Your association offers significant member value. But to attract and engage with more members, you must let that value shine through multiple channels.
We’re not just talking about communications channels here (although they’re important, too!). We’re also talking about multi-channel marketing, or using various approaches for your association marketing, including:
- Understanding what your members value most
- Reaching out to members in a variety of ways that attract and engage them
- Giving members new opportunities to grow professionally
Taking a multi-channel approach to your marketing will help you to grow and retain your association membership.
Let’s look at some high-impact ways to attract and engage members using a multi-channel marketing approach:
1. Understand Your Various Audiences.
Effective member marketing and engagement start with understanding your audiences. It’s important to know who you’re communicating with so that you can use the right content, tone, length, offers, and channels to reach them.
Start by reviewing the data in your association management software (AMS). Use the reporting and data analytics tools in your AMS to understand member interests, behaviors, career stages, and trends. This will give you deeper insights into what communications and information are most relevant for your members’ needs.
Another way to better understand your audiences is to develop personas. Personas are fictional, generalized characters that represent your audience’s various needs, goals, and challenges. They can help you think of your members as groups of people with similar characteristics, so you can design content for them and market it in ways that grab their attention.
Use what you know about your members to create these fictional characters for each type of member (and prospective member) you’re communicating with. Have a persona in mind (as you would when thinking of a friend as you write a letter to them) as you develop offerings, content, and communications for the group each persona represents.
2. Use Personalized Approaches to Deliver Greater Member Value.
So, how can you provide a more personalized experience to attract and engage members? An effective approach is to make sure you have the right technologies in place to deliver a customized experience – giving members the resources they need at each career stage.
For example, using job board software built for associations, you can create a robust online career center that offers job opportunities and career development resources to help members as their careers evolve. Utilizing association job board software like YM Careers, you can deliver job alerts, personalized job searches, job recommendations, and relevant career resources – allowing you to provide benefits your members seek in a more customized way.
3. Consider Tech Integrations.
A multi-channel approach to attracting and engaging members includes evaluating the technologies you use and how you use them together to reach members. For example, use your technologies together to optimize your job board for visibility, with limited access for non-members, effectively using the job board to drive membership.
One way to achieve this is to integrate your job board with AMS. For example, YM Careers online job board software integrates with Aptify, NetForum, Nimble, and YourMembership AMS solutions by Momentive Software. With this type of integration, non-members who visit your job board and sign up as job seekers via job alerts or account registration are automatically delivered to your AMS as a list of new-member prospects for your use in member marketing and acquisition efforts.
Another strategy is to integrate your job board with your learning management system (LMS). For example, YM Careers job board software integrates with Crowd Wisdom LMS by Momentive Software to help you combine an online career center with your professional education program. Together, they enable you to showcase career development opportunities alongside personalized learning paths that help members attain the education and certifications they need to be qualified candidates. This approach allows you to deliver more of the career-building resources your members want in a personalized way.
4. Offer Career Support in Other Ways.
As your members look to grow their careers, you can go beyond your association’s online career center to engage and support them. For example, host virtual or in-person networking happy hours so that members and invited non-members can connect with peers in their profession in an informal environment. Another idea: Host a career fair that’s open to all professionals in your industry (not just members). Extending your reach in this way can help you attract non-members to join your association while providing added value to members.
