Pro-Bono Marketing… Is it Needed?
No I'm not talking about giving a mega corporation some of your free time and marketing intelligence. I am not talking about discounting your value as a marketing consultant, down to zero. It’s also not about about creating a full strategy for a corporation, profiting them handily, and walking away with nothing to show for it.?
What I am talking about is providing some of your time as a professional marketer to either help advance the marketing profession overall, help out a non-profit, or contribute to smaller businesses that might not otherwise be able to benefit from your expertise. It is not about becoming a free asset. Rather it is about offering up perhaps 40 to 60 hours of your time per year to help a cause. This is about giving back to the community, contributing in a way that makes a difference, advancing our free knowledge (outside of academia... nobody does this right?), or helping grow organizations that might otherwise take much longer to flourish.
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What is Pro Bono?
Pro bono is a term derived from the Latin phrase "pro bono publico." It translates to "for the public good." It refers to professional work or services provided voluntarily and without charge, typically to individuals or organizations that cannot afford to pay for those services.
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Pro Bono Work in the Legal Profession
In the legal profession there are various different reasons for doing pro bono work. Lawyer often take on no charge services:
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Whatever the reason for taking on pro bono work, society, the community, and the legal professional themselves benefit when this is taken on by professionals. In effect it is for the public good and the service benefits all engaged in it.
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Can it apply to Marketing?
There are various ways in which marketers can take on a similar cause. There is a place in this world for pro bono marketing support. Think just for a moment about the small startup business barely able to scrape by. They may have a good and viable business proposition, but it simply may not be well known nor understand how to market themselves. To most marketers there are many easy solutions that may pop into your head about how promoting such a business. To the business owner, such ideas, strategies, and tactics may simply not be intuitive nor part of their experience base.
About the non-profit organizations, it could be a church, an association, or an established national non-profit. They may have their own professional marketing team however they may be in need as well.
Another alternative is our own industry at large. Wouldn't it be nice to come across good, well written, and well researched marketing studies that are not necessarily associated with a brand trying to sell you $150,000 solution? There's nothing wrong with these. I have written many for such organizations myself. It's part of core B2B marketing. But I would certainly love to see more such research published by marketers just coming together to try to push forward knowledge in our profession and industry. By the way there are many such academic research studies available... however I am specifically speaking to the non academic, pragmatic aspects of marketing research. No offence to academia but many such research papers are simply not accessible to most professional marketers. Often their results are simply not easily translatable into tactics to be used in the field.
Yet another option might be to offer a free ‘basics of marketing’ course to the public. Naturally not all of us are marketing gurus, able to educate the sharpest in our industry. However we could come together to teach the basics to those small startup businesses and others that want to learn. There may be opportunities at libraries, community centres, or even volunteering a few hours at a local college to help out with a marketing course.
Call To Action
Regardless of how you want to contribute to the community, I encourage you to take initiative and get involved. Seek out the opportunity to offer your expertise to educational institutions, a church, a non profit, an association, a community event or festival, a cultural organization, a startup, a small business, or with a group of other marketers interested in providing research to answer a question that no one else is addressing. Whatever you do - take action! Even if it is a small step to giving back it is better than not having considered it at all. As a profession we need to start thinking about pro bono services in the same way that the legal profession has done.
Afterthought: An Industry Research Example
Allow me to identify one example of some pro bono service in which I was recently engaged. It occured to me that in the realm of content marketing no one was speaking about how much content is enough for a company. Maybe it's not important. However how would a company know when to stop? How would a company know how much is a baseline that's necessary? Wouldn't it be helpful to other marketing leaders to understand whether they are underperforming, or just not keeping up with their competitors in their segment?
I thought it important enough that I undertook A benchmark study. I looked at over 120 companies across about 25 different dimensions of their content marketing offering. Then being a content marketer myself I analyzed the data and wrote it up. I would like to encourage other marketers to do the same.
Should you like a copy of this research please go to my profile and you will find it free to download listed under the Strategy D Consulting experience section. It is called: 2023 Content Marketing Benchmark.
If any marketers are reading this particle and would like to get engaged in a project please reach out to me. Send me an e-mail or send me a message on LinkedIn. There is no doubt in my mind that I will engage in yet another similar study. Best of all, I'm hoping that the benchmark will be one worked on with fellow marketers next time, providing an excellent learning and networking opportunity. ??