Ending the Year on a Strong Note

Thanksgiving meals and deals on Black Friday. Celebrating the holidays with friends and family. Elevating your organization’s marketing game. Toasting a new year. As we enter the last two months of 2019, one of the above themes may not be on our minds. However, it is good business practice to take count of your current marketing tactics and make sure the right strategy—and budget—is in place for 2020.

An acquaintance recently asked to pick my brain about ideas to get more clients in the door. The first question I asked was about her current marketing strategy, which involves a website and social media channels. The next question I posed: “What are you doing within those channels?” It soon became clear that a good next step would be focusing on concise brand messaging of the business’ unique value proposition.

As detailed in last month’s article, a clear value proposition is invaluable for showcasing what your organization does better than anybody else. And now is the perfect time to make sure that your brand message is clear for your target audience. How you can bring immeasurable value to your client is the best gift that you can give this holiday season.

In the spirit of giving, here are the top three strategic areas to focus on to end the year on a strong note:

1. Strategic marketing planning: What are your marketing objectives? If your marketing strategy and execution are a well-oiled machine, this could be reviewing the current mix, budget, and messaging. Tweaks could be made to make sure that the current initiatives are bringing the desired outcomes.

   If you’re like a lot of business owners, your focus is on the daily operation of your organization. Your priorities are providing amazing solutions to your clients and growing your business. Yet communicating your value proposition must also play a role. With this in mind, I recommend:

2. Brand identification and management: Does your perceived brand match the value proposition to your audience? It is crucial for an organization to streamline the “5 Ws”—Who, What, When, Where, and Why—into a compelling brand with an ongoing strategy of how to best communicate it. And it’s also important to share this compelling brand story and value proposition in the right mix of both traditional and digital channels. As we turn the page to a new calendar year, why not take some time to make sure your brand message is the right one? It’s an exercise that will take you into 2020 with a fresh story.

3. Expressions of gratitude: I once read a statistic that it takes someone eight times to truly feel thanked. Not only did this blow my mind, but it served as inspiration to make sure my clients know how much I appreciate their business in multiple ways throughout the year.
   
   The holiday season is the perfect time to show gratitude to clients, partners, vendors, mentors, and employees. And there are multiple options for doing so: Thanksgiving-themed appreciation, the traditional holiday gift, or even a New Year’s touchpoint to kick off a new year right. An organization doesn’t have to have a huge budget to show appreciation and thanks—a sincere message goes a long way.

Cheers to making the most of November and December and beginning 2020 with a bang!

This post was originally written by Shan Bates-Bundick for The Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce’s November-December 2019 Business Voice magazine. Click here to view the original article.

Marketing 101…and Beyond

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” I like to think of marketing as a combination of strategic initiatives an organization leverages to showcase its brand to target audiences. Either way you look at it, marketing activities are critical for any size of business or non-profit entity to strategically share its story.

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
-The American Marketing Association

Marketing is a key component of any business’s operations, yet it can be simple, cost-effective, and easily achieved for even small businesses. Marketing is all about the mix—the right grouping of both digital and traditional communication activities—that is unique to every organization.

Mix It Up
Turning attention to digital marketing, think about the following statistics:

•       We now spend more time on social media than in our email inboxes. (Source: WSJ)

•       Instagram is the overall engagement winner. Engagement with brands on Instagram is ten times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and 84 times higher than Twitter. (Source: Trackmaven + Social Pilot)

•       Facebook has over 8 billion video views each day. (Source: TechCrunch) A Facebook executive has also predicted that video will continue to comprise a larger percentage of content each year.

Current marketing trends point to a 100% digital strategy. Yet direct mail response rates are at the highest they’ve ever been at 5.1%. (Source: Capterra) I’m also a big fan of the well-positioned one-pager as a leave-behind or an incredibly designed postcard. The moral of the story: businesses must have a comprehensive approach to share their brand message across multiple channels. So where do we start?

The Value of a Clear Value Proposition

A good place to start is detailing what your organization can do better than anybody else: your value proposition. This will feed messaging, future content strategy, and any available communication channels moving forward, including website, email communications, print marketing, social media, public relations, video, broadcast advertising, billboard, and on and on. The point is, if an organization hasn’t taken the time to define its brand and properly communicate its value proposition, marketing tactics will not be as solid and based on the key principle.

Once an organization knows its value proposition, the right mix of initiatives based upon target audience, time, and budget can be determined. Is the company a small business targeting local consumers? One might consider a mix of direct mail within a certain zip code and geofencing (i.e., placing digital ads around a local hangout or store), as well as a robust client testimonial collection process. Is the business offering services to other businesses? Perhaps a grouping of networking and community involvement paired with a social media campaign targeting other small businesses is in the cards.

Strategic storytelling should be at the center of any great marketing strategy, and the right marketing mix is unique to every organization. The good news? With a focus on what you’re offering your clients to make their lives easier, better, or more enjoyable is a message people want to hear. The sweet spot is the intersection of great messaging in the appropriate channels…which is the fun part!

This post was originally written by Shan Bates-Bundick for The Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce’s Business Voice magazine in October 2019. Click here to view the original article.

The Value of Data

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

- Thich Nhat Hanh
Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems, Parallax Press, August 9, 2001

I’m sure they still make them in some form, but do you remember being on vacation as a kid and seeing the whole rack of personalized tchotchkes? Especially license plates from whatever state you were visiting? There was never a “Clay.” And I looked every single time. 

Dale Carnegie said it best, “Remember that a person's name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Get somebody’s name wrong and, boy, you’ve got a lot of recovery to do. You might have the best pitch, the best story, the most incredible product, but use somebody’s name wrong, and you’ve lost any credibility you had.

Clay isn’t a hard name. And it’s not THAT unusual, but you’d be surprised at the permutations I get – Clark, Craig, Chris, Clag . . . yes, somebody called me Clag. Because Clag is in much more common parlance than Clay. I’m still upset about that one.

Marketing, sales, and my field fundraising are really about persuasion. It’s about talking to people about their values, their identity, who they are, and encouraging—asking them—to make a commitment to something that really fits their identity as a human. It may be a product, or it may be, again in fundraising, a life-saving, world-changing mission.

But to truly get to people’s values . . . to their own personal brand . . . we have to appeal to them as a person. And if we get their name wrong, we have invalidated their identity right from the outset.

It’s why I’m passionate about data.

Data is the single greatest asset any nonprofit—well, ANY organization—can have. Our donors and our customers are everything. Without them, we don’t exist.  And if we can’t reach them and engage them in dialogue, conversation, and messaging, we become, as Shakespeare wrote, “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” And all contact begins with data:

• Name fields

• Address information

• Email address

• Phone number

• Spouse name

The quality of the data we have and use has, in my experience, the greatest impact on our ability to reach and engage with people. Our donors. Our customers. 

And yet the management and maintenance—indeed, the prioritization of data quality—is often hefted off or outsourced, and we don’t pay that close attention to it. Because it’s a numbers game sometimes, isn’t it? We’re not terribly worried (too much) if our email didn’t reach all intended recipients or the mail piece didn’t reach the intended homes, because we got other responses.

But somewhere in that big file of data was a Clay looking for his name on a license plate. And we called him Crag. And he thought, “You don’t know me at all.” Our audiences are begging us to call them by their true names. To show them we know them and that they’re valuable to us – and we’re valuable to them. The value of clean data cannot be over or underestimated.

T. Clay Buck, CFRE is the chief development officer at Nevada Blind Children’s Foundation. You can find him online at @TClayBuck or tcbfundraising.com.