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.
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