What marketing should a small organisation prioritise first?

Start with Audience > Goal > Capacity

Small organisations often need to reach several groups at once. A charity may need to speak to people looking for support, referrers, volunteers, funders and donors. A CIC may also need to reach local communities, customers, partners or commissioners.

You cannot give every audience equal attention all the time. Start by deciding three things:

Audience — Who do we most need to reach right now?
Goal — What do we want them to understand or do?
Capacity — What can we realistically keep doing well?

That might mean increasing referrals, recruiting volunteers, promoting a service, starting more partner conversations or encouraging donations. Once those three things are clear, choosing the right marketing activity becomes much easier. Pick the channel because it helps you reach the right people and achieve the right goal, not simply because you feel you should be using it.

Choose what your team can realistically sustain

You may identify several marketing activities that could help your organisation, but only have the time and resources to do a few of them well. Build your plan around the capacity you actually have. Small Charity Week’s guidance on managing social media with limited time reflects this approach, encouraging small charities to focus their activity and choose a schedule they can realistically maintain. The right mix will be different for every organisation. One might benefit from a useful website, a monthly email and regular LinkedIn activity. Another might get better results from local partnerships and Facebook. Choose fewer things, do them well and keep doing them consistently. Focus your time on the marketing that gives you the best chance of reaching the people who matter to your goals.

Make sure attention leads somewhere useful

Marketing can bring more people to your organisation, but what happens when they arrive matters just as much. Someone might discover you through social media, search, a campaign or a recommendation. When they reach your website, they should be able to quickly understand what you do, find the information they need and take the next step, whether that is making an enquiry, requesting support, volunteering, donating or getting in touch. If your website or key pages are unclear or out of date, more promotion may simply send more people towards the same problem. Before investing in more attention, make sure people have somewhere useful to go when you get it.

Use a simple priority filter

When deciding whether a marketing activity is worth your time, consider four things:

1. Audience — Will it help us reach people who matter to our goals?
2. Purpose — Is there something specific we want it to achieve?
3. Capacity — Do we have the time and budget to do it well?
4. Value — Can we tell whether it is helping?

Use the same filter on the marketing you already do. Over time, it is easy to accumulate extra social channels, newsletters, campaigns and content commitments simply because they have become part of the routine. Your marketing priorities should change when your needs change. Reducing or stopping something that is no longer useful can free up time to focus on something that will make a greater difference.

Give each priority a clear purpose

Focus on a small number of marketing activities that have a clear job to do. Each one should help you reach an important audience, achieve a specific goal and be realistic for your team to maintain. Then pay attention to what happens. Keep improving the activities that are helping you make progress and reconsider those that take time without delivering enough value. You don’t need to market everywhere. You need to focus your effort where it can make the biggest difference.