Five Nonprofit Marketing Fundamentals

by Matt Heinz

We've been working more closely with several local nonprofit organizations lately, and the more I speak with those responsible for fundraising and donor relations, the more I realize just how similar the process is to creating and managing a for-profit sales process.

I'm also seeing the same fundamental needs for those marketing a charitable cause or nonprofit organization. The below five fundamentals of nonprofit marketing are a starting point, but should be at the core of every nonprofit's strategy.

Donor Profiles: There are so many worthy organizations out there. Which prospective donors are going to be most predisposed to support your cause? What do those potential donors have in common - their associations, their history, their demo or psychographic make-up? You don't need to hone in on just one specific donor profile, but you should have a good sense for the 2-4 profiles that are your primary target. The more you know about them, the more self-evident the messages, channels and tactics will be to engage them directly.

Defining Your Product: What are you "selling" to prospective donors? It's not the tactics of what you actually do, but the outcome of that work. All too often, nonprofits tell their donors about the operations, or what additional infrastructure or materials they need. But what is all that for? What are you enabling? How are you making lives better? What's the benefit, the result, the outcome of what you're doing? THAT is your product, and that's the kind of vision your prospective donors will be attracted to.

Storytelling: Spend less time describing what you do, and more time telling stories about the differences you're making. Tell stories about the recipients of your work. Share the before and after. When it's an option, let the recipients of your work tell the story for you - in print, on video, and in person. Stories make an impression far longer-lasting than mission statements and operational descriptions. Stories can communicate the emotion behind what you're doing better than anything else.

Mobilizing the Community: Take your product definition, your mission, and think carefully about the ecosystem of people, groups, organizations, communities and businesses that relate to it. How can those various individuals and groups help you spread the word, or even contribute directly? If you're involved in transitional housing, how good are your relationships with local real estate offices? Are they giving directly? Are the individual Realtors involved, and getting their own buyer/seller customers involved? Be exhaustive and creative about mobilizing related communities on behalf of your organization.

Creating Evangelists: You have them already. Passionate donors. Highly-involved volunteers and board members. A variety of individuals and groups who feel strongly about what you're doing. No matter their level of passion, they won't help spread the word as widely as they could if you don't help them. Give them reminders to do so, give them content to pass along, give them the facilities and tools to share. This alone can be so simple, but so powerful. Identifying, arming and mobilizing the evangelists in and around your organization can be the very foundation of your marketing strategy.

Over the next several weeks, I'll go deeper into each of these fundamentals with more examples and suggestions for action.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Five Fast Steps to Sales & Marketing Success

by Matt Heinz

Too often, Sales & Marketing blame each other for a lack of results. The leads aren't good. Sales doesn't follow up. The excuses go on and on.

If this sounds familiar for your organization, there are things you can start doing right away to mend fences and start on a path towards not only better relations, but far better revenue results.

Call a Sales & Marketing Summit, and don't let anyone leave the room until the following five things are agreed upon:

1. Common Lead Definitions

• What, exactly, is a qualified lead? What are its characteristics? Get as detailed as you need to be, but make sure both Sales & Marketing agree on that definition. That way, when leads are delivered to Sales, they at minimum meet the basic criteria you've both agreed on to make them worth the sales team's time for follow-up.

2. Initial Response Time

• If the leads are good (and meet the minimum qualified definition), you need a "service agreement" for how quickly those leads will get their first response. If the lead is waiting for something (a white paper, for instance) response time should likely be no longer than 24 business hours. In other cases, 48 hours may be acceptable. Decide what's right for your organization and customer, get sales management's buy-in, communicate it clearly to the sales team, and put in place reporting tools to make it super-easy to track this on a daily basis (and send both you and the sales rep alerts when leads fall outside of the service agreement).

3. Lead Follow-up Steps & Channels

• How many times should a lead be attempted before the sales rep gives up and moves on? Should all of those attempts be via phone, or should there be a mix of other channels - email, social media channels, in-person, etc.? If you don't reach agreement on this critical process, every sales rep will have his or her own idea of what's right. Some will call once, leave a message, and consider the lead dead. Others will call the poor prospect 20 times. Create a standard with sales not only to ensure leads are thoroughly vetted, but also to ensure sales is moving on to fresher opportunities if there's nobody at home.

4. Clear Lead Stages

• A lead comes in. The rep starts to attempt a call back. They reach the lead and determine it's a good prospect, or long-term prospect, or just not qualified. How do they report this information to you? What lead stages have you set up in your lead management or CRM system to not only make it easy and clear how you want sales to categorize their working leads, but also to report to management progress & quality of leads (not to mention improve your lead generation ROI performance moving forward)? Don't go overboard - 15 lead stages gets way too complicated - but 4-6 stages is reasonable and actionable for most sales environments.

5. Handing Leads Back to Marketing

• According to MarketingSherpa and others, the vast majority of leads generated by B2B organizations in particularly will buy - just not right now. Those leads (once they're identified as such) need to be passed back to Marketing for active nurturing. Make sure there's a clear process for Sales to do just that - ideally with the click of a button.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Do you have a relevant message?

by Mike Myatt

It is simply not possible to have a well received message that is not relevant. Think about it for a moment... when was the last time you bothered to read, watch or listen to a message that wasn't relevant to your needs? Great leaders understand the power, influence, and leverage created by relevant messaging. Do you ever find yourself sitting back and marveling at those leaders who always seem to have the right thing to say? Contrast this with the feelings you have when you hear an awful sound-bite that makes a leader look either uninformed or unintelligent. The difference between the two aforementioned examples is that great leaders have mastered the art of finding the right message (the relevant message) regardless of the medium, market, or constituency being addressed. In today's post I'll share some of the messaging secrets used by the best leaders to keep their message relevant...

So why is great messaging so important? In the business world, as a chief executive officer or entrepreneur, corporate messaging is the key to both your personal and professional positioning strategy. A leader's message has a direct impact on their personal and corporate brand equity, how they manage a crisis, marketing initiatives, investor relations, press and public relations, team building and employee engagement, customer loyalty and virtually any other mission critical area of chief executive responsibility.

The reality is that your messaging will often times have a greater impact on your career than your performance. I have witnessed on numerous occasions CEOs with average, or even sub-par performance histories fare well because they possessed great messaging skills. Let me be clear that I'm not advocating form over substance here. I'm simply pointing out that they understood how to message their shortcomings and flaws, while engendering confidence around their planning for corrective measures to critical spheres of influence. The message was on target, it was relevant and therefore it was believable. By contrast, I have also watched CEOs with excellent performance histories not do so well because they did not possess the messaging skills necessary to keep stakeholders engaged. They did not address the needs or concerns of the audience they were addressing, and therefore the message was irrelevant and subsequently ineffective. Simply put, the relevancy, savvy and sophistication of your messaging will have a direct impact on the sustainability of your tenure as a chief executive.

CEOs who become recognized as great leaders are prepared, articulate, consistent, and crisp in their messaging. They speak with authority, clarity, and certitude because their messaging is relevant. In fact, it is the relevancy of their messaging that engenders confidence and serves to inspire and unify. Perhaps most importantly, a great leader's message is never in conflict with their values. They will not compromise their core beliefs simply to manipulate the outcome of a specific situation. They rest in the comfort that doing and saying the right things will ultimately put them in a favorable position, and if not, they are comfortable in assuming any negative consequences that may come as a result of right thinking and decisioning.

When it comes to the construction of messaging, I have found that people will tend to fall into one of the four following groups.

1. The Medium "is" the Message: People that fall into this camp believe that the medium will do the work for them. They believe in the reach and power of the medium to overcome any flaws in the message. This view of messaging constitutes a numbers based approach where the business logic states that if you reach enough people with the message some acceptable percentage of the people reached will embrace the message.


2. The Market "is" the Message: This view of messaging values the target audience above all else. The message is so targeted and niche specific that it is sometimes almost unintelligible to those who fall outside of the intended target market.


3. The Message "is" the Message: This group believes that content is king. The emphasis here is that if the message is creative enough, or valuable enough, nothing else matters. This view of messaging is all about the teaser, the hook, the calls to action, the design, the concept, etc.


4. The Messenger "is" the Message: This is the branded approach to messaging. If the person delivering the message has enough credibility and influence, nothing else matters. This iconic, ego-centric approach to messaging places a high premium on the spokesperson.

My view of the aforementioned four theories is that their sum total value is greater than their independent stand alone value. Other than in matters of character and principle, I don't tend to be an absolutist. Over the years, and especially in the genres of marketing, branding, positioning, and messaging, I believe a collaborative and cross-disciplined approach to be the key to success. While content can create credibility, credibility can also enhance the view of content. Furthermore, the best content or spokesperson in the world communicating to the wrong audience, with the wrong message, or through the wrong medium is likely to miss the mark. It takes a blending of approach to craft the right message and this will not happen when operating in a vacuum. Following are a few final thoughts for your consideration when crafting your message:

1. It Must Be the Truth: The truth always comes out in the end. If your message won't pass public scrutiny over time, then you have the wrong message.


2. Use a Multiple Medium Approach: Long gone are the days of one size fits all mediums…the best messaging campaigns take place across mediums creating multiple touch points to various constituencies and demographics.


3. Know Your Talking Points: Don't allow the message to get lost in the medium. Remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. You must be consistent and convicted in your opinions and your positions. Be clear, concise and don't compromise on key points.


4. Know Your Audience: All messages should be tailored to the audience being addressed. This does not mean you should compromise your position, rather it means your message needs to relevant, timely, and of significance. While your talking points need to remain the same, they also need to address the concerns and areas of interest of those being communicated to. The message must be relevant to be successful.


5. Don't Forget Your Critics: The tendency is to believe that your audience is comprised of friends and allies. You need to assume that every message given will find its way into the hands of your worst critics, and furthermore, that they will attempt to use your message against you.

Keep the message relevant and real and you'll stand apart from the masses. Good luck and good messaging...

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

It is NOT who you know

Why Trust Trumps Volume

by Matt Heinz

The assumption that a big network - thousands of followers on Twitter, an enormous rolodex, a really big mailing list - directly translates into influence and performance is ridiculous. Anybody can build a big list of names.

The more important question is whether those people care about you.

• Do they respect you?


• Do they trust you?


• When called upon, will they help you?


• Will they buy from you?

The trick is translating that big list into an army of evangelists, a group of individuals who respect and trust you.

That's how to measure the value of your network. Not by sheer volume, but by trust.

Trust drives influence, and influence enables action.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Can social media take the place of marketing automation platforms?

Our October Innovation Contest winners won a signed copy of "7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis" by Bill George and the right to have their article re-published here on Blogging Innovation. Here is the second of the three winning entries:


by Barrett Coakley

The Corporate Learning group at Harvard Business Publishing currently uses Eloqua as our marketing automation platform (MAP). Eloqua is very robust and does everything we need and more. However, I have been thinking lately as social media applications mature do they have the potential to be a free marketing automation platform, especially for a small business? Already today there are services that you can use to do some rudimentary tracking. For example, if I use bit.ly to shorten my URL and post a note on Twitter about a free article on my site I can track click throughs and retweets through bit.ly's tracking capability. I can then use Google analytics on my site to gain even more information.This certainly is not as robust as an Eloqua, but it certainly gets the job done, and it's free.

Another important aspect of social media that can't be replicated by a MAP is highlighted by the findings in the recent Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey as seen in the chart above. The survey found that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising. Ninety percent or consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

"The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't, has increased significantly," says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company."

Marketing is all about building trust and being relevant to the consumer. I know I regularly look at recommendations on sites like Best Buy before I purchase any electronics. I do not know these people, but it goes back to James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds theory, "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Social media has a much greater advantage over a marketing platform because a Tweet to people who follow you is more likely to be taken more seriously than an email from a campaign.

Think of the power of some of the services below and compare them to how you would react to items posted there versus an email in your inbox from a vendor that you may have a passing knowledge of but no real relationship. What do you trust and believe more?

• LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.
• revver, knol (yes, knol), etc.
• Gist
• Meetup
• Youtube
• Hollr

What other services are out there that have this same power? Do you think that social media could eventually be the defacto MAP as the technologies mature and people start building applications to track items (like Metricly)?

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Barrett Coakley is currently a Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Corporate Learning Group at Harvard Business Publishing.

Start with the Why

by Matt Heinz

Too many sales & marketing messages, unfortunately, talk about "what" and "how". And at the front of the sales process, that's a shame.

You're proud of what you've built, which is great. You have six new features in the latest version, awesome. But if you lead your pitch with a description of what you're selling, or how it works, you're skipping the most important part of the conversation.

Why the customer cares.

When you write about why, you're addressing your customer's world. You're speaking their language, feeling their pain, building credibility by associating with the challenges they face. Those challenges, that pain, is what drives demand for your product or service. It's why people buy.

If your prospect doesn't have that need, or you haven't established or created that need, selling the prospect on what you have and how it works isn't going to help. You've done nothing to build value, and given the prospect no context for which to understand why they need to talk to you in the first place.

In the end, it all comes down to why. Yes, you may eventually get to a product demo and operational training of how to get started.

But the top of the funnel is all about why.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Incorporating Social Media into the Conversation

I came across an interesting Fast Company blog article from Steve Rubel titled "How to Captivate and Hold Attention in the Age of the Stream" that caused me to think about parallels between digital media and physical media. Here is an excerpt:

"Imagine for a moment that you're standing on an overpass high above a busy L.A. freeway like the 405 or the 5. It doesn't really matter which. Pick one.

In a span of a few minutes literally thousands of cars will speed by. Some will be loud. Others quiet. Some will be notable, but most won't.

At the end of the experiment, if I were to ask you to recall ten cars and trucks and what was memorable about them, I guarantee that you would be hard pressed to do so. What's more, none of the cars would have been "repeat impressions." You saw each car only once, and likely not every vehicle on the highway. That's precisely the same challenge that marketers face in the 'age of the stream.'" (article excerpt)

Of course you can't make exact parallels, but it struck me that when people view social media as a distribution channel (which it isn't purely that), the following parallels emerge:


Steve Rubel concludes his article by saying that the solution to the streaming challenge of social media is to be ubiquitous. That of course is easier said than done and I don't feel goes far enough.

In this new digital world, excellent marketing campaigns will require integrated physical and digital planning, strategy, and execution that streams "conversation starters" through multiple physical and digital 'channels' to lead naturally into longer conversations in both corporate and uncontrolled social media outlets, before circling back into new "conversation starters" informed by this customer dialogue.


What do you think?

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Braden Kelley is the founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Effective Conversational Marketing

Business Strategy Innovation just published a white paper to its web site on
"Effective Conversational Marketing."

Here is an excerpt:

"Introduction

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is relationship marketing for the social media age. Thinking about your marketing efforts in terms of a conversation changes the approach and better integrates social media. Relationships are something that are formed, but conversations are ongoing and evolving and require both sides to participate.


How Social Media Fits In

It seems like I can't get through a day right now without hearing somebody in the media or on the street talking about social media. I think it is great that social media has captured people's attention, but will having more communication channels improve conversational marketing?

Only if properly integrated into the conversations between consumers and companies.

To do this, social media must be established both as part of your on-going conversational marketing programs (on-boarding, loyalty, retention, etc.) and also integrated into your ad hoc or seasonal marketing campaigns."


Download the complete "Effective Conversational Marketing" white paper in PDF form.

What do you think?

@innovate



Image Credit - NoLifeBeforeCoffee