Download Involve - Marketing

Involve - Marketing
This article will describe:
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What Marketing is
Why Marketing is so important to community and voluntary organisations
What typical Marketing Communications activities consists of:
o Copy Writing
o Public Relations
o Developing a Marketing Database
o Online & Internet Marketing
o Event Management
o Advertising & Sales Promotion
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How this could be relevant to your organisation in a skills based volunteering capacity
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is an integrated communications process through which people are informed or
persuaded that existing or newly identified needs can be satisfied by an organisation’s
products or services.
Marketing is used to create, keep and satisfy the customer. With the customer or service user
as the central focus, marketing is one of the most important components of any management
strategy.
Why marketing is so important to Community and Voluntary
organisations
Marketing consists of copy writing, public relations, database management, direct marketing,
online marketing, event management, advertising, sales and sales promotion.
Typically successful marketing campaigns combine a number of suitable mediums
simultaneously to attract attention and raise awareness within a particular target market. An
interested party, volunteer or donor will often only take notice or react to marketing efforts
after a number of hits or exposures e.g. an individual may receive an email, hear a radio ad or
read a newspaper article before they actually decide to pick up the phone, donate funds or
offer their services as a volunteer. For this reason, marketing professionals seek to plan and
implement integrated marketing communications programmes using multiple communication
methods.
Copy Writing
Marketing professionals can help you write documents brochures, web site content, email
communications, newsletters, presentations and press releases. Learning to write and talk
about what you do in a clear, consistent, concise and meaningful way regardless of which
communication medium you use, creates clarity, understanding, awareness and builds brand
recognition. Marketing tells your clients, employees, volunteers, funders, supporters and the
general public what you are doing and why you are doing it!
Public Relations
The main goal of public relations (PR) is to enhance an organisation’s reputation. PR is one of
the most simple and cost effective ways of promoting your organisation to a wider audience
and is often under utilised. Many larger organisations use a public relations firm, often
negotiating excellent rates or even pro-bono projects. However the costs are often prohibitive
to a small or medium sized organisation. The good news is that PR activities can be learned
and executed in-house quite easily and effectively. Very often in-house PR efforts reap
greater benefits than those executed by an agency because journalists and radio presenter
prefer to hear directly from the source of the news. Often the only associated cost with a PR
campaign is time.
What Is Involved In PR?
Building Up a PR Contact List
A volunteer marketer may be able to supply you with a ready-made list or help you to
understand who your target audience is:
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Journalists from the national press or magazines
Radio producers
Editors of online websites or newsletters
Editors of local regional press or related trade press?
Planning a Public Relations Schedule
A volunteer marketing professional can help you to understand what is newsworthy about
your organisation and how to make what you do sound more topical. It is good practice to link
what you do to current realities or news topics e.g. recession etc. Even though an
organisation’s story is always interesting to its own members, making it attractive to the press
takes a little work.
A marketing professional can help you create a public relations schedule. A once off press
release is a drop in the ocean but a constant stream of well thought out regular press
releases will ensure your organisation becomes understood and better known. A proper plan
will also help to build on-going relationships with key journalists. Timing is also important,
sending out a press release at the right time is key e.g. if you know you are having an event
you can maximize its coverage with a strong press release or by inviting the media on the day
and ensuring you produce quality photography.
Press Releases
All press releases take on a standard format. A volunteer marketing person can teach you
how to create them or could take on this role and write press releases for you:
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The headline for any press release should stand out.
The interesting or key facts need to appear high up in the body of the document.
The document should be no longer than two pages and needs a company boilerplate
and contact details at the end.
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A volunteer marketing professional could call each journalist, especially if he or she
has existing relationships or is good at building new relationships, talking up a story
or understands different publications’ editorial approach, features schedule and
timelines.
Developing a Marketing Database
Maintaining regular communication to all interested parties and supporters is crucial, the
creation and maintenance of a complete database is at the crux of any successful
communications programme. An excel spreadsheet is not enough to support the needs of a
growing organisation. A marketer can help you source suitable database software and help
you develop a database, database software is very often freely available to non profits. A
database is only as useful as the information that goes into it and how it is maintained on an
ongoing basis. Information needs to be input so that it can later be filtered by different
categories e.g. region, donor, member, newsletter recipient, PR contact, client, volunteer. All
database users need to follow a strict set of guidelines and keep contact information up to
date e.g its no use if you don’t have phone numbers or email addresses for half your
volunteers if you need to round up recruits quickly. The ability to communicate different
messages to different groups of individuals is worth its weight in gold!
Online/Internet Marketing
Online marketing is relatively inexpensive and can reach a wide audience for a small fraction
of traditional marketing costs. It brings results quickly. Online campaigns can be measured
and tracked immediately because initiatives usually require users to click on an
advertisement, visit a website or perform a targeted action, for the most part the response is
immediate. Such measurement cannot be achieved through traditional direct marketing or
advertising, recipients will at best be interested, then decide to obtain more information at a
later time.
Internet marketing includes a myriad of things: a website, email marketing, banner advertising
(pay per click), search engine optimisation (SEO), social media optimisation (SMO)
(facebook, Twitter and YouTube, linked In etc.) and competitor analysis. A marketing
volunteer will help you develop an online strategy that suits your business requirements and
targets your specific audience.
The web is often the first port of call when an interested party searches for information.
Developing a good website, even a very small one, requires planning and project ownership,
especially if different people are writing different sections.
Quality content must be written up and complete before any design phase commences. A
good web site should be easy to navigate and the design or user experience should be based
on clearly defined business objectives, quality content and good messaging. For smaller
organisations it is beneficial to be able to maintain and update the web site internally, using a
simple to use web content management system. Most importantly a well-designed site with a
well-thought out meta-tag and keyword strategy will ensure you can be found, and appear in
search engines results (SEO) such as Google. You can also increase traffic to your site by
running Google Adword campaigns or through the creation of partnerships or affiliate
programmes with organisations with whom you have a common but non-competitive interest.
Email Marketing and Newsletters
Sending out email broadcasts and newsletters is a great way to let your community know
about your latest news, announcements, opportunities and services and can inform members
about events you might be running. Communicating and marketing by email is easy-to-use,
cost-efficient, fast and highly reliable. Email marketing can save you time and energy. You
can also save thousands of Euro in printing and postage charges.
However there is a right way and a wrong way to create and broadcast email
communications:
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Understanding and adhering to data protection regulation is important, you need
permission from individuals or an “opt in” for large mailings.
A properly designed email promotes your organisation in a professional light and it
gets the right message across effectively. However a badly written or designed HTML
creates a mediocre or bad perception and is often simply ignored and deleted.
Email broadcast software is hugely beneficial. Built in reporting shows the number of
emails which were opened or bounced and the number of recipients who visited your
web sites as a result of each activity. You can quickly tell if you are getting the right
message across or not!
Social media optimisation (SMO)
This generates publicity through social media, online communities and websites. Methods of
SMO include adding RSS feeds (news feeds), blogging and incorporating images and videos.
SMO is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways. Primarily the focus is
on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is
also a benefit of successful SMO. It is in many ways a viral marketing technique where word
of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social
bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.
(SMO), is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly organisations are
integrating SMO as part of their product or service development, recruitment,
employee/volunteer engagement, client satisfaction and much more!
Event Management
Event management is simply the application of project management to the creation and
development of festivals and events. Event Management involves branding, identifying the
target audience, devising the event concept, planning the logistics and coordinating the
technical aspects beforehand and actually executing the modalities of any proposed event. To
successfully create an event that you wish to see develop and grow year on year, its
management should no longer be done on an ad hoc basis. Events can have a large impact
on the relevant community or target market and in some cases, the whole country. Events
can be of all sizes from a national awareness day to a short breakfast networking event.
Every industry, charity, society and group will host events of some kind in order to market
themselves, build relationships, raise money or celebrate. A volunteer marketing professional
can help you to create, plan or develop existing or new events.
Advertising and Sales Promotion
The same advertising techniques used to promote commercial goods and services can be
used to inform, educate and motivate the public about non-commercial issues, such as
HIV/AIDS, political ideology, energy conservation and deforestation etc. Different types of
media can be used to deliver messages or recruit, such as newspapers, magazines, TV,
movies, radio, billboards, web sites, direct mail and more. In fact, virtually any medium can be
used for advertising: from wall painting, ticket receipts, sky writing to town criers! Ads and
scripts can be created for you by volunteer copywriters and graphic designers and can be
placed by an advertising agency alternatively a volunteer marketing professional can to do it
for you internally. In the current climate non profit organisations are finding it easier to book
free or low cost media space. Advertising returns are down but publications still need to fill
space. Non profit organisations may also rely on free modes of persuasion, such as a public
service announcements.