Four Sources for Inbound Membership Marketing

At some point you reach the limit of how often and how many direct marketing efforts that you can send out to your established lists of membership prospects.  But your leadership may still say, “I want more members!”

This is when inbound membership marketing can become an important new contributor to your media mix.

Inbound membership marketing helps you reach new prospects that you may not have interacted with before and allows them to raise their hand and come to you in search of the very information and products that you produce.

Here are four proven sources to feed you inbound marketing efforts. 

1.      Google and Facebook Remarketing – After all of your efforts to drive a prospective member to your website, you may be shocked at how many abandon your join shopping cart before completing the transaction.  One of my clients has over 10,000 shopping cart abandons from their join page each year.  Remarketing efforts – following your visitors around the internet and Facebook with ads – encourages those visitors to return to your site to gain more information and perhaps complete their transaction.  

2.      Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Search Ads appear when a prospective member enters a word or phrase into a search engine that matches one of your keywords.  They are effective because you are responding with your information directly to a seeker who wants some piece of information that your organization possesses. 

3.      Content Ads – Whereas search ads are driven by keywords, content ads are shown on other websites offering information that relates to your products and services.   When the prospective member’s reading interests are a match to what you have to offer, your ad is displayed. 

4.      Social Media Advertising – Many social media sites offer millions of more impressions than one will ever achieve with traditional direct marketing efforts.  LinkedIn allows you to target ads to very specific job classifications, titles, and industries.  And Facebook allows you to match your current members to potential prospects who are on the site and display ads to these look-a-like audiences. 

All of these inbound online marketing sources come with these additional benefits:

·        Awareness – Many more prospects will see your ads than will click on them, but you typically pay just for clicks.

·        Coverage – Online advertising gives you access to every corner of the world where there is an internet connection. 

·        Flexibility – With these online efforts, you can adjust and allocate funds on a daily basis to maximize response.  

·        Speed – You can literally have a digital advertising program up and running and producing response in a day.

·        Measurement -- You can know impressions, clicks, and with good tracking the number of members joining.

The most important aspect of optimizing each of these inbound sources is thinking through the tactics on how to gain an opt-in for follow-up with anyone who does come to your landing page or website from one of these sources.  Lead capture and relationship building is where the pay-out comes from these efforts. 

Developing an inbound membership marketing program is not at all meant to eliminate traditional tools like direct mail, email, and telemarketing.  If these tools are productive by all means continue to use them.  But at some point even these established methods will see diminishing returns.  You need to find new, untapped audiences for the information and services that you offer and inbound membership marketing has proven to be an excellent tool to assist with reaching new prospects.

Four Challenges to Effective Content Marketing for Membership Recruitment

Over the years, I have done a number of posts related to trading content for contact. This technique is called a content marketing strategy where free samples of your membership content are made available -- typically online -- and those interested in using it connect with your organization.

But what if you have tried this approach after reading some of these posts and it is not working for you?  What might be the problem?  Joe Pulizzi shared some good insights on why content marketing may not work in the May issue of COO: Chief Content Officer.  

Here are some of his points. 

1.     Make sure that your content is not all about you.  Prospects are looking to solve their problems.  So be sure your content provides a solution. 

2.     Your content does not include calls to action.  Remember the real reason that you share content for free is to initiate and ultimately sell a membership. You need to communicate that buying a membership will ensure an ongoing flow of content.  

3.     Your shared content is too broad.  Your shared content needs to prove that your organization is the leading expert in your membership category.  If it is too general, you will attract unqualified prospects that do not need the specific solutions that you offer to members. 

4.     Your testing is too slow.  Pulizzi notes that “speed beats perfection”.  The web allows for rapid prototyping.  Offer up the content and if it does not work, try something else – fast.

For some additional ideas on how to implement a content marketing program, you may want to take a look at my post titled, Using Online Lead Generation to Drive Membership Recruitment.