Four reasons your nonprofit should conduct a marketing assessment

Marketing is an importance piece of any organization’s strategic plan. You need to make sure your target markets are not only aware of who you are and what you do, but how they can (and why they should) interact with you. For small marketing teams, finding ways to effectively stand out and reach potential customers without a large staff or budget can feel daunting. It might feel simpler to stick to the marketing tactics you’ve traditionally relied on, but in an industry that is constantly growing and changing, it is important to regularly evaluate your efforts to ensure you are reaching the right audience to help  your organization achieve its goals.

The way we at Dot Org Solutions evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing is to undergo a marketing assessment. A marketing assessment reviews your current tactics, resources, target market and more to determine what is working and where you need to refocus your efforts to attain better results. Not convinced yet? Here are four reasons your nonprofit should consider a marketing assessment:

1. It provides a snapshot of your current marketing efforts.

It is easy to get stuck in the day-to-day tasks associated with marketing tactics, especially if you are responsible for ensuring every print piece, social media post and magazine ad are proofed, printed and in your audience’s hands in a timely fashion. A marketing assessment takes a step back looks at all of your current efforts as a whole. This big picture view allows you to identify expensive tactics that may not be working or opportunities to automate processes to save you time in the future. It can also serve as a good reminder that effective, strategic marketing is better than more marketing. By analyzing your goals, audience and tactics as a whole, a marketing assessment helps you identify what marketing tactics will work best to reach the right people and further your organization’s mission.

2. It makes you reflect on your organization’s goals.

Marketing efforts do not exist on an island alone. They must be part of an overall strategy that aims to meet specific organizational goals. Without tying organizational goals to marketing tactics, you have no way to measure your marketing’s effectiveness. A marketing assessment helps to identify tactics that are not tied to specific goals and may be a waste of time and money. Your marketing may be reaching your target audience, but maybe it is lacking the correct call to action to convert that stagnant audience into active participants within your organization.

A marketing assessment can help you tweak your efforts to ensure they are effective, ultimately helping your organization meet its goals.

3. You will gain an outside perspective.

Having an outside organization conduct your assessment allows you to see your efforts in a new way. An outsider may be able to identify gaps in your messaging or tactics that you are unable to see. Our marketing assessments include multiple staff, leadership and board interviews. By talking to several people serving in different capacities within the organization, we get a well-rounded picture of internal and external processes. This helps us identify overlap in efforts, alignment of expectations and perceptions about what works and what doesn’t for attracting your audience. These interviews, extensive research of your materials and processes and an analysis of your space within the market provide you with a fresh perspective on your marketing.

4. It can spark innovation and excitement.

A review of your marketing tactics and an analysis of what is working well and where you can improve your efforts can reinvigorate you and your team to think differently. Based on the assessment’s results, you may decide you need to revamp your messaging, try a new advertising tactic or rework your marketing plan so that it better aligns with your organization’s overall mission. Changes like these can be hard to enact, but a marketing assessment may be the push you need to switch things up.

Reevaluating your marketing plan and tactics is an exercise you should complete regularly to ensure everything is in sync with your organization’s goals and strategic priorities. However, you may not have time to conduct this kind of analysis while simultaneously handling all of the marketing projects for your company.

If this sounds like your situation, consider an outside marketing assessment to compile and review your marketing efforts, rethink your tactics and priorities and gain a new perspective on where you need to focus your resources to get better results.

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