Marketing tips if you don’t have a marketing department
We love discussing brand marketing and impact with clients, friends, organizations, and colleagues. It’s our passion and our secret sauce. It’s our jam and butter. It’s our espresso and cream.
After a decade of working with large and small organizations on their marketing strategies, we have insights for smaller businesses and organizations that don’t have big marketing departments but want to make a big impact.
The first challenge we often hear is, “People don’t understand what we do.” Our work and impact can seem so obvious to us on the inside, but often our external audiences don’t have a clear idea of our services or how great we are. Here are five tips to help clarify and strengthen your brand message and highlight your impact:
Tackle the mission statement early, and repeat it. The mission statement should anchor the work, support your decision-making, drive your direction, and set your organization's voice. The mission statement should answer these questions: “What do we achieve? How do we do it? What is our goal?” Use your mission statement to guide how you talk about work in your marketing and outreach. This leads to the next step:
Create your top three messages based on the mission statement. Your top three messages are the bite-sized talking points distilled down from your mission statement. They explain what you want your audience to know and remember about your work. Think about the messages as the sum of how you do your work, how you are different, and what your focus is. Getting clear early about your top three messages will help you write content for your communications plan and content calendar that continues to drive your story.
Use the three messages everywhere. What should I say this week on social media? What should my website say? What should I add to my LinkedIn bio? Return to your top three messages, and say them repeatedly and in different ways. When talking or writing about your organization, rely on your top three messages to take you to the top.
Share your work under a “message umbrella.” Slide the examples under one of your three main messages when highlighting your work and projects. Now as you showcase your work, it ties back and highlights your overall mission. I am visual, so I write out my top three messages and then place all the programming under each heading. That way, I am clear to clients and stakeholders how each project supports the mission.
Done is better than perfect. When completing marketing assets like websites and social media, done is better than perfect. You can always add pages, updates, blogs, and pictures to your website. But you need to begin telling your story. We often see committees get stuck on editing language in multiple rounds. Start simply, state it clearly, and get it up and out. You will grow, learn, and adapt through the work, and your marketing materials can be adjusted accordingly over time.
What does this look like in practice? Let’s look at an example nonprofit arts organization called “Arts for All.” Their mission is to ensure everyone has access to art. From this mission, their top three messages are:
We bring art to schools.
We invest in artists.
We host community art engagements.
As an organization, they place each of the different projects they are working on under 1, 2, or 3. For example:
We bring art to schools.
Weekly art workshops in the local high school.
Hosting an art show in a school with the students.
We invest in artists.
Artist in-residency program.
Pay artists on staff.
We host community art engagements.
Monthly art shows.
From this list, “Arts for All” can create a content calendar for social media and their newsletter with these messages, over and over, with new pictures, new updates, event information, and other exciting visuals. They connect a project to their message and mission statement whenever they mention it.
What do you think? Let us know if this is helpful and if you have other tips!