Generating new opportunities and sales within membership organisations can sometimes feel overwhelming. An ongoing challenge for businesses and brands is how to be ready to grow membership, both now, and into the future.
Keeping your existing audience engaged, and attracting new members is paramount for success, so considering strategies that focus on emotion and driving behavioural change is an effective place to start.
Achieving meaningful growth is not easy. It’s hard because we live in an ever-changing, complex and competitive world. Additionally, consumer behaviour and expectations continue to shift, and disruptive technology presents opportunities and challenges in equal measure.
In response, to grow membership, you need to think innovatively, creatively, and with an even greater understanding of your audience’s needs and wants. You need to think about the entire communications landscape, where different audience groups go to digest information, the channels you use, the mediums your audience prefers. You also need to interrogate all available data to gain the most detailed and nuanced understanding possible. And, with the amount of data now available, that means considering how you can leverage machine learning and AI systems to do this analysis for you.
Strategically-driven, integrated campaigns
Increasing membership strategies can take multiple approaches depending on your individual business and its goals. One way to achieve increased engagement is through strategically-driven, integrated campaigns.
They are a proven way to reach and engage your audience across multiple channels and touchpoints and, when approached with excitement and creativity, enable all communications channels to work harder and deliver a greater contribution to generating revenue.
Integrated campaigns can be extensive in their scope and last a year or more, or they can be deployed quickly in response to a time-limited opportunity. At MTM, we worked with performing arts leader, Equity, to develop a new, best-in-class website to support the next stage in its journey. Through developing a more meaningful and engaging experience for users, it was referenced as a great tool for showing off the benefits of membership.
Essentially, integrated campaigns are about considering the role that each relevant promotional channel can play so you maximise their effectiveness, rather than a set of unconnected messages and visual styles that run the risk of leaving your audience feeling confused.
We live in such a connected world that you know your audience uses several platforms, across multiple devices, every day. It’s therefore critical that you consider this type of intelligence in your activities and build campaigns around your audiences and their day-to-day lives.
When all of your marketing activities are working harmoniously, pushing towards the same goal, you’re able to create a seamless journey from one communication to the next and from one channel to the next. That consistency helps you build trust with your intended audience. And, if customers trust you, then they are more likely to engage with you – and ultimately buy from you.
Increasing the overall levels of audience engagement
In our own experience, when aligned, the contribution made by each channel will collectively increase the overall levels of audience engagement.
An additional advantage of following an integrated approach to your campaigns is that it provides an opportunity to regularly assess the impact and penetration of each of your activities, by channel. By monitoring the results and considering each available metric, including social media stats, website analytics, on-site behaviour and sales leads, brands can direct future marketing spend towards the disciplines and channels that have produced the best return on investment, and ensure budget isn’t wasted on activity that isn’t producing the expected results.
Interested in how we can help you grow membership in your organisation? Get in touch today.