Mission Possible: Mapping Your Path to More Effective Marketing

Your organization’s marketing ecosystem lives on a maturity spectrum—the more mature, the more impactful; the less mature, the less effective. Where your marketing stands today tells a story of where you’ll end up tomorrow. 

Understanding where you’re in this maturity spectrum and gaining critical insights, trends, and correlations from other mission-driven organizations will help you navigate the road ahead, plan for more effective marketing strategies, and propel your organization forward.

In this data-driven presentation, we break down how to measure your marketing maturity across six key areas of marketing. We walk through results from the 2023 Marketing Benchmarks for Mission-Driven Organizations report, demonstrating how to leverage the data and insights to understand better how you stack up to your peers and develop more impactful strategies that lead to higher marketing effectiveness.

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marketing, organization, audiences, mission driven organizations, report, questions, gps, data, maturity, mighty, category, team, content, marketing automation platform, jarrett, effectiveness, resources, research, set, measuring

SPEAKERS
Brianna Martin (Director of Brand Marketing), Jarrett Way (Senior Marketing Manager)

Brianna Martin  Hi, everyone! Good afternoon. Welcome, welcome. 

Jarrett Way  Hello, everyone.

Brianna Martin  We’re excited to have you here, just a heads up that we will be getting started in the next couple of minutes. We’re just going to let some people kind of flow in. And while we are waiting, we have a question on the slide here for you. If you can pop in the chat, we are curious to know what area of the six that you see listed here that you struggle with the most. These are the six main categories that we define as the full marketing ecosystem. We’re going to be talking about them a lot today. And we’re just curious. You know what everyone thinks? Someone said team dynamics, research and analytics. Appreciate that. UX design, research and analytics, yep. We’re going to be talking a lot about today. Branding and strategy, right, a lot more branding and strategy than I would have thought. Big bulk of that. Interesting. Awesome. 

Jarrett Way  Yeah. It’s interesting.

Brianna Martin  So if anyone’s wondering if I color coordinated for this presentation? I definitely did.

Jarrett Way  I was thinking this morning, Bri. I was like, "Do I own any Mighty Citizen teal?"

Brianna Martin  Right? Teal happens to be my favorite color too, so it wasn’t a hard sell for myself to get into teal. All right. Let’s go ahead and get started. Thanks for answering that for us, y’all. All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Brianna Martin. I’m the Director of Brand Marketing here at Mighty Citizen. We’re here today for Mission Possible: Mapping Your Journey to More Effective Marketing. And I’m joined by Jarrett Way, he is our Senior Marketing Manager. Thank you, Jarrett, for being my partner in crime. 

Jarrett Way  Of course.

Brianna Martin  I do have, I do have some boring housekeeping items to go over. Apologies in advance if you know all these, but if you have any questions during the webinar, you can pop them in the q&a. Definitely post questions in the q&a section as opposed to the chat. Because we there’s usually a lot of interaction in the chat. And Mindy, who you just just heard, she helped fix the chat. She’ll be monitoring and she can grab them if she sees them. But sometimes they’re hard to catch because we we have a lot of activity in our chat. We also have closed captioning available. There’s a live transcript option at the bottom of the screen that you can enable if you need to. And then: this webinar, it’s very data heavy. We have lots of stuff to cover today. We are hoping we will have time for questions at the end. But based on some of our dry runs that we’ve done, we might only have a few minutes. With that being said, we’re actually going to do a follow up article. And y’all may have seen - we do these sometimes - called burning questions. It’s going to answer all of your burning questions. So please, please continue to ask questions and just know we’ll get to them if we can, and then anything else that we weren’t able to answer will be in that article and we’ll send it to all the attendees in a couple of weeks. And then lastly, as always, presentation slides, a link to this recording, and then a few other tools will be emailed to you tomorrow - you don’t need to take notes. And then because we are going over a lot of stuff, we also have a lot of recommendations and sharing resources throughout the presentation too.  All right, thank you for that. Again, Brianna Martin, I’m the Director of Brand Marketing and Mighty Citizen. I direct all of the internal marketing efforts here, including content like this webinar. I’ve been working in marketing for nearly 15 years, and about 10 of that previously was in the association space. My strength here: I try to think of something different to put after I do YouTube videos, but had kind of always comes back to this because I can’t think of anything else that I love more in marketing than marketing strategy. I love brainstorming and coming up with really thoughtful strategic marketing plans, with my team, to help engage our audiences and help y’all reach your goals. It’s really a passion of mine. And then you can see, my weakness is my sassy little five year old. Her name is Mia, and she started kindergarten last week. I was very proud of her - no tears, but definitely tears for Mama. And if you are a parents, you know just how fast it goes. Alright, Jarrett?

Jarrett Way  Thank you, Bri. And hello, everyone! Thank you for joining us. My name is Jarrett Way, the Senior Marketing Manager here at mighty citizen. I have about eight years or so of experience and the nonprofit mission driven social impact world. I love my job here at Mighty Citizen. I’ve been here for over four years now. Still really enjoying it. A strength of mine is storytelling. I think storytelling is the foundation of all good marketing, especially good content marketing. A weakness of mine, here is my little three and a half year old pup Juniper who is still just a baby. She’s never done anything wrong to anybody, and never will. And I love her a whole lot. She is my weakness, for sure. Again, we are Mighty Citizen. Mighty Citizen has been supporting mission driven organization just like yours for nearly 25 years. We love what we do. We get to serve associations, nonprofits, educational institutions, and government agencies with our full suite of services. Branding, marketing, digital communications, really everything that we do, and we love empowering the mission driven organizations, we are lucky enough to call our clients. Every day we’re working to really increase the revenue and expand their reach, and just help them better their communities as well. Let’s talk about today’s agenda. Before we’re done today, we hope that you will be able to do a few things. First of all is to define what marketing maturity is and how it relates to marketing effectiveness. We’re going to review some data from the 2023 Marketing Benchmarks for Mission Driven Organizations. This is a report that we just put out based on our marketing maturity assessment called The Mighty GPS. You’ll see some correlations and insights in there. And then lastly, we’re going to provide some recommendations to help you improve your marketing effectiveness or your marketing maturity. So let’s jump right into it. First of all, we got to define some terms: let’s talk about marketing maturity. Marketing maturity is marketing effectiveness. We consider these two terms to really be interchangeable. A quick definition for marketing maturity is it’s the degree to which an organization is achieving its goals via the entire suite of marketing channels, strategies, and technologies at its disposal. At its essence, marketing maturity is a journey to your organization’s best self; you cannot think about marketing maturity without really thinking about all the components of all the good marketing efforts. It really is a summation or culmination of all the little things that you’re doing. We’re going to talk about how we see that broken down in terms of these key operational traits for marketing. Before we go any further, Bree and I just have a quick question for you all. I just want to get a temperature of the room. I want to see if you know how effective the marketing is overall. Some of the some of you who may have already taken The Mighty GPS, you may have a good pulse on it. Maybe your answer is yes, maybe it’s no, or maybe a little bit, or maybe you’re just afraid to say, which is fine. I’ll give you a few seconds here.

Brianna Martin  Yeah, I was gonna say most are C’s - a lot of C’s. I’m trying to see if I see any A’s in there. A little, a few. Very few. Interesting, all right.

Jarrett Way  Okay. Well, regardless of what you said, especially if you said you have mentioned it very little or you don’t know, you’re not sure you’re afraid to say you’re in the right spot, we’ll be the first people to tell you, Bri and I, that marketing maturity is just simply hard to measure. It’s one of the really the most elusive aspects of marketing, but it is so so so worth measuring, and for a few reasons. Measuring your marketing maturity will help you do a few things. First of all, to help you capitalize on what’s working. When you measure your marketing maturity, you know what’s working, and maybe more importantly, you know what’s not working. That way you can know what to pour your resources into. In that same vein, it really helps you uncover some of that low hanging fruit. What are some of the easy wins, quick opportunities, that you have to really bolster your marketing effectiveness or your marketing maturity at the onset. It will save you some time and money, also, in that same vein, when you know what it’s working, you know exactly where to put your resources into. You’re not spinning your wheels, doing things that aren’t beneficial for your overall marketing effectiveness. It’ll show you how to augment your team. They’ll show you really what you can aspire to in terms of filling out your resources for who you have on your team, your staff, doing this work day in and day out, you’ll see what exactly you’re missing so you can know what holes to fill. It’ll help you understand your return on investment as well. Pretty self explanatory knowing exactly what’s working, what it’s bringing into the door, what it’s bringing back to your organization, hopefully make the case for a lot more in the future.  And then lastly, they’ll help you ask for investments where and when needed. Like I really just mentioned, when you have the data, when you have the numbers, it is easy to use that as armor going in and making a big ask for more resources - whatever that might look like for you. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Bri.

Brianna Martin  All right. We know that marketing maturity is really important. We know that it’s definitely worth measuring and Mighty Citizen. We’ve been looking at this for a few years. And we discover a problem related to measuring marketing effectiveness. If you’ve been on our webinars before, you know our favorite GIF’s to use our Shitt’s Creek - they’re never ending. There, you can always find one that kind of perfectly conveys how we feel. You can see David here is just very worried about what this problem is that we uncovered. And that is this: there wasn’t a single tool that we could find that existed to measure the effectiveness, or the marketing maturity, of an organization’s entire internal marketing engine. And I say the entire marketing engine, because there are definitely tools that will do part. To measure your digital, you know, digital effectiveness, it’ll measure your team dynamics, but there’s not something that existed holistically. You guessed it, yes, we’ve alluded to this, but we created The Mighty GPS, which is a marketing maturity assessment that we launched two years ago. A little information about this - the benchmarks report that we’re going to go over today are from responses from this report, or from this assessment. It’s around 40 questions, it takes about 10 minutes to take. It measures your organization in the six categories. Those are the six categories that we asked the first question when you first came on, and then it’ll put you in a score. And then you’ll be placed in different marketing maturity stages. The stages are the Crawling, Walking, Running and Soaring. After you take the assessment, you receive a report, you receive your overall marketing maturity score. And then you also get a marketing maturity by category. And then there’s custom recommendations based on where you score for each of those. There was another shocking revelation that’s kind of connected to there being no tool to measure the effectiveness of a marketing ecosystem. And that is that there are also no marketing benchmarks. None that covered everything in the mission driven space. There are definitely B2B benchmarks that you can find out there that will cover a lot of this, but there’s nothing specifically for mission driven organizations. And as we know, those are very unique and different from just B2B or B2C. Tthat’s why we also created the Marketing Benchmarks for Mission Driven Orgnizations Report and that is the bulk of what we’re going to talk about today. You can see Alexis is very excited here for us. A little bit about this before we get into kind of more fun highlights is the inaugural report that we released. It’s based off of 450 respondents who took the GPS from February of last year to January of this year. The respondents came from all of our audiences that we serve in the mission focus space associations, educational institutions, government agencies, and nonprofits. We launched it near that the end of May. And Mindy will share that link. And then it’s also an a bunch of other stuff that will spend. A quick respondent breakdown: at the time when the report was released, we have a bit more now, the nonprofit space, we had about 300, respondents; association was at 90; education was 50. And then government was 14. Just a quick note - we do in the report have some breakout stats for nonprofits, associations and education, we will not have time today to go over that. Definitely, if you want to see in your in those industries, I would download the report so you can see that. And then government, we didn’t feel that 14 was really enough to reach that threshold for us to have this breakout stat. If you do work for government, and you’re on this call, we’d love for you to take the GPS, because we would love to be able to have some more of those standout stats to have dedicated data for that. All right, Jarrett I’m gonna hand it over to you.

Jarrett Way  Thank you, Bri. Let’s talk about some highlights and insights. We can jump right into it. Just maybe a refresher for some of you. But to give you some context on the scoring, just before we start talking about the numbers. I mean, you can see we have our four stages of marketing maturity here: Crawling, Walking, Running and Soaring. And then just the ranges that we have for each of those. You can see of course, Crawling be on the lower end, Soaring being on the higher end. Just before we get into it all, just a quick refresher. The report itself covers overall scores for all mission driven organization. And then it breaks them down by the six key categories that we were talking about as well. Let’s take a look. For all mission driven organizations, this is our first look here, it’s the big picture, our overall averages, and you can see that we’re averaging over on 56.2 out of 100. We’re in that Walking stage and marketing maturity. Ee’re saying that we think that in general, mission driven organizations - they’re doing, they’re doing just okay, and that’s okay. But there’s there’s clearly room for some improvement. You can see that overall score for mission driven organizations. And then you can break it down a little bit here are the six key categories. You can see a few things: You’ll see that team dynamics was our highest scoring category at 68.2. That’s in that Running stage and marketing maturity. Close behind that you can see branding and strategy is at 63.7 out of 100. And then after that you see technology, marketing, and SEO, and then UX design and content - all three of those are in the Walking stage. This leads you to the very bottom, the big red eyesore of research and analytics across the board, the lowest scoring category of The Mighty GPS across the board for all mission driven organizations with that averaging 35.2 out of 100. And we will certainly talk about all of these here in just a minute, especially research and analytics. Today we’re going to be walking through them digging a little bit deeper, and talking about some of our insights from the report. Another quick poll: I want to know, do you use research based techniques to understand your target audiences? A for yes, B for sometimes, C we have before, but not a long time, and D for flat out nope.

Brianna Martin  All right. Lots of Ds, a lot of Ds, which is okay. Some B’s, some A’s, which is good. A lot of B, I would say B is probably the most.

Jarrett Way  Bri do you want to jump into some research and analytics?

Brianna Martin  All right. Yeah, not surprising. Again, research analytics was the weakest category across all six measures measured and by a pretty big margin. For context, the next lowest score was UX designing content, which was 54.1. That was a mere 20 point difference from where y’all scored in research and analytics. What does this category mean? Our main focus today is highlighting data largely on the research side. Things like audience surveys, interviews, focus groups, personas - there is other stats in the report for using data and analytics in website usability as well. You can read that in the full report. Some standout specific data we wanted to share to see how you responded to questions in this category show that a little over half of the respondents said that their organizations only sometimes conducted audience surveys to inform marketing decisions that aligns pretty well with the poll that we just did. Nearly two and three are saying that you they never conduct audience interviews or focus groups for marketing decisions. That was definitely a little shocking or higher than I thought it would be. And then 40% of respondents say their organizations don’t use research based personas when making marketing decisions.  As a part of the report, when we dove into the data and we analyzed, we found some really interesting correlations. So, related to research and analytics, these two standouts were it showed that those who did use research based personas or customer journeys when they were making the marketing decisions, on average, were seeing a 17 point difference in their overall marketing effectiveness than those who didn’t. And then similarly, those who were conducting audience surveys or having interviews, focus groups to inform decisions, we’re seeing a 14 point difference. If you remember that average marketing maturity score overall was around 56.2. In that Walking stage, you know, if you’re one of those folks, that is only sometimes conducting the interviews, or surveys, not doing interviews or focus groups, you can see here with the data, implementing those critical steps can really improve your marketing effectiveness overall. Okay, so this might be the longest recommendation portion, but we felt it was important, since this is obviously an area that a lot of mission driven folks struggle in. Before we get into them, though, I do want to say that we get it, we know that research, user research can be daunting, it can be time consuming, it can seem like it can be expensive - it can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be. And overall, we just know it’s very hard in your day to day to stop and focus on research, it’s one of those things that can easily get missed or not be done, you know, thoroughly. The thing with it is though, you know, it makes all of your marketing and design decisions, your overall larger organizational direction be far clearer and more successful. And those correlations, the data gives us proof - we see this all the time in our you know, work at Mighty Citizen, this is the part of marketing, the number one stop to get the rest of your marketing right to truly understand your audiences. A lot of these recommendations are going to be ones that are not that expensive. The first is to collect information with the data and analytics you already have. Most of you on the call, or you know, you have a donor database, you have an AMS, you have a student portal, you have a CRM, and you are probably using it for some information about your audiences. But you’re probably not using it, optimizing it, the way you can to dig in, you know, dig in and get as much as you can. If you’re able to, especially as we’re getting into planning season, before the New Year, seeing if you can really dig in and find some more information to kind of help you segment and personalize for your audience. The next is thinking about how you can collect information in the spaces you already have. The examples here are conferences or online communities. There’s probably other examples, if you think about this question. We do this at conferences all the time for our clients. It is where your audiences are the most active and engaged. It’s a perfect time to go ahead and try to get some information from them. We will do focus groups at conferences and set that up. Also, just asking quick, quick questions to attendees. You know, if you have a booth doing online communities, I know a lot of associations will have online communities. You know, do you have an intern or process maybe you can set up quarterly to call that information. Those communities are very much a place where there’s, you know, peer to peer talking and a lot of talking about pain points and struggles. Maybe analyzing that data quarterly and seeing what behaviors and interests, that psychographic information, you could use to find out what your audiences are having issues with.  There are some quick research methods that you could consider. The two examples here are phone polls and a five second test. Phone polls are easy. You know, if you have you know, I would say 10 to 20 audience members that are very engaged with your organization, pick up the phone, ask them a few questions, jot it down. I’ll make a quick note for these two bullets. Word clouds are really great to use. You can do them in online surveys too. You can have some themes pop up to help you. The five second test this is really easy - a conference or somewhere live is good. To do this, you can just simply show them a piece of marketing to a user for five seconds. Typically, it’s the website, but it could be something else, it could be a piece of marketing collateral, and ask them three questions: What do you remember? How would you describe the organization based on what you saw? And then are you curious to learn more?  These last two take a little more time, going wide, survey your audiences online, and then going deep, with stakeholder interviews. Online surveys, easy, free. A lot of you’re probably doing some something to this capacity. The key here is doing it consistently on a regular basis. And make sure you’re reaching the people that you need to reach with the questions you’re asking. For online surveys, because they’re so easy to create, they also can be dangerous, meaning, it’s very easy to write bad questions and not know you’re writing bad questions, promoting it ineffectively interpreting good data badly. There’s all sorts of things. It’s far more complicated, I think, then people realize. We have a webinar just dedicated to this and best practices on creating questions and analyzing data that Mindy will share in the chat, too. If you’re thinking about doing a survey, or you want to kind of revamp your process, I highly recommend that you watch that. And then lastly, the stakeholder interviews. This does take a little more time in coordinating. But it’s a great way to dig deeper, do some follow up questions, maybe after you’ve sent an online survey based off of how someone answered so you can get some more information. All right, that was a lot. Jarrett, I’ll let you take over.

Jarrett Way  Yeah, it feels it feels like the worst is over. Now, I hope no one is overwhelmed. But research and analytics, we have it behind us, you know, it’s lowest scoring category. We may have mentioned, we’re gonna go lowest to highest scoring, here, so the next one is going to be UX design and content. Like I said, this is the next highest scoring like 54.1 out of 100. You can see again, it’s in that Walking stage as well. The questions in our survey, The Mighty GPS, asked a lot about your website accessibility, about being a thought leader, if your user experiences is priority, if you have a style guide, or if you follow an editorial calendar, if you have a content governance plan - things like that. Some of the highlights that you can see here from our report is that that 37% of organizations say that they never hire experienced writers for the organization. And as the guy who writes around here, I take a little bit of offense to that, that should always be investing in your writers. And we’ll talk about that in a second as well. You can also see that nearly 7 out of 10 organizations say that they never follow a content governance plan. And lastly, nearly half say that only sometimes they’re maintaining an editorial calendar, so not all of the time - only sometimes - utilizing an editorial calendar. Let’s talk about some of the key correlations here for UX design and content. In this category, we can see that those who have a strong structure and strategy for their content overall see 19 points higher on the overall marketing maturity scores from our report than those who don’t. That structure in that strategy that I’m talking about here refers to whatever I was talking about on that last slide. Things like maintaining an editorial calendar, following a content governance plan, following specific rules for grammar usage, and a copy or content style guide. Those types of things. A19 point difference is huge. Some of our recommendation is for UX design and content are a lot less intense research, analytics, but are still important. Like I said, when all things are created equal hire the better writer. We have to invest in good writers in our organizations. And this is something we’re always saying at Mighty Citizen: if you have two candidates for the same role, and they are both virtually equal - the exact same - except one of them is a stronger writer, even marginally, always hire the better writer because it will always pay in dividends tenfold, for your organization. I cannot make that point enough. When all things are created equal, hire the better writer.  We also want to adhere to the almighty editorial calendar. Hold your weekly meetings, preview status updates and changes with your team. Like I said, I’m the Senior Marketing Manager here at Mighty Citizen. Where Mindy oversees a lot of our events, I’m overseeing a lot of our public facing copy content, whatever it may be, and I utilize our editorial content calendar. Our template is the exact same one that we use the one that we provide for all of you,  and every single week in our weekly marketing meeting, we come around and I lead the first part of that meeting going through our editorial content calendar. All the components of what we’re working on in terms of what’s getting published, what’s coming down the line, what we’ve already ideated on certain content strategies for certain quarters, whatever it may be, we’re staying on the beaten path with our editorial content calendars. Adhering to the almighty editorial calendar makes a huge difference.  Also develop a copy style guide that the entire organization can follow. We have a great resource for developing your own copy style guide. Your style guide includes things that are the rules for your brand’s voice, tone, consistency,  punctuation - whatever it may be - really anything that dictates how your organization talks and the style in which you do it should go into that copy style guide. And you should also include some real examples in there as well, just so your staff where this this document is accessible to, they can all see so your entire team knows exactly what you’re talking about when you say something.  And then lastly, a larger organization should consider creating and following a content governance plan. Like I said, content governance is a documented set of protocols or rules around when you’re ideating, creating publishing, and then ultimately maintaining all this content that you’re putting out throughout the year. A full content governance plan does not make sense for every single organization, especially for some smaller organizations. But for larger organizations, it almost always makes sense to have a full fledged content governance plan for your organization. Keep that in mind. And we have some great resources as well. We have a guide to content governance, which I believe houses all of our language, all of our tools, resources on content governance, as well. Also, keep in mind that copy or copy style guide is just one small component of content governance, but content governance is really this larger ecosystem around all these ways in which you’re publishing and maintaining your content. Bri?

Brianna Martin  Up next, we have the marketing and SEO category. This was pretty close to how organizations scored overall: 55.1 out of 100 in the Walking stage. Defining this category: this category asked questions about how you develop marketing campaigns, reaching your audiences through digital channels, setting measurable goals, documentation for strategies, keyword research, that kind of stuff. Some standout stats here: this first one might have been the most shocking thing to me of the entire report. And that’s that nearly 30% of respondents said that they never set specific, measurable goals. The way that the GPS is set up, it is asked, you know, do you never, do you sometimes, do you always, and 30% of those 450 said that they never set measurable goals, which is pretty shocking. Same thing with keyword research - half reported never conducting keyword research. And then 60% said that you only sometimes create content aimed at specific audiences. That segmentation personalization piece. For this correlation, this was by far the largest gap that we saw, organizations that reported setting specific measurable goals for their marketing efforts, on average, saw a 30 point difference in their marketing maturity score. And this is huge, ya’ll, this puts on an organization for example, at the in the middle of the Walking stage, the ability to move from Walking to Soaring in their marketing effectiveness, just by implementing something that, at least in our opinion, should be done for every marketing effort that you implement. Something else that I just want to quickly note, I thought it was important for like the overall maturity score and each of these questions. As you can see here, organizations were Soaring when it came to using digital media to reach their target audiences. This isn’t surprising, everyone on this call, if you’re in marketing, you’re using a digital channel, right? Where it gets interesting is that low score from setting goals. You’re using the digital media to reach target audiences, but you’re not measuring its effectiveness. How you really know where you’re at in the digital space is what’s most effective. This step is really crucial and being able to, and we will talk about how it’s worth measuring, being able to focus on what’s working, stop what’s not, saving time and resources, stuff like that. For the recommendations here: creating an annual written communications plan. This recommendation is in multiple categories. Very important. This is just a foundational step; you need an annual written strategy that ladders up to your organizational goals. It’s kind of the baseline to use as you set out for all your marketing efforts for the year. Also having that marketing strategy and plan for every campaign that you wanna run and making sure that it has specific, measurable goals. Establishing those just really gives your organization an unbiased data to track effectiveness. And it’s also great for you to recognize when a path is leading nowhere. Do you need to just stop that altogether? Do you need to iterate, update, find a new avenue? If you’re not measuring or tracking, you’re never gonna know that. And then also, this part is huge when it comes to showing progress to leadership and getting that buy in from them for marketing, the value of marketing, and these things should help you with more budget and resources.  And then the last two are auditing your website and then prioritizing the optimization of those keywords. I would say at a bare minimum, doing that at least once a year. There are free tools that you can use for keyword research. There’s Google Keyword Planner, there is Ahrefs, they have a keyword generator to find keyword ideas. And then there’s Google Search Console. And they will help you identify declining words, keywords. You can also just google this, there’s tons of other tools out there, too. Those are just a few. And then lastly, this is in a similar vein to using digital media but not measuring effectiveness. Social is obviously a digital channel, and you want to really make sure you’re only dedicating time and budget to those areas that your audiences care about. You might be on every digital channel. And if you’re tracking and measuring engagement, you realize there might be a few that you don’t need to spend time on. All right, Jarrett?

Jarrett Way  All right. Thank you, Bri. And let’s talk about technology - we’re getting to the end. This is the next highest scoring category, you can see 37.4 out of 100 still in that Walking stage, but just under that Running stage at 60. We’re getting close to it, would you like to see. In our assessment, that technology category includes a lot of questions about, of course, your technology. How you organization is following data privacy and security practices, how you’re optimizing and trusting your data for your martec platforms, which includes new CRMs, your CMS is your marketing automation platforms, in some cases, and of course, Google Analytics and other tools as well. Organizations are doing really well, overall on this front in terms of following data privacy and security rules, and using technology just in general. But when it comes to things like integrations and optimizations, that’s where we start to see organizations struggle a bit. You can see some of our data here from our report, nearly two in three organizations say that they don’t use a marketing automation platform to its fullest potential. And 41% say that their martec systems aren’t seamlessly integrated, as well. Let’s talk about some of the implications of that with our correlations. We saw at 19 point difference in overall marketing maturity scores by those who reported that they did use their marketing automation platforms to their fullest potential, and a 14 point difference in those who said that the martec systems were seamlessly integrated. That really speaks a lot to the power of investing, and your technology. Recommendations for technology: assign one or two members of your team to become masters of your marketing automation platforms. And you can see what training or certificates are available, too. Have them present new opportunities to optimize the platform for your marketing efforts. We were lucky enough to just hire someone, our  Marketing Operations Manager, Adam - he’s participating as an attendee right now, shout out to Adam. But we have someone now dedicated to HubSpot. And that is a beautiful thing for us. And we know not everyone has the resources to do that, but you should hire one or two people to be kind of the end all be all when it comes to HubSpot within your organization. Because having that centralized is really, really nice. Anyway, evaluate your tech stack, and then identify areas for maximizing your platforms through integration. Pretty self explanatory there. You also want to audit your CRM by annually to ensure data integrity.If your marketing automation platform and your CRM or maybe one in the same, in some cases, an audit both of those things. You also have that master of your marketing automation platform, ideally, your marketing operations person, and they should be the person that’s really responsible for leading the entire effort as well. We always say that your marketing efforts are only as good as the data that you give it, and dirty data is bad data. It’s a really tedious process, but it is always, always, always worth it for your organization.

Brianna Martin  Thanks, Jarrett. All right. We are at branding and strategy. We were in the Walking, and now we’re Running, which is exciting. It’s a slow run at 63.7. But you know, definitely, you know, Mighty Citizen, you know, as a branding agency, we were excited to see this. This category focuses on asking questions about your brand guidelines, your logo and tag recognition, following documented communication strategies using messaging platforms to guide content. The percentage breakdown here you can see give or take around 30%, a few percentage points. They’re reporting that they aren’t using messaging platforms at all, and also not following documented communication strategies to written communication plans. For those correlations, this probably isn’t surprising. But organizations that reported they do use a messaging platform to guide their content and they follow a written communications plan are seeing, on average, 19 point difference higher in their marketing maturity score. Alright, so if you are one of those folks that’s doing really well in this category, you might be doing a lot of these things that we’re going to recommend about still, there’s always ways to fine tune, update, and I’ll mention some of those in each. If you don’t already have one, definitely invest in creating a messaging platform. If you’re not familiar, it’s just this internal facing document that an organization uses for their entire messaging ecosystem. It gives insight into what messaging strategy works best for your target audiences, like breaks that down, and it really helps build consensus and consistency. Your messaging strategy should come before everything else except for research, because you have to do the research in order for you to know what messaging strategy is going to resonate with your audiences, right? If you have a variants of this already, I think the key here is to make sure that it is detailed. They’re very clear statements on your why, who you serve, and what you offer, and then that it is used by all staff members. Make sure that it is communicated and reviewed with all staff members. They have it, they know to reference it if they’re using it for anything. There’s that annual communications plan again. If you have a written one, great. Are you following it is one question, and does it have very clear goals, activities, tasks, metrics? This should be your main source - we have one for the year, and it is what we use to look at from, you know, task wise of what we’re doing for the entire year. You want to make sure that those goals ladder up to your organization’s strategic goals. I won’t spend any more time on this because we literally have a webinar that we do every year just dedicated to this comms plan, we’re going to actually have it - we just set a date at the end of October. If you’re on this, you’ll get an invite to it. But we’re going to walk through how to build out communications plan. And we should also have some real examples in this next one coming up, too. Excited about that. And then the last two here: evaluating your current brand and setting up a brand and marketing asset tracker. If you haven’t done this in the last few years, it’s a great time to evaluate your current brand and really see if you need a refresh or complete overhaul. We have a branding toolkit that actually has an evaluation guide that will help walk you through for you to decide if you need a refresher reboot. And it also has the brand and marketing asset tracker - that’s definitely something that you want to make sure that you’re tracking all of your assets to. And I know, you know, we love rebrands here, but I will say a lot of times quick refresh is all you need.

Jarrett Way  All right, team dynamics. There’s our last category. And it was of course, the most successful scoring category are average of 68.2 out of 100 in that Running stage of marketing maturity, and we love to see that. This section in the team dynamics from our report covers a lot of the variety of skills that are on your marketing team: your project completion success, things like having trusted partners, having leaders who believe in the power of marketing and communications, things like having a large enough budget to support your goals for marketing and really your overall organizational goals, as well. Some of the struggles here from our benchmarking report that we can tell you is that one in three reported that their budget wasn’t large enough to support the goals that they wanted to achieve or that they set out to achieve. And then you can see on the right that over half of organizations said that their departments are only somewhat aligned when it comes to things like strategy, messaging, and tactics. What are some of the correlations here for team dynamics? This is our next highest stat. Organizations that said that their leaders believe marketing is a critical part of the overall success of the or have on average a 23 point higher overall marketing maturity score than organizations who don’t have that kind of buy in from their leadership. Also, you can see that organizations who have marketing budgets that are large enough to support its overall goal, see an, on average, 21 point higher working maturity score the organizations who don’t. Having that buy in, having those resources, and really optimizing those resources, as well goes along the way. Some of the recommendations for your team dynamics: first of all, scale back and only focus on the initiatives that can get you to your established goals. We know that this requires you to look a little bit deep, but you really need to whittle it down into the necessary things that you can invest in right now in terms of your people, in terms of your money, your budget, whatever you have available, you should update your plan for reality. Always keep that in mind.  You want to evaluate your marketing department to see the skill sets you currently have on the team, what’s needed for the future, and if that requires more resources, upskilling, or both. Taking a look at your team thinking about do we need more people, do we need to upskill our current staff, do we need to add or modify or adjust responsibilities? We actually just released a really great article about the marketing staff audit that I think will be really beneficial for a lot of organizations. We worked with a lot of people internally on it.  And then lastly, with the team dynamics recommendation is to help leadership understand the value of marketing through understanding, planning, tracking, and communicating. When we say understanding, really, we want to know what your leadership really defines are what they say is actually valuable when they mean value in terms of your marketing, right. Thinking about what your leadership actually places value on. And that planning part, we mentioned it multiple times, is having that written communications plan with goals that ladder up to your organization’s strategic goals. And then of course, sometimes specific units within the organization, as well. On your tracking, you want to be able to measure every marketing effort you implement. There were very few things that beat showing that good data, right. And I always say data is the best thing you can have going to bat for you. If you’ve done a campaign, that you have some real results that you can show, especially if you’re asking for some more money, you should absolutely have those ready and available. And then of course, communicating that plan to your leadership to get that buy in. Your leadership doesn’t necessarily understand or have that marketing background for all the contexts. They don’t really even need the line by line play by play. But what you do need are really the bite sized chunks that you can give to them. Make sure that you’re being deliberate about that in the way that you’re presenting all this great information, especially if you’re making a big ask. All right, so that’s the six key categories. We’ve walked through a big portion of these results from our benchmarking report, we’ve talked about The Mighty GPS, let’s talk about how to operationalize it. Steps, you can actually take data from point A to point B to improve some of your marketing efforts and your marketing maturity. Steps to higher marketing maturity. First of all, take The Mighty GPS, it takes less than 10 minutes of your time. You’re going to take that assessment, you’ll immediately get your customized report the overall score and then your scores by a category as well across the six key categories. And then you’ll download the benchmarks report and then you compare yourself to your peers. We’ve had our inaugural benchmark report and of course, soon you’ll be able to have some even greater insights for your industry to really get an eye on what’s going on. Third is to use that Mighty GPS Planner or the comms plan template to review your custom GPS reports. We have this really great resource that we developed in tandem with the GPS, The Mighty GPS Get Started Planner. It really just helps you workshop your lowest scoring category, or whatever category you think is appropriate for your organization, just to get going on it. You could use that and/or the communications plan template that we’ve been talking about, truly start to write some of this stuff down, and actualize every organization. Fourth is to build your case internally to ask for more resources and or budget. You have the data you have the numbers, you know the kind of disparities that may or may not exist within your organization. And you can use that of course to build a case. And then fifth and lastly, you want to implement and check back on that progress. You want to maybe annually take The Mighty GPS again, take a look at the benchmarks, compare yourself, see where you stand, see where you’ve improved where you haven’t improved, some opportunities there, and then readjust to reiterate. You’re always reiterating. On those two resources I mentioned, and for deciding what to tackle first, this is an example of an organization who scored 21% on the research and analytics category for the 6 key categories of The Mighty GPS. These are some of the recommendations that they got in their customer report that you can see here. We always recommend to start with really no more than three next steps. And even if you need to just focus on one, that’s totally fine. They can overlap, they may have some overlap, but remember that marketing maturity is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t jump into a million different things, when you can really focus on one at a time and make it really, really great. Now imagine, for example, that your organization is launching this big new program next year. That could be a new fundraising effort. If you’re a nonprofit, maybe it’s a new continuing education course, for your members, that could be a new degree program, if you’re a higher ed institution, or maybe just a new like public initiative if you’re a government agency. You may say, "okay, we know we’re going to need a marketing campaign for that big new program," because that’s just one of the main goals of your written communication plan. But what you don’t know is maybe  some of that audience research and the audience behaviors for the actual plan. If you take the GPS, you might see some of these recommendations. You know, better than even we do, unless you’re working with us, of course, that you may want to focus on some things that have to do with audience research, some things that have to do with using surveys to improve your communication. You can really laser in on some of these tactics that we have and resources that support them, to help you start to move the needle. This here is an example of that get started planner that I was mentioning, we made in tandem with The Mighty GPS. This will help you, of course, workshop one or more sections of The Mighty GPS. Just your lowest scoring section is what we recommend. In this example, you can see that they have their overall goal, number one, is to learn from audience research to inform future program launch. And then you can see that they have the number one activity along with that: to interview internal and external audiences. Breaking it down even further, they have their measurable metric for that activity, which is to conduct 10 interviews with key audiences. And then they have all their tactics that ladder up to this activity, and you can list as many as you need to complete the actual activity. And you can also feel free to learn some sub tactics as well under each of the higher level tactics. In this example, you can see tactic number one is develop a list of stakeholders to interview then each tactic here below has a timeline as well in terms of deadlines for getting it done. Towards the bottom, you can see how you’ll put the activity into action. They’re saying we’ll use these insights from this audience research to create content and/or personas that can be used in our upcoming program launch, whatever that program might be. And then lastly, of course, your budget, very important. They want to budget $5 for every interviewee, for those 10 interviewees, in the form of a coffee gift card. We’re going to make sure we mentioned that during the plan and everything is accounted for. Now you’ve worked with your team, you prioritize which parts of research and analytics you want to work on first. You’ve access those resources, use a planner, your communications plan, whatever it may be, to make that robust plan written down with tactical steps. Bri, what’s next after all of that?

Brianna Martin  All right, so y’all don’t think you’re gonna get out of this webinar without seeing one more Shitts Creek GIF, did you? You know I had to add in one more. Stevie and Patrick are jazzed for us right now. The next step after this is really figuring out what resources you need to make that plan happen. And that is likely that you’re going to need money, right? You need to find a way to get the resources that you need to make your marketing more effective. Something interesting from the benchmarks report: of those who did provide their annual marketing budget, most are allocating between one and 5% of their total revenue on marketing. And our recommendation here is to really grow your revenue, your brand, your marketing effectiveness, we recommend spending between five to 10%. Now I know you’re all giving me a big eye roll right now, like of course, Brianna, everyone would love to spend 10% of annual revenue and I get it, I realized what we’re saying. I’m going to do some quick tips on what you can do to ask for more budget. Here you can see, I think Mindy already shared Three Ways to Convince Leadership to Invest in Marketing, so that has some tips that align with this. The first is being clear on your strategic goals and your vision for the organization. That also goes back to having that written annual communications plan that’s very robust. The second is identifying what your organization needs to really move the needle. That is where your GPS scoring and your planner come into place. You’re recognizing, you’re assessing, what you need to focus on the most, and then you’re using that planner to build out a plan. The third is to showcase what others are doing to achieve the results you desire. That’s where the marketing benchmarks come into place, right? If you can show leadership, that there is proof that there’s 30 point difference in marketing effectiveness for mission driven organizations who set measurable specific goals with the campaigns that they do versus ones that don’t, and that in order for you to do that properly, that means you need some campaign measurement tools that cost money,  that’s a huge way to showcase the ROI that you could potentially see from just, you know, getting some money to do that. Having a thoughtful plan. And then if you are going to seek outside help, you’ve identified that, that you do need to work with some vendors, really understanding what you need in a great partnership, taking time to think about that writing that out working with other team members there to really know what you need to set you up for success, if you are going to have a partnership outside of your organization. And then lastly, but definitely not least, having passion, belief and confidence to ask what you need. You know, most of you on this call, if you’re in marketing, you’re in marketing, because you love it. And you’re in the mission driven space, because you love it and believe in it. And you know, the impact that you’re making, I mean, those alone makes such a strong case to have passion and belief and confidence. You just got to work on making sure when you’re presenting, presenting that to leadership, that it comes that comes through so you can accomplish what you need to move your organization forward. All right. What is next? What is next for the Benchmark Report and the GPS. Y’all, we are always looking for feedback. We would love any thoughts on the benchmarks reports, anything in the future for The Mighty GPS. Some things that we’re going to work on in the next couple of years is next year, actually, we should have industry specific reports that mirror the main section of our benchmarks report. Most of the reports this year is mission driven organizations, their overall look at it. As we get more responses, we’re going to have specific reports per audience. You’re not going to see marketing benchmarks for mission driven organizations. If you’re an association, you’re going to see marketing benchmarks for associations, marketing benchmarks for nonprofits, and so forth. I’m very excited about that, then obviously, this wasn’t our first time doing the report. Next year, we’ll be able to have those year over year comparisons. We can kind of see what the audiences and industries are doing year over year and over time. And then lastly, don’t know if it’s going to happen next year, but I’m hoping that eventually we’re going to have a tool where when you’re done taking the GPS, you will be able to filter by industry, budget, revenue, things that line up with where your organization is at and then in real time get a comparison of all the people that took the GPS, right at that point that have those same filters, what, you know, what are their marketing, maturity scores look like? All right, so these, they’re just links to each category. And it’s most of the stuff that Mindy was sharing, and a lot of the recommendations that are in the custom report. These are all linked, we just put it in here, so you’ll be able to access them when you get the slides. And then that is it. Thank you guys. Oh, we have three minutes.

Jarrett Way  Barely made it.

Brianna Martin  I know, phew! There’s a lot. Before I think we might be able to answer a couple questions. Jarrett, I was laughing at the beginning. Because there’s something that was mentioned about a twin, and there’s a lot of twins on and I said Believe it or not. Jared and I are twins and we’re a small marketing team, so the fact that there are two twins is just kind of crazy.

Jarrett Way  Yeah, I always forget whenever it’s brought up, but yeah, it’s funny.

Brianna Martin  Okay, if people are still staying on, let me look through some of these questions. How frequent should an organization do surveys? So, I would say at least annually, I think it depends on what you’re asking. That example that Jarrett gave earlier of launching a new program, and doing an audience survey - that might not include your entire database, it could very much be just a subset of people that are in a certain you know, certain demographics or you know, type that you’re just going to ask them the survey question. In that regard, you couldn’t be doing multiple surveys a year if you are segmenting properly. Let’s see if there’s a question in here for you, Jarrett.

Jarrett Way  I’m looking at one from Joshua. His engagement on a specific social media channel is low. How do you decide whether you should invest more to build audience versus acknowledging that your audience might not be there? That’s the exact kind of question you have to ask. And that’s what you have to answer. If you don’t have engagement, it’s not always necessarily because you should be on that platform, sometimes your audiences just are not there. And you find that out by testing different content on different platforms, seeing what’s being engaged with and where, who is engaging with it, um, if that aligns with your target audiences, as well, and then adjusting from there. But you should always be testing your content, just to see how it plays, and then changing it up, and then testing it again.

Brianna Martin  Yeah, I would also say, understanding and knowing about your audiences ahead of time can help you sort of figure that out. If you feel like, there’s reason for you to invest in building your audience up on a certain channel, because maybe you do know from other research and stuff that they are there and that, you know, but you’re just not getting to them. And maybe you can make a case for investing in that, but my hunch would be that there are a lot of people investing time and money on social platforms that their audiences are just not using. Oh, let’s see, we have anything else? Will you be putting together a webinar on marketing and AI? That that is something that is on the list, we have a very long list, we’re actually still as an organization, kind of figuring out that that sweet spot of where we might implement an AI. A lot of like marketing, software tools and stuff using not just copywriting, so there’s lots of things. And all of our departments have very strong opinions about using AI. And it’s just interesting to see what we’re just kind of assessing it over time. Alright. I think that’s all for now. Just want to thank everyone. Thank you for bearing with us for some of the technical difficulties at the beginning. If you’re able to spend a minute or two to provide feedback, when you get off this call, I believe a survey will pop up. We really appreciate that. We definitely look at those right away and we try to make sure that we are improving the content that we provide for you. Thanks so much, everyone! Have a good rest of your afternoon.

Jarrett Way  Thanks for joining, ya’ll.