Using Market Segmentation in Membership Marketing

Everyone talks about the importance of market segmentation, but I find that not everyone knows what they mean when they use the term.

Let’s start out by saying that market segmentation is a tool not an end in and of itself. You use market segmentation to help accomplish an objective like improving response rates by targeting messages or providing differentiated value to a certain group of members to enhance retention.

So before jumping into segmentation, the first step is to define what you want to accomplish and then see if the tool of market segmentation will help you achieve your goal.

If you determine that segmenting your market is appropriate, then it is helpful to further define what segmentation will be practical and useful to accomplish your objective.

Here is one way to classify the segmentation options available.

1. Linear Segmentation – This is as simple as splitting your market into two groups. For example, it probably would not be practical to create hundreds of versions of a monthly print magazine, but you might create two versions to serve some natural split in your membership like students and professionals, owners and operators, manufacturers and distributors. You might describe this as a “one to two” segmentation strategy.

2. Group Segmentation – This segmentation splits your market into specific groups or buckets of people. For example, based on state and local issues, you might provide separate marking messages driven by geography to enhance relevance. Or your segmentation might be driven by categories of products previously purchased. You might describe this as a “one to some” segmentation strategy.

3. Granular Segmentation – This type of segmentation results in unlimited options for your market. For example, based on a purchasing history an algorithm can be built to push a shopping cart of specific items that would be customized for each individual – think Amazon book offerings. Each member could receive a unique offering based on their preferences or previous behavior. Many marketers describe this as a “one to one” marketing strategy.

Granular segmentation is obviously more complex than linear segmentation. But that does not mean that one is better than the other. Remember, as with any tool, the key is using the correct tool for the job.

Segmentation can add to incremental costs for marketing or servicing a member. It also takes time to craft and maintain variable messages, services, and fulfillment operations. So before embracing a segmentation model, it is wise to evaluate both the positive effects it could have and the added costs it will create.

What examples do you have of successful segmentation programs? Feel free to share them here.

Build Membership Resiliency through Innovation

This article is an edited excerpt from the book Membership Recruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission. Find it on Amazon.

When I do presentations on the need for innovation, I often share a comparison of Sears and Amazon as a case study. There may not be a better example of the implications of whether or not organizations innovate and embrace change.

In July of 1995, when Amazon first opened its online store, Sears possessed everything needed to become what Amazon is today and more. Sears had a dominant and trusted brand. They sold a full portfolio of products, from clothes to appliances to tools. Sears had an enormous print catalog along with an extensive customer list and warehouses to pack and ship purchases. In fact, for over one hundred years, Sears mailed out its big book catalog to a significant portion of the U.S. population. At times, the catalog was as large as 1,500 pages and offered more than 100,000 products.

Even a decade after Amazon came on the scene, Sears still held many advantages. In 2007, Sears had sales of $53 billion and had 350,000 employees, while Amazon had sales of $14 billion and 17,000 employees. However, those advantages were not to last long. By 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy as sales dropped to $16 billion, and staffing fell to 89,000. By that time, Amazon sales had soared to $232 billion, with over 600,000 employees.

So, what happened? Those who have done in-depth studies of the demise of Sears point to several factors, including the emergence of discount retailers like Walmart and category-focused retailers like Home Depot and Best Buy. But a massive contributor to Sears's challenge was their failure to capitalize on the movement to online shopping, leaving the door open for Amazon to capture this market. Their lack of innovation and adaptation in pricing and product focus, combined with its delay in moving from brick and mortar to the internet, spelled disaster for this retail giant.

There are lessons from the Sears experience that can be applied to not only for-profit companies but to membership organizations. Here is the lesson. If you do everything recommended in this book to drive growth through effective recruitment but do not use that growth to support innovation, your organization will ultimately reach a point of steady state and even decline.

In practical terms, this flattening of the membership growth curve happens because, by effectively marketing to prospects in your chosen field, you will ultimately reach a point of market saturation. In effect, you become a victim of your own success. You have reached the prospective members who were interested in joining and even succeeded in getting those who were on the fence to become members. You have fully penetrated your prospect market. What’s more, without investing in new product development, even the loyal members you have added will become bored and lose their excitement for the benefits that you provide.

In short, without a focus on innovation, just like Sears or any maturing organization, growth will be stunted, and membership will begin to diminish.

Sustaining the Membership Growth Curve

So how can a membership organization sustain vitality and growth?  One of the most-read articles on organizational resiliency by Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas in the Harvard Business Review put it simply, “Strategic resilience is not about responding to a one-time crisis. It’s not about rebounding from a setback. It’s about continuously anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the earning power of a core business. It’s about having the capacity to change before the case for change becomes desperately obvious.”  As these authors concluded, “A turnaround is transformation tragically delayed.”

Research conducted with nearly a thousand associations supports this conclusion. Associations with membership increases in the past year, and over the last five years, are significantly more likely to report that their organization has a culture that supports innovation. Conversely, those reporting declines in membership are considerably more likely to share that their organization is only slightly innovative or not innovative at all.

There is no single recipe for successful innovation. As Matt Ridley noted in his book, How Innovation Works, “Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.”  However, there are some methods that associations have used successfully to drive new ideas and maintain relevance in an ever-changing environment. These innovative methods include keeping a focus on seeing big-picture opportunities, using marketing research to monitor member needs and perceptions, seeking outside perspectives, and – very simply – trying lots of new ideas.

Keeping the Big Picture in View

Maintaining a big-picture perspective is one of the most significant steps for identifying new ideas and opportunities. However, everything in our daily life seems to pull us toward the details and incremental solutions. The proverb “You can't see the forest for the trees” captures this challenge. We tend to develop ever more granular solutions to try and fix a problem without stepping back and looking at the big picture and a high leverage solution.

Overcoming this myopic tendency is often a struggle for associations. For example, one of the often-repeated tenets in association marketing is that segmentation of members and prospects into ever smaller groups will produce better results. The theory says that highly targeted messages sent to each segment detailing specifics about the association’s benefits and services will solve a membership decline. You might hear something like, “If we tell the prospects that we publish articles in their specialty, then they will join.”  Besides the complexity in managing this type of program, the real issue is that by trying to serve these limited segments, an association can take its eye off the big picture and the more significant marketplace trends. Through their push for ever-finer divisions, they may accomplish the very opposite results of what they were hoping to achieve. Even if the message encourages a prospect to join by highlighting specific information as soon as they receive a copy of their first magazine and newsletter, they will see that the membership they purchased is not what they expected.

That is why one innovation method to achieve continued growth is to go in the exact opposite direction and focus on the forest and not the trees. Instead of focusing efforts on more granular segmentation, seek out the value needed by your broader audience. Advice in the book Blue Ocean Strategy included, “think noncustomers before customers; commonalities before differences; and desegmentation before pursuing finer segmentation.”  By identifying the broader needs in the marketplace, you have the opportunity to realize extraordinary possibilities.

Similarly, Amazon launched its business as an online discount book retailer. They could have stopped there and simply provided specialized services to book buyers. Instead, they used their highly efficient infrastructure to broaden their product offerings. The result was outstanding growth. In the next chapter, I will look at how some associations have achieved exponential growth by looking at larger opportunities and expanding to new markets.

Using Market Research

Keeping your membership offerings thriving also requires staying on top of the trends and demands of the markets you serve. Market research is a tool to keep your finger on the pulse of these opportunities. Regularly conducted qualitative research, whether in-person or online focus groups or in-depth interviews, provides meaningful directional information. Additionally, quantitative research offers statistical validation when evaluating new opportunities. Consistently deployed, these tools provide data on long-term trends that you may miss with a one-off research snapshot.

By understanding and capturing what is going on in an industry, an association can stay ahead of the competition and aggressively take hold of new market opportunities.

Seeking an Outside Perspective

Dr. William Osler, one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital, famously said, “A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” The quote should be an excellent reminder to us as membership marketers. We, as individuals, and our organizations, have blind spots and do not always have a clear vision of the opportunities and challenges in front of us.

So, another innovation opportunity is to aggressively seek insight and guidance from others to maintain a resilient program. This need becomes more important each passing day as the level of expertise needed to manage membership marketing is at an all-time high with the increasing availability of marketing channels, more sophisticated data analysis tools, and new regulations and laws. Getting guidance can come in a variety of forms, including attending and networking at professional development events, bringing consultants or contractors on board, or hiring a marketing agency. Each of these options provides valuable insights.

Trying Lots of Ideas

A final key to maintaining resilience for a membership organization is continuing to focus on innovation by always trying a lot of new ideas. Hamel and Välikangas concluded their Harvard Business Review article with this advice. “Most companies would be better off if they made fewer billion-dollar bets and a whole lot more $10,000 or $20,000 bets—some of which will, in time, justify more substantial commitments. They should steer clear of grand, imperial strategies and devote themselves instead to launching a swarm of low-risk experiments.”  Not every new idea will be a winner, but building this innovation practice into an association’s culture will ultimately lead to success.  As the great inventor and innovator Thomas Edison famously said, “invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” His methodology was always trial and error. For example, “In developing the nickel-iron battery, his employees undertook 50,000 experiments.”

This article is an edited excerpt from the book Membership Recruitment: How to Grow Recurring Revenue, Reach New Markets, and Advance Your Mission. Find it on Amazon.

A Blue Ocean Strategy for Membership Marketing

Stepping back and looking at the big picture is what three day weekends help us to do. So I wanted to share a couple of concepts that I came across today in re-reading the book, Blue Ocean Strategy.

As marketers, we tend to continually refine and focus our segmentation. But what if we took the opposite approach and looked for larger commonalities in the marketplace?

That’s what Kim and Mauborgne recommend in their book. The authors write:

“Typically to grow their share of market, companies strive to retain and expand existing customers. This often leads to finer segmentation and greater tailoring of offerings to better meet customer preferences. . . As companies compete to embrace customer preferences through finer segmentation, they often risk creating too-small target markets. To maximize the size of their blue oceans, companies need to take a reverse course. Instead of concentrating on customers, they need to look to noncustomers. And instead of focusing on customer differences, they need to build on powerful commonalities in what buyers value. That allows companies to reach beyond existing demand to unlock new mass customers that did not exist before.”[1]

Here are a couple of other unconventional solutions from Blue Ocean Strategy.

The authors claim that extensive customer research may not be the best method of opening up new strategies and markets.

“Our research found that customers can scarcely imagine how to create uncontested market space. Their insight also tends toward the familiar ‘offer me more for less’. And what customers typically want ‘more’ of are those product and service features that the industry currently offers.”[2]

So what is one way a company can evaluate a new strategy? They recommend, “A good way to test the effectiveness and strength of a strategy is to look at whether it contains a strong and authentic tagline.”[3]

If you cannot put your promise into a clear and concise tagline then you should question whether or not it is a viable offering.

[1] W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Harvard Business School Press, 2005, page 101 and 102.
[2] Ibid. page 27.
[3] Ibid. page 40.

How to Lower Churn in a Rapidly Changing Industry

The telecom sector of our economy has had perhaps more turmoil than most. There are new products and wholly new technologies being launched every day that have the potential to draw customers from one provider to another.

Some association prophets say that the future of the association world may also soon experience disruption. So I thought the recent book, Customer Churn Reduction and Retention for Telecoms, might have some application for membership marketing. Are there best practices that we can put in place to reduce churn and retain more members?

Interestingly, it appears that the solutions for preventing churn and keeping customers in telecom focus on many of the same measures discussed in association circles. And intense competition has forced these telecom companies to implement many of these strategies.

Some of the strategies highlighted in the book include Lifetime Value, Product Mix, Predictive Modeling, and Customer Segmentation. Let’s look at these in an association context.

Lifetime Value: One of the reasons I like to follow the game of baseball is that it lends itself to statistical comparisons. Likewise, membership lends itself to statistical analysis. The fundamental analysis is Lifetime Value (LTV). In economic terms, all members are not created equal. Understanding the overall value of a member and then the value of a membership segment or individual is foundational for developing a retention strategy.

Product Mix: In the telecom world they now have the Triple Play (phone, internet, and TV) and some are looking at a Quadruple Play by adding wireless to the product package. We also have this option available in membership. It is called tiered membership. The fact is the higher you can move a member up the membership product line the more likely he or she is to stay with you. Offering the equivalent of a black Ford is not the optimum membership package to enhance retention.

Predictive Modeling: Admittedly this is a marketing tool that increases in usefulness with the size of a membership or customer base. Nevertheless, past behavior is best predictor of future behavior. So modeling should come more into play in getting and keeping members. In a recent acquisition model that we ran, we found that using the best model we could get 80% of the members by mailing 20% of the prospects. In the chart below, the x-axis is the percentile of the prospect database and the y-axis represents the percent of the members gained. The red line would be the results without a model.

Market Segmentation: Because all members do not represent the same economic value and they display different buying behaviors, it makes a lot of sense to segment members and communicate differently to each group. The exciting news for membership marketers seeking to build segmented communication to members is that technology as never before is allowing this. For example, we are looking to move the renewal and retention work that we do now from traditional printers and variable laser black copy to an iGen – a high speed digital color printing press -- which allows for real time variable printing. This means no inventory and the option for a different messages, graphics, and data for each person who receives the retention communication.

Human nature does not vary that much. So it is a great idea to take best practices from other industries and apply them to ours. It is also a good idea to find out what the best and most successful practices are from other membership marketers and apply them in your situation.

Are Radio and TV in Your Membership Development Future?

In the Five Phases of the Membership Life Cycle, I highlighted how awareness is the first step in the membership relationship. If a prospective member is not aware of whom you are and what value your organization brings, then you are a long way off from closing a sale.

Making a sale involves a series of little steps moving a prospect from A to Z.

That’s why as a membership marketer, I have enjoyed watching the use of radio and television to build awareness and membership by two groups, the American Association of Family Physicians (AAFP) to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Here is the publicly available information on these programs that I have come across on the web.

AAFP has launched a major awareness program with sponsorship of my favorite radio program Marketplace on NPR and with 30 to 60 second ads on 71 XM Radio stations. SHRM has also been a sponsor of the regular feature on Marketplace. They sponsor the segment with interviews of top corporate CEO’s in a feature called Conversations from the Corner Office.

In addition, according to Digital News Direct, SHRM has run TV ads during CNN Election Coverage and FOX Business Jumpstart. If you watched the candidate debates you may have seen the ad. Here is a link to the ad.

Both of these groups are well respected organizations and it appears that their awareness advertising has been well thought out and done in a responsible and effective manner.

But as you read this you may ask are radio and TV something that all association marketers should jump on board and do? Will it help your association blossom?

From my perspective the answer is before these channels are considered, you need to have your bases covered with more traditional association marketing techniques. True with the increasingly defined market segmentation that HD and satellite radio and cable TV provide, it is now becoming a possibility to at least explore these mediums. But rarely do consumer demographics match up with the qualifiers that would make someone eligible for membership. You may have 50 year old woman as members, but they also need to be in your profession in order to be interested in membership.

Here is another major caution that I have to using broadcast or consumer advertising channels. There is a very big potential to spend a lot of money in a very inefficient manner. You need to ask the question, what proportion of those who see these ads are potential members or people that you want to influence and to compare this to the effectiveness of a tightly targeted promotion.

Some associations and non-profits are not effectively picking the low hanging fruit for new members already, so this should be the first use of resources before investments are made in the consumer realm.

What are your thoughts on the use of broadcast and consumer media to build awareness about your organization and get more members?

Recording of Membership Marketing Webinar Now Online

Several weeks ago, before spring appeared here in Virginia, I presented a webinar titled, Membership Growth Principles: Best Practices in Membership Marketing sponsored by Socious.

At the time, I forgot to mention that the webinar recording of the presentation was available. You can listen in and get the slides here.

I think that you will find the presentation gives a good overview of membership marketing with a focus on economics (renewal, lifetime value, maximum acquisition cost), market segmentation, the membership product value proposition, and promotional strategy.

How to Simplify Your Membership Marketing

Frequently, I have the opportunity to review the membership marketing programs of various associations.

Sometimes, I find that organizations are doing too little to get and keep members.  They need to increase the frequency and reach of their marketing efforts.

However, of late I have observed another problem; overly complex and tradition bound membership marketing plans. Here are some of the issues that I have seen and some fixes to these challenges.

1. Not Keeping a Focus on ROI: Some organizations continue efforts year in and year out without stepping back to really look at the time, effort, and budget required to deploy an initiative compared to the return it produces.  At some point, almost every promotion needs to be retooled or sunset.  Regularly identify and drop the poor performing promotions and reprogram the budget toward innovative new opportunities.
2. Over Testing: Any good marketer is in favor of testing.  However, too much of a good thing may not make sense.  It makes sense to test big elements (offers, lists, channels) because the results will normally come back with a statistically valid outcome.  However, testing little elements like a color, a signature, or a font will very likely produce such a minor difference in response that any variance will be statistically insignificant.  Test big items for big wins and save the time and energy on launching inconsequential tests. 
3. Too Much Segmentation: Every market can be segmented by a host of demographics, behaviors, and list selects.  But at some point providing a unique message and offer to each segment becomes inefficient and ineffective.  More often than not when I have tried to tailor unique “special messages” to each slice of prospective members a generic option has outperformed the highly targeted approach.  Present your most powerful and compelling message to your market instead of diluting it by trying to be all things to all people.
4. Too Many Steps: How many clicks and how much information is required to join or renew your organization’s membership?  It is great to gather a detailed profile of on member and you want to ensure that he is qualified, but over time your application process may have added requests that cause a member to abandon the transaction because it takes too much time or they do not have the information at hand.  In fact, many organizations report exceptionally high shopping cart abandons during the join process on their websites.  When you are asking a prospect or member to complete a transaction, require the minimum time, clicks, and information possible before the dues payment is received.
5. Too Much Research: Research is a foundational discipline for effective marketing.  However, research can become like pealing an onion.  There always seems to be another layer of the unknown.  At some point, gaining understanding has to give way to execution. And indeed the best research can simply be whether or not someone will write a check in response to your offer.  Lean toward a “ready, fire, aim” approach in your marketing by gathering real data from actual promotional efforts.

Here is the bottom line.  When you are developing a plan or a marketing campaign ask the hard questions.  Is this promotion really worth the time and effort required for the expected return?  Do we have the quantity necessary to get a legitimate statistical outcome from this test?  Are these demographic differences really significant enough to warrant a different message or is our core value proposition strong enough for each market segment?  Would I really take the time and effort to go through all of the steps needed to make this transaction or is it too much to ask?   And am I willing to take the risk to gain understanding by acting on what I know instead of waiting for more information? 

Two Levers Driving Membership Marketing Success

Two of the most important levers in membership marketing are frequency—how often you communicate with your audience—and reach—how many people your marketing touches. The way these two levers are managed in membership marketing efforts will determine whether marketing results succeed or fall short.

The Rule of 7, for example, emphasizes the importance of frequency. It holds that prospects often need to see a message multiple times before taking action. Reach, by contrast, aims to increase the number of prospects exposed to your marketing. Even a powerful message can't drive growth if only a small share of your audience ever sees it.

Growth occurs when both levers move in the right direction at the same time. Associations that communicate frequently and expand their prospect base build greater familiarity and impact. The challenge is maintaining both consistently, especially given limited time and resources.

Why Frequency Matters

Recently, an organization contacted a highly qualified list of prospects with whom they had no prior relationship. To engage the audience, they offered a free webinar on a popular topic. The results showed that 99.5 percent of recipients did not respond to the offer. This is not unusual. Marketing success rarely happens after just one impression.

However, repeated contact builds recognition and credibility. From my experience, I have consistently observed this pattern in marketing campaigns. Combining multiple emails and direct mail touches to a potential member, for example, yields a better return on investment than fewer interactions. Each additional, well-timed message boosts response rates without overwhelming the audience.

Membership, after all, is built on relationships, and relationships rely on consistent communication. The more often prospects and members hear from you in meaningful ways, the more likely they are to join, stay engaged, or renew. Associations that maintain a steady rhythm of communication typically see increased engagement and better retention.

For example, some associations still rely on just a few renewal messages or a short campaign period. However, data consistently show that successful renewal programs involve multiple outreach efforts, usually six to eight contacts, across different channels like email, mail, phone calls, and digital ads.

This does not mean sending the same message repeatedly. Frequency should be balanced with relevance and timing. Marketing automation also helps organizations personalize their outreach, ensuring that frequent communication remains valuable rather than becoming repetitive.

Why Reach Matters

If frequency measures how often your message goes to your target audience, reach measures the depth or volume of your audience. It indicates the total number of people exposed to your message who have the chance to respond. Even with compelling content, strong offers, and great creative, marketing won't drive growth if too few people see it.

Many associations excel at creative execution and channel strategy, yet still miss their membership goals because their campaigns simply do not reach enough of the market. Growth requires scale.

Expanding reach starts with investment. Associations that steadily grow their membership allocate resources to increase visibility across multiple channels and attract new audiences beyond their existing database.

Consider these methods for expanding reach:

• Renting or Leasing Third-Party Lists: Target new audiences that mirror your best members using industry directories, publication subscriber files, or membership lists of allied associations.
• Partnerships and Co-Marketing: Work with allied organizations to reach their audience through joint webinars, content sharing, or promotional exchanges.
• Digital Advertising: Use online display, paid social, search engine marketing, and retargeting to find new prospects worldwide who may not be in your existing files.

Effectively managing reach means tracking how many new prospects you engage over time. Metrics such as impressions, clicks, and inquiries provide insight into visibility, while database growth and cost per acquisition indicate the efficiency of your efforts. Successful programs typically cast a wide net and then refine targeting through segmentation and analytics.

Balancing Frequency and Reach

Too little frequency causes prospects to forget that you exist. Too little reach means too few prospects hear your message. However, because going deeper into a target market by reaching out to more prospects requires larger budgets and may initially produce lower response rates, reach is typically where associations miss the mark.

Growth ultimately demands reaching more prospects. Consider the math:

• A 5% response rate to a list of 1,000 prospects yields 50 new members.
• A 1% response rate to a list of 100,000 prospects yields 1,000 new members.

A larger audience, even with lower response rates, can produce dramatically better results.

Increasing reach happens gradually by testing new segments, lists, and methods outside of your existing database to discover and develop relationships with those who have never been members or customers.

At its core, membership marketing focuses on staying visible and earning recognition from a wide audience. The organizations that succeed are those that reach broadly and communicate consistently.

This article is an excerpt from the upcoming book, Membership Marketing from A to Z. Additional membership guidance can be found in the books The Seven Deadly Sins of Membership Marketing and Membership Recruitment. Both are now available on Amazon. 

Membership Marketing from A to Z

Here is something that I have wanted to put together for a long time.  It is a glossary of membership marketing terms linked to past posts that I have done over the years.  I have called it "Membership Marketing from A to Z". 

As you will note, I still do not have an entry for "X", so feel free to share your ideas.  Your feedback will also be appreciated on topics that are important that I have missed.  Generally, the reason a topic may not show up here is because I have not had a post to link to it.  But share the idea and maybe it will prompt me to put a post together on the topic.  All comments are welcome. 


A. Alternative Membership Models

A. Awareness: Starting the Membership Relationship

B. Branding

B. Brainstorming

C. Conversion of New Members

D. Dashboarding Membership

D. Discounting Membership Dues

D. Dues Increase

E. Economics of Membership

E. Engaging Members

F. Freemium Membership

F. For Profit Membership

F. Free Trial Membership

F. Frequency of Contact

G. Group Membership

H. Hiring Marketing Help 

I. Installment Dues Payments

I. International Membership

J. Joining: The Need to Belong

K. Keeping Members

L. Lead Generation and Conversion

L. List Selection

L. Lifetime Value

M. Maximum Acquisition Cost

M. Market Expansion Strategy

M. Marketing Plan

N. New Product Development

O. Offers to Incentivise New Members

P. Payment Options

P. Pricing Strategies

Q. Qualitative and Quantitative Reseach

R. Recruitment

R. Reinstatement 

R. Renewal Rate

R. Renewal and Retention

S. Segmentation Strategies

S. Steady State Analysis

T. Tiered Membership Structure

T. Test Marketing

T. Trade Show Member Sales

U. Unique Selling Proposition

V. Value

V. Volunteers

W. Website Maximumization

Y. Younger Members

Z. Zero Growth (4 reasons)

Can Associations Adapt to the Revolution in Marketing?

 A marketing revolution is transforming today's advertising agencies, as highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. The piece focused on the diminishment of marketing's creative aspects and the ascendence of the science of marketing. As one agency executive shared, “Whether we like it or not, the ‘Mad Men’ era is receding in our rearview mirror while we drive at full speed into the age of the ‘Math Men and Women.’”[1] 

While this shift occurs in agencies, associations are experiencing similar changes that demand new strategies and approaches. And the pace of change is accelerating. The article shared that the emerging roles in marketing will focus on expertise in digital marketing and data analytics. It noted that today, “the hot hires instead crunch numbers, run experiments, and use algorithms to analyze data and predict what kind of message will resonate, where it should appear, and even when someone is most likely to click ‘buy.’”[2]

The research findings in the latest Association Outlook Report support these trends. Respondents told us that their goals in 2025 are to increase operations effectiveness and marketing efforts through technology innovations. Some of the changes they noted include adding data visualization and dashboards to improve marketing campaign reporting and doing member and customer engagement scoring.

Additionally, the research highlighted the emerging use of AI technology. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents either use AI technology, plan to use it in the coming year, or will explore implementing it.[3] Some of the proposed uses of AI include supporting marketing, creating content, delivering more personalized member experiences, and automating responses to inquiries and support requests.

What does this ongoing marketing revolution mean for your marketing efforts? How will you need to change and adapt to remain relevant and effective?

Here are some areas that associations will need to evaluate going forward.

Staffing and Expertise: Building a Skilled Team

The first area to address will be staffing and expertise. Associations will increasingly need staff with abilities in digital marketing, data analytics, and AI. Traditional roles focused on creativity and general marketing strategy may diminish. New staff will need to be added with specialized skills. The new hires may require higher compensation because of more competition, as the private sector will also seek to fill these roles. Associations will also want to invest in training and professional development to ensure existing teams are equipped with more technology-focused skills.

Partnering for Success: Using External Experts

A second strategy will be leveraging outside experts: Associations may need to rely more heavily on consultants, agencies, and technology providers. This approach could allow them to access specialized knowledge without hiring full-time staff to accomplish some advanced technology and marketing functions. Associations might want to explore flexible, hybrid collaboration models with these external partners to implement digital marketing, data analytics, and enhanced reporting. At the same time, internal teams could focus more attention on strengthening member engagement and content development.

Harnessing Data: Personalization and Microtargeting

Additionally, association marketing must evolve beyond traditional segmentation and personas to focus on personalization and microtargeting driven by data analytics for prospect and engagement scoring. This analysis can identify the prospects to join, which members are likely to lapse, and what products and services are most relevant and engaging. The good news is that data will strengthen marketing effectiveness through testing, analyzing, and optimizing, empowering the association's responsiveness to market feedback and changes.

Budgeting for Innovation: Investing in the Future

No one wants to hear this, but budgets may need to substantially increase to keep up with these marketing and technology shifts. Marketing that relied on inexpensive email sends kept costs low. However, to maintain growth in this new era, the strategy must be upgraded with media spending for digital advertising and the accompanying data analytics tools to optimize campaign results. Planning for AMS enhancements and data integration tools will also be required.

Continually adapting to changes and innovations in marketing has been and will remain constant. For example, as early as the 1920s, marketing pioneer Claude Hopkins wrote in his book Scientific Advertising that in the past, “advertising was then a gamble – a speculation of the rashest sort. One man’s guess on the proper course was as likely to be as good as another's.”   In contrast, he asserted that “the time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science.”

Today, the science of marketing will continue reshaping how associations connect with their audiences, transforming the skills, tools, and strategies they require to succeed. By embracing this revolution—through strategic hiring, external partnerships, data analytics, and smart budgeting—associations can stay ahead of the curve.

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[1] Suzanne Vranica, “Sorry, Mad Men. The Ad Revolution Is Here.”

[2] Suzanne Vranica.

[3] Wasserman et al., “The 2025 Association Outlook Report.”