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If you are working to launch a mission-driven startup, you will benefit from learning the nuances of social enterprise marketing. This startup success guide provides over 50 social enterprise marketing actions and tips so you can establish a strong brand and attract the right customers.
Social Enterprise Marketing Process
Stage 1: Perform Market Research
The first step in social enterprise marketing is performing market research. You must gain an intimate understanding of the people you aspire to help through demographic, psychographic, and field research. We highly recommend selecting a population to assist before choosing a problem or designing a solution.
Market Research Steps:
- Select a group of people to study.
- Learn about the group’s perspective.
- Identify the group’s needs and desires.
- Choose a problem that is highly important to the group (and ideally other groups).
- Study the problem (causes, stakeholders, impacts, etc.).
Market Research Tips:
- Spend time shadowing and observing people in your target market.
- Learn how to perform customer discovery research and conduct interviews.
- Incorporate “Jobs to Be Done” theory into your research.
- Use online forums and communities to see what your target market is talking about.
- Develop customer personas for potential buyers, funders, and other stakeholders.
Stage 2: Claim Your Territory
Once you have chosen a population and problem, you need to select a relevant name for your social enterprise and establish an internet presence. The name will serve as the cornerstone of your brand, so you must ensure that it has strong potential to resonate with your target market.
Territory Acquisition Steps:
- Search for available names (legal registration and website domain).
- Buy a website (ideally your social enterprise name).
- Register your social enterprise (start with a simple legal structure).
- Reserve social media profiles (ideally your social enterprise name).
- Establish a physical location if necessary.
Territory Acquisition Tips:
- Use Bluehost for domain registration and website hosting services (They are highly affordable and reliable).
- Reserve accounts on as many social media platforms as possible since you never know which ones you will use.
- Customize your social media URLs to include your social enterprise’s name.
- Link to your website in all of your social media bios.
Stage 3: Create a Marketing Plan
The marketing plan provides a guiding framework for all of your social enterprise marketing operations. It is beneficial to make an initial draft early in your marketing process. That being said, the marketing plan is a dynamic document that you will continually update over time.
Marketing Plan Creation Steps:
- Document your market research.
- Record insights into your target market.
- Determine your positioning.
- Perform competitive analysis.
- Create a market strategy.
- Make an initial budget.
- Select your guiding metrics.
Marketing Plan Creation Tips:
- Adjust your market positioning and strategies based on your research into competitors and potential customers.
- Your initial budget should cover enough customer acquisition testing to allow you to determine successful strategies.
- Use tracking tools, such as Google Analytics and Search Console, to help determine and assess your guiding metrics.
- Learn more about marketing plan creation in our specialized strategy guide.
Stage 4: Establish a Mission-Driven Brand
During your first wave of public communications, you should focus on defining your social enterprise’s brand. Spend time honing your imagery and messaging to convey your organization’s core values. As a social enterprise, your organization clearly stands for a social or environmental cause, but you must practice superb brand management to become synonymous with that cause.
Branding Steps:
- Craft your mission, vision, and story.
- Design a logo.
- Set up a website and social media channels.
- Create images and posts to explain your mission/impact.
- Share your branded content.
Branding Tips:
- Test different stories to see what resonates best with potential customers.
- Keep your imagery and messaging consistent across platforms.
- Use Adobe Spark and Canva to easily design appealing images.
- Schedule and coordinate social media posts with Postfity.
Stage 5: Test Customer Acquisition Strategies
Once your brand appears credible, you can begin experimenting with customer acquisition strategies. Remember to set clear testing objectives (e.g. maximizing landing page views via social media ads or increasing email list subscriptions via form placement) and measure results with tracking tools.
Customer Acquisition Steps:
- Establish objectives, hypotheses, and metrics.
- Create marketing collateral (videos, images, landing pages, etc.).
- Conduct experiments (e.g. A/B tests).
- Measure results.
- Repeat with new hypotheses.
Customer Acquisition Tips:
- Start by selecting a sales funnel structure (e.g. 1) ad, 2) landing page, 3) email subscription, 4) onboarding emails, 5) sales page, 6) product purchase, 7) customer support).
- Work to increase conversions at each stage of the funnel with a focus on maximizing revenue/impact.
- Use relevant tracking tools to measure, analyze, and improve results at each funnel stage (e.g. Facebook Ads (ad conversions), Sumo (email subscriptions), Mailchimp (sales page views, Google Analytics (product purchases), Quickbooks (revenue changes), etc.).
- Use basic statistics principles (e.g. correlation, standard deviation, confidence intervals, etc.) to analyze results and guide design/investment decisions.
Stage 6: Invest in What Works
As you gather test results, invest in strategies that deliver positive returns, and discard unsuccessful tactics. Make sure to give your strategies enough time to deliver results and analyze sufficient sample sizes.
Marketing Investment Steps:
- Measure ROI for a sales funnel (e.g. $1 for ads + software + labor = $2 revenue).
- Predict the return on investment (ROI) for a sales funnel improvement (e.g. $.25 invested in upgrades, such as ad purchases or design improvements, leads to $.50 in revenue).
- Predict the impact return on investment (IROI) for a sales funnel improvement (e.g. $25 invested in upgrades leads to 5 more customers with desired results from the product).
- Invest in upgrades with the best risk/return/impact profiles first.
- Adjust investment levels until returns on investment and impact become zero for additional investments.
- Repeat the investment process with lower priority upgrades.
Marketing Investment Tips:
- All upgrades should support traffic, conversion rates, or organizational objectives (e.g. more revenue per customer or higher impact per purchase).
- Remember that marketing processes can always be better optimized to achieve organizational objectives
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