The first stage of any marketing strategy should always be to conduct market research so you have a clear understanding of your audience, your organisation and any broader market factors which may have an impact on your charity. A good place to start is by conducting an internal analysis of your charity. This will include uncovering your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose and vision, your values and objectives and identifying your key stakeholders. To identify threats and opportunities for your organisation, you need to complete a broader market analysis which will involve identifying key macro factors and analysing their potential impact on your charity.
Next, you will want to gain a better understanding of your audience – this is key to ensuring you are delivering the right message to the right people at the right time, using the right channel. When it comes to understanding your audience, it’s helpful to create personas for each segment you identify to highlight significant preferences and allow you to easily compare similarities and differences between each group. Some examples of key information you should define for each persona include:
To cut through the noise and really engage your audience, you need to ensure that the content you are creating communicates a powerful message and is consistent with your brand and objectives. Your content should form part of your broader marketing strategy and must be carefully planned to ensure it is relevant to your audience and your broader business goals.
To ensure there is a clear structure to your content, it’s useful to create content pillars to act as a framework for everything you produce. Content pillars are the key themes that are most relevant to your target audience and provide an opportunity for you to link your cause to their interests. Once you have established your content pillars, you will want to develop a content framework that segments your content by pillar and highlights the objective (for example, increasing awareness), format (video, blog post, podcast etc) and channels used to distribute it.
There are several channels to consider when creating a marketing strategy for your charity. Some of the most important include:
One of the few channels you have complete ownership of, your website domain and the content within it will play a key role in your digital marketing strategy.
This is key to ensuring your website is shown at the top of the search engine results pages and is what will drive organic traffic to your site. There are both on-page (including content, HTML and technical elements) and off-page (including links, social media and influencer marketing) aspects of SEO that must be considered.
There are several different social platforms, each with different benefits, purposes and audiences. For the most part, it’s free to use and is a great way to engage with your audience, drive traffic to your website and monitor key trends.
The only digital channel aside from your website that you have total ownership of, email is a free and powerful tool that’s great for building and maintaining relationships with your audience and generating donations.
Driving donations is one of the key purposes of your website, so you need to ensure that it is optimised for conversions. There are a number of ways you can do this, including:
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