Marketing automation platforms can make the job of communicating with association members easier for your team and can provide key business intelligence about the content that your members find compelling.
Instead of cobbling various communication platforms together, a marketing automation platform, like SharpSpring or HubSpot, can provide a centralized system to report on and measure your association’s marketing activities. Once you have a platform in place (we can integrate a platform with your website) you can begin the process of communicating with your current and potential members.
1. Start With Your Buyer Personas
These are sort-of fictional versions of your ideal customers. We say “sort of fictional” because they’re based partly on market research, but also partly on information you glean by interviewing existing customers. Think of them like composite characters in movies based on true events: the filmmakers take a few different real people and put some of their attributes into one person.
With these personas, associations can mold their content to reach their ideal members, based on the information the association has collected. Most associations use two to three personas in order to encompass their target audience.
2. Make Your Content Captivating
If you’ve created buyer personas, you know what your prospective members want. And you and your team’s combined experience makes you an expert in your field. Put those two ideas together to create compelling content: blog posts, e-books, case studies, anything that can solve member problems and also demonstrate your expertise.
Prospective members who visit your website or view your content on social media are on all different stages of their journey. If they’re in the first stage, “Awareness,” all that they know is that they have a problem they need solved.
Therefore, the content you create should try to help solve those problems. If you were a pest control company, you could create a blog post about reasons why ants find their way into people’s homes. In the consideration stage of the journey, when customers are looking for different companies to help them solve their problem, you could produce a case study showing how you helped a past customer with their ant problem.
3. Make Sure Your Content Gets Found
Inbound marketing is meant to pull people in, so be sure to populate your site and all of its content with keywords that have gone through the process of SEO, or search engine optimization. But it’s important to remember to keep your content sounding human. Google’s algorithms can tell when something’s been overloaded with keywords to get noticed by search engines.
4. Find The Right Social Media For Your Business
The targeted approach you took to creating your buyer personas should also extend to your social media strategy. Rather than setting up profiles on all the social networks find out where your members spend their time, and engage them there.
5. Measure Your Success
It’s important to track the impact of your actions. Test different headlines for your blog posts, different landing pages, calls-to-action, etc. and see which ones bring more engagement and conversions. A tool like Google Analytics can help you measure engagement.
Still feel like this is a forbidding task? Grow Associations is here for you. Our team of marketing experts can help optimize your website for SEO, and help you create entertaining and informative content. Incorporating inbound marketing might seem scary, but we’ll bet it’s still less scary than the thought of holding onto an outdated method of reaching new members.