Feature: Membership Marketing
ATTRACTING MEMBERSHIP FROM DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHICAL REGIONS AND CULTURES IAPCO Member: Business Travel Consulting (BTC Americas), Mexico
Becoming global is an opportunity for associations to grow, and it is also a main challenge they are facing. Understanding associations and their need for expansion and delivering a legacy is the first step in the membership marketing plan to successfully attract membership from different geographical regions and cultures. Membership marketing must be a continual process and has to be focused on working to understand your membership, establishing different strategies to clearly share the value of your Association in order to attract new members and to keep those who are already members. Below is a breakdown of the most important steps to outlining your audience, connecting with and attracting them. Identifying your target members: make sure you have identified your target members, considering age, gender, income, location, culture, general interests, social networks - if they are active and which ones they use - Google Analytics can provide you with the
24
PCO | March 2019
general demographics of your audience to help you get started, and the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Understanding your target makes prospecting and marketing so much easier. Back to basics: simply ask your members about their needs and expectations, develop the channels that allow your Association to communicate with your audience throughout the year and to receive feedback from them. Questions lead to conversations and engagement, which in turn leads to a better understanding of your target audience. Regionalisation of the membership by chapters helps members to connect with their peers that are equal or similar in cultural realities, implications and social behaviour, and make sure to deliver a smart solution to the needs of each chapter focusing on their members. In this sense, the leaders of the chapters can also be helpful when analysing other associations that are competing for your target audience’s attention, so you can
better understand weaknesses upon which you can then capitalise. Establishing a 360° customer experience that focuses not only on members but also on the industry suppliers and other stakeholders to support your Association that will help to grow reputation, generate engagement and to deliver real value. This will grow the perception of current members that they are in the right Association, to get more involved, to spread the word to potential members about the benefits of being a part of it and to enroll new members. Investing in a useful CRM Program (Customer Relationship Management) or in an Association Management Software that can help you to track your members/chapters and to improve the delivery value you are giving to them. Understanding what is on the mind of your target audience can lead to insights that could influence your marketing strategy or the direction your Association is, or plans to, take.
