Surprise: scrollbars are complicated, especially cross-browser and cross-platform.
Sometimes they take up space and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes that is affected by a setting and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you can see them and sometimes you can’t unless you’re actually scrolling. Styling them is handled in all sorts of different ways, including some very recent developments.
Follow Zach’s journey toward thinner, native, user-preference-respecting, more aesthetic scrollbars, particularly for element-level scrollbars that ends up here.
It sort of feels like our lives are nothing more than an endless string of decision-making, doesn’t it? You go to the grocery store and half an aisle is dedicated to olive oil. Or cereal. Or yogurt. Then, you go home and your streaming services give you literally hundreds of options for horror movies. Or documentaries. Or TV shows. And it doesn’t get any better online.
Decision fatigue happens when you put your consumer in the position to choose from an over-abundance of options.
That said, decision fatigue isn’t some minor frustration caused by having too many awesome choices. It can do some major harm to your conversion rate. For instance: Hick’s Law states that with each new option you put before a user, the longer it will take them to process all of their choices.
That’s the opposite of what you want to happen on a website. You want visitors to quickly explore, find exactly what they need, and convert. The longer you delay this, the lower your chances will be to convert them at all.
Or, you might find that too many choices lead visitors to make poor buying decisions.
This happens when there are too many similar-looking options or there’s an excess of information and the customer gives up. They know they need to buy something, so they make a hasty purchase just to “get it over with”. As a result, the company ends up having to deal with more returns and refunds because of unsatisfied customers. And they will cost you.
Your website already has enough competition to contend with, so why create competition for your visitors’ attention internally?
What Web Designers Can Do to Reduce Design Fatigue
If you or your client want your website to convert, you really need to think about the ways you’re forcing them to stop and wonder: “Which one do I choose?”
Whether your website sells content, services, or products, less is always going to be more in terms of decision-making. And this isn’t about how many products you sell on a website. This is about how you frame every individual decision leading up to conversion.
Here are some examples of where decision fatigue may take place and how to reduce friction there:
1. Clear Up the Navigation
With smaller websites and more narrowly-focused businesses, you won’t have to worry about this too much. With big stores, however, the navigation can get you into a lot of trouble if you don’t organize it well.
Here’s what I mean:
This is the website for ShopRite, a major grocery chain in the U.S.
While I understand that people may come to this website for a variety of purposes, it’s clearly set up as an online ordering system. If that’s your main priority, then the navigation should not be organized in this manner.
“Shop Aisles” certainly belongs there. But do they need three menus to promote specials and coupons: “Weekly Circular”, “Online Promotions”, and “Save”? What about “Discover”, “Careers”, and “Recipes”? There’s a lot of extra noise here.
If the data is telling you that the majority of customers come here to shop, give them what they want in a clear and simple fashion. Don’t make them read through other menu labels or click on them to figure out what something labeled “Discover” even means.
2. Choose One Promotion
Promotional offers and discounts are a great way to entice new visitors to take the plunge and for returning visitors to buy again. But just because they can be effective in increasing sales doesn’t mean you can go overboard with it.
For instance:
This is what the Bed, Bath & Beyond website looks like at the time of writing. Above the fold, there are promotions for:
“Free shipping on orders over $39”
“Reserve online and free pick-up in store”
“Up to 50% off select Shark vacuums”
“Save $100 on the Artisan Stand Mixer”
“Up to 75% off deals for every home in your room”
And, depending on where you catch the slider, there are rotating offers there as well.
Basically, the first impression they want anyone to have is: “Never pay full price with us!” and “We have so many deals, it’s going to be impossible to decide where to get started!”
Even if the offers your website advertises don’t conflict with one another, each one still requires visitors’ attention, which is a problem. When you offer something special, they’re going to take time to read it and make sure they’re not missing out on anything.
To keep your design from distracting visitors from converting, only include one (or maybe two) promotions on a page.
3. Reduce the Number and Variety of CTAs
This typically isn’t a problem on internal pages of a website where the structure is simpler:
This is the topic;
This is the call-to-action.
The home page, however, can be more complicated.
This is a section from the lower part of the Thrive digital agency website:
The home page, in general, is way too long. While it’s important to demonstrate authority and leverage customer testimonials when possible, this page is overkill. Then, when visitors get through the bravado, they stumble upon the call-to-action section above where they can:
Get a free proposal;
Call someone;
Follow them on up to five social media platforms;
Contact them through the website;
Learn about how the agency gives back.
Read more customer reviews.
If you’ve already taken up that much time to convince visitors of your trustworthiness, then it’s time to give them one clear call-to-action. It’s up to you to decide what the priority is and then let the navigation provide other options if the primary CTA isn’t a good fit.
4. Show Only the Most Recent Content
Content marketing is an essential part of most websites. And while it might seem like a good idea to show off how much high-quality content is available all at once, too many options can trigger decision fatigue.
Just like what happens with this example from the Convince & Convert website:
In just this screenshot, you can see six pieces of lookalike content, with four more poking up from the bottom. That’s ten headlines visitors have to read to determine which one or ones is worth clicking on.
You’d be better off using a recent posts slider where only one post shows at a time. Then, the “Blog” link in the navigation or the search bar at the top of the site can help them find more content if they’re interested in exploring.
5. Include Filters and Sort Functionality for Search Results
When it comes to online search, you don’t want to take a page out of Google’s book where the responsibility is on the users to type exactly what they’re looking for and to decide how far they want to dig into the search results pages (which usually isn’t far).
Give your visitors an easy way to filter and sort their search results so that the most relevant options present themselves and everything else is weeded out.
This page has dozens of dining options split up per location. It’s not a great approach to helping diners find the perfect place to eat with so much information being thrown at them.
That said, Patina Restaurant Group does have a solution for the problem. At the top of the page, there’s a custom search filter people can use to sort by location or by occasion:
In this particular example, it takes the list of 13 Midtown restaurants I was looking at before, down to 2 options.
As you look for ways to narrow down search results for your own users, don’t be afraid to look outside the box and develop filters specific to the things they’re looking for.
Wrap-Up
I know it might seem like a good idea to give your visitors as many options as they want. It almost seems luxurious, right? But when you ask visitors to make too many decisions, you run the risk of creating friction that doesn’t need to be there.
To reduce decision fatigue, take a look at your website and identify those spots where users have to make a choice.
Do I stop and watch this video… or do I request a free consultation?
Do I look at the 24 phones available… or do I do a side-by-side comparison of the top 3 top-rated phones to see which ones have the features I need?
Do I buy the mattress I came here for… or do I spend 20 minutes reviewing the specs of the one that’s 50% off this week?
Your goal is to design a website that turns visitors into customers. But, more than that, your goal is to design a website that turns visitors into satisfied customers. Make the decision-making process simple and easy so that can happen.
Back in 2016, Vitaly Friedman asked me to design the cover and layout for a printed version of Smashing Magazine, a magazine for web designers and developers. The design I created back then for the cover and inside template layout, however, was shelved for a while as the project was paused for about two years owing to other priorities. Later, after Smashing Magazine launched its new website, a new style was born, and the design I had come up with didn’t really match anymore. So it was dropped.
Around mid 2018, the project was reignited, and I was asked to design a new layout template for the magazine. Later, around the beginning of this year, I also redesigned the cover. Now, the pilot issue of a shiny new Smashing Magazine Print has been launched.
Old cover designs created back in 2016 for Smashing Magazine Print. (Large preview)
I’m very happy they chose my initial design of the table of contents, as I was really fond of it myself. The version I created later (see the above image to the right) was very different, since I went for something closer to the current design style.
In my first design back in 2016, I could choose the typefaces, and I had total freedom over the design style. It was totally different — very geometric and more modernistic. So I was very happy to see that some of the designs were adopted in the magazine’s final layout, like the table of contents and this page design for the introduction.
Reshape to Fit the New Design Style
The challenge now was to reshape the design to fit the current style of orange-red roundness, and cartoon cats. The answer was, of course, very simple: start from scratch.
Brainstorming and Sketching
Fortunately, the theme of the first edition had been identified, which made it easier for me to think about a suitable illustration. Smashing Print #1 would be about ethics and privacy. My first idea in terms of the overall design concept was to try out something along the direction of Noma Bar‘s negative space design style. That’s easier said than done, of course, but I thought it would be awesome if I could pull it off and come up with something clever like that.
After writing down a few keywords (spying, watching, tracing), things like an eye, a keyhole and a magnifying glass came to mind as suitable subjects to use in my illustration. As for “tracing” I thought of a trail of digital data, which I saw in the shape of a perfect curvy line with ones and zeros. So I doodled a couple of basic ideas.
Inspiration Browsing
While designing this cover I did a lot of browsing around. Here are a couple of images that inspired me. The bottom-left one inspired me purely in terms of the layout. In the top-right one I really like the rounded shapes, plus its simplicity and contrasting colors. The middle-top and bottom-right ones use cute figures and a fun, vertical 2D approach. The top-left one has nice smooth shapes and colors, and I like its strong image. There were more images, for sure, but these five did it for me.
Images that inspired me for the cover design. (Large preview)
First Design
Choosing Colors
I often start a design by choosing my color palette first. The colors I picked here were chosen purely because I felt they go well together. I wasn’t sure I would use all of them, but somehow I’m used to having a color palette in circles placed above my artboard. Then I use the color picker tool to select the color fill I want to apply, or I select them all and make them global swatches.
Then I worked with the doodle of the magnifying glass as an eye in Illustrator and played around with a bit of color and composition. I thought adding some colored bars at the bottom would give the illustration an eye-catching touch. They represent digital data gathered from users, converted into analytical graphs.
I ended up with the design shown to the left. (Ignore the name of the magazine, as this was changed later on.) I wasn’t sure how much of the Smashing orange-red I should use, so I tried out a version with a lot of orange as well, even though I preferred the other one.
While I did like the result, the idea of doing something with a trail also appealed to me as a second concept. I visualized a person walking around with a smartphone leaving a literal trail of all their interactions. That trail was then picked up, and zoomed in to and saved and analyzed. At the beginning of the trail I added a magnifying glass. I would have also mixed in some graph bars, but at this point I didn’t know where or how exactly I would incorporate them into my composition, though I was already playing with the idea of using some sort of rounded shape background, combined with some subtle patterns.
Typically, I don’t sketch out my entire design. I only quickly doodle the idea and sketch out the elements I need in more detail, like the person with the phone. Once I had the concept fixed in my mind, I started out designing in Adobe Illustrator. First, I created a grid of guides to be used for the background shapes, and also for positioning the trail and figure. There were a couple of steps to get to this final design.
Final Design
Setting Up a Grid
The inspiration image at the bottom left encouraged me to go for a layout with a lot of white space at the top for the title and some white space at the bottom to add three key articles. As for the illustration itself, I envisioned using a square grid, perhaps going all the way over the spine and back.
Final cover design shown in Adobe Illustrator with grid guides and layers panel. (Large preview)
I created this square grid and placed the guides in a separate layer. Once this was set up, I started with the walking man and his smartphone, positioning him somewhere at the top-left.
Next came the curvy path. I just drew an angled line on top of the grid and used the corner widget to convert these into perfect rounded corners. I was thinking of using ones and zeros on the trail, because that’s how I visualize digital data. I turned the curvy path into a fine dotted line with a very wide gap to use as a guide to place the numbers. Once I started to place the numbers on each dot, it looked way too busy, so I decided to place one tiny dot between each number.
The next thing in the process was the creation of the background. I only had a vague idea in my head: a composition of geometrical vertical shapes with rounded corners in different colors from the palette. During this phase, I did a lot of experimenting. I moved and recolored shapes over and over. Once I had the flat colored shapes finished, I started adding in patterns on top. I tried out tiny dot grids that I randomly shaped in length and width, and applied color to. This was all a matter of intuition, to be honest, trying out something, then trying out something else, comparing both and choosing what worked best: changing color, changing the transparency mode, opacity value, and so on.
The bar graphs and icons were created in the last phase, together with the magnifying glass, and the spine and back. I just kept the idea at the back of my head, and waited till I had the man and the background shapes ready. Finally, I added in some basic icons to refer to the type of action made on the data, such as geolocation.
Back Cover
As for the back cover, I had already envisioned the background composition going all the way around, only much lighter. That’s how I came up with the idea of using a light area in the center with a couple of intersecting colored lines there.
In the final printed version, text is added in the center space, nicely framed in a rounded box with a yellow border, so the composition of the lines you see here has been removed and doesn’t match the printed version.
Spine
For the spine, I’d had the fun idea earlier of having the Smashing logo build up with each release (see image at the top of the article), but the tricky thing here is that each edition needs to have the exact same thickness or the whole concept falls apart. It wasn’t realistic since I wasn’t sure each edition would have exactly the same page count. I had to remember that the width of the spine could vary. So I came up with the idea of using some sort of pattern combinations that can vary in width, but still have the magazines connected.
The general idea was also to use a different theme pattern for each issue. The pilot issue uses fine dots in combination with a capsules pattern. In the spine I use a couple of others. The idea is to achieve a coherent composition when you place or stack them in the right order, which serves also a motivation to buy all issues. ?
Drawing Can Be Really Simple
Here I’ll describe a quick process of a simple detail of the cover illustration: the creation of the walking man’s face. I know a lot of people are convinced that drawing in Adobe Illustrator isn’t easy and that you have to use the pen tool a lot, but that’s not true. You can create beautiful illustrations using only simple shapes like rectangles and circles, combined with the corner widget, pathfinder options and align tools.
Quick Design Process Of The Walking Man
If you keep the shapes in your illustration as simple, flat 2D, drawing in Adobe Illustrator can be easy. Take the head of the walking man. I didn’t even use the pen tool. I’ve only used simple shapes: rectangles and a circle, and these steps:
With the sketch in the background, I drew a rectangle for each part of the head, and a circle for his ear.
2. Align and unite
Next, I used the align options to align the shapes correctly, and the Pathfinder > Unite option, and I also moved the top-left corner point a little to the right for his nose, using the ? key.
Then, with the Direct Selection tool (white arrow) I created the rounded corners for the hair and chin.
4. Arrange and apply color
All that remains is removing the strokes and applying a proper fill color for each shape. Last but not least, I made sure the shapes were in the correct stacking order by using the Object > Arrange options.
Chapter Illustrations
The chapter illustrations also have a bit of my handiwork. Below are the illustrations created by someone else, but the request came to improve them a little bit and make them full-page.
Chapter illustrations already created but needing to be improved. (Large preview)
And so I did. Below are the ones I delivered to Smashing Magazine and which were implemented in the final version.
Note: As you can see, I’ve incorporated the dotted pattern and modified some of the icons a little bit, but I kept the overall illustration style.
For the first chapter, there was no image, so that one was based on the style already in place.
The six chapter illustrations created from ones already in place (with the exception of chapter 1). (Large preview)
I hope you’ve enjoyed my design process story and the quick process tutorial. Don’t forget to check out the pilot issue of Smashing Magazine Print (view sample PDF). It’s a must-have for any web designer! Enjoy!
Sounds kind of like a hard problem doesn’t it? We often don’t have product shots in thousands of colors, such that we can flip out the with . Nor do we typically have products in a vector format such that we can apply SVG fills to them and such.
There is a clever way to do it though, even when your product shots are bitmap graphic files, like JPG or PNG. Kyle Wetton demonstrates, and it’s essentially:
Make a vector path that covers the area on the JPG that should change color (probably in Photoshop with the Pen Tool and exporting the vector).
Place that solid vector area exactly on top of the product JPG.
mix-blend-mode: multiply; the SVG.
Change the fill color on the SVG as desired.
Here’s the super cool demo I think it originated from:
“Data Loss” is a funny term. My brain thinks of like packet loss on the way from the server to your browser, resulting in missing content in files. Perhaps it is that on some level, but in CSS parlance, it has to do with the overflow property. Too much content for sized container + hidden overflow = data loss.
But it isn’t only overflow that can cause this “data loss.” Alignment can cause data loss too. Imagine flexbox or grid with some alignment that causes content to be pushed off the top or left edges of the screen, where scrollbars do not venture.
To prevent accidental data loss caused by alignment, CSS now has some new keywords which can be used along with the alignment properties. These are specified in the Box Alignment specification — the specification which deals with alignment across all layout methods including Grid and Flexbox. They are currently only supported in Firefox. In our example above, if we set align-items: safe center, then the final item would become aligned to start rather than forcing the content to be centered. This would prevent the data loss caused by the item being centered and therefore pushed off the side of the viewport.
At the start of a new project, Sass compilation happens in the blink of an eye. This feels great, especially when it’s paired with Browsersync, which reloads the stylesheet for us in the browser. But, as the amount of Sass grows, compilation time increases. This is far from ideal.
It can be a real pain when the compilation time creeps over one or two seconds. For me, that’s enough time to lose focus at the end of a long day. So, I would like to share a solution that’s available in a WordPress CSS Editor called Microthemer, as a proof of concept.
This is a two-part article. The first part is for the attention of Sass users. We will introduce the basic principles, performance results, and an interactive demo. The second part covers the nuts and bolts of how Microthemer makes Sass faster. And considers how to implement this as an npm package that can deliver fast, scalable Sass to a much broader community of developers.
How Microthemer compiles Sass in an instant
In some ways, this performance optimisation is simple. Microthemer just compiles less Sass code. It doesn’t intervene with Sass’ internal compilation process.
In order to feed the Sass compiler less code, Microthemer maintains an understanding of Sass entities used throughout the code base, like variables and mixins. When a selector is edited, Microthemer only compiles that single selector, plus any related selectors. Selectors are related if they make use of the same variables for instance, or one selector extends another. With this system, Sass compilation remains as fast with 3000 selectors as it does with a handful.
Performance results
With 3000 selectors, the compile time is around 0.05 seconds. It varies, of course. Sometimes it might be closer to 0.1 seconds. Other times the compilation happens as fast as 0.01 seconds (10ms).
To see for yourself, you can watch a video demonstration. Or mess around with the online Microthemer playground (see instructions below).
Online Microthemer playground
The online playground makes it easy to experiment with Microthemer yourself.
Enable support for Sass via General ? Preferences ? CSS / SCSS ? Enable SCSS.
Go to View ? full code editor ? on to add global variables, mixins, and functions.
Switch back to the main UI view (View ? full code editor ? off).
Create selectors via the Target button.
Add Sass code via the editor to the left of the Font property group.
After each change, you can see what code Microthemer included in the compile process via View ? Generated CSS ? Previous SCSS compile.
To see how this works at scale, you can import vanilla CSS from a large stylesheet into Microthemer via Packs ? Import ? CSS stylesheet (importing Sass isn’t supported – yet).
Do you want this as an npm package?
Microthemer’s selective compilation technique could also be delivered as an npm package. But the question is, do you see a need for this? Could your local Sass environment do with a speed boost? If so, please leave a comment below.
The rest of this article is aimed at those who develop tools for the community. As well as those who might be curious about how this challenge was tackled.
The Microthemer way to compile Sass
We will move on to some code examples shortly. But first, let’s consider the main application goals.
1. Compile minimal code
We want to compile the one selector being edited if it has no relationship with other selectors, or multiple selectors with related Sass entities — but no more than necessary.
2. Responsive to code changes
We want to remove any perception of waiting for Sass to compile. We also don’t want to crunch too much data between user keystrokes.
3. Equal CSS output
We want to return the same CSS a full compile would generate, but for a subset of code.
Sass examples
The following code will serve as a point of reference throughout this article. It covers all of the scenarios our selective compiler needs to handle. Such as global variables, mixin side-effects, and extended selectors.
We edit the full code editor in the same way as a regular Sass file. That’s where global variables, functions, mixins, and imports go.
View 2: Visual
The visual view has a single selector architecture. Each CSS selector is a separate UI selector. These UI selectors are organized into folders.
Because Microthemer segments individual selectors, analysis happens at a very granular scale — one selector at a time.
Here’s a quick quiz question for you. The $secondary-color variable is set to red at the top of the full code view. So why is the error button in the previous screenshots blue? Hint: it has to do with mixin side effects. More on that shortly.
Third party libraries
A huge thanks to the authors of the following JavaScript libraries Microthemer uses:
Gonzales PE – This converts Sass code to an abstract syntax tree (AST) JavaScript object.
Sass.js – This converts Sass to CSS code in the browser. It uses web workers to run the compilation on a separate thread.
Data objects
Now for the nitty gritty details. Figuring out an appropriate data structure took some trial and error. But once sorted, the application logic fell into place naturally. So we’ll start by explaining the main data stores, and then finish with a brief summary of the processing steps.
Microthemer uses four main JavaScript objects for storing application data.
projectCode: Stores all project code partitioned into discreet items for individual selectors.
projectEntities: Stores all variables, functions, mixins, extends and imports used in the project, as well as the locations of where these entities are used.
connectedEntities: Stores the connections one piece of code has with project Sass entities.
compileResources: Stores the selective compile data following a change to the code base.
projectCode
The projectCode object allows us to quickly retrieve pieces of Sass code. We then combine these pieces into a single string for compilation.
files: With Microthemer, this stores the code added to the full code view described earlier. With an npm implementation, fileswould relate to actual .sass or .scss system files.
folders: Microthemer’s UI folders that contain segmented UI selectors.
index: The order of a folder, or a selector within a folder.
itemData: The actual code for the item, explained further in the next code snippet.
The projectEntities object allows us to check which selectors use particular Sass entities.
variable, function, mixin, extend: The type of Sass entity.
E.g. primary_color: The Sass entity name. Microthemer normalizes hyphenated names because Sass uses hyphens and underscores interchangeably.
values: An array of declaration values or instances. Instances are represented by the number 1. The Gonzales PE Sass parser converts numeric declaration values to strings. So I’ve elected to use the integer 1 to flag instances.
itemDeps: An array of selectors that makes use of the Sass entity. This is explained further in the next code snippet.
relatedEntities: Our rounded mixin has a side effect of updating the global $secondary-color variable to blue, hence the blue error button. This side effect makes the rounded and $secondary-color entities co-dependent. So, when the $secondary-color variable is included, the roundedmixin should be included too, and vice versa.
The following code example shows the itemDeps for the $primary-color (primary_color) variable. The $primary-color variable is used by two forms of the .btn-success selector, including a selector inside the min-width(960px) media query.
path: Used to retrieve selector data from the projectCode object.
mediaQuery: Used when updating style nodes or writing to a CSS stylesheet.
The connectedEntities object allows us to find related pieces of code. We populate it following a change to the code base. So, if we were to remove the font-size declaration from the .btn selector, the code would change from this:
And we would store Microthemer’s analysis in the following connectedEntities object.
changed: The change analysis, which captures the removal of the toRem function.
actions: an array of user actions.
form: Declaration (e.g. $var: 18px) or instance (e.g. font-size: $var).
value: A text value for a declaration, or the integer 1 for an instance.
coDependent: Extended selectors must always compile with the extending selector, and vice versa. The relationship is co-dependent. Variables, functions, and mixins are only semi-dependent. Instances must compile with declarations, but declarations do not need to compile with instances. However, Microthemer treats them as co-dependent for the sake of simplicity. In the future, logic will be added to filter out unnecessary instances, but this has been left out for the first release.
related: the rounded mixin is related to the $secondary-color variable. It updates that variable using the global flag. The two entities are co-dependent; they should always compile together. But in our example, the .btn selector makes no use of the rounded mixin. So, the related property below is not populated with anything.
The compileResources object allows us to compile a subset of code in the correct order. In the previous section we removed the font-size declaration. The code below shows how the compileResources object would look after that change.
compileParts: An array of resources to be compiled.
path: Used to update the compiledCSS property of the relevant projectCodeitem.
sassCode: Used to build the sassString for compilation. We append a CSS comment to each piece (/*MTPART*/) . This comment is used to split the combined CSS output into the cssParts array.
sassString: A string of Sass code that compiles to CSS.
cssParts: CSS output in the form of an array. The array keys for cssParts line up with the compileParts array.
full_code: The toRem Sass entity changed and the full_code resource contains the toRem function declaration.
.btn: the selector was edited.
.btn-success: Uses @extend .btn and so it must always compile with .btn. The combined selector becomes .btn, .btn-success.
.btn-error: This also uses @extend .btn and so must be included for the same reasons as .btn-success.
Two selectors are not included because they are not related to the .btn selector.
.entry-title
.btn-success (inside the media query)
Recursive resource gathering
Aside from the data structure, the most time consuming challenge was figuring out how to pull in the right subset of Sass code. When one piece of code connects to another piece, we need to check for connections on the second piece too. There is a chain reaction. To support this, the following gatherCompileResources function is recursive.
We loop the connectedEntities object down to the level of Sass entity names.
We use recursion if a function or mixin has side effects (like updating global variables).
The checkObject function returns the value of an object at a particular depth, or false if no value exists.
The updateObject function sets the value of an object at a particular depth.
We add dependent resources to the compileParts array, using absoluteIndex as the key.
Microthemer calculates absoluteIndex by adding the folder index to the selector index. This works because folder indexes increment in hundreds, and the maximum number of selectors per folder is 40, which is fewer than one hundred.
We use recursion if resources added to the compileParts array also have co-dependent relationships.
function gatherCompileResources(compileResources, connectedEntities, projectEntities, projectCode, config){
let compileParts = compileResources.compileParts;
// reasons: changed / coDependent / related
const reasons = Object.keys(connectedEntities);
for (const reason of reasons) {
// types: variable / function / mixin / extend
const types = Object.keys(connectedEntities[reason]);
for (const type of types) {
// names: e.g. toRem / .btn / primary_color
const names = Object.keys(connectedEntities[reason][type]);
for (const name of names) {
// check side-effects for Sass entity (if not checked already)
if (!checkObject(config.relatedChecked, [type, name])){
updateObject(config.relatedChecked, [type, name], 1);
const relatedEntities = checkObject(projectEntities, [type, name, 'relatedEntities']);
if (relatedEntities){
compileParts = gatherCompileResources(
compileResources, { related: relatedEntities }, projectEntities, projectCode, config
);
}
}
// check if there are dependent pieces of code
const itemDeps = checkObject(projectEntities, [type, name, 'itemDeps']);
if (itemDeps && itemDeps.length > 0){
for (const dep of itemDeps) {
let path = dep.path,
resourceID = path.join('.');
if (!config.resourceAdded[resourceID]){
// if we have a valid resource
let resource = checkObject(projectCode, path);
if (resource){
config.resourceAdded[resourceID] = 1;
// get folder index + resource index
let absoluteIndex = getAbsoluteIndex(path);
// add compile part
compileParts[absoluteIndex] = {
sassCode: resource.sassCode,
mediaQuery: resource.mediaQuery,
path: path
};
// if resource is co-dependent, pull in others
let coDependent = getCoDependent(resource);
if (coDependent){
compileParts = gatherCompileResources(
compileResources, { coDependent: coDependent }, projectEntities, projectCode, config
);
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
return compileParts;
}
The application process
We’ve covered the technical aspects now. To see how it all ties together, let’s walk through the data processing steps.
From keystroke to style render
A user keystroke fires the textarea change event.
We convert the single selector being edited into a sassEntities object. This allows for comparison with the pre-edit Sass entities: projectCode > dataItem > sassEntities.
If any Sass entities changed:
We update projectCode > dataItem > sassEntities.
If an @extend rule changed:
We search the projectCode object to find matching selectors.
We store the path for matching selectors on the current data item: projectCode > dataItem > sassEntities > extend > target > [ path ].
We rebuild the projectEntities object by looping over the projectCode object.
We populate connectedEntities > changed with the change analysis.
If extend, variable, function, or mixin entities are present:
We populate connectedEntities > coDependent with the relevant entities.
The recursive gatherCompileResources function uses the connectedEntities object to populate the compileResources object.
We concatenate the compileResources > compileParts array into a single Sass string.
We compile the single Sass string to CSS.
We use comment dividers to split the output into an array: compileResources > cssParts. This array lines up with the compileResources > compileParts array via matching array keys.
We use resource paths to update the projectCode object with compiled CSS.
We write the CSS for a given folder or file to a style node in the document head for immediate style rendering. On the server-side, we write all CSS to a single stylesheet.
Considerations for npm
There are some extra considerations for an npm package. With a typical NodeJS development environment:
Users edit selectors as part of a larger file, rather than individually.
Sass imports are likely to play a larger role.
Segmentation of code
Microthemer’s visual view segments individual selectors. This makes parsing code to a sassEntities object super fast. Parsing whole files might be a different story, especially large ones.
Perhaps techniques exist for virtually segmenting system files? But suppose there is no way around parsing whole files. Or it just seems sensible for a first release. Maybe it’s sufficient to advise end users to keep Sass files small for best results.
Sass imports
At the time of writing, Microthemer doesn’t analyse import files. Instead, it includes all Sass imports whenever a selector makes use of any Sass entities. This is an interim first release solution that is okay in the context of Microthemer. But I believe an npm implementation should track Sass usage across all project files.
Our projectCode object already has a files property for storing file data. I propose calculating file indexes relative to the main Sass file. For instance, the file used in the first @import rule would have index: 0, the next, index: 1, and so on. We would need to scan @import rules within imported files to calculate these indexes correctly.
We would need to calculate absoluteIndex differently, too. Unlike Microthemer folders, system files can have any number of selectors. The compileParts array might need to be an object, storing an array of parts for each file. That way, we only keep track of selector indexes within a given file and then concatenate the compileParts arrays in the order of the files.
Conclusion
This article introduces a new way to compile Sass code, selectively. Near instant Sass compilation was necessary for Microthemer because it is a live CSS editor. And the word ‘live’ carries certain expectations of speed. But it may also be desirable for other environments, like Node.js. This is for Node.js and Sass users to decide, and hopefully share their thoughts in the comments below. If the demand is there, I hope an npm developer can take advantage of the points I’ve shared.
It’s hard to articulate every reason to use Jetpack for your WordPress site. It’s taken us a series of posts to unpack it because it’s capable of doing so gosh darn much — a lof of which we put to use right here on CSS-Tricks.
The thing is that Jetpack is very much an active project and keeps improving with each and every release. While we’ve covered many Jetpack features and uses over the years, it’s worth revisiting here in 2019 to compile a list of personal favorites, both classic and new.
It monitors downtime
Wouldn’t it be nice to be notified if your site crashes for some reason? Well, Jetpack can monitor your site for you and alert you if something’s gone awry. Sure, there are other services, like New Relic or Pingdom that do this as well, but how great is it to not have to integrate yet another service on another platform? That’s the benefit of using Jetpack. You’re gonna get so many other features with it already, so there’s need to look outside for a solution it already provides.
It lets people follow your blog
Let’s say you’re interested in starting a newsletter so you can send new posts to subscribers and you’re looking into services like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor to carry the lift. At the same time, you’re trying to keep costs down and would rather not pay an additional service for this ability.
Well, you guessed it, Jetpack will do that for you. All it takes is flipping on the feature and a subscribe option will be added to your post comment form. Anyone who signs up will receive a notification in their inbox each time a new post is published.
Even better, you can see all your subscribers and flip an additional toggle that allows visitors to subscribe just to follow the comments for a specific post.
It comes with a CDN
Jetpack includes a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) that optimizes and delivers all your static files for you. And that’s any static file, including images, videos, CSS and JavaScript. Yep, again, there’s really no need to look outside the box to serve the most efficient assets to your visitors and get a hefty speed boost for your site.
Speaking from a cost/value perspective, especially since this feature is available on the free Jetpack plan as well, this tops the charts.
It embeds rich media for you
Want to embed a YouTube video in your post? Or a tweet? Maybe an Instagram post or a gist? A Spotify playlist? Jetpack will embed any and all of those among many, many others with either a simple URL or a WordPress shortcode. And it works whether you’re using the Block Editor, the Classic Editor, or even a sidebar widget. It’s the easiest way to embed media in a WordPress post with having to get into iframes or touching any code.
Like the other features we’ve covered here, all it takes to enable this is the flip of a switch, on the Jetpack ? Settings ? Writing screen.
It adds tons of options to the Block Editor
The new Block Editor (aka Gutenberg) already includes a number of blocks that make editing and publishing posts more flexible and versatile than ever, but Jetpack gives it an extra dose of additional blocks to make designing page/post layouts even more awesome.
Working in the Block and Visual Editors in WordPress is great most of the time, but have you ever needed to adjust the markup of a post to get things juuuust right? WordPress has the “Text” editor as well as an HTML block, but of course, that only supports HTML.
As you can tell, we love Jetpack around here and think anyone with a WordPress site ought to give it a try. It packs so many features into a single package that you get the same benefit as using dozens of other plugins, without the constant update madness.
(This is a sponsored post.) Errors, bugs and other issues are bound to arise in web development. Even if they aren’t outright errors, clients often have feedback about how something was designed, where it was placed or how certain elements work. It’s just part of the gig.
It can be a very painful part of the gig, too.
Take this scenario, for instance:
Email #1 from client: “I can’t see the button anymore. Can you please put it back on the home page?”
Email #2 from you: “Which button are you referring to? Can you send me a screenshot?”
You try to call the client, but get their voicemail instead.
Email #3 from the client: “The button to book a demo.”
You look at the attached screenshot and see that the Book a Demo section is intact, but the button doesn’t show. You pull up the website on Chrome and Safari and see it in both browsers: a big blue button that says “Schedule Demo”. You pull it up on your iPhone and see it there, too.
Email #4 from you: “Can you tell me which device and browser you’re seeing the issue on?”
Email #5 from client: “My phone.”
You know how this chain of messages will go and it’s only going to lead to frustration on both ends. Not to mention the cost to your business every time you have to pause from work to try to interpret a bug report and then work through it.
Then, there’s the cost of bugs to your clients you have to think about. When something goes wrong after launch and your client is actively trying to send traffic to the website, a bug could hurt their sales.
When that happens, who do you think they’re going to come after?
A Pain-Free Workflow For Issue Reporting And Repairs
It doesn’t matter what the size of the bug or issue is. When it’s detected and reported, it needs to be dealt with. There are a number of reasons why.
For starters, it’s the only way you’re going to get your client to sign off on a project as complete. Plus, swift and immediate resolution of bugs leads to better relations with your client who sees how invested you are in creating an impressive (and error-free) website for their business. And, of course, the more efficiently you resolve errors, the quicker you can get back to finishing this job and moving on to others!
So, here’s what you need to do to more effectively and painlessly tackle these issues.
The first thing to do is decide who’s going to triage issues.
If you work on your own, then that responsibility is yours to own. If you work on a team, it should go to a project manager or dev lead that can manage reported issues just as effectively as they would manage the team’s workload.
This person will then be in charge of:
Monitoring for reported issues.
Adding the bugs to the queue.
Ushering them through the resolution workflow.
Resolving and closing up bug reports.
Analyzing trends and revising your processes to reduce the likelihood that recurring bugs appear again.
Once you know who will manage the process, it’s time to design your workflow and build a series of tools around it.
2. Use An Issue Resolution Workflow
Your triage manager can’t do this alone. They’re going to need a process they can closely follow to take each issue from Point A (detection) to Point B (resolution).
To ensure you’ve covered every step, use a visualization tool like Lucidchart to lay out the steps or stages of your workflow.
Here’s an example of how your flow chart might look:
An example of an issue reporting workflow built in Lucidchart. (Source: Lucidchart) (Large preview)
Let’s break it down:
You’ll start by identifying where the issue was detected and through which channel it was reported. This example doesn’t get too specific, but let’s say the new issue detected was the one mentioned before: the Book a Demo button is missing on the home page.
The next thing to do is to answer the question: “Who found it?” In most cases, this will be feedback submitted by your client from your bug-tracking software (more on that shortly).
Next, you’re going to get into the various stages your issues will go through:
An example of how to move tickets through an issue tracking system. (Source: Lucidchart) (Large preview)
This is the part of the process where the triage manager will determine how severe the issue of a missing Book a Demo button is (which is “Severe” since it will cost the client conversions). They’ll then pass it on to the developer to verify it.
Depending on how many developers or subject matter experts are available to resolve the issue, you might also want to break up this stage based on the type of bug (e.g. broken functionality vs. design updates).
Regardless, once the bug has been verified, and under what context (like if it were only on iPhone 7 or earlier), the ticket is moved to “In Progress”.
Finally, your flow chart should break out the subsequent steps for issues that can be resolved:
A sample workflow of how to resolve website issues and bugs. (Source: Lucidchart) (Large preview)
You can name these steps however you choose. In the example above, each step very specifically explains what needs to happen:
New Issue
In Progress
Test
Fix
Verify
Resolve
Close the Loop.
To simplify things, you could instead use a resolution flow like this:
New Issue
Todo
Doing
Done
Archive.
However you choose to set up your patch workflow, just make sure that the bug patch is tested and verified before you close up the ticket.
3. Give Your Users A Bug Reporting Tool
When it comes to choosing a bug reporting tool for your website, you want one that will make it easy for your team and clients to leave feedback and even easier for you to process it.
One such tool that does this well is called BugHerd.
Basically, BugHerd is a simple way for non-technical people to report issues to you visually and contextually. Since there’s no need to train users on how to get into the bug reporting tool or to use it, it’s one less thing you have to spend your time on in this process.
What’s more, BugHerd spares you the trouble of having to deal with the incessant back-and-forth that takes place when feedback is communicated verbally and out of context.
With BugHerd, though, users drop feedback onto the website just as easily as they’d leave a sticky note on your desk. What’s more, the feedback is pinned into place on the exact spot where the bug exists.
Let me show you how it works:
When you first add your client’s website to BugHerd (it’s the very first step), you’ll be asked to install the BugHerd browser extension. This is what allows BugHerd to pin the feedback bar to the website.
It looks like this:
How the BugHerd sidebar appears to clients and team members with the extension installed. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
This pinned feedback bar makes it incredibly easy for clients to leave feedback without actually altering the live website.
This is what the bug tracker pop-up looks like:
BugHerd makes error collection from clients very easy. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
As you can see, it’s a very simple form. And, really, all your clients need to do is select the element on the page that contains the bug, then enter the details. The rest can be populated by your triage manager.
As new feedback is added, comments are pinned to the page where they left it. For example:
Review all reported bugs from the BugHerd sidebar. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
You’ll also notice in the screenshot above that tasks that have been assigned a severity level are marked as such. They’re also listed from top-to-bottom on how critical they are.
On your side of things, you have a choice as to where you view your feedback. You can open the site and review the notes pinned to each page. Or you can go into the BugHerd app and review the comments from your Kanban board:
This is the BugHerd dashboard your developers and triage manager can use. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
By default, all bugs enter the Backlog to start. It’s your triage manager’s job to populate each bug with missing details, assign to a developer and move it through the steps to resolution.
That said, BugHerd takes on a lot of the more tedious work of capturing bug reports for you. For example, when you click on any of the reported bugs in your kanban board, this “Task Details” sidebar will appear:
A place to review all of the details about captured bugs. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
This panel provides extra details about the issue, shows a screenshot of where it exists on the site, and also lets you know who left the comment.
What’s more, BugHerd captures “Additional Info”:
Click on ‘Additional info’ to reveal details about the browser, OS and code. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
This way, you don’t have to worry about the client not providing you with the full context of the issue. These details tell you what device and browser they were on, how big the screen was and what color resolution they were viewing it through.
You also get a look at the code of the buggy element. If there’s something actually broken or improperly coded, you might be able to spot it from here.
All in all, BugHerd is a great tool to simplify how much everyone has to do from all sides and ensure each request is tackled in a timely manner.
4. Give Your Triage Manager A Tracking Platform
If you want to keep this workflow as simple as possible, you can use the BugHerd dashboard to track and manage your requests:
An example of the BugHerd dashboard when it’s in use. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
Your triage manager and dev team will probably want to use something to complement the bug reporting capabilities of BugHerd. But good luck asking your client to use a platform like Jira to help you manage bugs.
In that case, I’d recommend adding another tool to this workflow.
Luckily for you, BugHerd seamlessly integrates with issue tracking and helpdesk software like Jira, Zendesk and Basecamp, so you don’t have to worry about using multiple tools to manage different parts of the same process. Once the connection is made between your two platforms, any task created in BugHerd will automatically be copied to your issue resolution center.
Now, if there’s a tool your team is already using, but that BugHerd doesn’t directly integrate with, that’s okay. You can use Zapier to help you connect with even more platforms.
For example, this is how easy it is to instantly create a “zap” that copies new BugHerd tasks to your Trello cards. And it all takes place from within BugHerd!
BugHerd helps users quickly integrate other apps like Zapier and Trello. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
Once the connection is made, your triage manager can start working from the task management or issue tracking platform of its choosing. In this case, this is what happens when Zapier connects BugHerd and Trello:
This is a new task that was just created in BugHerd. (Source: BugHerd) (Large preview)
This is a new task I just created in BugHerd. Within seconds, the card was placed into the exact Trello project and list that I configured the zap for:
The BugHerd Zapier integration instantly copies new bug reports to Trello. (Source: Trello) (Large preview)
This will make your triage manager’s job much easier as they won’t be limited by the stages available in BugHerd while also still having all the same information readily at their fingertips.
5. Work In A Local Testing Platform
When bugs are reported, you don’t want to test and implement the assumed fixes on the live website. That’s too risky.
Instead, work on resolving issues from a local testing platform. This article has some great suggestions on local development tools for WordPress you can use for this.
These tools enable you to:
Quickly make a copy of your website.
Reproduce the bug with the same server conditions.
Test possible fixes until you find one that works.
Only then should you work on patching the bug on the website.
6. Always Close The Loop
Finally, it’s up to your triage manager to bring each issue to a formal close.
First, they should inform the client (or visitor) who originally reported the issue that it has been resolved. This kind of transparency and accountability will give your agency a more polished look while helping you build trust with clients who might be unnerved by discovering bugs in the first place.
Once things are closed client-side, the triage manager can then archive the bug report.
It shouldn’t end there though.
Like traditional project managers, a triage manager should regularly track trends as well as the overall severity of bugs found on their websites. The data might reveal that there’s a deeper issue at play. That way, your team can focus on resolving the underlying problem and stop spending so much time repairing the same kinds of bugs and issues.
Wrapping Up
Think about all of the ways in which issues and bugs may be reported: through a contact form, by email, over the phone, through chat or, worse, in a public forum like social media.
Now, think about all of the different people who might report these issues to you: your team, the client, a customer of your client, a person who randomly found it while looking at the website and so on.
There are just too many variables in this equation, which makes it easy to lose sight of open issues. Worse, when feedback comes through vague, subjective, or unable to account for without any context, it becomes too difficult to resolve issues completely or in a timely fashion.
With the right system of reporting, tracking and organizing feedback in place, though, you can bring order to this chaos and more effectively wipe out bugs found on your website.
There are a lot of reasons to create a marketing plan. You might be looking for outside financing to grow and expand your business — many banks and investors ask for a marketing plan as part of a larger business plan. Maybe you’re expanding your marketing team and want to give them a blueprint for how you want to grow. Or maybe you’re growing quickly and want to write down how you got here and how to keep the momentum going.
The good news is that a marketing plan isn’t nearly as complicated as many people think. While there’s no “right” way to create a marketing plan; our simple template makes the process easy.
The goal of any marketing plan is to answer some basic questions:
Who are your customers?
Who are your competitors?
What do you want your marketing to accomplish?
What kind of marketing activities can help you reach your goals?
How much money will you need for these activities?
A good marketing plan will take your answers to these questions and put them into a simple framework that makes it easy for readers to understand. It will also make it much easier for you and your team to follow the plan.
This guide will cover why a marketing plan is important and walk you through the steps of creating your own marketing plan
Crucial steps of creating a marketing plan
Write an executive summary
Identify your target audience
Write a competitive analysis
Set your marketing goals
Create a marketing strategy
Set a marketing budget
Why is a marketing plan important?
The words “marketing plan” are enough to strike fear into the hearts of even seasoned marketers. You may have a lot of great ideas, but the thought of putting them on paper can be intimidating. Don’t worry! This guide will take you step by step through the process of creating a marketing plan.
So what is a marketing plan? Basically, it’s a document that tells readers who your customers are and outlines how you’re going to get more of them. It also covers who your competitors are, what they’re doing, and how you plan on out-selling them. Finally, a marketing plan helps you lay out how much your activities will cost and put together a general budget.
Why have a marketing plan?
You’re trying to secure funding
Whether you’re looking at a traditional bank loan or raising an investment round, most financiers will want to see a plan for how you’re going to grow your business. That usually means a business plan, of which a marketing plan is an important component. Investors will look for signs that you know your business inside and out, and have a clear vision for expansion.
It’s understandable that investors might have some tough questions, since you’re asking them to trust you with a lot of their money. Being able to show that you understand your market can go a long way to winning that trust. The more specific you can get when talking about your audience and your competitors, the more likely investors will believe you’re a good bet.
However, keep in mind that a business plan and a marketing plan are not the same thing. The former covers all aspects of your business, from how you create your product to who you’ll be hiring for key roles in your company. It’s a comprehensive document that outlines operations, support, company structure, and other details. A marketing plan, on the other hand, deals specifically with how you plan on getting your product in front of (and in the hands of) your customers.
You want to expand your marketing team
When you’re trying to get a business off the ground all by yourself, or with a small team, a marketing plan seems unnecessary. After all, you know what you need to do to market your product or service. But as you grow, you’ll need to hire a marketing team, and they may not know your market, your brand, and your company as well as you do.
Putting together a comprehensive marketing plan for a new marketing team goes a long way toward making sure everyone is working to meet the same goal. It lets marketers know what they need to be doing, and gives you peace of mind because you know that your vision is being maintained.
On the other side of things, if you’re an early marketing hire, putting together a marketing plan will help you make sure that you’re on the same page as your boss. Either way, a marketing plan is essential to make sure an expanding marketing team stays aligned with the goals of the organization.
You want to collect your thoughts
Up to now, we’ve only talked about external reasons why a marketing plan is important. But the truth is that the most important reason to create a marketing plan is for yourself. Many entrepreneurs and marketers spend a lot of time working on coffee and instinct. When there’s too much to do and not enough hands to do it, a marketing plan can be the least of your worries.
But as your company continues to grow, it may be a good idea to put your thoughts down in a more formal way than you have in the past. The exercise of thinking through a marketing plan can help you refocus. It can also help you figure out exactly what has and hasn’t worked to get you where you are. That kind of insight can be critical in helping you plan your next move — making sure you do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t, or finding new business opportunities.
What’s the format of a marketing plan?
As we mentioned before, there isn’t one single correct structure for a marketing plan. In fact, it’s safe to say that there are as many marketing plan formats as there are marketing plan writers. Still, the process of writing one is a lot easier with a template that gives some structure to your thoughts, especially if this is your first marketing plan.
A good marketing format for beginners looks something like this:
Executive summary. The executive summary is a brief explanation of the marketing plan in your own words. Unlike the rest of the plan, the executive summary shouldn’t be full of jargon, technical terms, or numbers. Instead, think of it as your elevator pitch.
Audience analysis. Who are your customers? No marketing plan would be complete without a look at who you want to sell to. You should answer questions not just about who your customers are but what their motivations are and how you can reach them.
Competitive analysis. Unless you’ve invented something no one has ever seen before, you probably have competition. And even if your product is absolutely unique, your audience might have other things to spend their money on. In this section, you’ll talk about your competitors and figure out what they’re doing and what your advantage is.
Goals and objectives. Setting goals and objectives for your marketing plan is critical. Without them, you won’t be able to properly evaluate your strategy, and you won’t be able to tell if something is working.
Marketing strategy and tactics. The strategy and tactics part of your marketing plan is the meat of what you’ll be doing. It’s also where a lot of marketing plan writers make mistakes by forgetting that strategy and tactics are two different things. (We’ll cover this in more detail later.)
Marketing budget and projections. At the end of your marketing plan, figure out how much all of this is going to cost and what you think you’ll be getting for that money. All your assumptions about results and costs should be laid out here.
The good news is that if you’re considering creating a marketing plan, chances are you’re already past the hard part. You know what you want to sell, who you want to sell it to, how you’re going to produce it, and what your business model is. Compared to that, writing a marketing plan is a piece of cake.
In fact, all you need to do to start is jot down your thoughts about what you sell, who you sell it to, why people should buy from you, and how you think you can reach those people.
Don’t worry about arranging them in any specific order — we’ll help you take care of that as you work through the rest of this guide on writing a marketing plan.
Writing an executive summary
The executive summary may be the most important but poorly understood document in the business world. Everyone agrees that writing a good one is critical to success, but most people can’t agree on what should go in one.
This is especially true for a marketing plan executive summary.
There is an old saying in the marketing world: “The only time anyone will read your marketing plan is while you’re writing it.” That might be a bit of a cynical exaggeration from a career famous for its exaggerating cynics, but the principle is sound.
A marketing plan can be a very large, very dense document. In the spirit of hoping for the best and planning for the worst, you should expect that the only thing people will read is your executive summary.
What isn’t a marketing plan executive summary?
Before we get too far into how to write a marketing plan executive summary, it’s important to clear up a common misconception. An executive summary is not just a summary of your marketing plan. Nor is it an intro to or explanation of your plan.
An executive summary doesn’t just exist to provide a quick overview of things you’re going to be covering later. Instead, your executive summary should be a pointed document that recommends a course of action. Even though it comes at the beginning, you should think of the executive summary as the conclusion of your marketing plan.
Earlier, we called it your elevator pitch. Like any good elevator pitch, it isn’t complete without a very specific ask. What you ask for might vary depending on the purpose of your marketing plan. It’s entirely possible that you may need to write several different marketing plan executive summaries for the same exact marketing plan. We’ll talk about the kinds of things you can ask for later in this section.
When should you write your marketing plan executive summary?
This is another hot topic, full of disagreements and conflicting advice. Some people say you should write your marketing executive summary first, as a kind of guide to what you’ll include in your marketing plan. We fall in the opposite camp: The marketing plan executive summary should be the last thing you write.
Partly, that’s because it’s going to change depending on who’s reading it. And to some extent, it’s because you’ll need to reference specific information in the summary, and that’s more difficult if the information doesn’t exist yet.
Mostly, it’s because we believe that your conclusions should be guided by whatever you find in your research, not the other way around. Saving it for last lets you use what you put together to find the best course of action, rather than picking your direction first and then trying to justify it.
What should your marketing plan executive summary include?
Why this information is important
Before you describe what you do, who you are, or where you plan to go, you need to capture the reader’s attention. The best way to make a big impact is to start by describing the problem that you’re trying to solve with your marketing plan.
Your problem should be clear, simply written, supported by evidence, and immediately obvious as a problem. For example, “Continuing with our current marketing efforts will result in missing our yearly revenue goal by 50 percent” is a great opening problem statement. So is “Our research shows that 80 percent of our ideal customers still haven’t heard of our product.”
On the other hand, “This marketing plan will radically change the way people think about the future of our industry” is not only a bad problem statement, but it also doesn’t clearly explain what the challenge is and how the marketing plan will solve it.
Starting out with a concrete and easy-to-understand problem statement immediately informs the reader what you’re trying to address and why they should care. If you can get a reader to care about your marketing plan, you’re 50 percent of the way to accomplishing your goals.
What if you solved that problem?
The next section sets you up as the hero in this story. What if your company solves the problem you set up in the first section? The point of section two is to paint a picture of what the world looks like with the problem out of the way in as simple and straightforward a way as possible. Think of this as the result of your marketing plan working flawlessly.
Keep this section as brief as possible. You can get into who you are, what you do, and how you plan to solve the problem later. For now, it would be enough to say something like “Capturing an additional 10 percent of market share would result in new revenues of over $10,000,000.” That’s it!
Who are you, and how do you plan to solve your problem?
This is the meat of your marketing plan executive summary. In this section, explain what your company or marketing department does and what makes you different. As before, be clear, simple, and direct. This is not the time for marketing messages and bravado. Instead, focus on the things that make you different than the competition — things that make you stand out.
You can also use this section to briefly outline some of the competitor and market research you did when putting together the marketing plan. You don’t need to go into detail, because you’re going to do that later in the report.
Instead, use broad strokes to talk about the state of the market — what percentage of all available customers know about your company and buy from you? Who are your biggest competitors? What makes you stand out from them? Do the same for your target market — you want readers to see that you understand who you want to sell to, without getting overwhelmed.
When it comes time to present your solution, remember that you’re the hero. The solution needs to be something that only you and your marketing plan can do. Touch on the strengths and differentiators you highlighted in the previous paragraph, and make it clear that only you can successfully execute this solution. Use references to the information contained in the report, and arrange the solution in order of what happens first, what happens next, etc.
Spend a paragraph outlining potential risks and setbacks, and how you plan to overcome or avoid them. Be straightforward and honest — don’t try to minimize challenges, and don’t try to avoid talking about them. Instead, focus on how the strength of your marketing plan and your company makes these risks avoidable.
What do you want?
Finally, get to the point of what you would like from the reader. We talked in section one about some of the reasons you may want to write a marketing plan. The ask in your marketing executive summary should be tailored to these purposes.
For example, if your goal is to raise money, you’ll want to allocate some for the marketing budget here. If you’re writing a plan for your team, a good ask is setting specific marketing goals and objectives for them. If you’re writing a marketing business plan as a thought exercise, your ask of yourself may be a commitment to marketing time and resources.
Whatever your ask, be as specific as possible about what exactly you hope to get. Put a number on the budget, use real measurable goals, and specify the resources you’ll need. And remember that you won’t get what you didn’t ask for.
Additional notes for your marketing plan executive summary
Make it complete
Remember that there’s a chance readers will never make it past your marketing plan executive summary. Make sure that it stands on its own and accurately tells your story.
Use the rest of the report as a reference
Rather than expecting readers to go through your marketing plan page by page, think of the bulk of your plan as a supporting reference guide for your marketing executive summary. Use footnotes and references to your plan to support the statements you make.
Avoid jargon and business-speak
Even if you know who the intended audience for your marketing plan is, don’t take the chance that they won’t recognize industry jargon. Even more important, you want to engage readers. Make sure your writing is plain, clear, and to the point.
Keep it positive without going overboard
Remember that this is a story about your business solving a problem. Keep the report positive and upbeat. Focus on the upside, and reframe challenges as opportunities for you to take advantage of. But don’t go overboard. Respect your audience, and they will respect you.
While you should wait until the end of the process to write your marketing plan executive summary, it’s never too early to start thinking about it. Before you even start the marketing plan, think about the problems you want to solve and how you may be positioned to solve them. Jot down some notes on challenges you’ve faced and might face in the future.
While going through the rest of this guide, look for data that supports some of your initial notes. Also look for data that disproves them, and don’t be afraid to revise your problem, solution, or risks as you go along. In fact, the more you revise and boil down what you learn, the stronger your marketing executive summary will be.
Identifying your target audience
If you could pick any customer to walk through your door (or visit your website or give you a call), what would they look like? How old would they be? What kind of work would they do? What would their income be? If you sell to businesses, how big a business would they represent? These are some of the essential questions you’ll need to answer when figuring out your target audience.
So what is a target audience, why do you need one, and how do you go about identifying yours? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this section.
What is a target audience?
We started this section with a simple question: If you could pick anyone to be your customer, who would they be? This is the basic premise of your target audience. What does your best customer look like?
Your target audience is going to vary based on what kind of product you sell. For public-facing or consumer-oriented companies (often abbreviated as B2C for business-to-consumer) the target audience is most likely going to be an individual or group with specific characteristics or demographics. These often include
Age
Location
Income
Gender
Career
Relationship status
Hobbies and leisure activities
Keep in mind that this is just a place to get started, not a complete list. There are countless characteristics you can sort groups of people by, and some of them will be more important to you than others. We’ll discuss how to pick the best ones later on in this section.
On the other hand, if you sell products or services to other businesses (business-to-business, or B2B) you’ll be much more interested in characteristics that describe the types of companies you sell to. For B2B companies, that might include
Location or service location
Industry
Size
Public or private
For-profit or nonprofit
Revenue
Again, this is just a place to get started, not a complete list. The characteristics that matter to your business aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that are important to other businesses.
Why do you need to know your target audience?
Many business owners are conscious of how much money they spend on generating new business. It’s easy to put a price on a new ad campaign, hiring marketing staff, or hosting a promotion. It’s a lot harder to put a price on the time you spend getting new customers, but it definitely has a cost.
These two costs — time and money — are the main reasons why it’s important to identify your target audience. You have a limited supply of both, and you need to spend them both in the most effective way possible.
Knowing who your ideal customer is will help you spend your marketing and advertising dollars in the most efficient way possible. Even more important, it will keep you from wasting time on prospects who aren’t likely to buy from you.
So the short answer is, you need to identify your target audience for the same reason you need to set other business goals and objectives: It’s hard to hit a target you can’t see.
How do you define your target audience?
Now that you know what a target audience is and why you need one, it’s time to start figuring out your target audience. This process is going to be slightly different depending on whether you’re already in business or just starting out, so we’ll break the steps down based on that criterion.
If you’re already in business
The bad news is that you’re going to have to do more work than a brand-new or as-yet-unstarted business. The good news is that you probably already have a treasure trove of information on your target audience and, therefore, have a much better picture of who you want to sell to.
The first step is to go through your customer records. If you don’t keep detailed records, don’t worry — you can do your best to take down notes from what you remember. Once you have your records, or notes, it’s time to do some detective work.
Start by identifying the customers who have spent the most money with you. It’s important to note that there are two ways of looking at which customers are the most valuable. The first one is customer lifetime value, or CLV, the total amount that an individual customer spends with you — just go through and add up all of their individual orders. The second is the average order amount. Add up all of the money an individual customer has spent with you and divide by the number of orders.
There is a good reason why you want to look at both values. You may have customers who have great customer lifetime value, but who do it over a lot of small purchases. On one hand, you don’t want to miss out on great customers just because they place a lot of smaller orders and don’t register as “whales.” On the other hand, if servicing those customers requires significantly more time and resources, they may be less ideal than customers who make fewer but larger purchases.
Once you have a list of your top customers, it’s time to do a little detective work. Figure out what all of your best customers have in common. Start with the most obvious characteristics, which will vary depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C business.
There’s no right number of characteristics to have. Keep going down your list of best customers and finding common threads, but don’t force it. And be careful that you don’t inadvertently throw off results with preconceptions. It’s easy to think of your favorite customers rather than your best. Make sure that you’re following what your data tells you.
After finishing with your customer list, it’s time to move from your own records to the broader market. At this point, you should follow the process for new businesses in the next section.
If your business is new
If you don’t have any customer data yet, or you’ve already finished going through your customer list, it’s now time to look at the market as a whole.
Your first stop is to look at what your competitors are doing. Of course, they probably won’t be too eager to share their customer research with you, but you can piece things together from how they market themselves. What kind of actors do they use in their marketing images? What kind of language do they use? Where do they advertise? What other products do they sell? Write down who you think your competitors are selling to. If you have your own customer data, compare the two descriptions and see if there’s any overlap or if you missed out on something.
Next, look at your products or services. What do you sell, and what benefits do you provide to your customers? Who can make the most use of your benefits? Sometimes it’s pretty obvious — if you sell plumbing equipment, chances are your customers are plumbers. Other times, it can be more difficult — if you sell a common product that is beneficial to anyone, it can be hard to pick just a handful of target audiences. You don’t have to narrow your list down from product information alone. Compare the list of benefits to the lists you made earlier and see if anything obvious pops out.
How do you refine your target audience definition?
By now, you should have a rough idea of the kinds of people that would benefit most from your product or service, a list of who your competitors are marketing to, a list of who benefits the most from your products, and maybe even a list of your best customers.
Go through your lists, and once again look for shared characteristics. Keep in mind that you may have more than one ideal target audience. For example, if you sell clothes for teenagers, you may find that you need to market to 15–19 year olds and to their mothers.
Now it’s time to put it all together and validate your target audience or audiences. The easiest way to make sense of all the information you have collected so far is to build something marketers call a “persona.” A persona is a profile of what a typical customer in one of your target audiences looks like. It’s often helpful to create a character that fits an audience — give them a name, find a stock photo of what they would look like, and give them a short backstory to help you think about who they are and what motivates them.
Then start compiling the information you put together into a set of demographics — statistical information about your persona, like age, income, education level, etc. — and their psychographics — the personal characteristics that describe what they do and why they do it, such as their values, hobbies, attitudes, and beliefs. The final persona should tell a story about your target audience and why they might be interested in buying your product or service.
To figure out if your personas make sense as target audiences, you need to ask yourself some questions and do some research:
Is my audience big enough to support my business, or do I need to expand it?
Can this audience afford to buy from me?
Are there easy ways to engage with my audience, or will it be too difficult to reach them?
Are there any other target audiences that I may not be reaching now but that I think I can reach?
Can I convince my audience that they should purchase from my business?
Is there room in this audience for a new competitor?
If you can answer yes to all of those questions, congratulations. You now have at least one target audience to pursue. If you answer no to any of them, it might be worth it to go back to the beginning and do a second pass to see if you missed anything.
When you add your target audience to your marketing plan, include the personas you put together and any background research you may have done to validate them. Make sure you have an estimate of how many people make up each audience, how much they typically spend on products similar to yours, and how much they have spent with your business if you have that information.
Having all of this target audience information will help you develop the rest of your marketing plan and will allow you to more accurately determine which customers you should pursue and how to reach them. It will also help you with the next section, writing a competitive analysis.
Writing a competitive analysis
If you have an idea who your target audience is, you’ll be ahead of many companies, but it’s still just the first step in putting together a strong marketing plan. Once you know who you’re selling to, it’s important to figure out who else might have their attention. This is where the competitive analysis comes in.
A competitive market analysis is a critical piece of your marketing plan. It can help you better understand who you’re going up against for customers, help you determine which marketing strategies to use, and can even give you insight about ways you can improve your own products and services — or create new ones — to gain a competitive advantage.
If you’re putting together a marketing plan for outside readers, a thorough competitor analysis will help to validate your market — or prove that there’s room in the market for you. It will also help demonstrate that you have a full and thorough understanding of the business you’re in.
On its face, a competitive analysis seems like the most straightforward part of a marketing plan. Most business owners have a pretty good idea who their competitors are and what they do. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re already informally performing many of the pieces of a good competitive marketing analysis: checking out competitors’ websites, looking at their marketing materials, maybe even visiting them in person or “secret shopping” them. However, there are some key differences between a full competitive analysis and these informal activities.
Types of competitors in a competitive market analysis
For a formal analysis, you’ll want to look at a few different types of competition:
Direct competitors. Direct competitors are companies that do the same thing you do, for the same target audience, in the same way. For many business owners, this is likely who you think of when you think of the competition. They’re in the same business, sell similar or identical products, operate where you do, and can seem interchangeable to your customers.
Indirect competitors. Indirect competitors share some but not all of the characteristics of your business. They may target the same customers as you, with the same product, but operate in a different geographic area. Or they may have the same customers and operate in the same location but sell a slightly different product.
Tertiary or peripheral competitors. These are companies that don’t sell the same product or service as you, but otherwise compete for your target audience’s money. Remember that most customers have a limited discretionary budget. If they spend it elsewhere, even if it’s not on products similar to yours, it’s still less money that they have to spend on your products or services.
Potential competitors. These businesses don’t exist yet, but they could change the way your industry operates. A great example is how Uber began competing with taxi companies. It was an entirely new business model that worked in a radically new way, and it provided a service that replaced some of the need for taxis.
Say you own a pet grooming salon that specializes in high-end dog haircuts. Another groomer that operates a block away would be a direct competitor for you. A chain pet store that also offers grooming services is an indirect competitor — they offer similar services but likely don’t have too many overlapping customers.
A gourmet dog food boutique would be a peripheral competitor, since they don’t offer the same services, but if one of your customers overspends on fancy dog chow, they may cut back on the number of appointments they schedule with you. Finally, a potential competitor might be an app-based mobile grooming service that comes to pet owners’ homes to provide doggy haircuts — Uber for Poodles.
Some businesses might not seem like they have many, or any, competitors. This is especially true for new business models that simply didn’t exist before. In these cases, it’s important to focus on the last three categories.
As an example, think about being the first iPhone repair shop to open when the iPhone first came out. Indirect competitors who don’t do exactly what you do can suddenly start selling your product — a watch or stereo repair shop might suddenly start fixing phones. Peripheral competitors can still offer alternatives to your product — a rival phone company might be offering discounts on new phones for anyone that brings in a broken iPhone. And there’s always the possibility that someone can open up a new business to compete with you.
How to start a competitive analysis
Finding competitors
The easiest way to begin a competitive market analysis is to create a list with four columns: direct competitors, indirect competitors, tertiary competitors, and potential competitors. Then start listing companies that you think compete with you — either selling the same products or taking enough of your target audience’s money and attention that they can cut into your business. As you think of names, sort them into one of the four columns based on the kind of competition they represent.
Once you’ve listed all the competitors you can think of, it’s time to do some research. In the past, this would have involved sorting through local newspapers and phone books. These days, the internet has made things much easier.
A great place to start is by searching for your exact product, paired with local keywords if you have a limited operating area. Something like “dog grooming omaha” would give you a great idea of who you’re competing with. Additionally, look through review services like Yelp and Google Local, and classified ad sites like Craigslist. And if you don’t have a service area, do the same thing, but without the local keywords.
Picking your competitors
If you tried to profile and analyze all of your competitors, your competitive analysis would probably be hundreds of pages long. In the interest of saving yourself and your readers some time, it’s important to cut your competitors down to just the most important ones, which leads to the next question: How do you decide which competitors to focus on?
When narrowing down your list, remember that not all competitors are created equal. Focus primarily on your direct competitors. These are going to be the most immediate challenges you face, so they should make up the bulk of your final list.
Your indirect competitors are important but not nearly as much. You can cut this list down to just one or two key companies that have the biggest chance of stealing your customers or turning into direct competitors.
For peripheral competitors, it’s often enough to focus on a few broad product categories rather than calling out specific companies. In our dog salon example, rather than listing several high-end dog food boutiques, you could combine them all together under the heading “high-end dog food boutiques.” This is enough to help you and your readers understand the threat without spending time on individual competitors.
Likewise, for potential competitors, it’s more important to paint a picture of where future competition might come from in broad strokes rather than focus on any specific competitor — especially since most of these competitors don’t exist yet.
Narrowing down your direct competitors is a little bit more challenging but not much more if you think strategically. A good rule is to think in groups of four: biggest, best, closest, and catching up.
Biggest is the easiest one to figure out. Who is the market leader or the biggest competitor you have?
Best is more subjective. Who do you think is the best, coolest, most talked about, or most envied of your competitors?
Closest is typically the second easiest to figure out. Which of your competitors do you feel is the closest in terms of size, price, customers, etc.?
Catching up is smaller than you but gaining ground. Which of your smaller competitors is closest to catching up with you? Note, if you’re starting a new business, instead of catching up to you, consider which newcomer to the industry has gained the most ground the quickest.
Go through your list of direct competitors and pick out one for each category. These companies will be the focus of your competitive analysis.
How to write a competitive analysis
Now that you have a good list of competitors, it’s time to actually do the analysis and put it all down in a structured way. There are hundreds of ways to do this, but the one that combines the most information with the most straightforward package is something called a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for quickly and efficiently assessing businesses, both your own and those of competitors. You should perform one for each of the competitors you selected earlier.
The SWOT analysis is often broken down into a grid, or matrix, along two major categories. Strengths and weaknesses represent internal factors — characteristics of a specific business. Threats and opportunities are external factors — characteristics of the business environment.
Strengths
What is your competitor really good at? Do they have a reputation for any specific thing or things? This can be products, services, location, or the way they conduct business. Maybe one of your competitors has a fantastic store on a busy shopping street, or they are well known for their professionalism and timeliness.
Strengths can also be resources that a competitor has or strategic differences that make them stand out. If a competitor has a patent on a product similar to yours, that is a strength. Or perhaps they just received a large investment so they have capital to improve, expand, or spend on marketing.
Finally, pay especially close attention to their marketing strengths. Do they have a fantastic blog or an incredibly engaging Facebook page? Maybe they’re geniuses at coming up with Instagram or Twitter hashtags.
Weaknesses
What are your competitors’ weaknesses? Just like strengths above, this can be anything about their business that represents an area where they are weak or perform poorly.
A great place to look for weaknesses is to look at reviews and customer feedback. Are there any particular negatives that customers bring up again and again? Do they have poor service or limited selection? Do they have limited hours or an inconvenient location?
Opportunities
What environmental factors related to your competitor represent the biggest opportunities for you? For example, maybe you’ve noticed a particular breed of dog becoming popular in your area that your competitor doesn’t work with. Or maybe your competitor doesn’t have an Instagram account, which is where most of your customers find you.
Think about specific ways that you can take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses, and make notes about tactics and strategies that you can use to exploit those weaknesses in this section.
Threats
This section is like opportunities but in reverse. What specific threats does your competitor represent for you? Think about how your competitor can use their strengths to threaten your business, and come up with strategies to counteract them.
If they have more money to spend on marketing, for example, think of ways that you can reach more people while spending less. Or if they offer products and services you don’t, consider whether you can start offering some of those products and/or services.
A SWOT analysis is a good way to organize a lot of different ideas about a business in one easy-to-read and -present manner. It can serve as the bulk of your competitive analysis. Before you finish looking at each one, make sure you’ve answered at least these basic questions:
How big is the competitor, both in terms of sales and locations/service area?
How similar are their product offerings to your own?
What is good about their products? What isn’t good?
How much of the market do they have — what is their market share?
How are they priced relative to you?
How do they generate sales, and what does their sales process look like?
Do they do a lot of marketing and what kind?
What sales and marketing channels are they active in?
How do they gain and lose business?
Are they growing or shrinking?
How similar is their target audience to your target audience?
If you have an answer for each of these for all of your selected competitors, then your work is largely done. You now have a competitive analysis and better understand the competitive landscape where you will be doing business.
Remember that this isn’t a one-time process. You’ll need to revisit your competitive analysis frequently to make sure that nothing has changed. You might also want to run a SWOT analysis whenever you notice a new competitor pop up, just to be on the safe side.
Setting your marketing goals
There’s an old saying: You miss 100 percent of the targets you don’t aim for. This is especially true for marketing goals and objectives. Without setting some specific goals, objectives, and targets, it will be hard to figure out just how well your marketing plan actually performed. That, in turn, will make it hard to know whether you need to change it or keep it the same.
You may have noticed that we talk about goals, objectives, and targets as three separate things above. That’s because while they may be interchangeable in casual English, in business and marketing, they have three distinct definitions.
Goals. Goals are things your whole business or organization wants to accomplish over a long timeframe. Goals are typically broader and less specific than other targets and have longer timelines to completion.
Objectives. Objectives are things that individual departments want to accomplish to help achieve organizational goals. They are much narrower and more specific than goals and are generally accomplished in the medium term.
Targets. Target is a broad term that can contain goals, objectives, or smaller units down to the individual employee. A target is just a specific thing that you want someone to achieve.
These terms should help you decide what kinds of marketing goals and objectives you need to set in your marketing plan. Keeping track of the different terms can be confusing, but just remember that goals are made up of objectives, and both are a kind of target.
The SMART framework for goals and objectives
Whether you’re setting goals, objectives, or targets, they should be SMART. The SMART framework allows you to set smarter, more meaningful goals and objectives for your marketing.
Specific. Is your goal clear, concise, and to the point? You want it to be as specific as appropriate to the level it’s set at and avoid any vagueness or uncertainty. A good, specific goal answers what needs to be achieved, who needs to achieve it, why it needs to be achieved, and when it needs to be achieved.
Example: In order to compete against Large Doggy Grooming, Small Doggy Grooming will need to expand to three locations by the end of the next fiscal year.
rather than We need to expand business to compete.
Measurable. The goal needs to be tied to a specific metric that can be quantified. In other words, the goal needs to be something you can measure, so that you can check your results and know when you’ve accomplished the goal.
Example: Sales need to increase to $5,000,000.
rather than The sales team needs to close more business.
Achievable. Setting goals that are impossible to achieve not only doesn’t help your business, it can actually hurt morale and productivity. A goal needs to be something that you can realistically accomplish with the resources you have.
Example: Our goal is to be the largest provider of doggy grooming services in Small Town, USA within five years.
rather thanWe will become the most well-known doggy groomer in the country by the end of the year.
Relevant. This may seem like common sense, but it’s important for your goals to be applicable to your business. They should have a real impact on your company, rather than being vanity goals, or goals that aren’t tied to business results.
Example: Small Doggy Grooming will win 50 percent of the local dog grooming market share.
rather thanSmall Doggy Grooming will have the most Instagram followers of any dog grooming salon.
Timely. There must be a definite time period in which the goal needs to be accomplished. You need a specific start and end date, so that you can accurately measure your success.
Example: Small Doggy Grooming will grow by 100 percent by the end of the next fiscal year.
rather than Small Doggy Grooming will grow by 100 percent.
Bad goals are almost as bad for a business as no goals at all. The SMART goal framework will help you make sure that the marketing goals and objectives you set actually help your business and help you constantly improve your marketing.
Setting marketing goals
As we mentioned, goals are broad, long-term targets. When we say long-term, we mean something that takes longer than a year to accomplish. Typically, marketing objectives will be set for one year out, three years out, and five years out. Particularly ambitious planners can shoot for longer than five years, but we don’t recommend it. Five years is a very long time in the life of an organization, and being specific about something that far away can be difficult, which would mean you can’t set SMART goals.
Remember that goals are the highest level of target, so you don’t want to get too bogged down in the fine details. You should set marketing goals that significantly affect the operations of your business — things like overall sales, market share, and expansion plans.
Setting marketing objectives
Marketing objectives, on the other hand, are short- to medium-term targets. These are things that you can accomplish in the next quarter to the next year. They are a much lower level than your marketing goals, and in fact it’s a good idea to tie specific objectives to specific goals.
Marketing goals are great for setting targets for specific strategies, tactics, or channels. If one of your strategies is to grow your social media presence, some great objectives would be the number of new customers you want to reach on each specific channel every quarter. Or if one of your goals is to expand to more locations, you can have objectives for identifying new space and preparing for the opening.
Formatting your marketing goals and objectives
There isn’t one standard format for presenting goals and objectives in your marketing plan, as the best way to format them depends on the specifics of each goal or objective. If you’re talking about sales or profit, for example, a bar or line chart might be the right way to show where you are and where you want to be. If you’re expanding, a map with expansion plans could be the best way.
One standard tip for formatting your marketing goals and objectives, though, is to group objectives underneath a specific goal and write out the goals and objectives clearly and concisely.
You should also try to tie your goals and objectives to the competitive analysis and target audience selection you did in earlier sections.
Marketing goals and objectives example
Goal: After analyzing our competition, Small Doggy Groomer has learned that we have a large potential customer base that is not currently being served in Fancy Suburb of Small Town, USA. The demographics for Fancy Suburb are a perfect match for our target audience, and our biggest competitor, Large Doggy Groomer, is not located within easy driving distance.
To take advantage of this opportunity, Small Doggy Groomer will open a new location on Main Street of Fancy Suburb by the end of the year and a second location on Large Boulevard by the end of next year. Within three years, we will expand to four locations, with the final location to be determined in year two.
Objectives:
By the end of the next quarter, our marketing team will locate a suitable location that has good visibility from Main Street, costs less than $10,000 per month, and has large windows we can advertise in.
Within eight months, we will secure a location and begin the build-out process for matching our current store downtown.
Within nine months, we will begin a marketing campaign that will reach at least half of the households in Fancy Suburb to build excitement for our grand opening.
Within 12 months, we will open the new location.
Goal: Social media is clearly an important way for our customers to share images of their dogs and find cute dogs to look at. However, our competitors are not active on social media, and we see a tremendous opportunity to win new business through this channel. By the end of this fiscal year, we will grow the number of customers who find us on social media to 50 per month.
Objectives:
By the end of this quarter, our marketing team will identify the three most important channels for our social media strategy and present a detailed set of processes for how to engage on each one.
Within four months we will launch our social media presence across the three channels identified by our marketing department.
Within nine months, we will grow our social media presence to 1,000 interactions per channel per month.
These goals are great because they use the research you put together in the previous sections and are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Each goal and objective answers the questions who, what, when, and why. All that’s left now is the how, which we will cover in the next section on creating a marketing strategy.
Creating a marketing strategy
You’ve done the research on your customers and your competitors. You’ve planned and written out some marketing goals. At this point you should have a pretty good idea where you want to go, what kind of obstacles you’ll need to overcome to get there, and who you’ll need to attract along the way. Now it’s time to plan how you’ll actually accomplish your goals.
Quite simply, a marketing strategy is the “how” of growing your business. It provides information about what makes your business stand out in the marketplace and how you’ll use those strengths to win new business. The plan also lists the marketing activities you’ll be performing to grow your business.
Having a marketing strategy is important for the same reason that having marketing goals is important. Without a clear idea of what you plan to do, it will be impossible to evaluate how effective your marketing plan actually is. Writing down the actual activities you or your marketing team will be performing allows you to regularly review how well those actions are working, and it gives you a base from which to expand or change your marketing strategy in a systematic way.
A marketing strategy will also allow you to figure out the financial needs of your marketing plan. Writing out each activity and putting a rough dollar amount next to each is the simplest way to start your marketing plan budget — something we’ll discuss more in the next section.
A complete marketing strategy consists of four parts:
Marketing positioning: an explanation of your company’s differentiators and competitive advantages and why they matter
Major marketing campaigns: any large or long-term initiatives you plan to run over the period covered by your marketing plan
Marketing tactics: an outline covering the specific activities you plan on performing to meet your marketing goals
Marketing calendar: dates for any marketing initiatives or campaigns you plan to run, along with any other dates you feel may be important (e.g., new store openings, new product launches, etc.)
Marketing positioning
Your market positioning tells the world who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you are better at it than anyone else. It’s usually summed up in a single statement, the positioning statement. Use all of the insights you gained while researching for earlier sections to come up with a short “elevator pitch”-type statement that sums up your company.
For [insert Target Market], the [insert Brand] is the [insert Point of Differentiation] among all [insert Frame of Reference] because [insert Reason to Believe].
The point of differentiation should clearly highlight how you’re different and better than competitors. The frame of reference is your market — for example, “airlines” or “small town” or “USA pet groomers.” And the reason to believe is a piece of supporting evidence that drives the point home.
Getting your positioning statement just right can seem like an impossible task. Even long-term marketers often require quite a few rounds of revision before they’re happy with it. The most important thing is that you have one and that it’s good enough to convey the meat of who you are and what you do. You can always refine your positioning later, but it’s important to have a strong focus.
Major marketing campaigns
A marketing campaign is an organized, ongoing, medium- to long-term set of marketing activities focused on a common theme. Think Geico’s “So Easy a Caveman Could Do It” or Hotels.com’s “Captain Obvious.” The idea of a campaign is to create a memorable experience around your brand by repeating the same messaging over a significant period of time.
Campaigns can be linked by characters or themes, or they can be linked by goals. That is, you can have a campaign like “Captain Obvious” where different sales messages are linked by a common story. Or you can have different stories and messaging linked around a common marketing goal — like a campaign that uses different messages to drive product demos.
There’s no “right” length of time to run a campaign, and no “right” number of campaigns to run over the course of a year. A good rule, though, is to have a separate campaign for every one of your major marketing objectives, plus additional campaigns as needed for any major events like new products, location openings, or major holidays.
Marketing tactics
Tactics are the smallest unit of a marketing strategy. They tell readers of your marketing plan what specific things you’ll be doing on a daily basis. Tactics can include things like posting on social media, sending out emails, advertising in the local newspaper, or other “marketing things you do.”
You don’t need to get too detailed about the tactics you present. For example, if you plan to focus on social media marketing, you don’t need a full breakdown of how often you’re going to post on Instagram. Instead, think about each of the tactics you plan on using as a percentage of your total marketing time. As an example, you can say you’ll spend 25 percent of your time on social media, 15 percent on direct mail, 15 percent on email marketing, 10 percent on web design, and 35 percent on campaigns and live events. Alternatively, instead of thinking in terms of time, you can think in terms of budget.
What you do want to get detailed with is the review of what each tactic will consist of. While developing your marketing strategy, remember that not everyone who reads your marketing plan will be an expert marketer. If you say you’ll be using social media as a tactic, explain which platforms you’ll use, what kinds of content you’ll post, whether you’ll use free posts or pay for promotion, and what you hope to accomplish with your posts.
That last piece is an especially important part of developing your marketing strategy. Every tactic you add needs to be tied to a specific goal, with specific measurable outcomes you hope to accomplish (look back at our section on setting goals if you need help). As we mentioned earlier, one of the most important reasons for developing a marketing strategy is to be able to evaluate how well your marketing is working. Without tangible, measurable goals, you can’t do that.
Marketing calendar
Finally, you’ll need to know when your campaigns and tactics will run, so you can properly plan for them. This is where the marketing calendar comes in. Depending on the business you’re in, it can be as exact as a daily calendar or as broad as a quarterly plan. For most companies, however, breaking things down to the month will be enough.
Figure out which months which activities will take place, and show them visually on a calendar. In addition, make sure that you include any major holidays that impact your business, as well as major business events like conferences, store openings, or even the birthdays of major clients.
How to develop a marketing strategy
Now that you know what a marketing strategy is, it’s time to put one together. You’re going to be relying heavily on your goals and objectives as well as your competitive analysis and target audience. You’re going to put together everything you’ve gathered so far to predict the future.
The first place to start is with your marketing goals and objectives. Ask yourself what smaller goals you need to accomplish in order to hit your larger goals. You should have already done some of this when building out your goals and objectives section, but this is your chance to get really granular. If your goal is to increase internet orders by 50 percent, and you think that a good chunk of that should come from social, you need to figure out how many social visits you need to support that growth and how many of those visits need to turn into customers.
For inspiration, look to what your competitors are doing. Focus on what they’re doing best and what they’re doing worst. The former category should act as inspiration — figure out what your best competitors are doing well and see if that could be applied to your business. The latter category, your competitors’ biggest weaknesses, are your opportunities — what do your competitors do poorly that you think you can do really well?
As in other sections, the best place to begin creating a marketing strategy is to start putting some thoughts down on paper. Once you have a good list of campaigns, tactics, and thoughts about your positioning, put on your customer goggles. Look at your ideas from the perspective of someone in your target audience, and ask, “Would this reach me? Would I be swayed by this?”
Collect your thoughts into groups based on shared themes and shared objectives. This is how you’ll build your marketing strategy — as groups of tactics compiled into campaigns, backed up with goals and objectives that are tied to each individual group and to your high-level marketing objectives.
Setting a marketing budget
Congratulations — you’re almost done putting together your marketing plan, so you’re done with the hard part. You’ve identified your target audience, analyzed your competition, set goals and objectives, and written a marketing strategy. All that’s left to complete your marketing plan is setting a marketing budget.
Creating a marketing budget is nothing more than looking at your marketing strategy and adding prices to all of the activities. Some of these will be very straightforward, and some less so.
How much should your marketing budget be?
The first step in creating your marketing budget is figuring out how much you want to spend on all of your marketing for the year. The best approach is to start with a standard percentage of your revenue. For businesses under $5 million a year, the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends about 7–8 percent of your gross revenue. For larger businesses, 10–15 percent, or sometimes even higher, might be the norm, but starting with the lower percentage is a safer bet if this is your first marketing budget.
It’s great to say you should be spending 7–8 percent of your revenue on marketing, but there’s a big gap between theory and reality. In reality, many businesses have different needs that can change this number. B2B companies might have different needs than B2C companies. Larger businesses might have more cash on hand than smaller ones. You need to evaluate your specific business needs and adjust the number until it makes sense in the context of your business.
Marketing budget breakdown
Once you have a number for your overall budget, you need to break it down further to make sense of how much you’ll be spending where. A good marketing budget template will give readers enough details so that they know where your marketing budget will be going but not so much that you overwhelm them with information.
Before you do that, however, it’s important to remember that a marketing budget isn’t just the money you spend on advertising campaigns and conferences. Your marketing budget should also include
Salaries and benefits. Instagram photos don’t post themselves, and someone is going to have to stand at conference booths to hand out samples. If you already have a marketing team, or you do it yourself, it’s easy to figure out how much of your marketing budget should go to staff. If you don’t have a marketing team, or if you’re seriously expanding your marketing efforts, you need to identify how many new employees you need to bring in and how much you’ll be paying them before you spend the rest of the marketing budget.
Coupons, samples, and giveaways. Most people remember to account for giveaways like branded t-shirts and frisbees (sometimes called “swag”). A lot of people forget to account for samples, coupons, discounts, and other “free” items they pass out to get customers. Remember that in the grand scheme of things, every dollar you give away has to come from somewhere, and even a free product isn’t really free. Consider the impact of this kind of spending on your revenue and include it in your marketing budget.
Once you list those items in separate categories, it’s time to actually create your budget. The most common way to write out a budget is to break it down into months and by buckets of activities. These can vary from business to business, but typically include
Campaigns
Paid advertising
Software and tools
Content
Events
Public relations
Branding and brand building
Miscellaneous
Under each category, you should have a few subcategories to present a better view. For paid advertising, for example, you might have
Facebook ads
Facebook promoted posts
Instagram ads
Google Adwords
Local newspaper ads
Dog Fancy magazine ads
Don’t worry if you aren’t sure what category to put a sub-category in. The most important part of creating a marketing budget is understanding where your marketing dollars are being spent, not making sure you have everything categorized perfectly.
Fill out the budget with the amounts you plan to spend by month, and refer back to your marketing calendar to make sure that you’re allocating enough resources at every point of the year. Remember that the point is not to spread the money out evenly across the whole year. The point is to spend your marketing budget wisely, in the right place at the right time.
It’s often helpful to keep a second spreadsheet of how much you actually spend, broken down by the same categories as your projected budget. That way, at the end of the year you can review and make adjustments for the following year if you budgeted too much some months and not enough others.
Remember to also keep a master column that keeps track of your total spending for the year, both projected and actual. It’s OK to go over your budget, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize your business, but you want to know when you go over and by how much.
And that’s it. With your marketing budget finished, you’re now done putting together a marketing plan. If you saved your executive summary for last, now is where you go back through your plan, gather your thoughts, and knock it out of the park. If you did the executive summary earlier in the process, you’re home free and can kick your feet up and relax. Congratulations — you now have a fantastic marketing plan, or at least all of the tools you’ll need to make one.
Launching a nonprofit organization can be exciting. But the excitement often goes hand in hand with a lot of hard work and challenges in figuring out the best way to achieve your goals.
On the surface, things may seem simple. You’ve probably already identified some sort of need; that’s what often motivates people to start a nonprofit in the first place.
You also may have some experience working to meet that need in various volunteer roles, which feeds into your passion and gives you some idea of what the work looks like. Now, all you have to do is secure funding, formalize your work processes, and start operating as a nonprofit.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape involved in launching a nonprofit. You’ll also have to deal with competition. You may not be the only one trying to meet a key need, and that’ll leave you chasing after grants, funding, and volunteer attention with other nonprofits in your region.
In practice, starting a nonprofit begins with building a strong vision for what the organization will do and how it will accomplish it. From there, you can move into formal matters of incorporation and building your organization. Of course, it’s important to understand what a nonprofit is.
What is a nonprofit organization?
A nonprofit is an organization that operates to meet a specific need or further the goals of its members as opposed to generating revenue. There are nuances in terms of the types of nonprofits, which we’ll get into later.
Don’t let the complexity of launching a nonprofit dissuade you from the work you want to do. In many ways, all the boxes you have to check to start your organization can help you refine and define your vision, giving you a stronger foundation to grow over time. The key is to be prepared for the work that’s on the horizon.
That’s what this guide is all about: giving you a deep look at what you’ll need to do to not only get your nonprofit off the ground, but also to create a foundation that will allow for consistent, sustainable progress.
Read on to learn about how to start a nonprofit organization
Defining your identity. It’s important to understand exactly what your mission and vision are if you want to maintain focus as your organization grows and changes.
Addressing incorporation. There are a variety of formal procedures you’ll need to go through to achieve nonprofit status.
Figuring out your structure. Creating bylaws and establishing a working structure is key to maintaining governance and taking full advantage of your opportunities.
Moving into early operations. Planning for how you want your nonprofit to operate is vital in getting started on the right foot, particularly when it comes to solidifying your presence in the community.
Supporting day-to-day work. Developing strategies to support your everyday processes is vital in ensuring you can function efficiently once the organization is up and running.
Setting a pathway for growth. Once your organization is fully functioning, the next step is to create a roadmap for growing your nonprofit.
There’s a lot to think about, but don’t let that hold you back. Do your homework, and you’ll be prepared to start your nonprofit and transform your community.
Defining your identity
Finding success as a nonprofit begins with having a strong identity. Chances are you’ll hear a lot of good, interesting ideas about what you can do at any given time. But how do you determine which ideas are best?
This is where defining your identity is critical. When you have a strong mission and vision, you can test ideas against your core goals and more easily determine the best ways to move forward.
Of course, there’s more to this than the ability to determine the best ideas. A strong idea of what the organization stands for echoes across everything from marketing and fundraising to hiring strategies and incorporation. At the start, you’ll need to determine whether to operate as a nonprofit or a not-for-profit organization.
Nonprofit vs Not-for-profit
These two terms are often used interchangeably. In practice, the difference between nonprofit and not-for-profit is fairly small, but it is integral to how an organization operates.
A nonprofit is generally an organization that doesn’t use any of its fundraised income to pay its staff. That doesn’t mean you can’t pay employees or offer perks to volunteers; you just need to use alternative funding sources so fundraised money is used entirely for the goal of the nonprofit. Not-for-profit entities can use excess fundraised money to pay their staff. Beyond this major point of distinction, the two organization types are extremely similar.
Determining how you want to operate is key at the early stages of the business. This guide focuses on nonprofits, but much of the guidance is valuable to both types of organizations.
In practice, the distinction often boils down to a simple concept: Nonprofit organizations tend to serve either their members or their communities. Not-for-profit status is used for a wider range of purposes. Nonprofits can receive some special tax exemptions if they are religious, charitable, or educational entities. We’ll provide more details on tax status later on.
For more information on the differences between nonprofits and not-for-profits, check out this BizFluent article. Assuming you’ve decided to function as a nonprofit, here are some key issues you’ll want to consider to refine your identity as an organization.
Identify mission, vision, and values
Why are you starting this nonprofit? Your answer to that question may seem like enough to get your organization started, and sometimes it is.
But over time, you’re going to be faced with a variety of difficult decisions about how you want to move forward. Taking the time to craft a mission statement, develop a vision for the organization’s future, and determine your core values can serve as a guiding force as your nonprofit grows and evolves.
Before developing your mission, vision, and values, you should do some serious market research and analysis. You’re probably starting this nonprofit for a specific reason. Maybe you’ve noticed a need in the community or have a cause you’re particularly passionate about. This research lets you gather data and develop concrete ideas that take your initial goals and build them into a basis for your nonprofit.
To analyze your market effectively, you should
Meet with local community leaders to discuss the needs of your community, including those that may not be entirely relevant to your goals, to better understand what people are looking for from nonprofits in the area
Identify local and regional influencers you hope to work with and seek out their perspectives on the needs and trends that may impact your nonprofit
Search for studies and market research from larger nonprofit entities or government agencies to help you see the big picture surrounding the issues you hope to address with your organization
Engage in volunteer work in a variety of settings and network with other nonprofit leaders to see how different organizations operate and assess the kinds of challenges and opportunities you’ll face
Identify the primary demographics you expect your organization to interact with and begin developing relationships with relevant individuals so you can get a stronger idea of what they need
Doing this type of deep market research that blends big-picture industry analysis with local relationship building can help you identify both short- and long-term needs that your nonprofit can help with. Once you’ve done your research, you can use that knowledge to
Develop your mission statement. Work to refine the primary goal and purpose of your organization into a single, concise statement that is both actionable and strategically informative. A mission statement can serve as a measuring stick that you use to assess opportunities and evaluate if they’re a fit for what you’re trying to achieve. Check out these examples of great mission statements from other nonprofits for some inspiration.
Solidify your vision. Your vision can encompass elements of your mission, but it should be more forward thinking. In essence, imagine what you want your nonprofit to create — a safe space for an at-risk community group, a cultural center, a volunteer hub, whatever your ideal is — and turn that image into a concrete vision for what your nonprofit should look like.
Define your values. How do you want to function as you achieve your mission and bring about your vision? Defining values helps you understand what to prioritize and how to do so by tying ideas and strategies to the ideals that underpin your organization. A strong values system can inform everything from how you interact with employees or volunteers to the methods you use for fundraising.
It can be tempting to skip some of this work, thinking that your initial ideas are enough to drive you through the startup phase. But doing so can introduce considerable risk because you’ll need to make many important decisions that have a long-term impact on your organization.
If you don’t have a clear understanding of your mission, vision, and values, you could end up making choices you’ll regret later. What’s more, having a strong idea serves as a great starting point for a nonprofit, but putting yourself in the best position for success depends on refining that idea to fit the needs of your community. You can’t do that until you’ve completed the background work that goes into determining your identity.
Analyze demographics
You will complete some of this work as you perform market research, but this stage of developing your business is a natural time to do a deep dive into your local demographics. For example, if you’re opening a museum with exhibits that you believe will attract children, you’ll want to answer the following questions:
How many schools are in the area, and what kind of budget do they have for field trips?
How many families are in your community, and what are their financial backgrounds? (You don’t want to price out your audience, but you also want to charge enough to sustain operations.)
What kind of tourist trade is done in the region, and what are the demographics of those out-of-town visitors?
These are just a few examples of demographic data you’ll want for such a museum. This guidance applies to any sort of nonprofit. It’s vital to ensure there will be an adequate audience for your services to sustain operations.
If you’re trying to start a new trend, you’ll need a critical mass of excited people to champion the idea. If you’re trying to meet a key need, you’ll need to ensure your organization is sized appropriately to serve the population you’re reaching.
Demographic research is vital in refining your mission, vision, and values, but it’s also important in making practical decisions about staffing, facility size, and how to recruit volunteers in the most effective ways possible.
Develop your brand identity
Up to this point, most of this advice has been internally focused — how are you defining your organization relative to what’s happening in your community and the demographics you’re serving? But all of this work should evolve to inform how others see you.
This is where branding comes into play. When you have your mission, vision, and values, you’ll need to develop strategies that communicate those goals to the community.
Effective branding can
Create awareness in the community, both for potential volunteers and for those you hope to serve
Give your organization a sense of professionalism and legitimacy, which is not only helpful for advertising, but also when you want to apply for grants or raise money
Ensure that the groups you serve have a clear understanding of what you offer
Successful branding is about more than creating a logo and some guidelines for your visual and writing style. Those things are important, but they’re the outward result of branding.
Internally, you want to make sure all stakeholders in your nonprofit have a clear understanding of what you stand for and why. They should all be on the same page about your goals and priorities so they can portray a consistent brand identity to those they interact with.
In practice, branding is both an exercise in building awareness and in crafting a narrative around your nonprofit. When you start with a strong mission, vision, and values, you can use that information to craft a brand identity that ensures people understand what your organization stands for.
At this point, you know what you want your nonprofit to be and the values that will guide it. That’s a great starting point to move into exploring the types of nonprofits and formalizing your organization.
Formal incorporation is just the beginning of this process; you’ll also need to think about everything from tax exemption to creating a board and dealing with licenses. Here’s a rundown of what you need to deal with in establishing your nonprofit as a formal organization.
Getting incorporated
Achieving incorporation can be fairly straightforward, but there are a few complexities to consider along the way. In the U.S., incorporation is a six-step process in which you choose a name for your organization, appoint a board, determine your legal structure, file incorporation paperwork, apply for tax exemption, and get the required licenses.
Some of these steps are simple enough. Choosing a name is just a matter of preference, but you may also need to comply with some state laws for naming. Filing paperwork is a clerical act you’ll need to complete before incorporation.
But even for these straightforward steps, it’s a good general rule to connect with whatever government agency oversees nonprofits in your state early on to ensure you’re complying with best practices. While federal issues do come up in incorporation, particularly when it comes to taxation, many of the more nuanced issues are handled by the state.
Let’s explore some of the more complex issues that come up during incorporation.
Creating a board
Who will have decision-making authority for your nonprofit? Your board will ultimately be responsible for regulatory compliance, strategic decision-making, supporting everyday operations, making hires, and a wide range of similar tasks. In some cases, you may be able to do much of that work yourself or with one or two employees while your board takes on more of an advisory role. It’s up to you to determine which you’d prefer.
And that’s one of the first decisions you should make: Do you need a board to be a hands-on supporting group that guides your business, or do you want the board to consult, advise, and provide some leadership while you work with employees to handle the majority of operations?
Answering this question is a key first step because you can’t really recruit effectively until you have the answer. Anyone you ask to be part of the board will need to know what’s expected from the start, so you should begin by identifying the role you want your board to play in the nonprofit. Once you have a strong vision, there are many places you can look for board members. A few options include
Friends and family members who share your vision for addressing the need your nonprofit meets
Industry stakeholders or influencers who may want to speak to what your nonprofit does; for example, if you’re starting a nonprofit as a charitable organization for a region, you may want to recruit board members who are leaders in local bodies that serve the community you’re targeting at the regional level
Members of your local chamber of commerce or similar community groups who have relevant experience and passions
These are just a few sources you can turn to for board members, but regardless of where you find leaders to work with, there are a few skill sets that you’ll inevitably depend on. You should look for board members who can
Provide financial expertise to manage your funds, advise on trusts, and recommend best practices for fiscal compliance and fundraising
Offer strategic thinking and thought leadership to help refine your vision
Speak to nuanced issues specific to the groups you’re trying to serve, bringing experience and expertise to your board
Invest time and energy into the work you’re doing (you don’t want absentee board members holding you back)
Take notes and handle the clerical duties that are needed to both maintain best practices and comply with regulations for reporting to federal or state agencies
You probably won’t be able to find one person who can do all of these things, but networking and strategic recruiting for your board can put you in a strong position to create the board you need.
Determining your legal structure
There are various types of nonprofits. A nonprofit can operate as a trust, a corporation, or an association. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service defines these terms as follows:
A trust is typically used when one person owns a certain property and is responsible for using it to benefit someone else. For example, someone who inherits a large amount of money may turn those funds into a trust to give scholarships to at-risk youth. A nonprofit trust would then have a board responsible for managing the scholarship process, determining how to distribute funds, and tackling related tasks.
A corporation is an organization that has chosen to operate under a set of articles, usually defined in a charter and filed with the state. This is a common format for a nonprofit.
The term “association” is typically used to denote an organization built around a group that has decided to work together in a formal way. The group needs to sign articles of association that define what the group is. A group of manufacturers that come together to determine industry standards and best practices, for example, could operate as a nonprofit association devoted to bettering the sector.
Defining whether you operate as a trust, corporation, or association can be a simple decision. Chances are, you naturally fit in one category or another.
The greater challenge is in figuring out precisely what to formalize as you declare your nonprofit in a given category. Typically, state law will provide specific guidelines as to what is necessary for each designation. For example, a state may require that, to become a nonprofit corporation, you need to provide your bylaws, formally define your board structure, and declare your tax-exempt status. Make sure you explore state regulations to get your legal structure right.
Defining bylaws
Your bylaws are the rules under which your organization will operate. Common issues covered in bylaws include
How individuals will be nominated for and elected to boards
Which boards and committees exist in your organization and what powers they have
What internal regulations you have for certain professional roles
Membership requirements
The frequency of formal board or member meetings and what needs to be done to call meetings
This is just a sampling of what bylaws can cover. There is a great deal of freedom in what you determine to be a bylaw versus what you set as a best practice. However, once you have bylaws in place, you are required to comply with them or face potential risk. Bylaws are typically filed with the state and are a requirement in maintaining your status as a nonprofit.
Handling tax exemption
Nonprofits can typically become exempt from certain taxes as a way to funnel more funds to the causes they support. Most nonprofits fall under the 501(c)(3) designation, but there are a few other common options to consider.
501(c)(3): According to the IRS, the 501(c)(3) label can be applied to a wide range of charitable groups, varying from religious and educational organizations to public safety or amateur sports competition bodies. In general, the 501(c)(3) label is applied to charitable bodies, but organizations with this exemption are limited in how much lobbying they can engage in and are prohibited from functioning for the benefit of private interests. No portion of earnings can be used to benefit a private shareholder.
Other 501(c) designations: The IRS provides provisions for a variety of 501(c)-type organizations, each with slightly different requirements. A 501(c)(4) typically applies to social welfare organizations, with 501(c)(5) being used for labor and agricultural organizations, and 501(c)(6) status attributed to business leagues. These are a few of the more common 501(c) designations; you may want to connect with an accountant or lawyer who has tax expertise to figure out the best option for your nonprofit.
527: The 527 exemption status is used for political organizations. These entities must provide a notice of their incorporation, offer periodic reports on funding, and file income tax returns and formalized information returns. In practice, these nonprofits face significant scrutiny to maintain their tax-exempt status.
It’s vital that you not only obtain tax exemption to control costs, but also to maintain your status over time. It’s a good idea to read up on what the IRS requires from organizations with your tax status so you know what to expect moving forward.
Dealing with licenses and permits
Licensing and permit requirements vary so much depending on the location of your nonprofit, the purpose of the organization, and the way you intend to function that we won’t get into the details here.
Instead, we’ll keep things simple: Licensing and permit requirements can exist at the local, state, and national level. Once you’ve defined the type of nonprofit you want to be and how you plan to function, do some research on permit requirements that may come up and consider visiting your local town or city hall to check in on permit requirements. You may need permits for anything from building a facility to holding large gatherings in public spaces.
Remembering one rule
Incorporation can seem intimidating. There is a great deal to think about and many formal processes that rely on one another. If there’s one piece of advice that we’d put above the rest, it’s that you should connect with state and local government agencies that interact with nonprofits.
Each state has its own requirements for incorporation, and they can vary significantly. Local government bodies can provide vital insight into what the state expects and any regional quirks you may have to deal with. You’ll eventually need to get involved with federal agencies as you figure out tax exemption and the like, but state and local bodies are likely to be the most influential as you formalize your nonprofit.
Getting to work
The good news is that if you’ve done all of the things we’ve just discussed, you’re just about ready to get to work on making your nonprofit function. Keep reading to learn about the more tactical aspects of determining your organization’s structure and getting everything running.
Figuring out your organizational structure
Choosing a formal designation
In the previous section, we went into detail on various nonprofit designations used by state and federal bodies. For the most part, which designation and type of nonprofit you choose is fairly straightforward based on your goals.
If you’ve been given control of a large fund that you hope to use to meet a need in your community, such as for scholarships, then you’ll want to set your nonprofit up as a trust. If you represent a group of experts in your industry and want to further some sort of goal for your sector, such as establishing standard guidelines for development of a new technology, then you’ll want to establish an association.
Most nonprofits end up being a simple corporation, and how they operate is defined by a charter they file with the state. Incorporation provides more flexibility than the other two options as it allows you to define many elements of how you operate and gives you more freedom when it comes to hiring and funding.
Besides your primary designation as a nonprofit entity, you’ll also need to consider how the specifics of your structure will impact your tax status. This is largely an issue of compliance. When different types of nonprofits file for tax exemption, they need to ensure that the way they operate aligns with the tax designation they receive.
We went over some of the most common options in section two of this guide, and it’s vital to consider what tax exemption status you hope to achieve as you determine the specifics of how you want your nonprofit to function.
Settling on a formal designation for your structure and tax status can be fairly straightforward, but the wiggle room offered in some areas, particularly in terms of incorporation, makes it essential that you understand the specifics of how you design your organization. Connecting with state and local government officials can be especially important here, as doing so can provide insights into the specific regulations that’ll impact your organization and help you understand exactly what’s expected of you.
Establishing a leadership team
We covered how to craft your board in the previous section, and that is one key component of building a leadership team. However, your day-to-day leaders may not be a part of your board. For example, if you bring a few community leaders with specific high-level skills onto your board, they may not have the time for or interest in leading your organization on a day-to-day basis. Besides the consulting and overarching management support offered by your board, you’ll also need leaders to help you when it comes time to get work done.
To recruit these leaders, first analyze your skill set and identify your strengths and weaknesses. Having leaders that can reinforce some of your strengths and shore up your weaknesses can be invaluable in helping your nonprofit run successfully. A few key leadership roles you may want to prioritize, regardless of your strengths, include
An individual with clerical skills who can help you manage paperwork, take notes at meetings, and handle the administrative elements of operations so you don’t have to worry about background management tasks
A person who is naturally gregarious and skilled at gathering volunteers or connecting with donors. Nonprofits depend heavily on relationships and while you’ll need to do much of this work yourself, it’s helpful to have another leader in your organization who can help you when there’s too much going on or connect with those who you don’t naturally relate to.
An industry/subject matter expert who can step in and handle a lot of the day-to-day work when needed and train volunteers
If you’re just starting a nonprofit, chances are you can do all three of these things. Filling out your leadership team with individuals who can complement your skills and step in when you aren’t available can go a long way in strengthening your nonprofit and ensuring strong leadership at all times.
Assessing options for staff and volunteers
Regardless of the type of nonprofit, once you have your core leadership team in place, you’re ready to consider how you’ll build out the staff and volunteer teams needed to keep everything running smoothly. There are a lot of things to consider when developing your plan. Below are some questions you should ask yourself:
How does your tax and organizational designation impact your ability to hire and pay staff? Some designations may mandate that all funds raised be used directly for your cause, limiting your ability to pay staff and forcing you to rely exclusively on volunteers.
How much time do you expect your leaders to commit to working on a weekly basis?
How many employees/volunteers do you need to sustain daily operations?
How will you select staff and volunteers? Accessible form and application processes are invaluable in ensuring you get the right information without inconveniencing applicants. A form-building solution such as JotForm can simplify operations.
How have other nonprofits in your region managed staffing and volunteer issues, and what can you learn from them?
Asking these questions can lay the groundwork for successful staffing, giving you the people you need to run your nonprofit effectively and sustain operations. Now that you have a structure and the right people in place, you’re ready to start considering how to manage operations and set a path toward growth.
Moving into early operations
With a structure, leadership team, and board, you’re ready to start moving on to everyday operations and nonprofit management. You probably already have some ideas about how you want to work. After all, you’re starting this nonprofit for a reason.
This is a good time to revisit your goals and values so you can ensure you don’t lose sight of your core identity as you start thinking about operations. With those ideals in mind, let’s explore key issues you’ll want to consider as you start to launch into day-to-day work.
Developing your marketing strategy
Effective marketing is integral to gaining visibility in the market you hope to serve. Awareness is essential for nonprofits, and a strong marketing strategy is key to creating a strong brand narrative.
How you are perceived is critical — you need a clear, consistent set of messages that communicate what you do and why you do it. This messaging is the primary element of your nonprofit brand, and establishing that brand identity should be a priority.
It can be tempting to let your identity develop organically, but doing so presents more problems than benefits. If you don’t have a strong brand narrative early on in developing your nonprofit, you can find yourself constantly dealing with new challenges, including
Marketing initiatives that fall flat because they aren’t cohesive
Inconsistent and inaccurate public perception of your nonprofit
Difficulty fundraising because stakeholders don’t understand what the nonprofit does or what it stands for
Bringing your board and leaders together to talk about branding your nonprofit is critical to setting a foundation for marketing and fundraising down the line. In practice, your brand identity can be a public-facing method for communicating your mission, vision, and values to those who may be interested in your nonprofit. Once you’ve crafted those messages, you can start thinking about
What channels you’re best off targeting based on your audience
How you can best tell your brand story on those channels
What specific local opportunities are available to build brand awareness
What costs you can expect as you work to take advantage of these opportunities
Different marketing methods will be better for various types of nonprofits. You’ll want to align your brand identity with the needs of your target demographics to get your marketing efforts off to a good start.
Putting your staffing plans into action
At this point, you’ve probably spent a great deal of time thinking about what kind of staff you’ll need to make your nonprofit business plan work. Now you’re ready to start hiring and onboarding your employees. To start, you’ll need to
Draft job ads that clearly and concisely describe what you’re looking for in employees and what you need them to do. Post ads on major job boards like Indeed but also in local publications or websites devoted to the specific industry you serve.
Create volunteer applications, employee onboarding forms, and similar documents to onboard staff and volunteers. This is one area where a digital form creation and management platform like JotForm can help you get organized, standardize your processes, and avoid the high costs and risks of managing paper-based forms.
Ensure you’re complying with human resources best practices. Form and document management is critical as the data contained in the paperwork (or digital assets) you collect needs to be kept secure and private at all times. What’s more, you have to ensure you aren’t asking volunteers or employees any questions that could be construed as discriminatory. As a nonprofit, you may have some flexibility in recruiting based on any ideologies your organization has. For example, if you are a religious nonprofit, you can require that volunteers or staff agree with a statement of belief or share your faith. Following HR best practices for data collection and management can be complex and fraught with risk. You may want to connect with a friend who has expertise or make a professional connection to protect your nonprofit from charges of discrimination.
Formalize your budget so you have a clear understanding of what you can afford in terms of staff. Make sure you know the total cost of bringing in volunteers, training them, and supporting them. It’s also worth considering fundraising for specific employee positions, which would allow you to get your community of donors behind specific roles that you need to fill.
Establishing your revenue generation plan
This issue comes down to a simple question: How do you plan on generating income to support your day-to-day operations?
As you established your nonprofit business plan, you probably used personal money or initial fundraising to get off the ground. Now you need to evaluate your opportunities for consistent revenue generation while aligning with the values and goals of your organization.
Building a revenue plan is a matter of knowing your budget along with proper nonprofit management, understanding how donors in your industry prefer to give, and being realistic about your reach. A few questions to ask yourself include
Are you better off seeking a small number of large donations from wealthy patrons or reaching out to the average consumer and getting a large number of smaller donations?
At what seasonal periods are you more or less likely to get funds from donors?
How should you accept donations? Online, in-person, etc.?
What grant opportunities can you take advantage of for revenue, and how competitive are they? Grants can be vital to sustaining operations, but be careful not to rely exclusively on grants that are in high demand and that you’ll be competing heavily for every time you apply. You’ll also want to make sure you comply with grant application requirements, as it’s easy to lose out on a grant simply by not following the instructions.
Finding a location
Do you need a physical facility for your nonprofit, or are you better served by an exclusively digital presence?
In all likelihood, you’ll need to have some form of physical presence in the form of an office space or service area where volunteers can work. At the very least, you’ll need a P.O. box so you can receive mail somewhere other than your home address. When looking for a facility, you’ll need to be realistic about your budget and how your facility will impact public perception.
Creating an online presence to compliment this space is particularly critical, as your web and social media sites can go a long way in promoting brand awareness.
Over time, you’ll want to develop a physical and digital presence for your nonprofit, but you’ll likely need to devote resources more heavily toward one at first depending on your priorities and overall business plan.
Look for partnership opportunities
Partnerships are often valuable for nonprofits as you can use them to access resources you can’t get on your own. Whether it’s a government agency that can help you identify grants, a local nonprofit with similar values that may be up for sharing facility space with you, or a business that wants to partner to offer funding or pro-bono services, the value potential is huge.
Don’t get so distracted with running your nonprofit that you neglect networking and outreach to other organizations in your area. The right partnership can drive early success and sustain your nonprofit’s growth.
These initial operational tasks can go a long way toward getting your nonprofit running. There are a lot of details to think about in all the issues we’ve discussed, but starting with this high-level guidance can help you dig deeper and get into the specifics you’ll need to get off the ground successfully.
Supporting everyday work
Sustaining your operations as a nonprofit requires effective systems and staff. You need staff and/or volunteers because you can’t do everything on your own, and you need support systems that enable you and your team to work effectively. Here’s a look at a few of the most critical issues you’ll need to consider.
Getting technology systems in order
If you’re planning to run a relatively small nonprofit, chances are you don’t need to go too deep into technology investments. However, regardless of your size, you’re going to need
A website that gives you a strong web presence. It can be tempting to set up a site with a free web hosting provider. However, you’ll be left dealing with extremely limited functionality that holds you back. You’re better off going with a low-cost web hosting service that gives you more flexibility to build a powerful, professional site.
A way to accept online donations. There are hosting services/web platforms built specifically for nonprofits. This can provide a simple solution to accepting donations online. You can also use JotForm to create a donation form that you can send to donors or embed on your website. You can also accept payment through your donation forms through one of JotForm’s many integrations with payment processors.
Productivity applications and possibly a database so you can manage data for clients, donors, and volunteers. You can subscribe to cloud solutions like Office 365, G Suite, or JotForm. JotForm allows you to create custom forms with ease, build common forms based on existing templates, and integrate your documents with apps and web systems you already rely on.
The typical nonprofit will frequently need to gather data from various stakeholders or file paperwork with government agencies. Being able to create and manage those forms easily can be invaluable, and JotForm makes the technology accessible by offering discounts for qualifying nonprofits.
Cloud subscriptions can be invaluable in giving you access to powerful technologies that you can’t afford from a capital perspective, but it can be easy to end up spending heavily for tech you don’t use. Make sure you keep subscriptions manageable to avoid unexpectedly high costs.
Social media strategies that allow you to easily connect with the communities you work with and strengthen brand awareness. While social media is free, it comes with a significant time cost if you want to get value from it.
Point-of-sale devices that allow you to process payments or donations at your primary work location. You may also want to consider a mobile POS solution that lets you accept card-based payments from any location.
This isn’t an exhaustive look at technologies, but it covers the core elements of what any nonprofit will need. You’ll also want to explore any industry-specific solutions that could benefit your nonprofit.
Maintaining compliance
Regulatory compliance is essential for nonprofits. You must comply with internal regulations, such as your bylaws, to ensure that you maintain your nonprofit status. You also need to align with external regulations that impact your industry. If you handle personal health data, you’ll need to consider HIPAA compliance, and if you process payments with credit or debit cards, you’ll need to think about PCI compliance.
The good news is that many technology providers build compliance into their solutions. Online donor tools can often secure payment card data for you. Databases and supporting systems built for healthcare are frequently designed to comply with HIPAA.
The right technology can simplify many regulatory processes, but there are still a few key best practices to keep in mind:
Keep employee, volunteer, and donor data secured at all times.
Consider criminal record checks for any individuals who frequently interact with children and comply with all standards for storing those records.
Connect with a copyright expert and ensure your use of music, video, or other media is in line with best practices.
Maintaining regulatory compliance often boils down to proper documentation and storage of data. Getting organized from the start can make it easier to sustain compliance over time.
Handling payments and donations
We’ve already touched on many of the issues that come up with payments and donations. You’ll need a website that can accept payments and some POS solutions to help you accept funds in diverse ways. You never want to be in a situation where someone wants to give you money and you don’t have a way to accept it.
Beyond having effective technology in place, you’ll also want to create a precedent about how to ask for donations online. Do you want to invest in marketing resources to get donors, helping you reach a larger audience, but creating expenses? Do you want to go the route that brands like Wikipedia have done, having one or two major donation drives per year? Do you think your target demographics are more likely to lead to small, frequent donations?
Think about what the donation process will look like and make sure you have the right tools to support your goals.
Keeping board members engaged
Your board is instrumental to supporting your nonprofit, but chances are they won’t have time to constantly check in on operations. Here are a few ways you can keep them informed and engaged so they’re ready to help when you need them:
Use newsletters to provide regular updates on your nonprofit.
Hold special events that give your board a chance to engage in a casual, low-stress way.
Identify opportunities to tap into the specific expertise of board members and get them involved in problem solving as appropriate.
These are just a few tips to get you started. The key issue here is to never let the board slip too far into the background. Finding the right balance between keeping the board involved and not asking too much from them is essential.
With so many everyday issues dealt with, you’re ready to consider your path toward growth and long-term operations.
Setting a pathway for growth
Launching a nonprofit is a great feat, but it won’t mean much if you can’t sustain the initial momentum you gain and use it to drive long-term success. But growth rarely happens without a great deal of careful planning and hard work.
Nothing can guarantee growth, but creating a realistic, sustainable roadmap with clear, measurable goals can position you to expand your efforts in a reasonable manner. And, of course, you’ll also need to consider how nonprofits make money. Ultimately, your financial health plays a critical role in determining how you can expand. Here are a few areas where growth roadmaps are particularly important.
Staffing roadmap
Look at the future in intervals. One year from now, what will you likely need to sustain operations? To answer this question, think about
What work are you or volunteers doing that might lead to burnout if you don’t have more resources devoted to it?
What grants or funding opportunities could help you hire critical staff that you still need? Effective nonprofit accounting is critical here as you can use historical financial data pertaining to grants and staff expenses to figure out what you can actually afford.
What are the biggest holes in your operations, and what kind of skills are necessary to fill them?
Your one-year staffing roadmap will likely focus on filling key needs that you aren’t fully prepared to handle when you launch. Once you’ve thought about the next year, consider five years from launch. At that point, what do you want the nonprofit to look like, and how will your staffing needs shift to achieve that vision?
Set annual goals that will help you reach your five-year benchmark. Those benchmarks can be anything from adding staff to filling key leadership roles with full-time workers or volunteers willing to do some heavy lifting. The key is to have a plan and strategies to measure your ability to execute that plan.
Fundraising roadmap
In many ways, this will be similar to your staffing roadmap. Develop both immediate one-year plans and forward-thinking five-year benchmarks so you can balance immediate needs with your future demands. The key difference is that there’s more data to gather here and a greater dependence on using that information to make your choices.
Be sure you’re digging deep into information on your donors. Why do they donate? Do they have connections they might be able to refer you to? How often are they likely to donate? Answering these questions can help you develop cohesive strategies to sustain initial fundraising success and gradually expand your pool of resources.
You’ll also want to do some research on grants, government programs, and any political or economic trends that could impact the availability of funding. You won’t be able to predict everything, but it’s helpful to stay on top of relevant news so you’re aware of impending changes in advance.
Mission/vision roadmap
Your mission and vision may need to shift over time. As you get comfortable with your new nonprofit, take some time to revisit your mission and vision statements to assess how well you are living up to them and what may need to change so they better align with your goals.
From there, intentionally set aside time each year to analyze your mission and vision to ensure you’re on track or identify new directions you need to go. Don’t get so caught up running your nonprofit that you lose sight of your core values.
Scaling roadmap
What are reasonable expectations for you to scale your nonprofit? It’s important to take some time to think about concrete growth goals after you’ve operated for a bit and have a better feel for what it means to run your nonprofit. You’ll want to think about
How you’re measuring growth (such as through people served, user engagement, funds donated, or similar metrics).
Which data points are most indicative of your operational health and point toward your ability to scale. You’ll likely need to focus on matters like cash flow, the size of your user base and the demographics of your donors.
How you can delegate responsibilities and offload some to various stakeholders to expand your reach.
How to focus your resources between expansion in physical locations versus digital channels as you work to increase brand awareness and engage prospects in diverse ways.
Scaling your nonprofit requires a careful balance between identifying the extent of the needs for your services and ensuring you have the resources necessary to expand those services.
Considering the aftermath
Starting a nonprofit requires a great deal of personal time and effort. You’ll likely put a great deal of yourself into your nonprofit, but making major sacrifices or single handedly running an organization likely isn’t sustainable over time.
What’s more, maintaining your operations requires consistent activities that can be both time-consuming and costly. Getting strategic help and taking care of the essentials is key to sustaining operations once you’ve gotten off the ground. Key issues you’ll need to consider include
Filing required federal and state nonprofit financial statements that will allow you to retain your tax-exempt status
Completing internal audits of your financial books to ensure your team is following best practices
Checking in with your board and filling any open positions, ensuring you stay in line with nominating requirements set forth in your bylaws
Hiring new staff or expanding your volunteer programs to offload some of your work so you can deal with an expanded role
This is just a snapshot of some of the issues you’ll need to handle each year, but as you do, you’ll know that you’ve moved from launching your nonprofit to sustaining it over time.
Conclusion
It takes a lot of work to get a nonprofit off the ground, but the right tools can simplify and streamline the process. As you work to get everything running, you’ll need strategic tools to make everyday life easier. JotForm is one such tool.
From volunteer signups to donations, you’ll need a wide range of forms to establish your operations and keep everything running smoothly. Building all of these forms in a word processor or publisher can be time-consuming and leave you with a wide range of files to manage stored across diverse locations.
A solution like JotForm can simplify form creation and management, letting you handle everything from surveys to employee onboarding with ease.
Our customers use JotForm to handle registrations, collect signatures, manage files, and process payments. All told, JotForm is a full-scale productivity tool that you can leverage to support a wide range of operations.
Want to learn more about how JotForm can help you launch your nonprofit? Sign up for free and experiment with our platform to see how you can use it. Check it out today to learn more.
