Five Ways to Do More Marketing in Less Time by Kivi Leroux Miller

My pal, Kivi Leroux Miller, has a new book out that I thought some of you might find useful, Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause.

As part of her virtual book tour, she's written a guest post for Have Fun, Do Good about Five Ways to Do More Marketing in Less Time. Enjoy!

No matter whether you want more people to donate to your good cause, to read your blog, or to recognize your name as an expert in your field, you have to make time for marketing. Here are five tips that I've used successfully and that you can too.

1. Decide Who Matters Most to Your Success

If you are marketing to the general public, you are wasting A LOT of time. You can't reach everybody, and only a very small percentage of the general public is likely to care about what you have to say and have the ability or willingness to help you achieve your goals. Focus in on the people who really matter. Are they people of a certain age, means, or education level? Do they have particular skills, hobbies or habits? Where do they go during the day and what do they see and hear there? The best way to do more effective marketing in less time is to focus on the needs and values of a more narrow target audience.

2. Use Filters to See What Matters Most

If social media is a big part of your marketing strategy, it can get overwhelming very quickly. There are just so many blog posts, tweets, and Facebook updates one person can read in a day and still get anything done. To help you focus on what matters most, filter the most important voices or keywords to the top of your reading pile. I use a custom page at Alltop to track the top bloggers on nonprofit marketing, fundraising and social media. I use keyword search columns in HootSuite and lists in both Twitter and Facebook to prioritize what I look at first.

3. Organize What You'll Need Again and Again

Collect all that stuff you are constantly searching for to use yourself and to send to other people in one place on your computer. This includes all the different variations of your logos, headshots, and boilerplate text like taglines, missions, and bios.

4. Get Fear Out of the Way

After reinventing the proverbial wheel, the next biggest time waster in marketing, especially among nonprofits, may just be fear -- your own fear and the fear of decisionmakers around you. What will people think if we say this or that? Will they like us? Will they hate us or think we are stupid? You can stop the hand wringing -- and save all the time you spend on it -- by taking a few simple steps. Do your homework on your target audience. Do some small test runs of your ideas and adjust accordingly. Create a crisis plan so you know how to react in case the worst does happen. Then go do it!

5. Keep Track of What Others Are Doing

You can learn a tremendous amount by paying attention to the "big brains" and the "cool kids." Big brains are the people in your field who are always making new connections, seeing things differently, and looking farther down the road than the rest of us. Cool kids are the ones who are leaping in while the rest of us dip in our toes. Watch, listen, and learn from them. You'll save a tremendous amount of time if you simply schedule a few minutes a day to read up on what others are talking about and doing.

Kivi Leroux Miller is president of Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com, where she blogs on nonprofit communications. She is also the author of the just-released Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause.