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USE THIS WHENEVER YOU WANT YOUR MARKETING COMMUNICATION TO REALLY WORK! TEN CRUCIAL THINGS YOU MUST DO TO CREATE SUCCESSFUL MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS EVERY TIME

Our new and barely passed federal tax laws will have many, many consequences. One of them will be that there will be a lot less money around and a lot less tolerance for wasting what money there is. This means you've got to get a lot savvier about the marketing communications you create. You've got to do more to be sure they're going to produce the results you want. Otherwise, you're just wasting your organization's slender resources... and that in daunting times like these just won't do.

To give you a leg up in the increasingly stiff competition ahead, here are ten things you can do to ensure that the marketing communications you produce will do the job for you... and not just waste your time and money.

#1: Stop Doing Your Marketing Communications The Way You Usually Do Them

New times demand new ways of acting. It's crucial you understand this and bring this insight to the production of all your marketing communications. In the past, you may have had the luxury of throwing these communications together. Does this sound familiar? You need a brochure... or a fund raising letter... or a media release... or an internal memo. Instead of thinking through who you're talking to, what you want them to do, when you want them to do it, and motivating the quickest possible action, you just throw out the usual "me-centered" tripe. It hasn't worked well in the past, true, but at least the job is done. Right?

Wrong!

To begin with, you must make a commitment to a new way of handling your marketing communications. You must never create one just to meet a deadline... you must always be clear about what you're doing and ensure that the communication you create meets your objective. The days are gone now when creating anything is acceptable. Marketing is, beyond everything else, the art of making designated publics take promptest action. If your marketing communication fails to do this to the maximum extent possible, it has failed... whether you met a "deadline" or not.

#2: Be Clear About Who You're Talking To Correct marketing

communications are all addressed to a specific person or group of people. What's more, these people know right away that you're talking to them. But, consider for a moment the marketing communications you put out now. Pick up one and scrutinize it. Can you honestly say that the person you're attempting to reach will immediately know you're talking to her? Or will she have to delve deeper and deeper into your jargon and self-congratulating language to find out that you're talking to her? In all candor, I think we both know the answer to this question, don't we? While you may know who you're trying to reach... you make it damned difficult for your audience to know. This, of course, is unacceptable in our new, resource-pinched age.

Before writing any marketing communication, write down just who you're talking to. Is it a particular person? Is it a group of people with common attributes? Don't guess. Know.

Nine times out of ten, you'll find that you're muddled about just who you're talking to... and therefore your focus will be unclear. Successful marketing is severely pointed marketing; it's designed for specific people... and focuses exclusively on motivating these people to act as quickly as possible. Moreover, it lets these people know RIGHT AWAY that the sender is talking to them, so that the intended audience is always clear that they are indeed just the right people to get the message.

#3 Be Clear About What You're Trying To Achieve

Every marketing communication has a point... to motivate the fastest possible action. Unfortunately, all too often people writing marketing communications forget this. Instead of trying to motivate action they get bogged down by trying to "educate" or "inform." But your job is to target just the right people... and, through your client-centered marketing communications, get them to take prompt action. Thus, before writing a single word of any marketing communication, be clear about what you want this communication to help achieve. It will help if you think in terms of completing this sentence, "When the person I'm writing this communication to gets it, I want him/her to...." Foolish "marketers" will complete the sentence by writing things like "read it," "study it," "think about what I've written." Friend, in marketing "reading," "studying," and "thinking about" are never where it's at. FOCUSED ACTION is always the objective. Moreover, you cannot leave the kind of action up to the recipient. You've got to determine what you want the recipient to do... and you've got to do everything possible to motivate just that action.

In this regard, here are some kinds of specific actions you might want to motivate. "I want the recipient to:

pick up the phone immediately and call to volunteer to assist at our annual special event;
fill out an action coupon and return it to let us know he'll help in some way or other;
make an immediate financial contribution to our work, etc."

In short, I want the recipient to do something SPECIFIC, not just pause, mull, deliberate... and, quite probably, do nothing further.

#4: Understand What Your Designated Recipient Wants... And What He's Anxious About

I've got some sad news for you: the people you're contacting with your marketing communications aren't focused on what you're doing. They're consumed with their own wants... and anxieties. This, of course, is always true, but in difficult times like these, they're even more self-focused than ever. You must understand this and create your marketing communications accordingly.

Your marketing communications must focus on what the designated recipient wants... and what he's anxious about. Thus, before even attempting to create any final marketing communication, you need to spend time brainstorming the wants of the recipient. How do you find these out? Keep asking recipients what they want... and keep recording this information for just such a time as this. Remember, you never have to think up recipient wants all by yourself; that's daft. You do need to keep asking recipients about their wants... and prioritizing them based on what you hear and discover.

By the same token, you've got to keep a list of what recipients are anxious about. As all good marketers know, recipient anxieties are crucial in getting recipients to take faster action. If your recipients are worried... and if you will work hard to ensure that they understand you can deal with these worries either in whole or in part, why, then, you're well on your way to having a truly successful marketing communication -- one, that is, that motivates the fastest possible response from just the people you want to take action.

#5 Be Clear About What You Can Do For The Designated Recipient

To be a person is to want. To want is to keep hoping to find that which will satisfy the want. For your marketing communication to succeed you must be clear about how you can satisfy recipient want... and to present what you have in the clearest possible way. Is this what you do now? I doubt it...

Take a look at your existing marketing communications. Are they as clear as possible about precisely what you offer the designated recipient? Or is what you offer disfigured by jargon, complicated language, third-person presentation, and a lack of specificity? I have my suspicions...

The sad truth is, most nonprofit personnel either don't know very well just what they have to offer... or if they do know, won't take the time and trouble to render this information in the most direct, understandable fashion. As a result, they keep producing marketing communications that are distinguished by an over abundance of unhelpful language instead of a series of clear, immediately understandable paragraphs about precisely what the recipient will get from the organization. Since good marketing is always simple, recipient-centered marketing, the best way of creating these paragraphs is to begin each one with just these two words, "You get..." It's not flashy... but it works.

#6: Make It Easy For The Prospect To Get What You've Got

The people who are going to do well in our difficult times are those who have considered how to make it easy for their prospects to get the benefits they've got. Are you one of these people? Or are you blocking the success of your marketing communications by failing to think through what will happen when the prospect responds:

Have you asked the prospect to call you but not provided a means of handling his call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?
Have you asked the prospect to act without briefing personnel who man your phone system on what to do when he calls?
Have you asked the prospect to send in a written response but not walked the response process through to ensure that his expression of interest gets handled in a prompt, reliable fashion? There is, you see, no point in creating any marketing communication unless and until you can handle the response. On the one hand, you must be clear about what you want the prospect to do... and make it easy for him to do it; on the other, you must be sure you can handle the response once you receive it.

#7: Motivate The Fastest Possible Prospect Action

Take a look at any of your marketing communications, your basic organizational brochure for instance. Can you honestly say you've done what was necessary to motivate the fastest possible action from the recipient? Or does it say in effect, "Whenever you get around to moving is just fine with us, don't even think of troubling yourself now"? The sad fact is, the bulk of "marketing" communications produced by nonprofit organizations are passive. They don't seek to motivate immediate action and you can review them in vain for any sign of any motivational device. This, of course, is wrong.

No marketing communication is complete which doesn't seek to motivate IMMEDIATE action. To achieve this objective, means thinking through what you've got to offer... and doing what is necessary to get your designated public to act now to take advantage of it.

Say you're running a program where space is of the essence... where you can only take an additional 10 people before you're full. Then tell prospects just how little space you've got... and remind them of what they'll be losing if they don't act IMMEDIATELY to get it. Don't just say you have a program... say you have a problem that's going to be full soon... and that the recipient will be sorry to miss (for whatever reasons). In short, MOTIVATE, don't just inform.

#8: Provide Prospect Reassurances

Whatever you're offering, most of the people you're connecting with feel some degree of uncertainty about doing anything to get it. Prospects are always asking themselves, one way and another, if they should act. Most decide to do nothing -- which is neither to your interest or theirs. That's why you must offer reassuring devices in your marketing communications. To this end, you should put testimonials in all your marketing communications, endorsements from real people who have used your services and found them beneficial. These testimonials should focus on what the person providing the testimonial got, and they should always be signed. In addition, you should be prepared to provide references, names and phone numbers of others who have found your services helpful. In short, every marketing communication you produce should be studded with results-centered testimonials from people who have reason to know that what you do works.

Where do you get these testimonials? Why, you ask for them. Every time you provide a service, you ask the person receiving it whether what you've done has benefited him. If he says yes, ask how. And ask for specifics. It is not enough to know, for instance, that someone has gotten something useful from one of yours services; you need to know how much. It is, you see, the specificity which is the most useful part of the testimonial. Specific, believable results convince others to use what you're offering... not just the fact that someone they don't know has derived some unspecified advantage. They are right to know how much advantage people like them have derived... and they are right to press you for such details.

#9: Assess The Success of Your Marketing Communications... And Make Necessary Changes Accordingly

Sadly, too many nonprofit personnel don't understand that the creation and use of any marketing communication is necessarily part of an ongoing process. This means that it is never enough merely to create and use a marketing communication, no matter how superior it may be; you must review its performance and make changes accordingly. You must be prepared for this review process... before you ever write the original communication in the first place! Thus, have you:

put a code in every marketing communication that enables you to ascertain where results are coming from?
informed telephone answering personnel that they must request this coded information and retain it for you?
promised yourself that you'll take this information into consideration before you create the next document, so you can maximize what it useful and delete what isn't? Or are you just gong to keep winging it, hoping that your hunches are correct, but being continually unable to verify them?

Every marketing communication you send provides you with useful feed-back information. But you must take the time to gather these data... and decifer them. When resources count as much as they do now, it's entirely unsatisfactory to throw this information away and fail to utilize it to improve your next marketing communication.

#10: Post This Article

Over the next several weeks and months, you'll have lots of marketing communications to create. Each of them will entail a significant investment of your scarce time and money. Each of them makes sense to create and use if and only if it produces a meaningful return. To this end, clip this article right now and post it where you can see it before you start working on your next marketing communication. It'll remind you that you can make every marketing communication successful... and that no marketing communication can be considered completed unless it meets these necessary specifications.