How to write a marketing strategy

CHARITY ADVICE

How to write A Marketing Strategy

Charities are already tight on time and money, and without a marketing strategy, they can end up losing more than they have. This is why it is essential for non-profit organisations to think about their goals for the year so that it focuses their efforts and they can decide on where the budget needs to be spent.

To propel your charity forward, to reach more people and generate more income, here is everything you need to know about writing a marketing strategy.

Think about your goals

Before starting any strategy, you need to think about what your goals will be for the year. If you have an idea of where you want to go and how you are going to get there, it will be much easier for you to start planning your strategy and it will give it more direction. Even if your goals end up changing when you’re planning, at least you would have started putting it into motion.

Look at your current situation

Before starting your marketing strategy, it’s always useful to take a look at the position of your charity right now by doing some market research. How is your market looking? What are the main challenges and factors affecting it right now? Are there any opportunities or risks that you can see? What factors are affecting your charity? What are your main challenges right now?

Once you have done this and have these in mind, you can be sure that you’ll address them while planning your marketing strategy.

Set your objectives

With your goals in mind, you then need to decide what you want your charity to achieve through its marketing. Whether that’s a fundraising target, to rebrand or grow your social engagement on your social channels, you just need to make sure that they are:

SMART

Specific, M

easurable,

Achievable,

Realistic

Timed to when you want to achieve them by

Once you have your realistic objectives, you’ll soon find that every decision you make thereafter will move you further towards achieving them.

What will your key messages be?

When you have these first essential steps in place, it’s now time to think about your marketing content. What will your key messages be? What audiences are they aimed at?

When thinking about your key messages, try to be as concise and specific as possible. That way, you can easily keep all your efforts on message and your audience will easily understand what you’re saying. With so much “digital noise” online, the more punchy and unique you can make your message, the better.

Prioritise a target audience

Even if you have multiple target audiences, that’s okay. You just need to make sure that you’re targeting them individually in different ways.

When thinking about your marketing strategy, focus on one audience at a time. Do you need to reword your message to appeal to them? What is their preferred method of communication? What social channels (if any) do they use? What time of day and what days do they engage the most? The more specific you can make your strategy, the more directly you can target an audience to get the response that you want.

Measure your success

When you’re doing anything that takes up your time, it is important to evaluate whether it is worth continuing as time = money. This is especially important in marketing, as how will you know if a campaign has been successful or not if you haven’t evaluated it?

When creating your marketing strategy, you always have to think how you will measure its success. If your goal is to increase income, track your donations over time. If you want to know if a social campaign was worth it, track the engagement and see how this affected donations.

Remember:

By evaluating what went well and what didn’t, you can keep improving your marketing strategy to make sure that your charity is always moving forward.

Now all is left is to put your strategy into practice!