Smooth The Path

Member Informed Strategy, Innovation & Marketing

  • Home
  • Speaking
    • Presentations
    • Upcoming Events
    • Happy Event Organizers
    • Happy Participants
  • Resources
    • Virtual Networking Incubator Roundup
    • Associations of the Future
    • New Member Engagement Study
    • Association Industry Innovation Research Study
    • New Strategies for Member Onboarding, Engagement, and Retention E-book
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

September 25, 2018 By Amanda Kaiser

Radically Alter the Focus of Your Association’s Marketing

Too often an association’s marketing messaging to new members focuses on the association; specifically how great the association is. We use words like the premier, the largest, and the oldest. We have 500, 5000, or 50,000 members. We are international or we a close-knit and local. All this talk about us, however, does not do much for new members. They can only connect with us when we talk about them!

“Your product should bridge the gap between your customer’s imperfect present and her imagined future,” says Bernadette Jiwa in a recent post on her blog The Story of Telling (a great blog for anyone trying to improve their association’s marketing). Instead of talking about how great our association is, we should focus our messaging on our new members’ problems and the solutions we have for their problems.

Put yourself in your new member’s shoes. What is going on in their career right now? Are they new to their organization navigating a new corporate culture? What projects are they working on? Have they been assigned to a project no one else in their company has ever worked on? What is going on in their jobs? Do they lack the technical or soft skills to get their job done efficiently?

Construct your member messaging by explaining what their problem is in their words and include a link to the content or resource that offers the solution. By providing a tour of solutions, new members will more quickly understand the value of the association than if we merely tell them the value of the association.

Related:

  • 6 Strategies for member email effectiveness
  • The new member engagement rule of three
  • Association email is dying

Filed Under: Association Marketing Tagged With: email, email campaigns, email marketing, email messaging, new member engagement, new member onboarding, onboarding

Follow

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Sign up for member insights & association inspiration.

Work With Me

Recent Posts

Association Strategy
Association Marketing
Association Innovation
Association Leadership
Association Value
Member Experience

Member Engagement
Member Research
Member Insights
Conference
Membership

Member Research

Blog

About

Happy Clients

Speaking

Popular Presentations

Contact Us

More Resources

Copyright © 2022 Amanda Kaiser