[MUSIC] The commercial world has long understood the value of marketing and branding for their products. It is just about time that organizations working on social issues get better at telling their story and getting support, which in return, will provide them with authority on funds. That has been my main motivation and drive for the past 10 years. My name is Claudia Gonzales, and I am the head of marketing at the Global Fund, as well as a marketing teacher at the University of Geneva for the MBA specializing in international organizations called Ayumba. The session today will aim to share key principles of marketing and give you a step by step guide to create a marketing plan. So, let's start with the definition of marketing. Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers, and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit your organization and its stakeholders. Said in other words, marketing is a social management process in which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want by creating products and value and exchanging it with others. Let's look at this slide to see how marketing fits in the private sector. Most organizations in the private sector have a marketing function, they have large budgets, they fall under the CEO and communication normally under them. Look at the difference in international organizations. In international organizations, rarely there is a marketing function. It has small budget. It falls under communications and the main purpose is to get funding and awareness as opposed to planning as in the private sector. So, what is it, you might wonder, that one can market? Well, everything can be marketed, not only products. Everything for which there is a need, or one can create a need, from services, to experiences, organizations, and even people. The best way to execute marketing is to create a marketing plan. Why? Because a marketing plan is the central instrument for directing and coordinating the marketing effort. It operates at the strategic and at the tactical level. Let's explore for this video the strategic element. So a strategic marketing plan is a long term plan that describes how an organization will adapt it's objectives and capabilities to a changing market, opportunities, and threats. So you may wonder what are the key elements of a strategic marketing plan? Well there are three. The first one is called organizational overview. Second, the market overview. and third, the marketing plan. Let us explore the elements of an organization overview. It includes an executive summary, the mission, the vision, and the values. Let's see. An executive summary is a section that should include a description of what the organization is and does, how it does it, it's core differentiating factors, and your organizational place in the market. The mission is a statement of your organization's that should be a few sentences that provide a reason to believe in the products or services that you offer. If your organization didn't exist, what would be the market or the world's lose values. These are the core values and principles that guide your organization. Try to keep it simple and be authentic to who you are. And the vision, which is the guiding star of every organization. I'm going to give you an example about my own organization, the Global Fund. The Global Fund has a vision to eliminate AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria from the world, which you can see is a high, guiding star that we could never do on our own. But then we have our mission that guides us to invest the money's world in order to save lives. The values are keen on organization, because they really drive how you operate, not only how you present yourself, but how you operate. In the case of the Global Fund, there are a couple of them, but I'm going to mention one, transparency. It's a core value for the organization, and therefore everything we do has to be transparent. The salaries of the employees are there. Every single piece of information that is available to the Global Fund is shared with the world through our website. The second element to do on marketing plan is called market overview. Start by doing a market summary, the geography, the competitive landscape and an overview of the growing trends for your market. Follow that with a SWOT analysis. Here you can highlight your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Do the strengths and opportunities outweigh the weaknesses and threats? What is the primary weaknesses you're facing? Is this something that marketing can solve? Remember that marketing is focused on highlighting your strengths and neutralizing your weaknesses. Finalize this section with giving a sense of the competition. What is, include all the competitive research you've conducted, either direct or indirect competitors, data on the competitors, donors, service features, events, and other relevant information. It is very important that when you are thinking of competitors, you dare to think out of the box. If you are thinking like Apple, you're just not thinking about computers, but you're thinking entertainment might be my competitor. If you were Pringles, the chips, you're not thinking my competitor is another brand of chips, it's everything that can actually fulfill your stomach with hunger. So dare to think in competitive terms and make sure you analyze who are you competing with to find your space in the market. Let's go into the marketing plan. The first part is to make sure that you get your objectives right. To deliver on your marketing strategy, your objectives need to be smart, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound in order to set, meet the final objectives. Define your target markets. Get as much information about your target markets and include information about the people you serve, as well as your donors, your business partners, policy makers, everything you have to select the target markets in order to be effective. I would suggest, have three targets the most. Most organizations suffer by not being clear about their target audiences and trying to cope and embrace to many things. Let's jump into the next element, positioning and messaging. This should be a few sentences that include your positioning statement, if you have one, and a value proposition. The last part is to go into the execution. Discuss all the marketing initiatives to date. What has worked, what hasn't, what are your competitors doing? How is the competitive landscape changing in such a way that you will need to approach your marketing differently in the future? How are you using all the different tools that you have available. Let me give you some examples to illustrate what we just said. In setting your objectives, say that you really what you want is to get 150 volunteers, increase by 200% the funding that you're getting from corporations, and you also want to be 20% better known in certain markets. You have to be specific. If you're going to go into 150 volunteers, you have to be smart, you have to be very specific. What age, how many hours, in how long? How am I going to go and get them? The more specific your objectives are, the easier it is to get them. When you're talking about targets, let me give you an example. The chart that you see on your screen exemplifies how you really put the emphasis in that inner circle, in that 1% of the target that you're trying to get, its decision makers. It's only 20 to 50 people. It's the presidents of the G8 or the G20. It's as specific as you can name the people that you have. The second circle is how are you going to be influencing this target audience. My real target audience is number one. The second and third circles are going to help me get to that target audience. Because it's not easy for me to pick up the phone and call any GA president, I have to go with my target audiences that will help me influence and achieve the real target audience that I have. When it comes to positioning and targeting, it's very important that you are very clear about how do you want to position yourself, to understand whether you have a chance in that market. Let's see. If you are in the water business, water is a very crowded space right now. Everybody does water, charity water, this water and the other water. So it's very important that if you're going to be willing to go there, you position yourself very distinctively and in a way that makes you unique. You might actually say I am the water, I will give money to refugees. I am a social cause water that is doing this. In the case of the Global Fund, the positioning actually is to be the leading organization when it comes to health financing. That actually allows us to partner with other organizations that are doing the work, but it gives us our unique space. Once you have grasped all the elements of your marketing plan, I recommend you to use a similar chart as the one you can see on your screen. It allows you to see in a snapshot all of your objectives, audiences and way in which we're going to measure your success. Hope this session was useful for you to grasp the key principles of marketing, and I encourage you to try to do a marketing plan on your own. After 15 years in working in marketing, I still find it the basic principle to guide my actions. Try them. Exchange it. Evaluate with your peers. There is nothing better than trying and doing marketing plans to become really good at it. Remember, everything can be marketed. [MUSIC]
