As a business owner or leader of a small nonprofit, you’re constantly juggling a million things, right? Sometimes that means marketing gets buried in the long list of more urgent priorities and becomes a reactive effort rather than a proactive one.
When an opportunity comes up, you may find yourself scrambling to put something together to hand out at an event, display on an electronic billboard, or even post on your social media accounts. But this reactive, non-strategic approach to marketing has significant downsides, as it can lead to lack of clarity surrounding your message plus excess work for you and confusion or frustration for your customers.
Lack of clarity
Being reactive instead of proactive with your marketing efforts can dilute your message over time. If you create individual marketing pieces for an event here and there without looking at the big picture of your print materials, you run the risk of those pieces not sharing a cohesive message. Same goes for hiring an intern and tasking them with starting an Instagram account for your nonprofit with no clear strategy for managing that platform moving forward. All too often, the account gets neglected once the intern moves on to their next opportunity, which could make followers start to wonder if you’re still in business.
Excess work
Another thing that happens with a reactive marketing mentality is you end up creating more work for yourself. This is especially true with any print pieces your organization creates. Maybe you need a handout for an upcoming tradeshow, so you quickly put something together and get it off to the printer. But if you’re not strategic about the messaging of that piece, you may end up needing to recreate it for the next tradeshow. You could end up creating extra work for yourself on digital communication efforts as well.
Confusion or frustration from customers
We’re all bombarded with thousands of marketing messages every day. An unclear message due to lack of marketing strategy can create confusion or frustration for your customers. If you’re extremely active on social media for a couple of months and then go completely dark for weeks or months, your customers may not know what to expect from your business. If you have conflicting messages about your hours or services between print pieces and your website, that’s also going to create confusion or frustration.
Bottom line: You won’t get the results you want with a scattered, unclear message. That’s why it’s important to look at the big picture and think strategically about your marketing efforts. When you take the time to sit down and create a strategic marketing plan for your business, you can create a clear message, avoid extra work, and make sure your customers know what to expect from your business.
If you need help creating a strategy for your marketing efforts, reach out to us today to talk about what you need.