How do membership organizations stand out in today’s digital marketplace? In the old days, businesses, nonprofits, and membership organizations all relied entirely on pushing advertisements out to the public. This one-sided, transactional model didn’t take into account the need membership organizations have to deepen engagement and involvement among supporters, volunteers, and donors.
That’s why content marketing can provide tremendous value to associations. To help understand the value, it’s helpful to visualize a flywheel with members in the center:
Content marketing constantly engages members and prospective members, while delighting existing members, via your organization’s content, experiences, and relationships.
What Is Content Marketing?
In order to attract and retain members, associations need to get valuable content to the target audience. That content should reach them in a way that feels natural and organic, not intrusive or interruptive.
Content marketing is all about planning, creating, distributing, and sharing content with the goal of reaching your target audience and increasing brand awareness and sales engagement. Your association’s content—from social media to newsletters—provides the foundation for content marketing.
Most membership associations already have content marketing assets, such as
- Blogs
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Webinars
- White papers
- Case studies
- Infographics
Content marketing is an approach that helps you build relationships with potential members and guide them to solutions to their problems. But it goes further than that. It also deepens their connection with your organization, facilitating long-term growth. Members consider the organization to be a valuable resource that they can return to. They will renew their membership, become advocates, and recommend that others join.
Why Content Marketing?
People join associations to be empowered, educated, and inspired. That happens when high-quality content works to attract, engage, and delight them.
Content marketing helps to educate members and prospective supporters about the products and services that an association provides. It also provides advanced tools for data collection and analytics that give associations new ways to recruit, retain, and engage with their members.
Content marketing
- Boosts conversions
- Builds relationships between members and organizations
- Results in increased loyalty
- Shows your audience how your products and member services solve their challenges
- Creates a sense of community with your brand
Content Marketing Basics
Every association has its own goals, but getting started with content marketing means paying close attention to the following essentials:
- Personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal consumer: members, donors, supporters, volunteers. Personas help you discover and understand who you’re trying to connect with. It’s a way of finding your community.
- Keywords. After you understand your personas, you need a strategic SEO plan. Keywords and phrases help you target the right content to answer people’s questions. SEO is key to your audience finding your association.
- Content strategy. A content strategy is the way you plan a two-way conversation between your association and your potential and existing members.
- Social media. A social media strategy driven by principles of content marketing focuses on sharing content: your own and from sources your personas will enjoy and engage with.
Your association should not be your best-kept secret. Every potential member should have a chance to learn about the value your organization provides—and existing members should be shouting it from the rooftops.
A strategic marketing plan can help you share the value of belonging with everyone who needs to hear it.
Content marketing helps you realign your content strategy to become more interactive and dynamic. Belonging is a reciprocal experience where both parties grow and change. And with all the options available, people aren’t likely to pay to be part of an organization unless it is clearly a community that welcomes them, responds to their needs, and delights them.
Associations have an advantage when it comes to creating marketing materials. That’s because great content exists already. It is baked into your organization’s events, presentations, publications, webinars, and training.
A solid marketing strategy and content mission help associations to share valuable information with potential and existing members to deepen their relationship with the organization.
Your Mission Matters
The importance of a mission statement in driving an association’s marketing strategy can’t be overemphasized. A powerful mission guides everyone’s priorities and helps target marketing efforts. But creating a mission statement can’t be rushed. It involves deep soul searching and conversations with the team to make sure that it is a genuine expression of your organization’s mission.
In Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman’s book Marketing That Matters: 10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World, the authors write, “A powerful mission statement articulates the … aspirational and often audacious outcome that an organization is pursuing.”
Here are some tips for getting started with a new or revised mission statement:
- Make it a group effort. Set aside time for brainstorming or a retreat for uninterrupted focus.
- Start by reflecting on the need your association fills in the market. What value is being created?
- Ask questions like
- What do we do?
- How do we do it?
- Who do we do it for?
- What value are we bringing?
- What level of service do we provide?
- What three words or phrases would we use to describe our mission?
A mission statement doesn’t need to be long, but it should be audacious and inspirational. Once that’s in place, you can move forward with a mission-driven marketing strategy.
Mission-Driven Marketing
The most successful businesses, organizations, and associations are those with a clearly defined mission—a commitment to making an impact beyond the bottom line.
The voice of the brand and the mission ring out loud and clear in the content elements of a content marketing strategy. Content marketing also helps align the entire team and organization around the meaning, messaging, and branding—making for a unified and streamlined process.
A clear mission and a solid brand platform form the basis for a beautifully aligned marketing strategy.
A brand platform is an internal, living document that provides standardized language describing what the organization does, why you do it, who you do it for, and other essential information. The basic components of the brand platform are:
- Mission Statement
- Core Values
- Unique Value Proposition
- Key Messages
- Stakeholder Attitudes
- Core Style Principles
- Brand Style Guide
The brand platform serves as a compass, allowing the organization to move forward while staying true to its mission. By creating a brand platform guided by the IDEA Framework, you’re building your brand from the inside out. You’re also helping to build capacity, inspire action, and maintain focus on the organization’s mission.
Locating Content Sources
Where is all this great content? Membership associations have distinct advantages when it comes to creating marketing and SEO content. There are already myriad sources of content at your association.
Here are just a few examples:
- A conference presentation where you have a transcript, video, and deck. These raw materials can be mined to create multiple pieces of content in multiple formats across several channels. Webinars, explainer videos, blogs, and pillar pages can all launch from one session.
- Members and internal experts can provide interviews, posts, videos, and stories that will resonate with members and prospective members.
- Publications can be turned into blogs, videos, infographics, and fact sheets.
The tech tools for associations are growing and expanding at a dizzying rate. That’s a wonderful thing—unless it becomes overwhelming. One peril is called “frankensteining.” That’s when your organization is expanding and cobbling together various technical elements: your website and its content management system (CMS), a membership management system (AMS), a learning management system (LMS), a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and a donor platform. If these various systems don’t work together, you’ve created a monster called a frankenstack. As a result, your organization, staff, and tech might have to work harder than they need to.
From managing your members and prospective members to creating valuable experiences and educational content for them, you need to harness your technology to save your staff people time and provide even more value for your members.
Your tech stack should help keep your organization running smoothly. You can’t do this if all of your platforms aren’t working together.
But how do you know if you are creating inefficiencies by frankensteining your tech stack?
- Learn from your data and make sure your technology is set up to take advantage of it.
- Compare your tech stack to that of your leading competitors.
- Talk to your team about their experiences. Do you always feel like you’re trying to catch up?
- Put yourself in the shoes of your members. What are their experiences like? Can you do better?
Watch for the Signs
Change can be hard. We get that! But it can only help to take a look for signs that it is time for a tech change:
- You have unintegrated tools. Too many associations are running operations with tech tools that don’t talk to each other. One sure way to identify this problem is if staff are pulling data from one place and manually importing it into another.
- Staff is wasting time reconciling data from many different sources.
- You’re not saving money. Your operations budget is growing as you spend money on support systems from multiple vendors, and your members get frustrated with poor user experiences.
- You don’t know who your members are. There is no way to serve them, delight them, and solve their problems if you don’t know who they are. Your tech stack needs to help you segment and target content to members.
On this last point, successful membership associations have been perfecting the art of using ideal supporter personas to keep members at the center of their efforts
Successful membership organizations are getting the right content to potential and existing members. That starts with attracting the right folks to your content.
The key to this strategy is personas. These fictional representations of ideal supporters or participants are a variation of buyer personas used in marketing goods and services.
Personas are based on market research about the demographics, attitudes, concerns, goals, motivations, and behavioral patterns of people who would be ideal members for your association.
There is a free template for creating personas to help organizations get a taste for this process that helps bring precision and delight to membership marketing efforts.
Using personas helps a marketing team to use content marketing strategies to bring ideal supporters into their orbit by creating educational content that solves ideal members’ problems. It puts you in control of your marketing and the members in charge of their membership journey.
What does your association provide for prospective members? For new members? What about experienced long-term members? These folks all have different needs and respond to different types of content and offerings. You don’t want anyone to let their membership lapse because they feel like they have gotten all they can from your organization.
Mapping the membership journey is a way to meet the audience where they are. This content mapping template helps associations learn what type of content to deliver and what channels to use to deliver it.
What are the most common questions or problems people are searching the internet for? What can you learn about their lives and needs? The more you learn about prospective, new, and long-term members, the more you can use that information to educate and delight them.
Provide Content for Every Career Stage
Think about the people your association serves, and whether they're at the start of their careers or at a later point on the journey you're supporting them on. Those at the beginning of that journey are likely to have different challenges and goals than those who are farther along. Plan content—from the sources you already have—that connects with your members at every stage. Understanding where they are and the pain points they have at each stage along that member's journey will help you to nurture your contacts with varying content all the way through to joining.
Example: Your association has a comprehensive guide to your field. You build it up as an introductory offer and generate traffic and convert visitors to leads through a simple form. Then you email those contacts information based on either their actions or your typical sales cycle. As your leads move along through the member’s journey, offer them things of value, such as your compensation survey or links to webinars you're offering, and then ultimately, if they join, you offer them the guide to the field you have been promoting since initial contact.
It Works!
Content marketing for associations is based on getting leads/potential members to enter your orbit. Your authoritative and unique content keeps them coming back. When the time is right, you ask them to become members, and they just might take you up on that offer.
Create a Membership Benefit Download
You’ll need something juicy to offer as an incentive for joining. This is where all your research on personas pays off. Is there a comprehensive guide, a checklist, or a collection of resources that arrives in their inbox as soon as they pay dues? That kind of collateral is useful, educational, and a valuable resource that helps members understand the value of belonging.
Members Only?
Many associations face internal debates about restricting content. How much content should you restrict to members? Is your journal off-limits to people who don’t pay dues? Do members receive a different newsletter than prospective members?
All of this depends on your organization. You can help discover the answers by mapping content to different stages of the members’ journey.
Marketing When Your Association Has Chapters
An association’s regional or local chapters are often an underutilized resource for expanding the organization’s mission and increasing engagement. Chapter members and volunteers are sources for storytelling and can energize an association’s social media and web presence. Chapter members can become social media influencers.
To be an effective marketing catalyst, chapters need to stay connected with the messages, mission, and technology of the parent organization.
Many associations with chapters find a brand platform to be an essential tool for keeping everyone on the same page when it comes to messaging, both visual and verbal. An association brand platform creates alignment across teams and departments. It generates excitement and brings the brand’s personality to life.
It’s also crucial to have a unified website theme. For example, HubSpot’s themes and templates allow associations and chapters to create their own content that fits the look and tone of the overall brand.
The Student Veterans of America (SVA) has a dynamic and integrated marketing strategy that harnesses the power of chapters. Here are a few of the approaches they use.
- Creating branded T-shirts and swag (hats, stickers, etc.) to turn members, families, partners, and allies into “walking billboards”
- Partnering with other student organizations to diversify the audience
- Cultivating relationships with influencers
- Opening Snapchat or TikTok accounts and posting chapter updates to these media
- Creating chapter playlists or events
- Creating and using a “true-to-mission” logo
- Collaborating with other organizations and groups to pool resources
Like all aspects of marketing, the chapters are sharing their delight and excitement about their association with a wider audience. And they
Mapping Content
Content boosts conversions. Without it, your social media followers, for example, can't be nurtured in the journey toward association membership. A prospect needs to “hear” an advertiser's message at least seven times before they'll take action.
By using content mapping tools to share select pieces of your most valuable content, you can in exchange earn the trust of member prospects that you can:
- Communicate with
- Build a relationship with
- Encourage to join your association when they're ready
Does your organization have a marketing plan? You need one. For an association, a good marketing plan is also a blueprint for building a community, creating connections, and deepening engagement and relationships.
For a membership organization committed to growth, marketing is simply widening the circle of folks who share and contribute to your mission. There is a nonprofit marketing plan template that helps jump-start the process of creating a marketing plan. 
HubSpot outlines five steps to creating a nonprofit marketing plan.
- Define your marketing goals.
- Understand your audiences.
- Craft your key messages.
- Choose, plan, and create your marketing strategies.
- Analyze your marketing performance.
Associations want to learn all they can about people who sign up for your fee-for-service training, consulting, and events, as well as members, donors, and volunteers—anyone who will contribute to your organization's success.
The key to marketing an association is creating an engaging online presence that goes beyond just having a website. You’ll invest in a presence that also includes SEO, social media, email marketing, blogging, and other ways to share your content and use it to convert strangers into friends and supporters.
And this strategy will further your mission.
Build a Community
Content is connection. It’s a way of taking potential members on a journey from interest to engagement.
These can be challenging times for engagement. Some of the traditional ways of reaching prospective members include in-person educational events, conferences, and annual meetings. All of these had to be moved online in recent years to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The silver lining of this terrible pandemic is that organizations had to learn to rely even more on online strategies for staying in touch with members and prospective members. Some were able to expand their reach and membership because of the limitations.
Paul Stark, marketing and communications director at the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), shares insights on how his association has been able to survive and thrive by harnessing the power of collaborative partnerships and technology.
This organization’s marketing team has learned new skills and ways to connect with members, such as creating and sharing more digital and video content. They have even expanded their reach because virtual meetings allowed them to connect with different segments that normally couldn’t attend.
And they are working tirelessly to understand the behavior on their website, how people are responding to the content.
Retain Members by Delighting Them
Where is all this delightful content? It’s there, if you know where to look. Membership associations have treasure troves of great content already. They have brochures about the value of membership. They hold annual conferences every year and record sessions that can be turned into blogs. They have white papers, educational materials, research studies, and journals. The content is there.
We just need to learn better ways to use it, share it, and get it into the right hands. A great place to start is to take inventory of all the literature your organization has, even if it’s an old print piece, or something buried on a server. You might be surprised to learn what’s already out there that can be repurposed to educate, engage, and delight potential members.
1. Create a thriving online community for members
Your organization is there to be a resource to your members, and your content should be informative. But humans are social by nature—we want to interact with your organization and with you. Instead of always pushing information, make engagement a key component of your social media strategy. Host a Facebook group. Ask questions. Incorporate interactive polls into your content strategy. If members are (politely) debating a topic on a post you shared, let that discussion inspire your next post.
Turning members into social influencers is also a tactic to use, according to the Center for Association Leadership; We’ve seen social influencer campaigns work very well for coalitions and membership organizations. Letting highly engaged members “hold court” on your social media accounts—think Instagram takeovers or Facebook/Twitter chats—goes a long way in building a community and influential relationships.
Don’t worry: you don’t need an influencer with a million followers. Instead, connect with the right members who are active online and who have become authorities in their own right. Once you’ve built that relationship, they can then become advocates for your association.
2. Provide opportunities for feedback
Highly successful association leaders regularly solicit feedback from members, according to this Forbes magazine article. Digital media can be a critical tool in creating this feedback loop, and it is an extremely effective way to stay top of mind with your current and prospective members. These don’t have to be formal surveys—though those are important too. Instead, these mini-feedback sessions could be Twitter or Facebook polls, or a simple question in an email. They could be timed around an annual event or a membership drive.
Some organizations use their annual meeting to spark member feedback, asking for panel and keynote speaker recommendations far in advance, and sending follow-up surveys in the days and weeks after the event is over. The result? Their membership feels like they're part of the process, and that the organization values their input. Taking the opportunity to regularly ask, “What would YOU like to see/do/read/hear?” shows your membership that you’re interested in building a reciprocal relationship with them. Bonus: You’re giving them a chance to weigh in on programming. Both of these go a long way in building a loyal membership.
3. Personalize content
Sixty-seven percent of respondents to a CMO Magazine survey said it’s important for organizations to automatically adjust content based on what they’re currently doing online. When associations send generic, mass emails, engagement and action rates suffer. Segmenting your database of members, leads, and prospects and customizing the content they’re receiving is a must. The busy professionals in your field want to feel like they’re receiving content that’s relevant to their unique needs and specific interests—and they will reward you for that.
Personalized content gives the user a reason to browse your Facebook page, spend time on your website, sign up for your email list—and join your organization. Websites, emails, and Facebook ads can all be tailored based on a user's browsing history, member profile, and user persona. Creating and delivering personalized content in this way is effective in attracting attention, increasing engagement and retention rates, and converting prospects to members.
It's equally important to have a content marketing strategy that draws your ideal members to your association and provides them with the information they're looking for.
These are just three of the many creative and strategic ways your association can use digital marketing to bolster your membership recruitment activities. They aren’t designed to replace your offline programs; in-person touchpoints are important. Rather, they will help you leverage the very tools and technologies that could otherwise threaten your recruitment and retention efforts.
Case Study: Professional Association
In this case study, an association increased web traffic by 43%. Their leads increased by 57%, and they converted 10% of leads to members, just in the first year. This organization already had a wealth of content at their fingertips. They just learned how to get it into the right hands.
What happened? Working with Yodelpop as their content marketing partner, they
- analyzed the competition and their peers,
- figured out how they could offer unique content for their potential and existing members,
- created personas—profiles of ideal members and influencers—and helped them create and target content to those individuals, and
- developed a content marketing strategy.
When associations use all the tools at their disposal to understand who their members are, what they need in their professional journey, and how to get it to them, the results become obvious. More clicks, more engagement, more downloads, more shares.
Marketing becomes a continual process of discovery that leads to a passionate, engaged membership.
It’s no secret that in order to achieve their recruitment and retention goals, associations must leverage data to drive decisions, enhance member engagement, and optimize marketing strategies. Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data can provide valuable insights into member behavior, content effectiveness, and overall organizational performance.
Associations can set up and use analytics tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot, along with key metrics to track and interpret for informed decision-making.
Setting Up Analytics Tools
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that provides in-depth insights into website traffic and user behavior.
Step 1: Create a Google Analytics account and add your website as a property.
Step 2: Install the tracking code on your website. This code collects data on visitor interactions.
Step 3: Set up goals to track specific actions, such as membership sign-ups or content downloads.
Step 4: Configure event tracking to monitor interactions like video plays, form submissions, and outbound link clicks.
HubSpot: HubSpot offers comprehensive analytics for content marketing, sales, and customer service.
Step 1: Sign up for HubSpot and integrate it with your website and CRM.
Step 2: Use HubSpot’s tracking code to collect data on visitor behavior.
Step 3: Set up dashboards to monitor key metrics and create reports tailored to your association’s goals.
Step 4: Utilize HubSpot’s tools for email marketing, social media, and content management to gather holistic data across all channels.
Key Metrics to Track
Website Traffic:Metric: Page Views and Unique Visitors
Interpretation: High page views indicate strong interest in your content. Unique visitors show how many individuals are accessing your site. Analyze traffic sources (organic, direct, referral, social) to understand where your audience is coming from.
Membership Conversions:Metric: Conversion Rate
Interpretation: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g., subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an ebook, etc.). A low conversion rate may suggest a need to optimize your landing pages or calls to action.
Content Engagement:Metric: Average Session Duration and Bounce Rate
Interpretation: Average session duration indicates how long visitors stay on your site, while bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. High engagement (long session duration, low bounce rate) suggests that your content is relevant and valuable.
Member Retention:Metric: Churn Rate
Interpretation: The percentage of members who do not renew their membership. A high churn rate may indicate dissatisfaction or a lack of perceived value, prompting a review of member benefits and engagement strategies.
Email Campaign PerformanceMetric: Open Rate and Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Interpretation: Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who open your email, while CTR tracks how many recipients click on links within the email. Low rates may require improvements in email subject lines, content, or personalization.
Social Media Metrics:Metric: Engagement Rate (likes, shares, comments) and Follower Growth
Interpretation: High engagement rates and follower growth indicate that your social media content resonates with your audience and effectively builds your community.
Interpreting Data for Decision-Making
- Identifying Trends:
Regularly review your analytics to identify trends and patterns. For instance, a spike in traffic following a webinar can highlight the effectiveness of your promotional strategies.
- Segmenting Data:
Segment your data to gain insights into different member groups. Analyze behavior by demographics, membership status, or engagement level to tailor your marketing efforts.
- Setting Benchmarks:
Establish benchmarks based on historical data to measure performance over time. Compare current metrics to these benchmarks to assess growth and areas needing improvement.
- Making Data-Driven Decisions:
Use data to inform strategic decisions. For example, if a particular content type (e.g., videos) shows higher engagement, consider producing more of it. If certain traffic sources (e.g., social media) drive conversions, allocate more resources to those channels.
Using data for decision-making is not just advantageous; it's essential. Data-driven insights lead to more effective marketing strategies, enhanced member experiences, and sustained organizational growth. By embracing data analytics, association marketers can ensure they are making the best possible decisions to support their association’s mission and goals.
All About Relationships
By using content marketing, focusing on attracting the right visitors, and providing content that answers their questions/problems, associations cultivate relationships by providing delightful, meaningful content.
With smart strategies and mission-driven marketing, the right content gets to the right people when they need it. The result is a thriving membership organization—where paying annual dues is a joyful way to participate in a community where the value of belonging is demonstrated all along the career journey.
