I had the privilege of teaching a marketing seminar last week to a group of over 60 volunteers with the Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener program. These dedicated individuals donate their time to run fantastic, educational programs in almost every county in Virginia. The group I spoke to was made up of the leaders of the program in their local units.

The programs focus on horticulture’s importance and impact on daily life, they work to increase awareness and knowledge of responsible landscape management and natural resource conservation, and they aim to increase awareness of the benefits home food production, food systems, and locally grown foods. These Extension Master Gardener volunteers, through their programs, are helping people in their communities in tangible ways. For more information, check out their website.

Getting the word out about their programs and services to those in their communities is a challenge that many of the local Extension Master Gardener units face. I talked to them about different types of marketing they could use, how to create a marketing plan, and these five principles for making their marketing efforts successful:

 

1. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE & APPEAL TO THEM

Who is it that you’re trying to reach? Is that person in a specific age range? Are they male? Female? Are they a student or someone of a certain profession or field? Do they have similar interests or hobbies? In order for your marketing efforts to be successful, you have to know who you’re trying to reach.

Once you narrow in on who you’re trying to reach, you need to think through where and how that audience gets their news and information. Why? Because you have to reach them where they already are. You can’t expect someone to see your message if it’s through a means they never use to get their information.

Whether it’s TV news, online news outlets, radio, a print publication, social media, or from friends or family members, these different ways of reaching people each have their pros and cons. We know that different platforms are better suited for reaching different demographics. So a print newspaper ad might be very effective for reaching someone who gets their news that way, but someone who never picks up a newspaper will not see your message.

There’s a lot of data available about how different age ranges are most likely to get their news and information. A study from Pew Research Center found that TV is still the most popular method for getting news, but that online platforms are quickly gaining on TV. The study also found that news consumption through mobile phones has risen rapidly, especially among those ages 18-29.

When it comes to social media, recent research from Sprout Social showed that while Facebook is the most widely used social media platform across all age ranges, Instagram is the most popular social platform for younger millenials (ages 18-24).

So using information like this and thinking through who is in your audience, decide on which platforms will be the best to reach them. Keep in mind that it’s best to use a variety of platforms so that your message has a higher likelihood of being seen (more on that in a later point).

Once you’ve figured out who they are, where they are, and what platforms you’re going to use to reach them, you also have to make sure that you appeal to them with your message. Even if you’ve decided to run an Instagram campaign because you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, if you don’t design your message in a way that appeals to them, your messaging will not be noticed.

An example of this is iPod ads – yes, from like 10 years ago when iPods were still a thing! (Do a quick Google Image search if you’re not familiar with how they look). With their bright colors and their silhouettes of young people dancing with their headphones plugged in, these ads were clearly targeted toward a younger audience. Apple knew that this product was likely to appeal to younger people who wanted their music in an easily portable device, so they designed their ads to appeal to them. So when thinking about your messaging for your audience, you have to think about how the overall look and feel of the marketing piece will appeal to them and cause them to pay attention to your message.

This leads perfectly into the next principle…

2. PRESENT IT WELL

If you have 7 seconds to make an impression in person, you have only a tiny fraction of that when it comes to digital or print marketing. Think about how quickly we mindlessly scroll through our Facebook feeds on our phones or flip through a magazine while we’re in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. How easy is it to keep on scrolling or flipping past that sponsored ad? Even if you’re using the right platform to reach your audience, if your marketing message is not presented well, it will be ignored! So what will make your audience stop and pay attention to your message?

Several principles you can follow will help you present your message well, and in a way that will increase your odds of getting noticed:

  • Make it visual if possible. There’s a reason that Facebook posts with images have 2.3x more engagement than those without images. Or that Instagram is rising in popularity every day. Visuals are powerful. They create a focal point. They reinforce memory. Use a relevant and eye-catching photo or illustration or infographic as part of your marketing whenever you can.
  • Keep it simple. Focus on the main message you are trying to convey in your marketing and simplify it as much as possible from there. There’s nothing worse than an ad that’s so busy that you don’t know what to read first. Or worse – that you don’t even want to try! Less is more. If you have a lot of information to include, boil it down to the most important information. Then send that person who’s engaged with your message to a specific page on your website or your Facebook event page for more information if they want it.

3. KEEP CONSISTENCY

When you’re thinking about your marketing efforts, it’s important to think about consistency in multiple ways. One is that you need to be consistently marketing – so you need to be doing it on a regular basis. In the marketing world, there is the pretty well know “rule of 7,” which is the idea that you have to see or hear a message at least seven times before you will take action. Many would argue that in today’s digital world, seven touches is just scratching the surface of what you would actually need. Think about how news becomes “old news” within a matter of moments on our Twitter feeds. If you’re not keeping your message in front of your target audience’s eyes on a regular basis, they will forget about you.

Your marketing message needs to be repeated, and preferably, repeated across several platforms that your target audience is using. However, as you go from one platform to the other, the look and feel of your messaging should be consistent across these platforms.

Take Nike, for example. If you look at their website, their social media accounts, their print ads, their TV commercials, all of these platforms have a similar feel for the user. They all incorporate their checkmark logo, the same fonts, the same color scheme of black and white, their focus on athletics, etc.

This touches on the importance of branding. Building a brand that people know, like, and trust involves coming up with those recognizable features that make your brand unique and using those features in all of your marketing, no matter the platform.

4. MAKE THEM FEEL EMOTION

The best marketing makes people feel something. Maybe it makes you laugh, maybe it makes you sad or mad, maybe it makes you stop and think. But if you’ve made your audience feel something, then you’ve successfully made them engage with your marketing message!

How can you make your target audience believe in your cause, buy your product, or whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do through your marketing? I think a great example of this is the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. Dove had done a survey of women in 10 countries to find out their interests and priorities. They found that only 2 percent of women they interviewed considered themselves beautiful! Cue an amazing series of TV commercials and print ads that challenged our society’s perceptions of beauty and encouraged women to embrace their features as beautiful. Dove didn’t just say, “buy our soap.” Instead they enabled their target audience to feel positive emotions about the commercials and ads, and as a result, toward their company and products.

It may take some creativity and it may take some digging, but you can engage your target audience in a memorable and emotional way too.

5. CALL THEM TO ACTION

You need to make sure it’s clear from your marketing message what you want your audience to do. Do you want them to come to your event, donate money to your organization, register for your webinar? Make it clear what steps you want them to take. This goes hand in hand with principle #2 above – keeping it simple. Your call to action should be one of the most prominent points of your simple design, or else it will be missed.

I think a great example of a clear call to action is Netflix’s homepage. They have a very simple, visual design and the most prominent thing on the page is their call to action button: “Join Free for Month” (which isn’t even great grammar now that I think about it). But it gets the point across! Their website visitors have likely heard of Netflix, and Netflix is making it very obvious and easy to get started with their service.

In conclusion...

We are bombarded daily with thousands of messages. Brands and organizations are always competing to hold our attention and gain our trust and business. In this world of constant messaging, applying these five principles will help your marketing stand out.

Does your small business or nonprofit need help with branding, marketing strategy, or design and writing for your marketing pieces? If so, I would love to chat with you about how I can help!