In this blog, Sue Jenkins, Head of Communications and Marketing at Benefact Trust, shares her insights and top tips for keeping marketing simple and practical, so that you can effectively promote your project or organisation without it being all-consuming.
Marketing communications can feel very complicated and overwhelming, particularly if it’s not your full time role or specialism. There are so many terms and specialist areas now – content marketing, social media, digital and much more which can take up a vast amount of your time. So I’m a fan of keeping things simple!
Have clear marketing objectives
All marketing needs to show a return on investment (investment doesn’t have to be money, it can also be your time) so make sure you understand your organisation’s objectives and translate them into marketing communications objectives. For example, if you have an organisational objective to increase youth ministry in churches across the UK then your marketing objective will be to generate new church leads and your marketing activity will be campaigns across the relevant marketing channels – website, social media, events etc.
Your marketing communications plan will need to include:
- Marketing goals, success measures and timing.
- Target audience, their needs and how you can meet that need.
- Key proposition to the target audience.
- Marketing activity to deliver to your marketing goals.
Get to know your target audience
Be clear about who your target audience is and what their key need is. This can be done through surveys, visits, calls and reviewing who is looking at your website and social media. It’s very useful to create personas – these are descriptions covering demographics, key needs and challenges etc. Basically anything that is relevant to your organisation.
What value can you add?
When communicating to your target audience it’s important that you focus on the audience value proposition, this is your offering which provides them with a key benefit that is unique and something they truly value. Quite often marketing communications are overloaded with information and don’t focus on a clear message that resonates with the audience. With a focused audience value proposition you’ll have a strong theme for your marketing campaigns.
Get inspired!
Lastly, a great way to know what marketing communications are effective is to look at what similar organisations are doing. Are you looking to promote your new church community hub, for example? Why not see what other churches have done to share similar projects.
There is also a host of free, online experts who can help you learn more and keep up to speed with marketing communications. Podcasts, videos and blogs are a great way to learn – and an added bonus is you can listen, watch and read on the move!
