Successful Marketing Campaign Strategies for Small Teams

Mission marketers have unique challenges. Sometimes, it’s fundraising. Or member recruitment. Or enrollment strategies. Sometimes it’s just good ole’ brand awareness. Whatever the goal, your marketing campaigns help you get there. 

Join our marketing campaign experts, Joi and Alicia, for our first mighty webinar of the year! Delve into innovative strategies, practical tips, and proven tactics that will empower your marketing team to not only survive but thrive. Discover how to make the most of your resources, leverage digital tools effectively, and craft strategies that punch above their weight.

In one hour, we’ll cover the different aspects of a marketing campaign strategy, where attendees will learn how to set goals, define activities and tactics, uncover risks, discover new opportunities, and manage the campaign.

By the end of the presentation, you’ll:

• Access tools to build your marketing campaign strategy
• Understand what (and what not) to include in your campaign
• Track results over time to analyze and optimize 

You can also download this free Marketing Campaign Template that walks you through the same sections our speakers do in the presentation, including creating goals for your campaign, key elements, logistics, and calendar. 

Transcription: 

Joi Bass: I’m Joi Bass, the Director of Client Marketing here at Mighty Citizen. I’ve been here for almost three years, and I primarily focus on strategies for associations and nonprofit organizations. My background is in nonprofits, both as a comms person and a fundraiser. And as you can see here, my favorite mystery show is Murder She Wrote, because I’m a Jessica Fletcher stan.

Alicia Ritchey: Hello, everyone. My name is Alicia Ritchey, and I’m a Senior Marketing Strategist at Mighty Citizen, and I actually just celebrated my one-year anniversary. Though my time at Mighty Citizen has been relatively short, I’ve been in marketing for quite some time, primarily in higher education. I’ve also had some stints and healthcare and a startup. So, I’m pretty well-versed in marketing for teams of all sizes, and one of my favorite mysteries is And Then There Were None. Classic. Can’t go wrong there.

So before we get started, I just want to thank you all, again, for spending time with us today. Joi and I thought really carefully about how to maximize your time. So you will walk away with a course of action that you can put in your toolkit. So if you’re here today, it is safe to assume you check one or more of these boxes. The first being you have some great ideas for marketing your organization, and you want to get buy-in from your leadership and stakeholders. Maybe you’d like to take a step back from tactics and start thinking about the big picture. You’re dealing with unrealistic expectations and timelines, we’ve all been there and perhaps you just want a framework to help you build out a strategy. These are all things we’re gonna talk about today. And so by the end of the presentation, you’ll be able to finesse a strategy, through research insights to develop it, to define key elements of your campaign, get that buy-in that we mentioned, and get a great template that we will provide at the end. We will do this by working through an example of a client who needs a strategy. So let’s do it. I’m going to pass this off to Joi to tell you about our client and their needs. 

Joi Bass: Yeah, so who’s our client? So as Alicia mentioned, we’re going to walk you through the process that strategists here at Mighty Citizen use whenever we get a new client. We always start by trying to understand our clients: what they need, what they want to achieve, and just how they want to be seen in the world. So let me introduce you to our clients. They are the hosts of a popular true crime podcast that started out about one case, and they expanded to others.

Recently, they’ve noticed that their podcast subscribers’ growth is stagnant. As a result, sales are down. They came to us for a strategy to fix that. So before you provide a strategy, you really need to clearly define the challenge that you’re facing. This feels like something that you could maybe skip because it seems obvious, but a problem statement is essential because it’s going to help you stay focused on what really matters. Because you made your way through the strategy, you can use it as a measuring stick. If you’re on the fence about a tactic or a message, you always refer back to your problem statement, and you’ll get clarity. A good problem statement is simple, succinct, and urgent. So in the case of our clients, they want more people to subscribe to their podcast to increase ad sales. It’s simple and you can identify the urgency right away, right? We need more revenue. 

Now, at Mighty Citizen, we have a very thorough discovery process. We have a whole multidisciplinary team that looks at every aspect of a client, but I know that most marketers don’t have that. No matter how small your team is, though, thinking is the key to making a successful strategy. Before you develop a strategy, you need to research, research, research. When you’re a small team on a tight, tight timeline, it’s really tempting to think that you need to just jump right in, especially because you already know a lot about your organization and your audiences; but don’t skip the research. Skipping the research is like going on a road trip without a map. Research is our map, and it helps us understand where we are, where we want to go, and the best route to get there.

So you’re going to become a data detective, whether it’s donor, member, or student data, you have valuable intel at your fingertips. Just look past the demographics and focus on behaviors. Do you have donors who have given multiple times in a year? Do you have members who are active and then all of a sudden dropped off? The data is going to help you make your diagnoses and it can also be the key to your solution. When it comes to surveys and interviews, you want to spend time developing questions that support your goal. My biggest tip here is to edit. You want to edit the phrasing of your questions and edit the length of your surveys. Surveys should be short enough that it doesn’t cause your audience to just shut down and x out right? Social listening is a great way to not just monitor your brand, but also find out what your audience cares about (who else they give to, what they like, what they’re saying, and what their competitors are doing).

Speaking of which, looking at your competitors is also part of the strategy. You do it not to copy them. It’s just a great way of understanding how to make your organization stand out and get a sense of what you offer that’s special. I think positioning is just something that a lot of organizations don’t consider enough. Our tendency is to want to copy the top company in our category because what they’re doing is working to an extent. When you’re a small org, against a bigger, better resource, or well, more well-known organization, you better figure out how to set yourself apart, doing what they’re doing is not going to work for you.

And then look at previous campaigns, see what worked and what didn’t. Google Search Console is another step in understanding the terms that people are using to find your website, and it may spark some ideas for your campaign strategy. There’s also website analytics. So use GA4, learn about your audience, and what parts of your site are most compelling for them. I also like to look at platform ad libraries. So like competitor ads, look at ads from similar organizations that can spark ideas. You can even take inspiration from brands that are not in your industry. So the research is not just about gathering the data. It’s about making it work for us. You want to look for patterns and trends, you want to see what stands out, what surprises you. Look at the data with an objective eye. What do you notice? Use your organization’s priorities to put the research into context. To give you an example of this, we’re going to dive into our own client’s data and see what we find.

Our client has tons of data on their current subscribers. So, let’s see what trends we can identify. We looked at their data, and we see that there’s 90% of their subscribers live in New York City. Word of mouth from neighbors plays a key role in getting new listeners, and we identified two important demographics: women aged 25 to 35, and retirees over 60. So, things are getting a little clearer for us. We know where the podcast is popular, we know how the audience is hearing about it, and now we have a good sense of who our primary audiences are. We still need to push ourselves a little bit further.

So after interviewing a group of subscribers, we found that people love stories that were set in their neighborhoods. They recommended the podcast more when the story was close to home. Despite loving the podcast, people often forget to listen. That gives us a clue that we have to do a better job of keeping the podcast top of mind. And then we also found they had a group of super fans who are extremely passionate about the podcast. The great thing about talking directly to your audience is that you find out not just who they are, but what they like and what motivates them.

Our next step here is going to be to do a SWOT analysis. You want this to be so specific that when you read it, it can only apply to your organization. Let’s say you want a bigger marketing budget. That’s the case for most marketers, right? When you’re talking to your CEO or CFO about increasing your budget, you need to be able to show them how that budget is affecting your work. So you wouldn’t write in a SWOT analysis “we don’t have enough money.” Instead, you might say something like, “we can’t run ads on the channels our target audience uses the most because our budget is too small.” That paints the picture of how your budget is limiting your growth.

A SWOT analysis is also a good place to capture how you compare to your competitors or peer organizations. So in the case of our podcasters, there are dozens of other true crime podcasts. Maybe you might see that as a threat, but also you can see I’ve put it here as a strength because their podcast is unique. They investigate crimes rather than just relying on new stories which gives them a unique value. When you’re attempting a SWOT analysis, you want to make sure you’re not just stating facts, but you’re actually putting heavy emphasis on the analysis part. This shouldn’t be a driverless observation, this should be taking a look at your situation and putting it into a framework where people can understand very quickly where you are.

Alright, so now it’s time to think and wait. And this part of the process really can’t be rushed. It took me a long time in my career to realize that the thinking is the work. You have a to-do list a mile long, there’s only so many hours in a day, you want to just jump right in, but you have to pause and let your brain do its thing. Your brain needs time to make connections to find insights, and this is part of the creative process, and strategy is a creative endeavor, so you just have to wait and eventually, it’ll all come together. For me, sometimes ideas hit me when I’m out for a walk, or in a shower. Your brain will work in the background making those connections for you. Everything that you’re ingesting will kind of come together. So let’s explore the strategy that we crafted for this client after taking in all that research.

Our strategy here is to increase subscribers by partnering with superfans to promote New York City neighborhood-specific content. Take a second and think about how our research informed this strategy. Remember, our subscriber data said 90% of our audience is in New York City. We really will be excited about the 10% who live outside of the city, sure, but we have to work so much harder and spend so much more time growing that audience. So we’re gonna focus on NYC.

Don’t be afraid to go after that low-hanging fruit because when you’re a small team, you have to make decisions that will help you get the biggest impact. From our interviews, we learned about those superfans who were spreading the word about the podcast and really influencing their neighbors. We’re going to capitalize on their passion and make them part of our strategy. That also helps expand the capacity of the team. And then the last piece there: neighborhood-specific content. We know that our audience loves to hear about what’s happening in their neighborhood, so we’re gonna give them more of that content. You can see how the things you learn in the research phase provide the foundation for your strategy.

We’re not done yet. Now that we’ve decided how to approach our goal, you need to get everything down on paper. The process of doing this is how you’re going to crystallize it into a real strategy and make the case to your boss, your board, your team, and anyone you need to convince that your strategy is the right one.

Alicia Ritchey: Alright, so let’s talk about how you build a successful marketing strategy. I think sometimes the tactics and strategy can be used interchangeably and convoluted. A good way to think about strategy versus tactics is strategy is your "what" and tactics are your "how," that is something to keep in mind while you’re writing it. There are many different ways to define strategy, especially a marketing strategy, but what we did was boil it down to the overall approach you take to solve an important and achievable problem.

It doesn’t feel achievable sometimes, right? It actually is like solving a mystery. Nancy commented in the chat about how your research is like gathering clues. Another analogy that came to mind: I feel like building a strategy is one part frustration and one part satisfaction, because there’s these puzzles they make, and they have nothing on them. There is no art. There’s no design. There is nothing to help you build it. You’re just given this jumble of cardboard cut out into shapes, and you hold it you look at, and you’re like, "I don’t even know where to begin, how am I going to do this?" What do you do first with puzzles, even if there’s no design? You build your outline first, right? Then it’s going to take time and effort to sort through all those puzzle pieces and put them all together. When you get that last piece in, it feels pretty good. Maybe you haven’t solved it, but you’re close enough, at least in that iteration.

So components of a good strategy, this is essentially the outline that we’re going to discuss. I’m going to ask Joi to kind of go through these quickly, simply because we’re going to go through these here in the next part of the conversation, but these are all the components of a good strategy, and our framework will contain these.

The first thing in your strategy is your executive summary and it is actually quite important. The reason why is it is sometimes the only thing that leadership will have time to read. Even if you craft the best strategy possible, you’re not going to be able to convince them to read it all. They don’t have the time to do so. You need to make sure that you know your strategy well enough to have a concise snapshot where anyone reading it gets the plan, understands completely what you’re doing and why you’re going there. When you’re writing your executive summary, I think the best way to approach this is the classic who, what, when, where, and how framework. What business goal is this strategy working towards? How will you accomplish this? Who is your audience? When will the campaign take place? Where will it run? And why should you take this approach? I think that’s a really easy way for you to start crafting that summary. Oddly enough, even though it’s the first thing in the strategy, it is the last part of your strategy you should complete. There are many reasons why. If you start off by going in with your assumptions, and you’re writing this strategy summary, you have already boxed yourself in that this is the idea. I’m going to take this. What you have to do is be flexible. Go through all those puzzle pieces, sit with the information, and think. What you may find is I went in with this assumption, but now that I’ve seen the data, now that I’ve had anecdotal conversations with members, customers, students, etc, I have a clear vision that the strategy should actually be this, which is why you should do it at the end. 

Joi Bass: Yeah, the good thing about executive summaries, too, is think of it as something that you would send your board, you don’t want to send the entire plan with all the details. They don’t need to know all that, right? You just want to let them know what’s going on. Big picture, high level so that they understand what you’re doing, how you’re spending your time.

Alicia Ritchey: So goals, definitely another big part of writing out your strategy. What you’re going to consider is: "What are the business problems you are trying to solve?" When you’re considering that, you definitely want to make sure that you are writing SMART goals and just a refresher on what a SMART goal is. That is a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You’re also going to want to think about KPIs and benchmarking that will help you track the effectiveness of your goal because you want to be able to see for yourself and your stakeholders that this tactic is succeeding.

So an example is, after we looked through our client’s data and talked through their business problem, we decided that by the end of the quarter, we’re going to add 100 new listeners by creating an influencer program of local superfans who will create amazing video content for Tik Tok and Facebook, and the KPI we will use to track the effectiveness of this is the conversion rate, which will be the calculation of the percentage of influencer-driven traffic that converts into podcast subscribers or listeners.

Joi Bass: Now that we decided on our audiences, you still need to push past your basic demographics, and segment your audience based on behavior. You want to think about their pain points and their motivations. For our client, we named our segments here and clearly defined them so that everyone internally knows who we’re talking about. We have our Gotham Girls, who are women, ages 25 to 35, who live in New York City and love true crime podcasts. Then we have our Silver Sleuths and these are our true crime fans of all genders who are over the age of 60, retired, and live in New York City. So again, this is using the research, deciding on which segments are the most important to you. I think one of the things that people like to do here is that like, you want to speak to everyone, you want to get as many donors or as many members or customers as you can, but you want to segment so that when you’re writing to them, when you’re doing advertisements or emails, that it feels like you’re speaking to just them - an audience of one.

Alicia Ritchey: All right, so you have done your SWOT analysis, and what that helped you do was figure out your areas of strength and differentiation. So now you can develop your value propositions. I think a really good way to think about a value prop is this is your benefit statement. What is it that your organization can do for your target audience to either improve their lives, solve a problem, enhance what they’re looking for, etc? In this case, you do want to keep it simple because the value propositions are more of an internal thing to help keep you on the right path when you are developing messaging.

For our client, we said your value proposition is the Only Murders in the Building podcast offers exclusive insider insights from a one-of-a-kind group of amateur sleuths all residing and cracking cases at the Arconia. Now that we have that, we can write some key messages. These clearly define the value props. They contain things like proof points and these are also something that - not even just key messages, value props, anything - you want to test and iterate. You can do that by crafting some key messages, and maybe surveying your members or doing focus groups. You want to figure out what messages are resonating. A difference between the value prop and a key message is that a key message is something you could literally copy and paste, drop it into social media copy, put it into email marketing, and the message is ready to go so it’s compelling. It’s not as simple. It’s a little more exciting, and you try to tip the scales a bit to get your audience to do whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do. 

Joi Bass: Yeah, and this is where our research can also come in, too, because if you do social listening, oftentimes you can mirror the language of your audience and use the exact phrases that they use so that they recognize themselves when they see your communication.

Alicia Ritchey: So one of the key messages we wrote our client is: "Calling all armchair detectives! We’re not just talking about true crime, we’re living it. Join us as we search for clues, suspects, and maybe even a little bit of justice at the Arconia."

Joi Bass: Alright, so now we have our target audiences, we have our messages confirmed, you need to figure out next, where are you going to distribute your information. What channels work the best? What format? Videos? Images? Or maybe copy only? Are there new channels we should explore? For our clients, the Gotham Gals are likely to be on TikTok, so they’re inspiring us to try out a brand new channel. The podcasters don’t actually have a ton of video content yet, so maybe they start recording their podcasts on video as well as audio to make video content. Repurposing what you’re already doing is a great way for small teams to expand their capacity. Then we see our Silver Sleuths here are already following us on Facebook, so we know we need to prioritize that channel, but we don’t need to do as much work to grow our followers there because they’re already there.

When you’re thinking about your budget and this is for me the hardest part because sometimes it can feel like you’re guesstimating. In a lot of ways you are, but you want to take a look at previous campaigns to help you understand how much you need and how much things will likely cost as far as advertising, you really want to prioritize your channels. If you know that TikTok is a new channel like it is for our podcasters, you might want to put more of your budget towards that because it’s gonna take a little bit more experimentation. You want to use industry benchmarks, especially if you don’t have any internally.

For this, our podcasters have never done any advertising before, so what we did here is take a look at industry benchmarking and that shows that the average cost per acquisition for a podcast listener is $50. Since our goal is to add 100 new listeners this quarter, we just did some simple math and decided that we needed a budget of at least $5,000. Now, you probably want to pad this. Give yourself a little extra space and time to make adjustments, but you know, at the least, you need $5,000.

Alicia Ritchey: Another step you don’t want to forget is to do a peer organization analysis, also known as competitor research. So the first thing you would do is you should identify organizations that you feel are doing the same thing in your space. Or if you feel like there really isn’t a true competitor, so to speak, at least lookalike organizations, maybe you aspire to be like them. There’s no cold and hard, hard and fast rule. You have an idea of who these people are. Once you figure out who they are, you need to start collecting data. This is where it’s gonna get tricky because a lot of organizational data might not just be readily available for you to pull off the internet. 

So we’re gonna go back to the SWOT analysis, do a SWOT analysis for each of those peer orgs, and then figure out what are the strengths and weaknesses. What are they missing? How can you differentiate yourself from them? How do they position themselves in the market? Another good thing to do is attend their webinars, sign up for their emails, check them out on social media, and see how they’re speaking to their audience. What are they offering? Is it something that you can offer? Is it something that you offer better? Another thing you could consider if you don’t have your own current benchmarks for KPIs, I personally think the best thing to do is to compete against yourself. You want to go against your own open rates, your own click-through rates, your own engagement rates, but sometimes maybe that information wasn’t captured. You could always look up industry benchmarks and use those, but you could also check out and see what the peer orgs are doing, how they’re performing, and perhaps craft some baseline benchmarks from there. For our clients, we have found that there are dozens of true crime podcasts, but none of them focus solely on New York City. That’s a huge differentiator for them. 

Joi Bass: So you want to document all the risks that you identify, particularly in your SWOT analysis, you want to include internal and external risks. You want to prepare in advance for any potentially negative situations. Risk is inherent in almost every decision you make, so you just have to be prepared. With our podcasters, they’re using those superfans as influencers. The risk there is that if an influencer does something that negatively reflects on their brand, they have to deal with this right? For risks, you want to make sure you’re prepared when things are calm so that you have a plan on how to react when they’re not calm. Then you look smart, because you’re already prepared for it, and you know what to do.

Alicia Ritchey: Okay, leadership buy-in. So important and we will talk about why this will make an impact on your strategy. You’ve done all your work, you have your strategy, you are so excited, and you’re ready to create the plan. Please don’t do that, please get buy-in before you do the plan for a litany of reasons that we’ll go over here shortly. Why buy-in matters. Support directly increases your success. By not getting the buy-in first, you are risking a lot, failure being the number one thing. I have an example of a misalignment of goals. We have a client where my assumption was membership is the number one driver. That’s their goal. Let’s work on creating campaigns and goals around this. Behind the scenes, their leadership was thinking maybe we pivot from membership and focus on certifications as a revenue stream instead. Great to know because whatever I would have come up with would not align whatsoever. Another issue is you put this great campaign out in the world, your ads are running, and your email campaigns are going, maybe you have contests going. But then someone found out this is going on. They’ve never heard of this. They want you to pause everything. That jeopardizes the success of the campaign that was pretty successful, but now you have to pull everything while they look at it. 

Another big thing that you can encounter is if you don’t get buy-in, the other departments might have barriers, especially if you are in a siloed organization. When I worked at one of the universities I was at, we had this really great idea for our online distance program. We wanted all the schools and colleges to buy in. So our leadership, our CIO was like “this is great, let’s do it.” So we went to our first school and college and said, “Hey, this is the plan, hooray.” They were not impressed. They felt like it went against some of their business goals, so we went back to our leader and said, “Hey, this is probably not the right approach. Can it trickle down from the Deans of the colleges, because it’s better coming from them first, than these randoms coming out of nowhere, saying we’re doing this?” So once they did that, everyone was on board. They saw the value. We found ways to compromise where maybe there were some conflicting goals, and it made the process so much smoother. Additionally, if you had spoken to your leadership, they could have pointed you in the direction of funding resources, things that would have made the campaign so much better, so you want to make sure that you have this conversation first.

Alright, so you’re ready to have your conversation. How do you make a compelling case? Answer the questions before they ask. I find that being prepared is the number one thing you can do in most situations. You should have the strategy, know the best strategy forwards and backwards. You have your data. So, pretend you’re having a conversation, what would you ask in the shoes of leadership and just cut them off at the pass? You’ve already answered it. Tie it back to the business goals. This is typically the number one thing that they are focused on: How is this moving the goals forward? And definitely focus more on the strategy versus tactics. They don’t need to know that you want to create a TikTok campaign, right? But they do want to know that you’re going to increase subscribers because you’re engaging with Gen Z and Millennial females.

Data, data, Joi and I can’t say it enough research, research, research. If someone does push back and you have the data to back it up, it’s really hard for them to say that you can’t do it or this isn’t right. You’ve come up with all the information possible to make it perfect. So another thing you need to focus on is expected ROI, also top of mind for leadership. What you should think about is when you’re asking for budget or support, emphasize the long-term benefits and the short-term wins. If we run this campaign tomorrow, these are the things that are going to happen right away that tie back to our business goals. And then a year from now, you’re going to see this. And last but not least, enthusiasm is contagious so you have to believe in your vision. If you’re selling something that you don’t believe in, leadership is going to feel it, and they’re going to be a little more hesitant to buy in on this. But if you come with all the information, excitement around the strategy, and all the reasonings behind it, it’ll be difficult to not be on board with that kind of enthusiasm.

So your stakeholders are on board, they’re ready to go, and everything is great. This is not a one-and-done conversation, you’re going to keep them clued in for, again, tons of reasons. One, this is an area that is funny because we all say we want accountability, but then when it’s there, it’s kind of nerve-wracking. But you do. You want to create a sense of accountability. You want stakeholders to know I have made these promises or these hypotheses, and we’re going to go forward with this plan, and it’s going to hopefully work, and it ought to work because of the data that we used. And because of the fact you had your stakeholders involved early, collaborative decision-making went down. So now that things are maybe having to be optimized or changed, you can bring them in, and they can help you if you do hit some of those hurdles, point you to resources, point you to solutions.

So keep those updates and feedback loops going, and in terms of sharing KPIs and benchmarking, super important to do. Your leadership may not want to see something every single week, so you should decide what is the best cadence. Maybe it’s monthly. Maybe it’s quarterly. It might depend on the length of your campaign, but this is another step you want to show because one accountability, right? But then you also want to show that, hey, my hypotheses are correct. And all of these KPIs are showing that this is effective. Conversely, now, the KPIs might be saying this hypothesis wasn’t so correct. That’s not a big deal. You know this, so you come and you say these numbers aren’t measuring great, we’ve been doing it for three months, we’re going to course correct by optimizing, maybe we’ll AB test the email subject lines, maybe something about those aren’t resonating with folks. There are ways you can do this, and I feel like success is a loaded word. A successful strategy doesn’t have to be, of course, you want to accomplish all these goals, but sometimes, especially if you don’t have prior learnings and you’ve never done it this way, you now have learnings. How was it not successful that you have new data based on your first campaign built on a strategic framework, and now you know how to improve it for next time?

Joi Bass: So strategy answers kind of broadly, how are we going to reach our goals? Tactics are the specific actions that you take to make your strategy successful. So for our clients of the podcast, it might be something like put ads in neighborhood newsletters or host neighborhood watch parties. These are the steps that support the overarching strategy. So when you’re making your campaign plan, I know it’s a lot we went over today, but we have a template for y’all to download. So, instead of starting from scratch, it gives you a clear structure to follow. I know Mindy has probably already put the link in the chat. I highly encourage you to download it and customize it to your needs. We created a strategy. So just to sum it all up for today: The thinking is the work. Don’t forget that. A good strategy includes research, strategic alignment, KPIs, and an omnichannel approach. You want to get buy-in from your leadership first. And then your tactics are the last thing on your list. Don’t jump straight to tactics. Take the time to do the research and the strategy first.

Before we head to questions, I want to encourage you all to take our Mighty GPS assessment. It’s like a little health check for your marketing efforts. Once you finish the assessment, you get a personalized report that shows your scores in each of the six areas. Plus, it’ll give you some friendly advice on what you might want to spruce up in your market. It’s also a great way to get buy-in when you can point to data and say "We need to invest more, in let’s say branding, because that’s like one of the categories in the GPS." So check that out when we’re done here. But now it’s time to shift to questions. And I think Mindy mentioned before that with this link you’ll be able to get the slides and the templates.

Mindy Avitia: Yes, thank you Joi. You can use the QR code and that will link to a lot of the templates that I shared in the chat. But yeah, I’d love to get questions going. So we had a couple come in. We had one ask "What is the best way to calculate ROI? Could you use the example from this presentation?"

Joi Bass: Yeah, so I mean, a very simple way is to just look at your budget, how much you’ve invested, and then look at how much revenue you brought in to calculate the ROI. A very simple formula. Sometimes, when it comes to running a new advertising campaign, you want to look at the cost per acquisition, or the cost per lead if you’re a little bit higher on the funnel. So it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve, but those like really typical marketing formulas tend to work for talking about ROI with your uppers. 

Mindy Avitia: Yes, thank you Joi. Another question. This is kind of long, so bear with me. "I think the biggest thing we struggle with on this stuff is how many in-depth strategies like this can a team of two reasonably juggle at any given time. From audience research and data and analysis to strategy development to metrics and reporting, it’s a lot if done well. We are a team of two and an org with 40+ staff who are managing many different projects, all of which have various comms/marketing needs. It would be really hard to spend this much time on a full strategy for every single one of those projects, but we’re required to do some sort of comms for them all. Do we build out strategies for a couple of main priorities and just kind of do our best with the rest?"

Alicia Ritchey: I would say that I’ve been in the position where I was a marketing team of one and a communications person of one having to build emails for departments, while I’m trying to also build strategies. And what I have found is: Yes, something that we still balance at Mighty Citizen today is you have an allotted amount of hours to work on your strategy. So I would say, when you see the slide deck, go back to the components of a good strategy section, bare minimum work on those, as long as you have clearly defined goals that you have some research to do to have data-driven decisions, I do think there’s a way for you to do it. And some of it goes back to that accountability. I would say, you won’t be able to spend as much time on the strategy, it is true, but you can at least build a strategy out. And if this is a cyclical thing, where you know that you could do a similar strategy next year, say it’s like a retention strategy, that doesn’t change. Maybe some elements of the campaign will change, but you at least have something to work from, and then next year, you can make the 2.0 version of that with some of the learnings from the more bare-bones campaign strategy. And just continuing to revisit it. I know that what I did was, I really did not have time to babysit the strategy and check everything, but I promised stakeholders they would be getting benchmarking spreadsheets once a month. And so what I would do is every other week I would check on the campaign and really focus an hour because I could at least find an hour a week to dedicate to optimizing the campaign or building my strategy. So it’s gonna be a tough slog at first for sure when you’re a small team, but it’s important work. And once you have it built, you can always improve it, you can always extend it. And at least again, you have a North Star guiding you while you were working on the campaign throughout the year.

Joi Bass: Yeah, I’d also add, go back to your organization’s overarching strategic goals. When you take a look at everything that you’re doing, and you compare it to your organization’s goals, that will help you prioritize and figure out what to cut. Because when you’re a small team, it’s really important to make the hard decisions about how to spend your time and effort. And so the things that you should be spending the majority of your time on are the things that move the needle for the entire organization that line up with your strategic plan. So, always lean on that. That will also help you when you’re kind of having to push back on things or when you have to have conversations with your managers about why you’re prioritizing things the way you are. It’s because this is what our organization has that is important and so these are the strategies and tactics that are going to get us closer to winning in those areas. Everything else is extra. You just have to kind of prioritize that way and make things more simple for sale by maybe templatizing things for things that are less relevant to your organizational goals so that you can really focus the strongest brainpower on the things that are going to make the most impact.

Mindy Avitia: Yeah, thank you, Alicia and Joi. I have a few questions that came in around the links that I shared in the chat. We will be sending a follow-up email with some more additional links, but if you use this QR code and go to that link there, some of the tools and templates that I posted in the chat are also at that link. We do have time and one more question. "Where do you find or how do you estimate benchmarking?"

Joi Bass: It really depends on the industry. If you’re a nonprofit, I know the M&R benchmarks are ones that people wait for every year. There’s tools like SimilarWeb that pull them benchmarking ins from across the web. HubSpot puts out industry benchmarks, probably your email tool has benchmarks as well. So like Constant Contact or MailChimp, they all kind of put out benchmarks on different industries. You might have to pull it together from different sources. We have a doc that we call Benchmark Central, which is basically like a bunch of different places to get benchmarks, and we kind of have to check them and make sure they’re up to date and pull them in. So it’s not a one-stop shop. It is about having to figure out what’s most relevant. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of two categories, let’s say you’re a healthcare nonprofit, you might want to pull in stuff from healthcare and nonprofits and average it to help you figure out your benchmarks.

So, it’s not an exact science. It just gives you a starting place to understand you know how you’re comparing, but you don’t have to take it literally as if you don’t hit those benchmarks, but you completely failed. It’s just a matter of like, okay, this is what’s average in my industry, you want to be tracking as closely as possible or even above.

Mindy Avitia: Great, okay, I know I said I, that was the last one, but we do have one more that I’d like to get to. And this is "If you do all this and it still fails, what are your recommendations for how to handle this with leadership?" That’s a good one.

Alicia Ritchey: I touched on this lightly. You should always have a post-mortem, once your campaign has wrapped, and figure out, you know, what went wrong, what went right, and do an analysis of if hindsight was 20/20, we would have done this. So again, I feel like failing a campaign doesn’t necessarily mean you failed. I think those learnings are very important. So you should go to your leadership, take accountability; “hey, the hypotheses weren’t correct, but here is what we learned.” And for next time, this is what we should do. I would say come up with a roadmap of how you would do things differently and look at your data, right? Maybe you were putting money into channels that people weren’t at, maybe they were here on Meta, and you should have put money there, but you were spending all this time on LinkedIn. It’s an expensive lesson, right? But it’s real data, and it can help you make real decisions. I would say just accountability and a path forward is the best approach if it fails. 

Joi Bass: Yeah, I think being clear about what Alicia said, what you would do differently, and having a plan for the next time is great. I mean, all this kind of goes back into the cycle of research, right? So now, you know, things that you didn’t know, a few months ago when that campaign started. And then marketing is, the research is not a guarantee, right? The research is like our best chance of getting it right. We want to bring in as much information as we can to help with that, but it doesn’t guarantee that it will be right and it’s just it actually was just part of it. I think it should be hopefully part of your culture like it is at Mighty Citizen to be able to experiment and learn from your mistakes or failures and kind of turn those learnings into positive for the next time.

Mindy Avitia: Great, well, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Joi and Alicia. Like I said, we will send a follow-up tomorrow with all the tools and templates as well as the recording and the slides. So again, thank you, everyone.