My Gardening Metaphor for Q2 Marketing
It’s officially spring, my favorite season. My birthday is in spring, the smells of fresh grass and mud are swirling around my Vermont homeland, and I love seeing new blooms pop up in gardens and along the roadside.
I find it refreshing to think about gardening in springtime as a metaphor for digital marketing in Q2. Out with the old, in with the new! In this seasonal edition of The Good Stuff, I've laid out how I go about this “gardening” process in my own work and for my clients.
Open up your Google Analytics, your email marketing tool, your fundraising or sales platform, Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager… any and all digital marketing tools you use. Pour yourself a coffee, a tea, a lemonade... even a glass of rosé if it won't impair your number-crunching abilities! Let's dig in.
Step 1: DIG
This is a great time to conduct a full digital audit. Dig as deep as you can within the tools you have to assess how your Q1 marketing efforts performed. Dig for answers to the following questions:
1. Which marketing channels brought the most traffic to our website in Q1? Which brought the least?
2. Which marketing channels brought in the most leads/email contacts in Q1? Which brought in the least?
3. Which marketing channels directly drove the most sales/donations in Q1? Which brought in the least?
If you ran any marketing or fundraising campaigns in Q1 (advertising campaigns, email drip campaigns, sales promotions, etc.) run through the same three questions again, replacing “channels” with “campaigns.”
I recommend digging deeper into each tool, too, to look at your email performance, social media performance, digital advertising performance, etc. to compare your metrics with last year’s Q1 performance and industry benchmarks.
Step 2: WEED
Based on what you uncovered in your big dig, determine at least one thing that didn’t work in Q1—or that hasn't worked for multiple quarters—that you can weed out of your marketing or fundraising program. Perhaps you sent out a direct mail piece that didn’t get much traction, put a ton of time into a weekly e-newsletter that didn't drive any conversions, or managed six different social media platforms and only got a few “likes” on each.
Figuring out what to weed out can be the hardest part of this process. We marketers often feel pressured to do everything. “I should be able to keep up with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest and run a podcast because everyone else is doing it all. Right?”
Absolutely nah-h-ht. We as consumers make choices about where we want to spend our time on our phones and online, and we must also be selective as marketers—matching the platforms and experiences our supporters love most.
No matter the size of your organization, doing fewer things better is the name of the game. So, wherever you’re spending time that isn’t paying off, weed it out.
Step 3: PLANT
You should be entering this phase feeling a little lighter, having weeded out at least one ineffective program or task.
Now the question is, what should you be doing instead that will be effective—or what is already working that you can do better? What can you give love to now that will continue to strengthen supporter relationships for months and years to come?
Perhaps you ran a virtual event in Q1 that was a surprising success and was a lot of work to put on. Can you commit more of your time to the next one and invest in tech tools that will streamline the process?
Perhaps your LinkedIn posts get 10-20 likes apiece, which is a lot more engagement than you see on other platforms. Can you post far less on your stagnant Facebook and X accounts and focus on utilizing all of the formats within LinkedIn to drive more engagement, email sign-ups, and donations?
Perhaps you see stronger engagement when you send fewer short, plain-text emails with more merge tags and personalized content. If you nixed your long-form newsletter in the WEED stage, can you send a shorter email once a week?
Or perhaps you’ve always wanted to try running digital ads to grow your list. Is now the time to choose one advertising platform and invest?
Step 4: WATER
Whatever you’ve committed to planting, it ain’t gonna grow itself. This is when you pull up your calendar and reserve chunks of time to devote to this new or improved project. Do you need help to make it happen? Do you need buy-in from other members of the team? Selling your team on the value of this endeavor, as well as your reasoning for weeding out what wasn’t working, may be an important first step.
If you do need to pitch these decisions to a boss or the Board, let the numbers do the talking. It’s a sign that you’re a great marketer—not a sign of defeat—to show your boss that something you tried in Q1 underperformed, so you’re ditching it to make room for a promising new tactic based on what you know about your audience, what’s worked in the past, or what’s working for other organizations.
A final word of encouragement:
If this process sounds like something you don’t have time for, I promise it will save you time and energy later. It will also make your job a lot more enjoyable. Auditing and assessing the performance of your marketing and fundraising activities regularly is the key to freeing yourself from the content-creation hamster wheel. So break out those analytics, fix yourself that beverage of choice, and enjoy getting your hands dirty, my friend! It’s an investment you must make to grow.
Would you like to walk through this process with an expert guide? Check out my Nonprofit Digital Assessment. I would be honored to serve as your gardener-in-crime and lend a fresh perspective to help you strategically weed, plant, and grow.
