Tips for Marketing Your Non-Profit
Marketing is not just a practice for established, multi-national corporations. In fact, with the rise of digital marketing, it is now possible to run a successful marketing campaign on a very limited budget. Marketing your non-profit organization does not have to be an expensive or time-consuming endeavor. In fact, it is possible for anyone to use marketing to reach their target audience, educate and increase the support for your cause.
1. Find Your Target Audience
As Eleven Marketing outlines, the first step to any successful marketing campaign is to outline who your target audience is and where you can find them. You should try to outline your target audience demographics and as much other information you can to gain a deep and comprehensive understanding. Some of the information you will need to learn about your target audience includes:
— Age
— Gender
— Income
— What social media platforms do they use
— What issues and causes they are interested in
— How they usually get involved in social causes (such as via donation or promotion)
— What ideas do they identify with?
— How they spend their time
The more that you learn about your target audience, the better able you are to target your upcoming marketing campaign to increase the impact of your campaign.
2. Define Your Goals
Once you have identified who it is you are targeting, the next step is to outline the goals of your campaign. The goals of your non-profit marketing campaign might be donations, membership, attendance at an event or an increase in email sign-ups.
You should make your goals as defined and specific as possible. If you can break down your goals into achieving aims that can be outlined on a detailed timeline, this enables you to clearly keep track of your progress throughout your campaign.
3. Choose Your Marketing Techniques
Next, you will need to decide what marketing techniques you are going to be using in your upcoming campaign. It can be tempting to choose the most popular marketing techniques at the time of starting your campaign, however, it is useful to look past marketing trends. Instead, you should focus on which techniques are most appropriate to your target market and campaign cause.
4. Track Your Progress
When you are executing your campaign it is vital that you keep track of your progress. It can be easy to lose track of your progress, as a marketing campaign usually involves many different tasks with a range of staff involved. It can be helpful to use project management software to more easily keep up with your progress.
5. Track Results
No successful marketing campaign is over until you have tracked what level of success you have achieved. Comparing the expected return with the realized results will help you to move forward in a more informed manner. Whether you achieved what you intended to or not, the information that you gain from reviewing your results will help you to move forward and go into your next marketing campaign with a more informed point of view.