MKF 7 Marketing Insights 2018 › wp-content › uploads › 201… · marketer for years. Start by...

7 marketing

insightsBy Marc Fey

MKF Strategic Marketing


MOST COMMON MARKETING MISTAKE:

Misplaced Instead of a focus on ROOTS

(trying to get RESULTS before you know what WORKS)


focus on FRUITS


focus on ROOTS

Building relationships of trust


Strong roots:

INSIGHT #1 Educate & inspire your best customers


Every effective merketer knows the power of referrals. The “net promoter score” movement is the best example of this emphasis. Referrals represent the most efficient marketing dollars you can spend—to encourage your happy customers to tell others.

If your product or service is making a difference in your customers’ lives, then it’s your job to tell those stories and to continue to educate your clients.

Your clients’ needs are real, their stories are real. Staying close to your customers gives you insights that will pay off for future marketing efforts and help you continue to develop your product or service. Educating your customers keeps you in the role of trusted guide.

Is there a new challenge your customers should know about? How are your best customers using your product or service?

While it might seem counter-intuitive, the same nurture marketing you do at the top of the funnel needs to be done at the bottom of the funnel—and in fact, I’m suggesting you start your marketing efforts with your customers.

Educate and Inspire Your Best Customers1

Besides referrals, staying close to your customers gives you invaluable insights into how your product or service is working, the stories you can share in your marketing, and perhaps most importantly, you won’t be the last person to hear about problems your customers might be having.

Application: Build a nurture marketing campaign for your clients, being sure to 1) tell stories about the difference your product or service is making in the world, 2) keep educating your clients regarding adjacent topics (for example, if you sell software for customer relationship management, educate them on software that manages other aspects of the client relationship, like finances or help desk tickets.

Then, when the time is right, ask your customers to be an advocate for you—being involved with you in delivering your product or service to others who need your product or service.

Always follow up. Contact them again to say thank you. Then, show them what their money is doing. Giving your donors a real-life look at you’ve accomplished together. It will build trust that they’re giving money to the right cause and make them feel included.

Educate and Inspire Your Best Customers1

INSIGHT #2 personalize the experience


Not everyone comes to a product or service offering for the same reason. Yet, it is still in your best interest to truly connect with potential customers. That means learning what a meaningful relationship looks like—one you shape based on their unique needs, questions, and problems.

Think about a couple advocacy asks you could make: volunteer your time or give money. If someone is in a tight place financially, they aren’t likely to answer the call when asked for money, not even a small amount. But if he is given the opportunity to give his time instead, he is much more likely to show up. His work, too, will probably be more valuable than the $5 option you prompted him with.

Of course, the opposite is also true. For people with demanding jobs and families, their time is a more precious resource. Being able to entrust money to someone to follow a common cause is their ideal way to effect change in the world.

Personalize the Experience2

The difference often depends on demographics. 90’s kids are much more likely to donate their days to a cause than older generations, who have more money and are willing to share it. But the most accurate way to personalize their experience is to let them choose for themselves. Ask them whether they would like to give their time or their money in the subscription process. Then, you can segment your contacts based on this factor. When you send out an email or serve them an ad, you can call them to their preferred action. At the same time, people are their surroundings to a certain extent. In marketing, we call this right place, right time. Reach an individual at this intersection. When they renew their memberships, make donations, or check out a certain campaign. With an automated email system, you can target the donor with the right message. Donate now, thank you, or get involved.

According to a nonprofit resource site, Blue Sky ETO, “When the right message is sent at the right time, engagement and conversions rise.”

Personalize the Experience2

INSIGHT #3 Achieve a sustainable model


Nonprofits have to run sustainably, but they usually don’t have the money for continual outreach. Jeff Kear of Planning Pod outlines the problem, “One big challenge is that most nonprofits have a limited (and some nonexistent) marketing budget to work with. It’s a Catch 22” (Blue Sky ETO).

Where should you start? Use your existing contacts, members and donor lists to direct the content marketing and personalization methods we talked about before. The increase in communication is the baseline for reaching sustainability.

Why? Because it matches today’s preferred way of giving. Over the last few years, monthly giving has been on the rise. This more frequent donating has doubled nonprofits’ online revenue. Increasingly, as demographics change, monthly giving will replace large one-time gifts.

Achieve a Sustainable Model3

Sure, you can throw the Hail Mary for that million dollar donation. But the practical trick to really achieving sustainability is to grow your network, not donation size. To do so, you might have to change your approach as your pool of donors is now predominantly Millennials. In fact, the demographic become the most represented in the workforce, which of course will only continue over time (Hubspot).

There has been a lot of talk about what kind of people Millennials are. Being self-absorbed and entitled are the two stereotypes people usually reach for. The statistics, however, don’t match. In fact, the 2014 Millennial Impact Report found that 87% of employed Millennials surveyed had donated to a nonprofit, usually more than $100 over the course of a year (Commit Change).


It’s true, they are giving less. Millennials don’t have as much giving power as the generations preceeding them. The average Millennial makes $2,000 less than their parents did at the same age, accounting for inflation. And as far as hope for larger donations, researchers actually predicted Millennials are 10 times less likely to become millionaires than Baby Boomers (Hubspot).

Therefore, your nonprofit has to change its model to account for more donors giving more frequently, but at lower amounts if it wants to survive in the future.


INSIGHT #4 shift to integrated digital marketing


Is print your medium of communicating with donors? If so, you should implement a digital strategy as soon as possible. According to the research, the only donors who respond to direct mail are over 55 years old (Hubspot).

You don’t have to become all digital right away. In fact, you shouldn’t. What you should do is phase print out at the rate at which your donor demographics change. What if you’ve never published online before? Start by always sharing everything you pint somewhere online. Then, distribute it through your social media channels.

Don’t stop there though. In fact, marketing experts say the best way to lose an audience is by failing to write posts that match the medium. That is, if all you do is post articles, social media users won’t find your account engaging and will probably tune out.

Address your audience. Ask them for their thoughts and share yours. Show who you are, what you do, and how you do it, with text and pictures from everyday operations. Remember to think of your company’s story and incorporate it in each.

Shift to Integrated Digital Marketing4

INSIGHT #5 Create, document & work your plan


The strategies above are the touch-points with donors, but much more goes on behind the scenes. What about the moving parts that go into maintaining a consistent strategy and developing your marketing for the future? For many, it’s a time problem. And others, as many as 70%, have a marketer overseeing content marketing, but only 30% have a written plan in place.

How do you create a proactive strategy? Here is a three-step process I’ve used as a nonprofit marketer for years.

Start by gathering all the information. Create a baseline of your existing efforts using all the stats available. Subscribers, email open rates, and Google analytics. Document everything you know about your clients, from their demographics to their interests, to what they’re engaging with and when.

Stay as up to date as possible. Never stop learning about the major trends in the nonprofit space, marketing, and the world in general. That way, you can be preempt the trends and take advantage.

Create, Document and Work Your Plan 5

Synthesize the information. Give your marketing a purposeful creative direction by combining these currents in the present and projections for the future. With all your information gathered, you can draw a line from where you are now to best practices and the position you want to be in.

My favorite articulation of the process comes from Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experience they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

All the best marketers look like psychics. In reality, they’re just highly attuned to the forces, large and small, growing or shrinking in the world around them. Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, built a million-dollar wine e-commerce business because he understood the possibilities of the internet and culture’s adaptation to it. It’s a vision he cultivated from a young age:

“When I was 19, I knew that the internet was going to be a big deal. That’s why I convinced my dad to let me launch Wine Library, one of the first e-commerce platforms in the world for wine. The day google ad-words came out I bought the word “wine” for 5C a click. This was a great bet. […] I just believed in where the market was going.”


https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/much-money-made-twenties/

Vaynerchuk made a smart, but simple observation. In retrospect, it seems downright obvious that the internet would be a big deal. But that belief kept him on the look-out for value that other people couldn’t see yet.

Not to say that it’s easy. Be prepared for brainstorming, mulling, and scrambling to find a pen to write a flash of brilliance down. But after everything is accounted for, you’ll think, “Of course.”

Break down the vision into smaller goals by starting at the end and working backwards. Before each, ask “what needs to be done to achieve this?” This way, you can clearly delineate your efforts as they branch off into more minute goals. Then tie KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to each goal. Make your benchmarks realistic. At the same time, they must be set high enough to realize success in the next step. For example, if your plan calls for 100 donations per month, and you have 1,000 contacts, then you need to set 10% as your conversion rate.


This exercise brings meaning to your efforts on a daily basis and allows you to allocate your precious resources strategically. With your plan in motion, you can monitor progress and make changes accordingly. For example, if your conversion rate is meeting your benchmark but your reach is not, then you can take steps to improve it by tweaking your messaging or social media strategies.

ConclusionNow, you have the insight to identify all the challenges and opportunities in the nonprofit landscape. Personalization, messaging, and social media are just the strategies you employ. In the end, you have to spread your story to incite action. If you can do this effectively and consistently, you marketing efforts will deliver your organization to a place they can confidently follow the mission for years to come.


INSIGHT #6 Steward your brand, especially the promise


Your voice is what your audience knows you by. It’s what you say and the tone that you saw it in. Think about the adjectives that define your organization’s identity best. Is it compassionate or bold? Peaceful or challenging? Or course, these adjectives are not mutually exclusive, but prioritizing the ones more central to your mission will enhance the way you tell your story.

Then think about the stylistic decisions that match this identity. Are you conversational or educational; enthusiastic or appropriately reserved? Do you speak to your audience in the second person or not?

The final piece of your voice is the look and feel. Make sure every visual decision fits in with the identity you have chose and the experience your donor should have.

Finally, make sure you maintain consistency across all events by sharing designs and creating a style guide you can share with the sometimes numerous satellites of an organization. This way, people can recognize and trust your professional bran no matter how far it is removed from headquarters.

Steward Your Brand, Especially the Promise6

INSIGHT #7 Use social media effectively


Make sure you are on every platform that your donors and potential donors use, even if it feels uncomfortable to you at first. You can capture their attention by being where they are and delivering attention-grabbing content. That means you should be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Video attracts the most eyes, especially on platforms where people expect to watch them like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. The demand for video outstrips what is currently produced. Additionally, one of the most popular video types are “explainers.” This is a great opportunity for nonprofits. It fits your marketing’s MO. You can share your knowledge, provide updates to your community, and give them an inside look at the visuals of your operation.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. Have one of your experts write a script and overlay it on top of your footage. For Facebook and Instagram especially, users often watch videos without sound and read the captions. However, if your data shows people are watching it during work hours, you’ll want to give it narration so they can listen to it when its open in another tab. Either way, you are providing great sharable content. If it’s relevant and tells your story in a compelling way, your piece has the chance of going viral.

Use Social Media & Other Innovative Channels7

That’s the real jackpot for a nonprofit organization. The most famous example is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The American A.L.S. Association raised awareness and $168,000 per week versus their average of $14,000 per week the year before.

What did they do to achieve such organic visibility and success? They were able to gamify the experience. They made it fun. Pour ice cold water on your head or donate $100. In the end, users posted over 17 million videos and raised 220 million dollars (Blue Sky ETO).

What they understood was the incentive to avoid donating for some would lead to more challenges, and therefore, more awareness and donations from participants and viewers alike.

Is there a way you can similarly gamify the sharing of your message? The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a phenomenon, but there is another one out there and it could be yours.


And if it isn’t, the stats on the return of social media shares is impressive enough. According to research, each social share translates into $37 worth of donations (Blue Sky ETO).

That’s the best possible solution to your marketing’s sustainability. If you get enough momentum, it can even achieve exponential growth.

It’s great for Charity Navigator scores as well. Great content spreads mostly organically, while high-spending campaigns without a compelling message won’t reach their expected return, making your organization look bad (Hubspot).

One final tip for social media: If you build it, you have to be prepared to maintain it. A social media account without updates for months damages your brand. It will make your organization look incompetent, disorganized, or not very busy.


Building relationships of trust


The end game

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MESSAGING PLATFORM

‣ Client is the hero ‣ Role of Trusted Guide ‣ Clear Process and CTAs ‣ Defining success

BRAND SCRIPT LOW HANGING FRUIT

BRAND SCRIPT

‣ From the client’s point of view, connecting value proposition

‣ Being clear about the “why” ‣ Brand dimensions (first

discussions)

‣ Questions and prickly challenges that need resolution

‣ Recommendations for immediate successes

WEBSITE & SALES FUNNEL

MARKETING STRATEGY

EXECUTION (CAM-PAIGNS & FINANCIAL)

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

‣ Keeping the long term view ‣ Reverse engineering, beginning

with the end in mind. ‣ Starting point

‣ Connecting the brand script to real needs

‣ Identifying role of educational content and other offers

‣ Test, test, test

‣ Campaign integration ‣ Marketing systems, tools ‣ Assignments, roles ‣ Budget and financial model

A word about the mkf process

MESSAGING PLATFORM: CLIENT NAMEStart with the Brand Script, go to Messaging

VALUE PROPOSITION 3 We articulate your value proposition.

We identify your “Why” Providing clients (and advisors) with discretion, expertise and transparency to clients to manage high risk & underperforming investments.



Strategy 1 Detail about Strategy 1.





LOW HANGING FRUIT

IMMEDIATE PROGRESS We’ll help you identify 3 to 5 strategies leading to immediate wins.

www.MKFStrategicMarketing.com 719.246.0117

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