A Short Communication & Marketing Growth Strategy Template

TL/DR: To use marketing & comms to maximize your impact & achieve your goals, pull together this 4-part plan (more details on our blog): 

1. Research & Audience Deep Dive
2. Analysis & Health Check
3. Strategy & Tactics
4. Measure & Experiment

While the value of communication and marketing for EA has been growing over the past few years, it still represents a huge opportunity. You are reading this because you're working incredibly hard to change the world.  Comms & marketing can maximize the impact you're working so hard to create.  When done right, it can amplify the awareness, engagement, growth, and impact.

But that said, as an organization trying to do good, you likely have a million things on your plate, are conscious of proving your ROI, and aren't 100% sure which marketing tactics will achieve your goals. For all these reasons, it’s easy for comms to fall down the to do list.

Simply put, this represents a huge potential opportunity for EA organizations if executed well.  Look at some of the core focus areas of EA orgs and how marketing & comms might help:

• Growing awareness of your cause area
• Building a community
• Enacting change, in policy and/or in public perception
• Inspiring people to take action
• Fundraising to do more good in the world
• Launching new projects, courses, campaigns, or goals

Think of it  – the power to change people’s opinions and actions in the world. 

The right comms strategy can do that.

So, how do you do it?

After working in marketing & comms for 20 years and launching my own marketing consultancy, I wanted to share with you the template we use with organizations around the world.

Let’s break it down into the 4 main parts:

1. Research
2. Analyze
3. Strategize
4. Measure

1. Research

First, make sure you’ve pinpointed your target audience. Understand exactly who they are, how they find you, and the steps they take before they’re ready to take action.  You’ll want to know:

1. Demographics: What's their age, location, education, career experience, focus areas, family status, net worth, etc.?
2. Psychographics: What content they consume, social channels, spending habits, biggest goals, biggest challenges, what keeps them up at 3am?

From here, you can create an Ideal User Persona (IUP), a one-page snapshot of who you want to engage with. If you want to dive in deeper, you can also create a user journey map, essentially plotting out the steps they take from being completely unaware of your organization to being a power user and advocate for you.

• 💡 Example: By getting an IUP & User Journey Map in place, you see where your target audience is spending time and can prepare a plan to get in front of their eyeballs there (e.g., certain events, social channels, and news outlets).
   

2. Analyze

Second, do a health check. What activities have you been doing, how well have they performed, and what gaps exist? Compare them against standard paid benchmarks like these, conversion benchmarks like these, and email benchmarks like these.  Are there activities across Paid-Earned-Shared-Owned (P-E-S-O) channels that you’re missing?  Think about the funnel from someone being completely unaware you exist, to becoming your biggest advocate. Where is the biggest drop-off & how can you close that gap?

If your organization is pretty new and you have minimal stats, you can do a competitive scan. What activities are similar organizations doing, and how are they looking?

• 💡Example: In looking at Google Analytics and email benchmarks, you found you’re above average on converting website visitors to email sign ups, but they’re not subsequently coming back to your site. This could mean email marketing is your spot to work on (or vice versa).

3.  Strategize

When you know your target audience and have analyzed performance & gaps, pulling together a strategy becomes 10x easier. Start from your overall organizational objective, and think about how marketing can help make that happen. 

• 💡Example: if your goal is to hit a certain fundraising amount, maybe a marketing goal will be to build an engaged email audience, or increase website hits to your donation page.

After you have your overall strategy, next up is the tactics that can get you there. Many organizations will throw out tactics (newsletter, LinkedIn, blog) without tying it back to their overall goals.  We have a list of about 60 tactics, across Paid - Earned - Shared - Owned (P-E-S-O) channels. The mix is going to be different for everyone based on what your goals are.  

• 💡Example: SEO might work great for one organization, while guest posting works for another, and PR for a 3rd.

4. Measure & Experiment

Marketing without measurement doesn’t really count for much in today’s landscape! Especially in EA organizations, you need to be able to prove the impact of your efforts. Look at your Google Analytics regularly.  Search out both a) the successful things to double down on and b) the less successful pieces to stop investing in. You can even create an experimentation calendar with ideas of things to try.

• 💡Example: If one blog post is doing 30% better than average, try creating more content around that topic, and set a website conversion target. If your media strategy isn't working, pivot.

Pulling It All Together

When you know your audience, find the gaps in your funnel, pick tactics that make sense, and set up experimentation calendars, you can easily find your results taking off.  

Tip:  If you want to dive deeper into these categories with more of a step-by-step playbook, check out our full article on How to Create a Marketing Strategy over on Marketing Growth Lab.

When NOT to Invest in a Marketing Strategy

If you're in the very initial stages of your organization and growing an engaged audience isn’t your first priority, this may not be the time.

Similarly, if you’re on a great growth trajectory with more people coming to you than you know what to do with, putting this together should probably wait until you have your feet under you again.

In other cases, getting a solid comms & marketing plan into place sets the stage for you to accomplish your goals. Your marketing & comms goals should align with your organizational goals, and get you where you need to go faster - maximizing the impact you’re working so hard to achieve. 

Should You Do It Alone?

If you do feel now is the time to grow your awareness/reach/engagement, you may wonder if it’s better to do it yourself or hire for it. I get it - many people are afraid to invest in comms & marketing, fearing it will be too expensive, make them bloated, and might not work. Let’s explore the options:

1. Option 1 - DIY:  If you have the in-house skills and time to dedicate, feel free to use this template to craft your own comms & marketing strategy. It has a lot of the bones you'll need and can get you started on your path to growth.
2. Option 2 - Bring in contract support:  If you’re time-strapped and/or aren’t in a position to dedicate a resource to this work, a comms and marketing consultant can get you where you need to go quicker, bringing templates, tools, and experience, at a fraction of a full time hire cost.
3. Option 3 - Hire full time: This is the most expensive option, to bring in a full time communication specialist or manager. The drawback is the cost, time, and ongoing management required, but you'll have someone growing your impact full time.

Next Steps

Whichever route you choose, you're on your way to increasing your impact, and for that you get my applause.  To help, regardless of which option works for you, we offer free comms & marketing strategy sessions for EA organizations - because we believe how powerful marketing can be in helping EA organizations achieve their goals.

Simply email us at [email protected], book via our Calendly link, or check out marketinggrowthlab.com/comms-marketing-for-effective-altruism/.

Either way, I hope this strategy can help EA organizations out there grow and maximize the impact you’re working so hard to create!