Maximizing Non-Profit marketing, sponsorship and fundraising opportunities for more revenue

How to do we maximize our marketing opportunities for more revenue for our organization? When it comes to sponsorship and the fundraising that results from it, good PR strategy cannot be ignored. In fact, potential sponsors expect you to have a solid communications strategy! I hope from this recent video that if you have had any doubts about the relation between solid communication strategy and its impact on revenue generation for your organization, that doubt is now removed!

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Please let me know your thoughts! What has been your experience? Please leave a comment.

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Mark A. Buzan, APR
Principal & Chief Magnifying Officer
Action Strategies
#3, 270 rue Champlain
Gatineau, Quebec J8X 3S1
819.770.2899 phone
http://www.actionstrategies.ca (Action Strategies website)

LinkedIn Profile: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/markbuzan
LinkedIn Group for Public Relations: http://tinyurl.com/nonprofitideas
LinkedIn Group for Government Relations: http://tinyurl.com/nonprofitlobbying

Please take a look at my just released book: Online PR and Social Media for Associations and Not-for-Profits - http://www.onlineprsocialmedia.com/associations

Why is Market Research Important?

This month, I've come across a number of organization heads throughout Ontario and Quebec. One of the common themes we seemed to have touched on was research and how that applies to marketing.

On that note, I came across an interesting article by Martin Day that touches on this important point.

Enjoy!

Market research will help you better communicate - Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong.

By asking the customer you not only show them that you care but you also take the guess work out of customer services.

Market research helps you identify opportunities – If you are planning to operate a new service and want to know the preconceived attitudes people have then market research can help, not only in evaluating the potential for a new idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to honed.

Market research will minimise risk - Market research can help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the development of a product is highly focused towards demand.

Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress - Unless you measure you may not be able to gage how well your business is performing. Early research may highlight glaring holes in your service or short falls in your product, regular market research will show if improvements are being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.

Martin Day is a Director of Survey Galaxy Ltd a web site that allows anyone to create, design and publish online surveys. For more information please visit http://www.surveygalaxy.com.

I couldn't agree more with Martin on these points. If you are looking for advice on where to target your marketing efforts, Action Strategies develops solid marketing plans that are based on research.

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Mark Buzan is Principal and Chief Magnifier in Action Strategies, a full service Marketing Communications, Public Relations and Public Affairs Consultancy. Make sure to contact him for advise on reaching audiences you may or may not have yet considered in your marketing communications and PR campaigns. Drop him a line if you are looking for help in developing a marketing campaign. You can view his website at www.actionstrategies.ca.

How I go after link strategies to market clients

Wikipedia defines Link exchanges as a practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the web. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google.

Personally, one of my favorite means is monitoring blogs, newsgroups and a clients' linked-in sites via Alexa.com. Additionally, there are more and more resources out there for PR professionals such that Action Strategies can hit a broad range of numerous websites in a fast period. To clarify, the need for PR practioners in the internet age has never been clearer.

Just as in traditional PR, I pride myself on building a rapport with the webmasters of websites I know would benefit a client should a link be placed on their site. The message has to be clear to them, nonetheless. There needs to be a real interest placed in the mind of the webmaster as to why a link to your site is beneficial.

If there's to be any doubt as to the value of reciprocal linking, check out Alexa.com's report on EQAO. Impressive to say the least! Nearly 120 sites linking in and Action Strategies will be increasing that number!

Be forwarned, this strategy is not for the faint of heart. It takes time and consistent monitoring. For advice on implementing your own link exchange strategy, consult a PR consultant. Action Strategies can advise you on the best methods available in building a ''buzz''on the internet and raising your link-ins.
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Mark Buzan is Principal and Chief Magnifier in Action Strategies, a full service Marketing Communications, Public Relations and Public Affairs Consultantcy. Make sure to contact him for advise on reaching audiences you may or may not have yet considered in your marketing communications campaigns. You can view his website at www.actionstrategies.ca.

Using bloggers to leverage marketing and build a buzz

Ok, so we've all heard about blogs and their power to influence opinion. Hopefully, if you're reading this blog, you've got an interest in how to commercially apply this new social medium...one that allows readers, publics, targets, prospects, etc. to give you instantaneous feedback.

So yada yada yada! What does this really mean? What this means is that with the ability to have comments posted by interested publics, your web content has the capacity to remain constantly fresh. By extension, this means the potential to increase the visibility of your online PR and presence also goes up.

On a wider scale, PR practitioners are cluing in on this possibility. For example, as a publicist, I can research a vast array of blogs that exist in the ''blogosphere'' and with a carefully coordinated campaign of emailing the blog authors or posting message responses to their posts, the possibility of initiating a viral marketing campaign really becomes impressive. There are tools out there that allow individual entrepreneurs and association executives the option of doing this work themselves. In reading a post recently from another PR professional well known in the US, it was suggested that one should subscribe to google news via blog posts for leads of where to respond.

While this offers one option, I can't help but think that the process is overly burdensome for the average person in terms of the time commitment required to reach every single blogger who could have enough impact.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would venture that this task would be better pawned off to a professional. On numerous occasions, I've used blogs and bloggers as an avenue to promote clients or a cause. Most often rather than not, blog posts are more likely to first appear in media-monitoring search engines. Moreover, a good publicist takes the time necessary to build appropriate lists of bloggers with which a dialogue and relationship can be established.

Imagine if you will, a buzz being developed on another site that talks about your services or what's going on with your website. Pretty exciting, no? What's best is that blogging public relations can often be monitored in close to real time.

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Mark Buzan is Principal and Chief Magnifier in Action Strategies, a full service Marketing Communications, Public Relations and Public Affairs Consultantcy. You can view his website at www.actionstrategies.ca.