7 tips to start your social enterprise marketing plan

7 tips to start your social enterprise marketing plan

If you have never written a marketing plan before (or it’s been a while) this will give you a steer in the right direction to help get your social enterprise creating sustainable impact.

There are countless in depth strategies that can be implemented for different types of business but this will cover the basics and give you a frame to build on.

1.Why?

It’s now a well used starting point for marketing from the mind of Simon Sinek https://startwithwhy.com/. Starting with Why you do what you do is key, not what you do. This creates the emotional connection to your audience, this is even more important with social enterprise.

Here are a few examples:

GoldieBlox:

What do they do?

They build toys for girls.

So what?

Why?

“Because girls are discouraged from building things, and we need to change that.”

Their mission is: to correct the gender imbalance in engineering.

This creates the connection and seeing the purpose behind the what creates more impact.

PK Clean

What do they do?

They convert plastic waste into reusable oil.

So what?

Why?

Because the future can’t be a giant landfill.

Their mission: To end landfilling and create a clean & secure new energy source, for a more sustainable world.

2. USP’s?

What are your unique selling points (USP’S)? This isn’t about what you are selling as a product or a service but what benefits your product or service will give to your customers.

3. Who?

Who are the people that are going to benefit from your purpose and the benefits of your product or service. It is important to list all the different personas and really try to separate the different types of people as they will likely require different marketing approaches and channels.

4. Test

Now you have the above information you can test out your product or service before going any further. If you go past this stage without getting confirmation of your ideas you could waste a lot of time planning for an idea or target sector that do not want what you are offering.

How do you do this? It’s relatively easy, ask your prospective customers. Build a set of questions that will give unbiased answers. There is no point asking leading questions to try prove your idea, you want honest, impartial feedback.

Use your why and your USP’s to outline your business and ask if they would use the service, how much they would pay, who they use at the moment etc.

5. Goals

Assuming your test went well you can now set some goals. These are needed to build a proper marketing plan. How many units or how much revenue do you want to sell to each persona you supply from the Who section above. You will need to set timeframes for each and make them realistic. This is using the SMART targets rule – Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, Time-based.

6. Channels

There are over 100 different marketing channels including Social Media, Web, PR, advertising, Blogs, Stores and so on. Now you have the information from steps 1 to 5 you can identify which channels will be best to use for your social enterprise.

You can list your customer personas and work out which channels will work best for each of them.

You can further narrow this down based on your budget, there are plenty of free channels that you can use. Here is an overview of demographics for social media platforms.

Top to bottom: Active monthly UK users, Ages, What people go there for, what content.

7. Always give value

No matter what you do make sure you stick to your brand, values and your why. This is especially important when communicating to your stakeholders, no matter what channels you choose.

The other key thing to remember is to always add value to your stakeholders whenever communicating, ultimately it’s about them. If you give value then they are much more likely to remember you and that’s the eternal marketing battle in a very crowded marketplace.

Here at Agency For Good we help organisations spend much less time and money while driving more impact through better, more ethical use of digital.

We are an ethical digital marketing agency.

We have a mission to help 50 not for profits this year create more impact. We do this by offering our experience and time for free to hone your digital marketing efforts backed up by low cost, high quality digital marketing services. Get in touch for your free digital marketing strategy session.