So you need to boost your marketing and communications in 2023. But where to start? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the blogs and articles telling you what you should do.

Many charities struggle with marketing and communications due to limited resources and a lack of expertise in these areas, so let’s strip it back. In this blog post, we’ll discuss tips on how charities can improve their marketing and communications.

The most important things to remember about any marketing campaign are:

• What do you want to achieve?

• Who do you want to speak to?

Goals

Without knowing why you’re doing something, you’ll never be able to know if you’ve achieved your goals. It’s easy to get excited by the outputs (like new branded pens or a fancy new video) rather than coming up with a solid plan about what you want the outcomes to be, however, if you spend time in the planning phases, it will help you focus your time and resources, leading to more successful campaigns.

Audience

Once you’ve decided what you want the marketing campaign to achieve, then you need to think about the audience. Try and be as specific as possible. “We want to speak to everyone” will result in a campaign which is likely to be quite bland and vague and will end up speaking to nobody rather than everybody.

This can be a difficult task sometimes, as you might want to avoid stereotyping or leaving anybody out, but being specific enables you to know what language to use and which platforms to run the campaign on. There is little point in spending all your time chasing a journalist for a piece in the local printed newspaper if you’re trying to reach teenagers across the country. Think about where they access information and news, and go to where they are.

Methods

So you’ve got your goals set, and you know who you’re talking to so now you need to choose the best methods for reaching that audience. You don’t need to do EVERYTHING for every campaign – unless you have a huge communications team behind you, it just won’t be possible, so focus your attention on the most effective ways to reach your target audience. And again, be specific! Don’t simply say “social media” – which social media channel? Why? Do you want to speak to professionals in the industry? LinkedIn would be most appropriate. Are you wanting to reach teenagers? Consider going on TikTok.

Create a plan

Now you’ve got everything you need, time to put it all together in a plan. There is no set way to write a plan, so do what feels right for you. Don’t forget to consider the resources you’re going to need to create a successful campaign! It’s good to make a contingency plan too, so you have a plan for what to do if something unexpected happens.

Final words of wisdom

Do something different! Try and be as creative as your budget allows, and try to not design anything by committee – often organisations will be slightly fearful of anything bold, but being bold will get you noticed, so try to push yourself, and your organisation, out of your comfort zone. Try and create something which will evoke emotion – whether that makes people laugh or cry – try to do something which will stick in people’s minds!

For more advice, or to get our take on things, why not get in touch at amanda@marketingwithpurpose.co.uk