Low Cost No Cost Marketing

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?

Before embarking on any new marketing strategies, it’s important to establish what your organisations goals are. Only by fully understanding what you want to achieve can the results be measured and the effectiveness of your work monitored and improved.

Some of the broader goals for not-for-profit organisations might be:

  • Raising funds
  • Raising awareness
  • Improving engagement
  • Educating
  • Attracting and motivating volunteers
  • Attracting membership
  • Providing support

Of course, with all these goals you will need to narrow down the broad terms to specifics that can be measured. For instance, if you are trying to raise funds, set a target, tie fundraising in with specific projects or specific campaigns, set goals for each and every avenue of fundraising whether its targeted emails, online donation forms or bringing in members etc.

Then you can really measure the effectiveness of all your online marketing work, allowing you to grow those that are working and change those that aren't.

In many ways, all these broader goals are inter-linked - a well-co-ordinated marketing campaign will address all of these issues (and more). Increasing inclusion will be much easier if you raise awareness, improve engagement and attract members. We'll now look at some strategies for achieving these goals.

NO COST LOW COST OPTIONS

Newsletters

Surveys

Press Releases

Customer Feedback Forms

Loyalty Programmes

Social Media

NEWSLETTERS

-Consider your audience: Before deciding on what content you need for your newsletter, take a moment to define your audience; gather demographics, and decide what topics will interest them. Choose a topic that will connect with them--specifically on a personal level.

-Be Informative:Being informative and relevant is the end-all, be-all in the newsletter realm. Telling useful and/or compelling stories is also how we catch up with friends. If your newsletter looks like a newsletter, but isn’t full of valuable, interesting, educational content, then it isn’t really a newsletter, nor is it a very good friend. So what do people consider valuable content?

  • Organisation news – updates, improvements, new products, awards, volunteer projects, etc.
  • Tips, tactics, how-to’s
  • Industry news/third party news
  • Events, dates to remember, holidays
  • Interesting facts
  • Reviews
  • Photos
  • Contests/contest winners
  • Resources
  • Testimonials
  • Recipes

-Five ‘W’s and a H: Keep all information accurate. Use the six questions to give your newsletter a versatility: who, what, when, where, why and how. The best articles incorporate all six of these questions and answers, if applicable. This may require some research such as interviewing, but it is worth it if you want to make an effective newsletter.

-Make it understandable: Use concise and comprehensible vocabulary to ensure readability. Avoid wordy language. Remember that you are promoting inclusion and consider how someone with a disability may look at your newsletter – is it easy to read and easy to understand? Is the font big enough and easy to read, are colours and layouts simple?

-Use interesting headlines: Write dynamic headlines by using action verbs that evokes curiosity. Without an interesting headline, readers may skim over your articles, because they find it uninteresting. Also, if any of your articles are more than a few paragraphs long, use subheadings to break up the text.

-Proofread: After writing your articles, proofread for typos and then edit all articles for consistency of tone and voice. Never leave proofreading to your spell and grammar check tools. They are great for preliminary editing but poor substitutes for manual editing. Have someone else look over your newsletter for typos, since you can easily skip over them after staring at the text too long. And don't forget that you can't edit enough. Once you've thought you edited enough, go over it one more time. Even just a few typos will annoy readers enough for them to disregard you as a professional.

-Be consistent: Use the same template for subsequent newsletters. Your readers will get used to a design and are more likely to read your newsletter if they recognise it. Free templates are available for both Word and Publisher users from Microsoft.com.

-Use Volunteers: Recruit and use volunteers to help you with your newsletter. There are lots of jobs that volunteers can help you with; template design, researching and writing articles, proof reading, and deliveries.

-Shop around for cheapest print options: Can you use your work printing facilities?Can you get a local business to sponsor your newsletter? Will a local print company print your newsletter for free if you include their advert on the newsletter? If you have to pay to have your newsletters printed shop around – some of the best deals can be found online. The cheapest one I have found is cheapestprintonline.co.uk.

SURVEYS AND FEEDBACK FORMS

-Surveys and feedback forms should be done to answer program-oriented questions.

  • Include only information useful to design or revise interventions
  • Do not include information which is just "of interest" or already proven or obvious

- Answers to such program-oriented questions may be necessary to:

  • Determine need for new program
  • Help design new program
  • Evaluate existing program

-Surveys and feedback forms may also be done to gather data to use to advocate for additional resources in order to meet the needs of your service users.

-For best results, include no more than five to 10 questions in your surveys and feedback forms. Consumers generally have short attention spans, so if you bombard them with dozens of rapid-fire questions, your completion rates can drop significantly.

-As you're writing your survey or feedback questions, try to let participants expand on their thoughts. "Yes or no" questions won't give you as much information as free-form text responses.

-Print your survey or feedback forms yourself or even better put them online using platforms such as surveymonkey which allow you to create free surveys.

-As with newsletters, use volunteers to help design, proofread, and deliver your surveys and feedback forms (online or in person).

PRESS RELEASES

  • Only issue press releases that are newsworthy: In general, a newsworthy press release addresses issues that your service users are grappling with and demonstrates why they, as well as the press, should care about the press release as well as your organisation.
  • Define Target Press List: When developing your target press list, make sure you determine who at the publication covers your service area. Do not use a blanket distribution strategy to disseminate your press release to publications.
  • Capture the reader's attention with the headline: the headline should be all capital letters, boldfaced, succinct, includes an action verb, and gives a benefit if possible.
  • Include your service’s key features, and benefits to service users.
  • Include a service user quote if possible: this helps raise its level of newsworthiness and chance of being covered by the press
  • Include a quote from the Chief Executive of your organisation or other appropriate spokesperson:
  • Include pricing and availability information.
  • Include contact information for press to receive additional information.

LOYALTY PROGRAMMES

A loyalty programme should attract new service users to the organisation; how effectively will depend on how exciting and how valuable the rewards seem to be to the target audience. Loyalty schemes can be more profitable than discounts. To increase loyalty, you need to recognise and reward your best customers. A loyalty scheme can be used to incentivise and delight your most valued service users.

  • Use a simple points system: This is the most common loyalty program methodology. Frequent customers earn points, which translate into some type of reward. Whether it’s a discount, a freebie, or special customer treatment, customers work toward a certain amount of points to redeem their reward.
  • Use a Tier System to Reward Initial Loyalty and Encourage More Purchases: Offer small rewards as a base offering for being a part of the program, and encourage repeat customers by increasing the value of the rewards as the customer moves up the loyalty ladder.
  • Partner With Another Company to Provide All-Inclusive Offers: Strategic partnerships for customer loyalty can be extremely effective for service user retention and organisation growth. Fully understanding your customers every-day lives will help determine which company is a good fit as a partner.
  • Make a Game Out of It:Who doesn’t love a good game, right? Turning your loyalty program into a game is a fun way to encourage repeat customers and, depending on the type of game you choose, help solidify your brand's image.
  • Keep it simple, keep it cost effective: No need to go all out with a loyalty scheme – a simple credit-card sized card with your logo and stamp boxes will work for example: for every nine times a service user attends your activity they get the tenth session free!

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media – done well – is a highly effective marketing and communication tool.

  • It can be done by volunteers (with guidance)
  • It doesn’t have to take much time
  • It requires sign-up so your message is going out to people who already buy into your aims
  • It creates engagement and discussion among supporters – helping to highlight issues
  • It’s a cost-effective way of co-ordinating and informing service users, volunteers, and fundraisers
  • It can generate real-time calls to action

Where it’s done well, it can generate immediate and significant rewards. By using it regularly to provide useful information to followers, you can build up a significant and loyal enough following to enable your supporters and service users to become one of yourmarketing tools.

Below is a list of some of the different social media platforms you could explore in 2014:
•Twitter

•LinkedIn
•Pinterest
•Snapchat
•Vine
•Instagram
•Reddit
•Flickr
•Foursquare
•Google+
•YouTube
•Tumblr