Marketing is the action of promoting your organisation and its services, but when was the last time you took a step back to look at the material you’re posting? It is important to focus on the reasons why new members are joining and use that to drive your marketing.
Your organisation will see a fluctuation in members over time. It is important to ask yourself what your new audience want to get out of your membership, and how you can best relate to them. If your marketing content is the same as it was a few years ago, the chances are that it may not be relevant anymore.
Longstanding members will value their membership differently to those who have recently joined. Marketing the lesser-known perks of your membership to non-members may help increase member retention in the long run.
Your Brand Image
Ask yourself how your members see you. Step back from the Board and picture how members view your organisation as a whole. Ask yourself why they join, and what you offer as incentives to renew their membership.
Perhaps your membership base is more diverse now – is everybody catered for? Does your mission statement need to be updated? Does your logo need updating?
Rebrand vs Refresh
We are not suggesting that you need to rebrand your organisation, and you may not even need to refresh, but it is important reassess your organisation’s objectives from time to time to ensure you are maintaining your core values.
A brand refresh is updating your public image to strengthen your organisation’s message and ideology. To rebrand would be to completely breakdown then rebuild your organisation from the ground up.
Refreshing your branding will most certainly create a buzz for potential new members, assuring them that you are involved with current trends. Alongside this, a refresh will give confidence to your current members that they have joined a constantly evolving organisation and help increase retention numbers.
Useful Apps
There are hundreds, if not thousands of apps and services to help you develop your marketing strategy. A plethora of paid for and free options are available to help you manage your social media.
Most of these services are available on both desktop and mobile, making it easier to manage your organisation when you are away from the office. Website support, social media schedulers and work orientated messengers are just a few of the options available.
Test and Analyse
If you think it’s time for a fresh marketing approach, then trial some new methods and find out what works for your organisation. It’s not one size fits all in the world of marketing, depending on your demographic, your approach may need to be vastly different from other organisations.
Most social media now have inbuilt reports so it’s easy to monitor how well your posts are doing. Compare which posts do better than others, and experiment with new types of content. There are multiple website plugins that can also help with this, alongside Google Analytics.
Let us know what marketing tools you find most helpful in the comments.