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.

Bring in Talent with Strategic Storytelling

Once upon a time, there was a business. This business looked like many other organizations, but its leaders were deliberate on how they told their story. In our fable, the organization dedicated time to create its brand, solidify the value proposition, and share key messages. As this business grew, the goal became to hire the best talent to join the team. In keeping strategic storytelling at the front of every initiative, the organization gained clients, grew market share, and recruited the best talent in the market. The end.

Perhaps this tale seems simplistic and contrived, yet often the important initiative of strategic storytelling is skipped when organizations create their external—and internal—brand. I like to think of strategic storytelling as crafting a value proposition and positioning this message in a compelling and articulate way. Leveraging communication tactics is critical when sharing a business’ vision and differentiators within the market.

Strategic storytelling is crafting a value proposition and positioning this message in a compelling and articulate way. 

In a future piece, I’ll cover ways companies can leverage consistent brand messaging to build the trust and loyalty customers feel for the business. To coincide with this issue’s theme of workforce development, I’d like to share how strategic storytelling can be utilized to reach the right talent.

Just like bringing clients to the door, recruiting the right workforce involves creating a comprehensive message across all channels. When potential employees are searching for jobs, the first places they look is on your website or LinkedIn page to learn more about your company. You cannot underestimate the importance of clear branding and messaging to people that you want to work for your firm.

Three Ways to Leverage Strategic Storytelling in Recruiting

1.       Your employees are your best source for introducing others to your organization, including potential hires. Make sure you equip your team with powerful messaging—a dynamic elevator speech—about your organization. If an employee clearly can define your mission and where he or she fits into it, the pride and ownership will be compelling to new talent.

2.       The brand that you showcase to the market should be similar to your workplace. If you’re a casual tech company with cool products, chances are your office environment will be laid-back and hip. If the perception of the internal and external are not in alignment, regrouping to tell a congruent story can help bring these together.

3.       There is a saying that a person needs to hear a concept eight times for it to sink in. With this in mind, consistent messaging in multiple channels from leadership to employees is critical. And in recruiting, key talent will also need a precise message across the board.

With strategic storytelling, positioning your business in a compelling way isn’t a fairytale. In taking the time to clearly share your value proposition as an employer of choice, potential hires will have the benefit of understanding the business’ place in the market and how they can be a part of future growth. And they lived happily ever after.

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