No matter what era we live in, you can always be certain of uncertainties, disruptions, innovation and major shifts. How can you strengthen your brand to better prepare to adapt to the promise of constant change? 

Let's get right to it: setting goals is one of the most important steps to take when creating an effective marketing plan.

Without goals, all of your marketing efforts are essentially floating around, with no way to gauge their performance, or how they are helping your organization.

At their best, annual reports are a golden opportunity for nonprofits to showcase their accomplishments through storytelling and photos, thank their donors and supporters, and issue a clear call to action to readers for how they can help keep the momentum going. At their worst, they're a boring exercise in self-promotion or a thinly-veiled request for donations.

If you publish an annual report, you want the former, not the latter. But how do you get there? There are so many formats and storytelling approaches — which one is best for your organization? Moreover, should you even bother publishing an annual report?

Annual report season often brings a mix of emotions. There's the excitement of a new year of programming, educating, fundraising, and success stories to report on!

Then there's the trepidation of having to compile the data, get team members to provide needed information, and find people to tell those powerful stories. Oh, and did anyone take any good pictures at that fundraiser?

At their best, annual reports are a golden opportunity for nonprofits to showcase their accomplishments through storytelling and photos, thank their donors and supporters, and issue a clear call to action to readers for how they can help keep the momentum going. At their worst, reports are a ho-hum recitation of donor names (yawn), actions taken (so what?) and dry data (zzzzz).

An AB test can be a great tool for nonprofit or small business marketing. Whether you're doing the marketing yourself or overseeing a team, it's important to understand how AB testing works — when to do it, how to do it, and what kind of effort you can expect to put into it.

A key goal of the marketing collateral you create for your small business is to share your brand’s story with the world. Before you begin broadcasting that story, it’s important to take several behind-the-scenes steps.

Everyone on your team – not just the marketing department –should understand what your brand means and what it stands for. A clear articulation of your mission and reason for being will drive everything about your small business marketing, including the traditional elements of collateral.

Before you create your collateral, here are some internal tools to help you understand and define your brand.

The biggest tactical challenges for how to market a small business often come down to time, expertise and resources. You know you should be marketing, but who has the time? How do you even know where to start? Where will the money come from?

Fortunately, launching an effective marketing program doesn’t have to take forever, can use tools you already have in hand and won’t break the bank if you make wise investments. And keep in mind that you don’t have to go it alone.

When you set out to create a detailed marketing plan, your mind should already be on the cornerstone of great marketing: content.

You want to regularly produce content that's relevant to your ideal customer, patient or supporter.

The key to successful marketing plan is knowing your audience and crafting unique messaging and content for them.

Collateral materials such as your website, social media accounts, email newsletter, and even your blog are all opportunities to provide your audience with targeted information—content that helps them solve their problems. 

As you dig into your marketing plans for the year, one of the biggest challenges is knowing where to start. When creating a marketing plan with the specifics of your marketing activities for the entire year, it's easy to get pulled in different directions. Some of your colleagues may see budget as the place to start, while others want to jump right in with how to improve the website, social media, email, or blogging strategy.