all the new channels give you options to meet your future supporters in countless different ways, at the end of the day, most of those channels won’t matter to your organization. Don’t care how shiny they are, they just won’t matter. Sometimes it feels like separating the wheat from the chaff is as laborious as actually separating wheat from chaff (whatever that is).

So in those moments when you are reading about the new online thing and it sounds as sexy as whatever Apple is putting out this week, stop. I mean it…stop…and ask yourself:

• What are my marketing objectives and is this channel consistent with meeting them?
• Whose support will I need to meet those objectives? Who is my audience?
• Where does that audience hang-out? How do they consume information?
• Does this channel create meaning for that audience?

For example, donor retention might be high on your list of priorities. And when you look at the people who give to your organization, you find that a good old-fashioned, hand-signed thank you note (the non-boring variety) means a lot to them. And while you could reach these folks by Twitter, a “Thanks peeps #yourock” isn’t going to pack the same punch, either because your donor audience isn’t down with the bird, or because that type of interaction doesn’t make them feel like you really care.

Every channel isn’t for every organization. So when someone starts to tell you that you really should be using [insert the much hyped channel du jour], don’t jump to “how do I make this work for my organization?” Think about what your marketing is supposed to help you accomplish, i.e. what’s your goal, , who the people are on the other end of that marketing, and the types of interactions that get them excited about what you do.

In sum, resist shiny object syndrome. It’s expensive and will makes you want to poke your eyes out with little bamboo sticks. Ouch!

When someone is super duper smart about something, I always hope they’ll share their smarts. Lucky for us, Heather Hamilton, who knows a gob smacking amount about personas and audience segmentation, has agreed to. She knows about the art and science of connecting with people on-line. Enjoy! Erica

“My name is Heather, and I research people online for a living”. Well, that’s partially true…I mean, it’s part of what I do. I run a small consulting firm called Whiz Bang Solutions that helps organizations connect with people online. We help our clients understand who their most important audiences are and then we develop content and engagement strategies that help these organizations connect with those people in relevant and meaningful ways. So target audience insights are a foundational piece of that work. In fact, I believe that understanding the folks on the receiving end of your messaging is the most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your outreach. All the help that Erica provides to organizations telling the story of their missions? It all starts with knowing their audiences.

So Erica asked me to share a little about my process. Let me start out by saying that if you are an organization with a humongo budget for an audience insight project, I am NOT your gal. My experience comes from  looking up boyfriends online almost twenty years in the staffing industry, where you really can’t attract the right people if you don’t know who they are, and from creating these target profiles with a budget of exactly zero dollars. Fortunately, the age of over-sharing is upon us, so gathering data online about peoples’ opinions and habits? Piece of cake.

Step One: Define your mission and stakeholders. It sounds a little basic, but revisiting your objective and asking yourself who the people are that can impact your success will help ensure you’re looking at the right potential audience subjects. For example, if your mission is to provide safe playgrounds for kids and you are only reaching out to moms of toddlers, well, Houston, we have a problem. You’re not thinking big enough. Explore your objective, toss it around and poke at it so you are able to define your stakeholders in the broadest possible way. For example: parents, members of communities that include children, child-related service providers, people who talk about issues related to children online, leaders of organizations serving families, toy manufacturers. You get the idea. Brainstorm and go broad.

Step two: Determine where you can find data about these people. Much of the data you can find online, but don’t forget the data you collect about your current supporters. I really enjoy this part. I feel like a PI (sans mustache)…that data is out there and it’s my job to uncover it. Don’t try to focus your research only on uncovering your targets in the context of their interest in the nonprofit space. Donors don’t think of themselves only, or even mainly, as donors.  They think of themselves as parents, professionals, neighbors, friends, etc. Get creative and think about where folks might share their relevant thoughts. For example, you might find people sharing comments about the merits of specific playgrounds in parents forums. You’ll find information on peoples’ careers and interests on LinkedIn. You’ll find folks’ buying habits in Amazon product reviews. And here and there you will strike upon chunks of data that really start to paint the picture of your target audiences.

Step three: This step I refer to as “collect without judgment” because you’ll start to collect data for analysis before you ever know if that data is important. For example, you may end up finding that families with multiple children are more likely to use a playground. You won’t know this at the outset of course. So capture your data (like number of children) when it’s available and don’t judge its usefulness just yet. I use Excel for this because it allows me to create huge data sets and manipulate them easily through hiding, filtering and sorting. Make sure that all of the stakeholder groups you identified in step one around accounted for. You now have loads of audience insights. So now comes the targeting part…

Step four: Next determine some messaging or engagement goals that relate to your objectives and the role that your stakeholders play. Let’s return to our safe playground example. Perhaps enhancing name recognition for the organization and retaining donors are shorter term priorities and growing your average gift size is a longer term priority. When they align their stakeholders to these goals, they see the importance of people who talk about issues related to children online, because this stakeholder group impacts their short and long term priorities: they can help generate name recognition and can be a source of donor advertising opportunities; they may even become donor-advocates. These stakeholder groups are now priorities for your analysis. They aren’t your target audiences, but they will be highly represented.

Step five: Now the data fun begins. I’m not even joking. This is where your target audience personas really come to life. Review your data set and specifically focus on your priority stakeholders from step four (without completely excluding your other stakeholders). Start to sort the data and you will see trends emerge. For example, you might see that there is a group of stakeholders that live in large cities, are active on social media with many followers and like to post pictures online, and others are donors to child-related organizations, go to church, have a dog and drive a sensible car. The magic of this stage is that you don’t end up finding your target audiences, your target audiences end up finding you. Don’t keep your data subjects sequestered in their stakeholder buckets. The folks that live in large cities and post pictures to their massive Twitter followers can help you generate more name recognition and the sensible donors who drive a Volvo may be great fundraising targets.

Step six: Create audience personas. This part is creative and can feel a little silly, but it really helps rally the troops behind your target audience segments. I write short biographies about a prototypical member of each high-priority segment. So “Susie” may be your social media maven, who lives in a walk-up in Brooklyn with her two kids and cat. She works as a writer and on weekends she takes her kids to the playground and then out to lunch and checks her Facebook account frequently throughout the day and writes her mommy blog at night. By creating a persona for fictional but totally data-based Susie, your influencer audience comes to life. And the people responsible for messaging can make sure they are talking to Susie each time they produce a campaign or program aimed at generating more name-recognition for your organization.

Essentially, you’ve taken a big amorphous group of people who maybe-could help your organization fulfill its mission, and turned them into tangible audience members with the highest likelihood of helping you kick a little do-good butt.

If you’ve got questions on my approach, or ideas on great sources of audience data, feel free to get in touch or drop a comment here!