Strategic Marketing Means Tackling More than Low Hanging Fruit

Your house is a mess. It's easy to pick up the dirty clothes, straighten the shoes left by the back door, make the beds. You know, the easy stuff. But when was the last time you reorganized dressers and closets? Climbed a ladder to dust the tops of light fixtures and moldings? Or bent low to clean your cabinet under the sink? Now if you did that, your house would be really clean. But who has time? Or the energy to do all that?

Can much the same can be true of your marketing efforts? Too often we spend our time addressing "low hanging fruit". Like the clothes left on the floor, we spruce up what's easy and not especially time consuming. Get a new logo, ask the agency to come up with some new ads, write a few press releases and leave the harder stuff like market research and strategic goal setting to another day.

Today, Brandcurve.com comments on this very issue. Seems Toys R Us has a cute new logo. Is the logo good enough to hide the fact that their stores are crowded, difficult to navigate and rate badly on customer service? Not really. I'd suggest they are just trying to sweep the bad stuff under a pretty new rug.

Want to know how you can tackle your strategic marketing? Log on to our website for free tools!

Rid your Business Documents of Abstractions

Is your organization a world-class provider of cutting-edge solutions? Do your people offer turn-key robust service? I’m sure you do. Unfortunately, your customers and donors have no idea what all those abstractions really mean or should mean to them.

We might criticize teenagers for talking in a language that defies comprehension (whose BFF R U?), but if you are writing business documents, be careful that your messages can be easily understood. Business language, no matter what the business, is too often laden with meaningless jargon. In fact, it’s so common that we stop recognizing the words as meaningless hype.

If you want to build your brand (who doesn’t) stop using mumbo-jumbo and start talking so that your messages are crystal clear.

Want to know how? Log on to our website and read this month's enews for our top tips.

Write like every word matters

How impactful are your organizations fund development letters? Case for Giving? Annual Report? Do these documents beat around the bush and contain a lot of flowery jargon rather than cutting to the quick? Time to get out your red pen. Slash the jargon. Stop beating around the bush and instead say what you mean.

"We need your money and time to help us save lives."

Before you start editing, take a minute to read Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog Is your s*@t detector on?

Nonprofit Marketing Fix

Attention Nonprofit Marketers,

Do you need a helping hand (who doesn't)? We are on the verge of launching a new nonprofit marketing website just for you. It will be chock full of tools, resources, tip sheets and even an ebook.

Since we are still under construction, we want to know what resources would be most helpful to you in your job.

• Does your newsletter or enewsletter need a
  makeover?
• Do you need help building your direct marketing/fund
  development database?
• When was the last time you updated your strategic
  marketing plan? Do you have a strategic marketing
  plan? What's getting in the way?
• Do you need help writing a more compelling case for
  giving?
• Do you need resources to better communicate with
  donors?

What else can you tell us? What do you need to construct a marketing program that will attract clients
and donors and move your organization forward?

Can't wait to hear from you. Please take a minute to post a comment here or send us an email to: info@fixyourmarketing.com

7 Rules for Best Managing the Production Process

Your sales team is screaming for the brochure that you promised in time for their sales blitz. The copy revisions you sent four departments for approval were due back a week ago and no one has responded. The annual report you need for a major board of directors meeting is late coming in from the printer. Your e-newsletter was due out four days ago and you don’t have an idea for a topic yet.

Whether you’re a small business or a non-profit marketer, trying to get materials created, produced and printed on time and with the requisite approvals can be enough to make you hide under your desk.  But before you surrender to the chaos that often surrounds production, here are our top seven rules for bringing some order to your world.

1. It has to be right
2. Plan backwards
3. Be careful what you promise
4. Manage the input, or it will manage you
5. Automate
6. Build in some margin
7. Know thy vendors

Want to learn more? Check out the Fixyourmarketing.com enewsletter for the whole scoop.

Shortcuts to Calculating your Marketing Budget

Your CEO has asked you for the 2008 marketing budget. Yuck. Why does budgeting time seem to creep up on you each and every year? And we know you'd like to find someone to do the work for you or maybe just provide a few estimates of what you'll need for marketing (with a nice little increase over last year), get it approved and call it a day.

But that doesn't work (if it does, please let us know how or where!). Instead, you will likely be asked to justify each and every red cent you want to spend and what it will generate in terms of revenue. Even worse, you may be handed a budget figure based on some arbitrary formula that doesn't take your goals and objectives into consideration.

What to do? How do you come up with a workable budget - and get it approved? Start by reading our free enewsletter on this very subject!

Find Out What Your Customers Really Think of You

Ask a group of randomly chosen customers to tell you the first word that comes to mind when they think of you. Would you be surprised by the results? It's important to take stock and know what your customers think of your organization, your marketing, your service, your website, your delivery and more.

Take a look at Brandcurve's post today and ponder the results of their free association wrap up. Then consider doing some research on your own. We like Zoomerang and Survey Monkey for our clients. These are low cost tools that provide powerful results.

Is Your Organization Sharing too Much Information? Or Not Enough?

There are two extreme kinds of people when it comes to information sharing.

Type 1: The person that bleeds personal information. They are so personal that you are left feeling like you know too much.

Type 2: The person that is too closed lipped. You know nothing of substance about this person and therefore it's hard to feel connected to them or their life.

Often Companies and Non profits market themselves along the lines of these extremes too -- i.e. either too much or not enough info. Take a look and make sure that you are not "an extreme".

When is it too much? When there's nothing new and when it comes off as bragging as opposed to news. And don't forget that your audience has the attention span of a gnat. Make sure that ad campaigns and publicity stay consistent but don't go stale. Make sure PR is relevant and interesting and newsworthy. We love Donor Power Blog today. They have put forth basic rules for spin:

• Be personable.
• Don't exaggerate.
• Pay attention to your stomach. (Never say anything you don't actually believe to be true)
• Be specific.
• Concede unfavorable facts. (Don't make up lies to dispute them.)

When is it not enough? Whether you have good news or bad news, make sure that you actively manage your company's external and internal information flow. There are so many ways to promote your brand other than simply paid advertising. Whatever your choices, you should be continually priming the media pump. By this I mean putting out new information about your services and products via different media. Offer your expert advice to websites and local media. Continually update your own website. Have a regular schedule to pitch articles to local and national and international news outlets -- print, broadcast and web. Consider partnering with other businesses. Whatever you choose, be interesting and relevant.

Use Gift Receipts as an Opportunity to Touch Donors

Recently I asked a nonprofit client if I might see what they send to thank donors. The answer -- a lovely folded card with a simple "Thank you for thinking of us." That would be fine if this was a greeting card but it's not. It's one more opportunity to market your nonprofit to someone who obviously cares...after all, they just sent a check!

Rather than your pretty card, use the gift receipt as an opportunity to let the donor know what you are doing with their investment in the organization. New projects, works in progress, the enewsletter, whatever, just don't throw away the opportunity to engage. This is a chance to turn that one gift into a lifetime or support. You just never know!

I love Donor Power Blog's entry on this same subject. Take a look.

Mid Year Marketing Check: Are You Making Good Grades?

If you had to grade your marketing for the first half of 2007, how would you do? "A" for effort, but short on results? "C-" for being stuck in a rut, doing the same things but not reaching the goals you set?

This mid-year point is a great time to take a hard, close look at what you're doing: what's working and what's not. It's a time to be brutally honest in your assessments and fearless in looking at new and better ways to create the marketing organization you want. Read our July e-newsletter to find the right questions to ask in order to answer whether you are right on course, or need to change your direction.