You probably know by now that member stories are great for marketing. But did you know that some story formats work better than others to convert prospects into members and event attendees? For maximum success with your next member story, divide content into three key areas: early career, mid career, and late career.
Early Career
Focus on the resources your organization offers someone who is new to the industry. How can you help them learn the business and increase their value to their organizations? What events or offerings do you have to connect them with other newbies? How might you help them meet industry veterans and mentors?
Mid Career
Mid career professionals already have a pretty good feel for their role and industry. Now they want to focus on professional development, leadership skills, and promotions. Keep in mind their personal lives are often getting increasingly busy at this stage.
Late Career
Seasoned veterans want resources and connections that can help them lead better, develop stronger teams, and improve their organizations for the long term. Chances are they are interested in working smarter, not harder, given their demanding schedules.
Incorporating all three of these elements in one member story helps your marketing reach a broader audience while showcasing a range of your association’s offerings. But getting a member to articulate all of this during an interview or survey can be tricky. Here are a few pointed questions to help you get the info you need.
7 Interview Questions for Better Member Stories
Tell me about how you got into the industry. What was it like in the early days of your career?
How did our association help you learn the business and make connections? Can you point to a specific resource or event that was helpful?
Thinking back to the middle years, how did our association help you advance in your career?
Can you think of anything specific that helped you land a promotion or execute an important project?
What is your role today? How does our association help you thrive in that role?
In what ways does our association help you be a better leader? Develop your team? Strengthen your company for the long term?
If our association ceased to exist tomorrow, how would that impact your role? What would be harder for you? What would you miss out on?
What would you tell someone who is on the fence about joining our association?
How to Use Member Stories
Once you have concise, compelling member stories with rich details for early, mid, and late career stages, it’s time to put them to work. Create a website with three or four stories. Add headshots to emphasize the human element of your organization. Launch emails and social ads that direct people to the site. Include a call to action button that encourages prospects to schedule a call to learn more about your community and your full range of member benefits.
Why It Works
Member stories work because they speak to the real-world value of your association and offerings. They help build trust and drive engagement by creating a human connection with your audience. Career-focused stories are even more powerful. They prove to your base that you are there for them at every stage of their professional journey. These stories work because they compel people emotionally while also focusing on tangible resources that help them do their jobs better.
Want to remind members that your association is THE source for vital, up-to-date industry intel? Need to attract new members with exclusive content that proves you are an authority in your space? Looking to reassure members and prospects that you’re committed to their success? A “Top Trends” content piece can help you do all this and more.
What it is
A Top Trends content piece contains 8-10 predictions for your industry in the year ahead. Trends might include economic or market insights, new tools or technology, emerging threats, best practices, and more. Content can be rolled out as an e-book or website and repurposed throughout the year in social media, ads, emails, TV spots, and more.
How to do it
Follow a set format to make trends easy to create and easy for your base to read, digest, and act upon. Each trend should have a brief overview paragraph, bullet points describing the impact, and resources to help navigate it.
Pro Tip: Include a featured article from one of your members or industry partners for each trend. This serves a dual purpose of delivering extra insights while providing valuable exposure to the author. You can even sell these articles as sponsored content to generate additional revenue.
Sample Trend Format
Overview Paragraph
Write 3-4 sentences describing the trend and what’s ahead for your base.
Bulleted List
Create a subhead for each trend titled “How [TREND] affects [INDUSTRY].” Write 5-8 concise bullet points with tangible, real-world examples of exactly how each trend will impact your membership.
Sample Bullets
An increase in cyberattacks will cost widget companies and average of $XXXXXX in downtime in 2025, according to a new survey.
Many companies are taking XYZ steps to educate employees on new phishing scams that will be prevalent in the coming year.
Resources List
Identify 3-5 resources your association offers that can help people navigate each trend by either minimizing a pain point or seizing an opportunity. Include at least some free, ungated resources so prospects can see for themselves what your organization offers.
Example Resources
Whitepapers
Webinars
Certification programs
State of the Industry Report
Partner organization
Newsletter or magazine
Conference or event
Sponsored Content
Add a full-length article on a specific topic related to the trend.
How you benefit
Increase renewals: Trends content can help you drive renewals by reminding your current membership that you are the top industry authority. They also showcase a broad range of your exclusive resources that members might not be aware of.
Membership accruals: Trends get prospects’ attention with industry-specific intel and forecasting. They speak to your credibility and also emphasize the value of your association by offering useful tools and resources to help people prepare for the year ahead.
Why it works
People love “Top 10” lists. The headline alone will get attention and pique curiosity to encourage clicks and time on your website. The format is also compelling. A trends content piece breaks down in-depth information into small, digestible bites for busy people. Readers can quickly and easily scroll to the topics that interest them most and gain instant insights.
Ultimately, trends are powerful because they show off everything great about your association in one place and they compel people to engage—no sales pitch needed. Members and prospects alike can see your value, be inspired, and lean in to your organization.
The digital age demands a new approach to word-of-mouth marketing that actually gets results. Gone are the days of casually hoping people will talk about your brand. Today, you need strategy, creativity, and authenticity. Thanks to social media, the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing have changed. The potential reach of a single positive recommendation is staggering. So how can you harness this power effectively? Let’s break it down.
The Power of Organic Social Media
Organic social media is a great place to build trust and authenticity. It’s where you can have genuine, unpaid interactions that form the bedrock of your of word-of-mouth marketing. While paid ads can grab initial attention, they often fall short in fostering the same trust that organic engagements do. Similarly, world-of-mouth marketing is even more valuable than a paid ad from user-generated content or an influencer.
Buzz Kits: Your Secret Weapon
Buzz Kits can help you turn passive followers into proactive brand advocates. They offer a blend of easy-to-share content—from infographics to quotes—designed to spark curiosity, create FOMO, and energize action. Think of them as a toolbox that your loyal followers will be excited to share.
So many members see the value of your event and offerings, but they don’t organically post unless they are guided to. A well-crafted Buzz Kit turns your audience into a marketing machine, distributing your message organically and spontaneously. For maximum impact, customize your Buzz Kits for various audience segments, such as members, board members, staff, event speakers, and registrants.
The Game-Changer: Social Media Takeovers
Social Media Takeovers disrupt your routine content by lending your platform’s voice to an influencer or enthusiastic member for a day or even a week. This approach doesn’t just broaden your audience but injects authenticity and novelty into your channel. It’s an invitation to see your brand through fresh eyes. A successful takeover can generate a surge of engagement and leave lasting impressions.
So much of social media marketing is about cadence and timing. If your base doesn’t see your ad, the ad can’t get results. But an extended takeover will help make sure your audience sees and engages with your message.
CASE STORY: We recently helped a client stage a week-long social media takeover to promote their annual conference. The results were impressive! The takeover generated 18,000 impressions, up 40% from the same week last year. It also garnered 1200 engagements and 457 clicks, each up about 100% over last year. Best of all, 250 people registered for the event in just that one week.
Engage via LinkedIn: The Professional Playground
LinkedIn has evolved into much more than a network for job seekers and recruiters. It is a place to connect, both personally and professionally, where you can build meaningful connections that convert into invaluable word-of-mouth marketing.
Leverage Personal Profiles
Personal engagement on LinkedIn is about humanizing your brand. Share authentic behind-the-scenes stories, professional challenges, and triumphs so you can engage with members and their victories. Showcase projects you’re working on so you can be seen as a leader in your space. When your audience sees the real faces and narratives behind your brand, they’re more likely to feel a deeper connection and become an advocate for you. This approach transforms your business from a faceless entity into a community of real people with compelling stories.
Maximize Business Profiles
On the business front, LinkedIn is an excellent place to showcase your credibility and expertise. Post thought-provoking content to create an image of authority and knowledge. In-depth articles, industry trend analyses, and case studies should make up the bulk of your LinkedIn strategy. This approach positions your brand not only as a participant in your industry but as a leader to whom others turn for guidance. Plus, you’ll get extra milage out of posts that mention members and their companies and projects. These help foster a professional relationship.
Showcase Value: More Than a Sales Pitch
Modern consumers are savvy; they’re not interested in being relentlessly sold to. They want to know how your product or service can add significant value to their lives. Your task? Show them in ways that resonate deeply and authentically.
Show, Don’t Tell
Turn testimonials and case studies into your brand’s storytellers. Let your base articulate how your offerings have made significant impacts or solved complex problems. When potential customers see these real-world applications, your value proposition becomes credible and compelling.
Connect Through Relatable Narratives
Facts and figures inform, but stories resonate. Craft your content around powerful narratives that highlight real-life impacts. Show potential members the tangible differences your solutions have made. This narrative approach creates interest and moves people to share these stories within their own networks.
The Final Insight: Make Meaningful Noise
In a digital world of constant noise, you’ll need more than a great event to generate word-of-mouth marketing that stands out. You’ll need to create a narrative people want to share. Aim to foster genuine connections, demonstrate real value, and maintain an authentic presence. Then let your audience do the rest.
Your messaging needs a day stopper, something so powerful it makes your audience stop what they’re doing, pay attention, and take action. The tired old refrain of “networking, education, and certification” just doesn’t pack enough punch in today’s busy world. A better strategy is to focus on business benefits.
Business Language is Better
Sure, people love your cause, your community, and the way you change lives for the better. But things like profit, strategy, M&A, growth, expansion, and competitive advantage are what keep them up at night—especially in a tough economy. If your marketing messages are missing this concrete business language, chances are you’re missing out on members, event attendees, and…well…revenues. See what we did there?
How to Develop Business Messaging
Use this questionnaire to evaluate your association’s resources and position them in terms of business benefits to your audience. The answers to these questions should show that your association is invaluable to the success of your members’ businesses. Ideally, they should also show just how much of a return on investment your members and event attendees get from engaging with your organization.
For each question, list specific resources, tools, services, and events that propel your audience toward growth and financial well-being. Do NOT list networking, education, or certification.
How does your association alleviate economic challenges for your members?
How do you save members from making costly mistakes?
How do you help members increase market share?
How do you help members grow and expand?
How might your organization help members reverse a decline in revenue?
List your top 3 most valuable resources. Then explain how each of these helps members drive profits.
The Things That Matter
An important takeaway is that people will always make time for things that matter. And quite often, money matters. Beyond that, you also need a human element to get attention and engage your base. Company leaders want their businesses to be successful. This is their baby and they will go above and beyond to see it thrive. Potential day stoppers you can use to tap into the human side of business include security, passion, ambition, status, prestige, pride, fear, anger, and many more. Here are a few emotionally compelling examples with a human element:
Security: Be confident you won’t have to lay off staff.
Passion: Do more good, change more lives.
Ambition: Be seen as the leader in your industry.
Anger: Legislators are making it harder for you to do business.
The Killer Combo
Any association can advertise networking, education, and certification. But if you want to gain a competitive advantage, attract more members, and boost revenues—all in support of your mission and cause—you’ll need a killer combination: business benefits plus compelling emotional appeals.
It’s time to get fired up about membership renewals!
Easier membership renewals happen when members see your association as more than a line item that can easily be cut from the budget.
Sure, you’re up against some challenges—people are busy, money is tight, and uncertainty hangs around every corner. But you’ve also got a lot going for you—people want to connect, they’re looking for solutions to their challenges, and they see your organization as the heart and homebase of their community.
This renewal season, focus on nurturing relationships, delivering value, and communicating that value to hit your numbers and minimize lapses.
Convince the Check Writer
Often, the people using your resources and attending your events aren’t the people paying your membership dues. The check writer doesn’t experience your value firsthand. This could spell trouble in a tough economy when that same check writer is looking to make budget cuts. Do you have a way of definitively showing the value of your association to someone who deals only in facts and figures?
One way to show value is to set up member engagement tracking. This will track where members spend time on your website, how many questions they ask in your forums, which events they attend, and more. It will also give you the ability to generate a report for each member to show them exactly what they got for the membership dues in the past year.
If you suspect your members aren’t taking full advantage of your association and the report will show a lack of engagement, start there. What can you do to entice people to lean in?
Speak to Trends and Pain Points
The best way to fuel member engagement and improve that report is to make sure your editorial calendar mirrors current industry trends and pain points. In short: Stay relevant.
You might think you’re already doing this, but are you really? What are you doing to look ahead? To innovate? Can you honestly say your members should renew every year because you have new, different, and amazing offerings they can’t afford to miss out on?
Relationships vs. Transactions
Once your content is on point, consider your relationship vs. transactional messages. How often are you asking your members to do something (e.g., pay dues, attend an event) compared to sharing valuable resources with no strings attached? In addition to the message itself, you’ll need to optimize how you package and deliver it so members see it and react.
Maintain Momentum
Don’t wait until September to start showing value. You must nurture relationships starting with onboarding and continuing all year long. New members are often enthusiastic initially but need a reason to maintain momentum. Think about the last subscription you paid for—maybe a gym membership or video streaming service. At first you’re thrilled and eager, but it’s all too easy to lose interest or forget about it entirely. If your members don’t see your value, they decide not to renew long before you reach out to them in the fall.
5 Proven Steps to Fuel Renewals
Once you have a solid strategy, it’s time for action. Here are five tried-and-true ways to get attention and move people to renew.
1. Segment: Divide your audience into distinct groups based on shared characteristics or behaviors. For example, large and small enterprises. Why? Because a one-size-fits-all message is the quickest route to the spam folder.
Purpose: To tailor your messages and offers to the specific needs and interests of each group.
Implementation:
Analytics: Use detailed analytics to understand member demographics, engagement history, and preferences.
Customization: Create specialized content and offers for different segments. For example, in-depth industry reports for seasoned members and orientation resources for newer members.
2. Use Technology: Tech is your ally. It can help streamline, automate, and enhance every aspect of your renewal campaign.
Purpose: To increase efficiency and member engagement through advanced tools and platforms.
Implementation:
Automated Email Marketing: Set up drip campaigns that adjust messaging based on member behavior.
CRM Systems: Use CRM software to track member interactions and personalize communications.
Analytics Tools: Employ data analytics to monitor engagement rates and refine your strategies.
AI Personalization: Use AI to offer personalized content recommendations based on past interactions. Highlight key features dynamically to maintain member interest.
3. Humanize: People connect with people, not with faceless entities. Humanizing your campaign makes it relatable and engaging on a personal level.
Purpose: To connect with members emotionally by showcasing the human side of your organization.
Implementation:
Member Stories: Share real-life testimonials and success stories that illustrate the impact of your organization.
Engaging Tone: Use a warm, conversational tone rather than corporate jargon. Focus on community, not transactions.
Visible Faces: Highlight team members and other faces of the organization to create a personal connection.
4. Offer Unique Benefits: You must give people something really good that they need that they can’t get anywhere else. Your value proposition must be crystal clear and compelling. This is what makes members decide to renew rather than lapse.
Purpose: To communicate the unique benefits of renewing membership.
Implementation:
Articulate Benefits: Focus on key pillars like brand value, community, networking, and personal growth.
Exclusive Perks: Offer exclusive access to events, valuable resources, and special discounts.
Clear Communication: Make sure members know exactly what they’re getting by renewing.
5. Remove Barriers: Even the most compelling offer won’t work if you don’t address the obstacles standing in the way of renewal.
Purpose: To identify and mitigate potential reasons for non-renewal.
Implementation:
Feedback Loop: Conduct surveys to identify common barriers like cost, time constraints, or perceived lack of value.
Address Concerns: Proactively solve these issues by offering flexible payment plans, showcasing clear value through success stories and benefits, and providing easy access to customer support.
Flexible Options: Provide a range of membership options to cater to different needs.
Renewals don’t have to be a struggle or a year-end scramble. Keep the focus on relationships and measurable value all year long. Use proven strategies and tactics to get more from what you’re already doing. You’ll will better serve and delight your members while also pleasing the check writer who ultimately makes renewals happen.
Chances are you’ve thought about the impact AI might have on your association this year, next year, in five years…There’s likely some apprehension as you wonder whether AI will replace your content, education, or other key offerings—at no cost to your potential membership base.
You’re right to be concerned. AI will no doubt get smarter, become even better at finding people’s pain points, and provide value you likely can’t even predict yet. But you also have a golden opportunity. You can embrace this new game-changing technology while you hone in on the unique value of your association.
The big question you’ll need to answer is this: Why would anyone pay your membership fees when they can access a universe of AI-driven value for free? The answer lies in the things AI can’t touch. Your community. Your advocacy. Your people.
Finding the “Almost”
AI will provide almost everything that your association can. Even today, it’s pretty good at content generation, data analysis, and education. If all you bring to the table is AI-level service with a “human-made” tag, you are already obsolete.
So, what about that elusive “almost”? When AI tools and resources mirror everything you do—only faster—will your members still see your worth? Can you define your value in that sliver of “almost”?
If you can’t answer these questions with a confident “YES!”, then you’re right to be concerned. It’s time to get ready.
How to Be Proactive
First, stop viewing AI as a handover to robots to ease your workload, and start leveraging AI to deliver unique value to your members. Position your association to embrace AI, not compete against it.
You might think, “Here we go with another tech panic.” You’re right to a degree. Apps and social media were hailed as member engagement godsends, and yes, they had their moments, but they didn’t shift the tectonic plates. Conference apps? Usually downloaded in a hurry.
Social media was once labeled the “email killer,” but now more emails are sent than ever before (not that this is a good thing).
The real power lies in leveraging AI to serve your members in ways you never could before. AI can help your association better understand your audience, refine event offerings, improve your administration, track and enhance your marketing efforts, build smarter chatbots, create better content, and so much more. Don’t compete—let AI amplify the human value of your association. This is how you stay ahead and lead, not just survive, in the age of AI.
Broadcast Your Unique Value
To successfully coexist with AI, you’ll need to know and articulate your association’s value. What is your unique edge? What does your association offer that AI can’t touch? Consider your advocacy, community, and connectivity. Now think harder. How strong will your community be in five years if AI makes LinkedIn even more powerful? If AI delivers education, expertise, content, and data crunching as good or better than your association, what’s left for you to do? If your members don’t see your value, it’s game over. Your value proposition must be ironclad. It isn’t just a statement—it’s your most powerful asset. Once you figure it out, shout it from the rooftops.
Pillars of Your AI Strategy
The next step is to amplify what makes your association irreplaceable—your brand, your voice, your tight-knit community. Strengthen your story, build your community, and clarify your advocacy. These are your pillars.
Let’s get tactical. Here’s how to bolster your foundation while thinking strategically:
Website: Overhaul your user interface. Think clean, intuitive, and lightning-fast. Simplicity outperforms an over-designed labyrinth. Consider an AI chatbot instead of a search bar.
Research: Conduct deep analytics to understand your members. How do people engage with your content? Which platforms and formats do they flock to? Can you prove your value objectively to justify your dues to the person writing the check?
Content: Create unique, helpful content that addresses member pain points and current or future industry trends. Make it scannable, digestible, impactful, and actionable to deliver maximum value.
Behavior: Recognize the seismic shifts in event registration behavior. Enter The 40-Day Dash—our tailored program acknowledging the last-minute registration frenzy. Get ahead of this curve and you won’t just survive; you’ll thrive.
The Here and Now
Don’t panic. But don’t stand still either. AI is here and it’s only going to get better and more powerful. Now is the time to find ways to move forward alongside AI while still enrolling prospects and renewing members. Expect some bumps along the way, and sure, your numbers might take a hit. But keep your focus razor-sharp on your core value for lasting success.
Future-Proof Your Association
It’s time to define what makes you irreplaceable. Let’s dive in, refine, and proclaim the “almost” into something powerful to futureproof your association.
It’s true that most people favor email as their preferred method of communication; it’s immediate and versatile. That said, this same flexibility often leads organizations, including associations like yours, to an over-reliance on transactional emails. Could your email strategy be overwhelming your audience rather than engaging them?
What We’ve Learned from Email Audits
Time and again, our audits reveal a common trend: most organizations, perhaps yours included, have a tendency to send out more transactional emails than those dedicated to building relationships—often at a ratio of 2:1. For instance, one client discovered that in a period of promoting events and membership campaigns, 71% of their emails were transactional, while only 29% focused on nurturing relationships.
This imbalance often results in communications that feel less humane and more directive—simply instructing subscribers to “buy” or “do” something rather than engaging them on a more personal level. We’ve got to start treating our audience like people, not just potential sales.
Comparing Transactional and Relationship Emails
Transactional emails have their place. They are essential for confirmations, reminders, and information about discounts. However, the problem arises when these types of emails dominate your communication strategy, reducing your members to mere transactions. This not only distances your audience but also increases the likelihood of your emails being disregarded or deleted with a simple thought: “Not today.”
Relationship-based emails prioritize building a meaningful connection with the recipient, whereas transactional emails focus on completing or confirming a specific action or transaction.
By strategically balancing these two types of emails, organizations can not only optimize their communication effectiveness but also foster stronger connections, enhance customer satisfaction, and potentially increase the lifetime value of their audience.
Transforming Your Email Strategy
How can you turn a standard transactional email into a relationship-building opportunity? Here are a few strategies:
Event Registration:
Instead of just pushing for registration, frame it as an invitation to an exclusive event where they can connect, learn, and grow. Share stories of past attendees who found significant value in participating.
Membership Renewal:
Replace a straightforward renewal reminder with a personalized appreciation message. Reflect on the tenure of their membership and highlight upcoming opportunities tailored for them.
Resource Promotion:
When promoting a benchmarking report, initiate a consultative conversation. Provide snippets of insights they could gain and discuss how these could address specific challenges they face.
Webinar Promotion:
Offer more than a simple discount—invite them to an exclusive learning experience designed to enhance their professional growth, adding a preview of the actionable knowledge they’ll gain.
Have You Evaluated Your Email Strategy Recently?
Too many transactional emails make people stop listening.
If you’re planning join and renew campaigns or simply aim to improve your communication, consider conducting an email audit. Compare your transactional vs. relationship emails and adjust accordingly to enhance recipient engagement and achieve better results.
Your Next Steps
Transactional emails serve a purpose, but remember, building lasting relationships will sustain your organization in the long run. Begin transforming your emails today to deepen connections and elevate your overall communication strategy.
For more insights into enhancing your communication impact, read our guide on optimizing email strategies here.
Transition your strategy from transactional to transformational with Rottman Creative’s expert insights and watch your member engagement soar!
Associations that have been around for a while—years, decades even—are doing a lot of things right. A word of caution, though. It’s easy to get complacent, to keep doing what’s always been done because it “works,” or because everyone is too busy to contemplate a better way.
See if this sounds familiar: Your association runs basically the same marketing plans year after year for membership and events. You have similar messaging and a similar value prop every time. You also have the same overall look and feel, the same offers, the same vibe. You might even cut and paste messages from years past into your current promotional materials. Maybe you’re short on time. Maybe you truly believe it’s hard to top a classic.
What You’re Leaving on the Table
Even if what you’re doing “works,” chances are you’re leaving something on the table: memberships, registrations, and non-dues revenue. Sure, you are getting members in your door and filling some seats at your events. But consider how many people might be tuning you out after all these years. And imagine how many more people are out there that your association could help and support if only they knew you existed. If only they knew how great and valuable your offerings are.
There’s an old business saying, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” It used to mean that if you don’t change, you’ll never grow. Nowadays, however, that’s a best case scenario. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll erode your brand. You could see a decline in your membership and event numbers until eventually your association ceases to exist.
It’s Time to Shake Things Up
It’s time to get more. To shake things up. To ensure your association will still be around for decades to come. Newspapers, print ads, and direct mail were once the backbone of a solid event marketing strategy. Then came email. And now associations are sending lots and lots of email. Too much email. Digital ads, AI, and automation are powerful new tools, but they’re also causing a noisy, always-on, information-overload culture that can actually decrease engagement. It’s essential to put your time and money behind the things that will do you the most good and lay aside the things that no longer serve you well.
How to Make the Right Changes
Don’t just change for the sake of change. Change is tough. It’s hard to get buy-in for new processes, ideas, and tools. You need to make the right changes. The most meaningful changes. The ones that stand to make the biggest difference in terms of your event and membership numbers and, by extension, your association itself.
Let the data tell you which changes to make. Track performance. Talk to your members to understand their current goals, fears, and pain points. Consider your options carefully. Don’t just jump on the latest digital trends. Think like your members and prospects and do what’s best for them—not necessarily what’s the easiest or most fun for your association. Approach challenges with boldness and scrappy determination to fuel members’ success and to secure the future of your association
What’s left? Closing the deal. Sealing both the inspiration and the intent with action.
We call the third and final phase of marketing The 40-Day Dash. Because . . . well, it’s a 40-day dash. It’s 6 weeks of focused effort to help you reach your attendance goals.
Why Does It All Happen in the Last 40 Days Now?
Simple: Covid.
Covid changed the rules about everything. And while we’ve returned to many of our pre-Covid behaviors, one that hasn’t come back is registering early.
In our post-Covid world, attendees are waiting longer than ever to register for events. Many people won’t commit until 40 days out or less. In a recent survey to our newsletter subscribers, 53% said most of their event registration is happening within 40 days of their event!
Hence, the 40-day dash.
What do you do in these last 40 days? You think like your prospects, meet them where they are—which means using a range of messages and platforms—and make direct asks.
This is how we are approaching marketing for our clients, and it’s working. We’re seeing the numbers peak in those last 40 days.
Here’s how to do it.
40-Day Dash Tip #1: Lean Heavily on Social Media
Instead of over-relying on email (something associations notoriously do), create a plan that leans heavily on organic and paid social media. Your organic posts can be about speakers and sessions, as well as testimonials from past attendees. Draft posts for your board members, executives, and speakers to post on their accounts.
You’ll need to do some paid campaigns as well. Where do your attendees spend their time? Invest in that platform. We’ve had great luck with paid LinkedIn campaigns, using custom targeting and demographic targeting.
40-Day Dash Tip #2: Retarget Likely Suspects
You have to stay in front of people! One post isn’t enough. Follow potential attendees around the web. Web retargeting is a great way to nudge people who have shown some interest in your event.
We will often do pixel retargeting, to re-engage people who went to the event website but didn’t register. We also use CRM targeting, which means uploading lists of past attendees, current members, resigned members, and prospective members for targeting.
40-Day Dash Tip #3: Cross-Market Across Your Organization
Take advantage of your existing communication channels and warm audiences to cross-promote your events. That can mean adding a few sentences about your event in the footer of other emails. Or you can include mentions of the event in blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and videos.
Remember, you’re trying to reach people everywhere they are!
40-Day Dash Tip #4: Send Thoughtful Emails
Yes, you are allowed to send emails. Some emails. We all get too many emails, and if people see emails from you over and over again, they’re more likely to ignore. But, if you’re strategic about it, you can still reach people with email.
Just don’t send more emails than necessary, and make sure each one answers your audience’s number one question: What’s in it for me?
One thing we often recommend: Schedule your last-chance reminder email for Sunday evening to boost engagement.
40-Day Dash Tip #5: Don’t Forget Direct Mail
Mail volume is down, so it’s a little easier to get attention these days with good old mail! Direct mail can yield excellent ROI for event marketing. People like something they can hold in their hands. Direct mail pieces can add a level of authenticity to your event, and executing them is quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive.
A great postcard with agenda highlights, an invitation to a special reception, or an infographic of your event “by the numbers” can play really well in those last 3 weeks. Always include an QR code!
So . . . what’s left? We do have one more tip for you as you navigate this 6-week sprint. Call in reinforcements!
When you absolutely must meet your attendance goals, enlist the help of experts who know how to navigate the 40-day dash.
This is the third of a four-part series about how to market your association’s events in 2024.
Human beings make most of our decisions from the emotional center of our brain. And then our pre-frontal cortex (the logic center of the brain) helps us reaffirm that our decision was the right one.
We know this because scientists put people in scanners and watch the different parts of their brain light up.
But what does brain science have to do with your association’s event? Everything.
In this series of posts, we’ve been working through the 3 phases of event marketing. Each phase highlights a key attribute your event marketing plan needs: Emotion, facts, and urgency.
So far, we’ve covered the first phase, Inspire People. That’s the phase that targets emotion.
Today, we’re going to talk about the second phase: Reassure the Intent.
This is the phase that targets facts. This is where you need to communicate to people: You know how you felt a spark when you connected with our message? Well, here are the goods!
What Does It Mean to Reassure the Intent?
Reassuring the intent simply means filling out the rest of the picture for potential attendees. You’re giving people what they need to confirm that registering for your event is something they must do.
This is the phase of marketing where you craft messages that answer questions like:
What will I learn?
Who will be there?
Who are the speakers?
What are the highlights?
What are the big reasons I don’t want to miss out?
We find that these are the questions associations usually want to start their marketing with. They want to lead with facts. Throw all the bullet points and all the checklists at people right away. It can be difficult, in Phase 1, to stay higher level, to find the deeper reason, the emotional hook.
But now, in Phase 2, you’re released! Let the facts shine! If you’ve done your job in the first phase and found the inspiration to hook attendees, this phase can feel a bit easier.
But don’t let that fool you.
Be Sure To Communicate the Value Proposition
We came across a study that another marketing agency did, that found that only 13% of associations surveyed said they had a compelling value proposition.
13%!
Coming up with a sterling value proposition and knowing how to communicate it has always been a challenge for associations. It’s like answering an existential question: It’s hard to do and you’re so close to it that you often can’t see if you’ve truly answered it.
Reassuring the intent is an uphill climb if you don’t know the value proposition for your event. So before you start listing bullet points, do some work around crafting it. (If you’re struggling, we can help.)
Case Study: How We’re Doing It
We helped a long-time client market their annual event, Staffing World.
In our last post, we talked about how we found the inspirational thread by analyzing the audience and focusing on “people people.”
For phase 2, it’s time to focus on the facts.
Reassuring the intent is about hitting people in the logic center of their brain. It’s when concepts like “reputation” and “expertise” matter. That’s why we created messaging around the fact that this event is the biggest gathering of its kind in the industry. It’s THE place to be for staffing professionals who want to connect, learn, and grow.
We designed various print and digital pieces to highlight specific educational sessions, formal and informal networking events, and the best-in-class expo hall. We also talked in-depth about the high-caliber individuals who would attend, creating a sense of FOMO so that potential attendees could see themselves among this crowd.
Remember, people read 30% or less on the web, and slightly more in print. Design and messaging matter just as much now as they did in the inspiration phase.
Your marketing can’t become a Wikipedia page, dry and factual. You’re still jockeying for people’s time, and you have to give them a reason to listen to you
Reach out if you’d like to talk about how your association can best reassure the intent. Or if you’re still chewing on how to find the inspiration, we’re happy to talk you through as well.
Each phase highlights a key attribute your event marketing plan needs: Emotion, facts, and urgency.
Today, we’re going to talk about the first phase, Inspire People. This is the phase that targets emotion.
What Does it Mean to Inspire People?
When you connect with something you really want, such as a career or personal goal, you’re connecting with it for emotional reasons. You want the thing because you want to feel a certain way—like delighted, proud, or contented.
The thing matters. But it’s the feeling that truly drives it.
Inspiring people means understanding how they want to feel, and connecting with them at that level. In other words, you need to understand what moves your members and what feelings they are chasing.
Associations often make the mistake of leading with the facts. Facts are very important, and we’ll talk about their role in phase 2. But if you skip the inspiration phase, you miss your chance to reach people at the gut level.
And that matters, because so many of our decisions are actually made from the gut. We think logic is driving our choices. But logic merely confirms what we already feel.
How To Find the Inspiration That Will Drive Energy Around Your Event
Finding the inspiration is a process of discovery. It means looking closely at who your audience is. Not necessarily their demographics. But rather, what motivates them.
Are they type A go-getters who always need a challenge? Are they career veterans who are thinking about legacy? Your people are likely motivated by more than one thing. But you need to dig until you find the central idea that will move them, the central spark of inspiration.
Once you find that, you need to turn it into remarkable pieces of content that hit your audience in their feeling center.
We’ll get to the tactics of how many emails, when to send direct mail, and which social media platforms to use. But first, you must know what feeling you’re trying to create, and what big idea you’re channeling. This will help you develop actionable messages, and to choose the style of design that is most likely to grab your target audience.
Case Study: How We Did It
We were tasked with helping a longtime client, the American Staffing Association, market their annual Staffing World conference. While ASA has been hosting this event for more than 50 years, today’s uncertainty was causing a drop in registrations. Six weeks before Staffing World, they still hadn’t hit their numbers.
ASA’s target audience are “people people.” They are staffing, recruiting, and workforce solutions professionals who put individuals to work in meaningful roles. As a result, they improve lives, businesses, and the U.S. economy. But they also deal with some pretty tough challenges, ranging from economic uncertainty to budget cuts and layoffs.
We combined this audience analysis with industry trends and proven formats to craft emotionally charged messaging and creative. The goal was to inspire people to come together for the good and the ugly. To seize opportunities and collaborate on challenges.
From there, we engaged the audience with targeted social media campaigns complemented by brief, thoughtful emails with easy calls to action.
Six weeks later, Staffing World had more attendees than ever in ASA history.
It’s well worth the investment to spend time digging into what will inspire people to come to your event.
Even more helpful is to get an outside perspective. Someone who can look at your event and your attendees with fresh eyes. Reach out if you’d like to chat about how to find the inspiration for your event!
How are you going to get people to your association’s event this year? If you’re not asking yourself this question right now, you should be.
Why? Because just about everyone is having trouble marketing events right now. The fear of recession, combined with the reality of inflation, means companies are searching for areas to cut.
Inevitably, they see education and travel, i.e., your event, as the low-hanging fruit.
In fact, a Forrester report from late 2023 predicted that companies would be rethinking investments in “employee experience” for 2024. Top on the list? You guessed it: Meetings and events related to personal development, education, and training.
According to our own data, we’re predicting that in 2024, event attendance will be down 12 – 15% and accruals will be down 18 – 25%. The percentage of members renewing will stay roughly the same. But because so many of your member companies now have decreased revenues, they’ll renew at a lower fee.
You need a plan to cleverly circumnavigate these brutal realities. To get your event off the chopping block and into the pipeline of possibility.
The reality is that attendees behave differently today than they did even just two years ago. This means you’ve got to take a fresh look at the year and the way you’re going about things. You’ve got to be willing to think differently, and to go back to the drawing board on some key elements of your strategy.
We’ll explain what we mean in this series of blog posts. But for now, we’ve got 3 words for you: Think in phases.
With uncertainty always swirling around and the world moving faster than ever, you’ve got to take a phased approach to marketing your event. Each phase is as important as the next, but you also can’t get ahead of yourself.
In this series of posts, we’ll talk about what each phase looks like, and offer some real-life examples from association clients.
We can’t wait to share all the details. But here’s the TL;DR:
For years, we’ve been championing the idea that for your event to stay relevant, you must inspire the base. What we’ve learned in working with more than 100 different associations is that inspiration is part-science, part-art.
Finding what will inspire people to commit to your event is a process of discovery. Once you understand what moves your people, you must create actionable messages around it. Then you have to know when and how to deploy them, to wrest people’s attention away—even momentarily—from every other distraction competing for their time.
Inspiration fosters unity, aligning elements through a dynamic force in our collective pursuits.
The second phase of marketing is all about curating the facts, to paint a vivid picture of your event. This is when FOMO is your friend. You’ve got a millimeter of people’s attention. What will you do with it?
It’s not that the inspiration phase is over. Rather, you’re pulling the inspiration through into more concrete details, talking about who will be there, what attendees will learn, and what benefits await them.
In our contemporary landscape, attendees are waiting longer than ever to register for events. Many people won’t commit until 40 days out or less. We call this the 40-day dash.
We created an entire marketing program around the 40-day dash, with specific tactics to help you reach your audience goals in those last 6 weeks. We’ll show you how to target and re-target, how to get others to spread the word for you, and how to make email work for you (versus getting ignored).
We’re going to face challenges in 2024, there’s no doubt about it. But when you take the right steps, and invest in the right phases of marketing, you can have a successful, inspiring, well-attended event.
The good news is this: When you take the right steps, and invest in the right phases of marketing, you can have a successful, inspiring, well-attended event.
Events are alive and well, says a new survey of event producers, convention center executives, and attendees—though you can expect some changes and challenges ahead. The survey reveals key insights that can help you leverage opportunities and minimize difficulties as your prepare for your association’s next in-person event.
Overall Outlook
The big picture looks good. Overall, the event industry rebound has been better than expected, with 83% of convention center executives saying the pace of recovery has exceeded their expectations. Remarkably, 0% of execs surveyed said recovery has been worse than anticipated. On another positive note, more than 40% of event producers surveyed plan to launch completely new in-person events in the next two years.
Attendance is Up
Event attendance has been rebounding over the last few years. For example, attendance in Q2 of 2023 was 85% of 2019 numbers, and attendance in 2024 is expected to reach “full recovery.” If your event date is fast approaching, you could still see a late surge in registrations. Nearly 75% of event producers surveyed say attendees are registering closer to event dates.
Costs Are Also Up
Expect to pay more. A whopping 70% of convention center executives say they increased pricing for venue services, and nearly half hiked rates for exhibit halls and major event spaces. As consolation, you can expect improvements in venues’ safety and security, technology, signage, and services.
Hotel Woes
Be aware of hotel issues that could affect your members’ event experience. These include high room rates, staffing issues, lack of quality, and overcrowding. Coincidentally, the number of attendees who book short-term rentals and AirBnBs is on the rise.
Hybrid Work
Teleworking doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of interest in in-person gatherings. Some data suggests companies could use your event to bring dispersed teams together. Additionally, nearly half of convention attendees say they are more likely to travel with a friend or family member. Half are also likely to extend time in the host city for vacation.
Cautious Optimism
While the overall event outlook is positive, keep in mind that every event, sector, and organization is different. Expect to struggle with issues like inflation, sustainability, political and social activism, the labor shortage, technology, and more. But forge ahead knowing your event is still a powerful place for connection, collaboration, and learning that can make a difference for your members and their constituents.
Ask any one of your members or customers how they’re doing, and there’s a good chance they’ll say, “Busy,” as part of their answer.
Busy professionals are busy working hard, accomplishing goals, and advancing their companies. They’re also busy making phone calls, answering texts and emails, and sitting in meetings. Busy parents are extra busy taking their kids to things like piano lessons and soccer practice. Many people are also busy scrolling endlessly through social media and binge watching their favorite shows.
The Dark Side of Busy
The trouble is that a lot of this busyness is a distraction. It’s activity, not productivity. Just think about how many meetings could have been an email, how many emails could have been a quick phone call, or how many of those emails and phone calls weren’t really necessary at all. Consider how many hours you have lost to social media scrolling or streaming television this week alone.
The Things That Matter Most
Of course, some of this busyness is truly worth your time and attention—like work and family milestones. People will always make time for the things that matter most. As an organization, this is the sweet spot you are looking for. First, you need to cut through all the busy noise that steals your audience’s attention. Then, you need to be one of those things that matters most so they carve out time for you in their busy, busy lives.
Your Biggest Competition
Busyness might just be your biggest competition right now. But there are ways to overcome it. Here are two strategies to get you started:
1. Adapt to New Technologies
First, do your part to fight busyness by reducing the number of emails you send. Next, fish where the fish are. Package your messaging in formats that your audience can digest in places they’re already spending time. Try short videos, subscription-based TV ads, social media ads, and web retargeting. These formats can be targeted to your current email list so you reach the same audience but with better results.
2. Speak Like a Human Being
Corporate speak just doesn’t cut it anymore. Your messaging needs personality. Your tone should be caring and empathetic to pain points. You need people to trust you as a human being, not an impersonal entity. Prove you’re worth their precious time and attention by speaking like a human being who understands their challenges and is here to help.
Adapt to the new Busy Normal
It’s time to adapt to the new busy normal because busyness isn’t going away. Even if you’re getting okay numbers with your emails right now, it’s only a matter of time before people will be too busy to read them. Besides, you’ll have to do better than just “okay” if you want your organization to grow and thrive.
You send out an email to members and prospects in the morning, and then check your open rate and click-through numbers in the afternoon. As usual, your numbers are stellar!
You’ve got an open rate of 70% and a click-through rate of 60%. You notice that your numbers seem to keep getting better and better.
If you haven’t realized it by now, your numbers aren’t accurate. Over the past few years, it’s become increasingly common for security bots to be responsible for the great majority of B2B email engagement—as much as 80% by some estimates.
These bots don’t mean to screw up your marketing plans. In fact, they’re in place to scan for links to malware and phishing attempts.
They derive from security software associated with various B2B email programs. Their job is to scan the email intended for your recipient. And in fact, if they just scanned it, it would be no problem. But the bots also open the email and click the links to check the redirects and make sure they aren’t malware.
The problem is, bot engagement gets recorded just like actual engagement. According to HubSpot, these security filters are more common in certain industries, like finance or healthcare. Ultimately, you don’t really know if your emails are getting opened or not.
And while some marketing automation programs have tried to create fixes, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. Every time the bad actors increase their phishing efforts, security must get more sophisticated, too.
The bottom line is: The bots are going to win.
But that doesn’t mean you need to lose.
Let’s Stop Talking About Your Emails
During our regular client meetings, one topic consistently dominates the conversation: emails. The focus revolves around the emails we sent last week and planning the next set for the upcoming week.
We get it. We monitor our own email performance, hoping for high open rates and click-throughs. We recognize the value of email as a form of communication.
However, we also know that email shouldn’t be the sole communication platform. Relying excessively on it carries the risk of failing to reach the intended audience.
Therefore, our primary message to you is this: It’s crucial to significantly reduce the number of emails you send.
It’s scary to think about slashing the number of emails in the queue. But it’s even scarier to rely on a false narrative of engagement, created by security bots.
Instead of your entire marketing strategy being tied to sending email after email, you need to create a more holistic strategy. There are lots of names for this. Integrated. Omni-channel. Multi-channel. Cross-channel. Unified.
We’re agnostic as to the terminology, but for our purposes in working with associations, the key idea is Not just email.
Not just email can look like utilizing the social media platforms where your members and prospects hang out. It can look like texting, calling, and messaging. And it can look like thoughtful content strategy that hasn’t just been rinsed and repeated from the previous year.
We know it’s uncomfortable to let go of the main tactic you’ve always cleaved to. To untether from what seems like a sure thing. And it’s overwhelming to think about learning platforms you’re not yet familiar with or perhaps haven’t even been invented yet.
Marketers in industries across the spectrum are feeling the pain, but we know the particular stress that membership- and subscription-based organizations are feeling. We also know that it will only get worse—and not “worse before it gets better,” but “worse before it gets even worse.”
Trust is the foundation of just about any relationship. This is true in life and business. It’s true for your association, too.
We know that you think people trust you. You think that, by virtue of existing for the good of your industry, trust is a given.
But we’ve seen the numbers and interviewed enough people from enough associations in enough industries that we’ve been able to form a pretty good working hypothesis.
And here it is: The reason prospects, non-members, and less engaged members don’t come to your event is that they don’t, in fact, trust you. Specifically, they don’t trust you with their time and their money.
Therefore, if you want these people to come to your event, you must build their trust.
Here’s how to start doing that.
Trust Building Step No. 1: Question Your Assumptions
When you’ve been putting on an event for a while, with the same kinds of meetings, sessions, networking groups, celebrations, awards ceremonies, etc., it’s easy to get tunnel vision about what the bulk of people in your industry want.
In working with associations, we see this all the time.
It looks like this: Your association has always done things a certain way, and because a small group of passionate members have given you good feedback, you assume that experience generalizes to everyone. The events team gets it in their head that this is what people want.
So you invest in certain types of programming and spend your marketing budget on what you believe are the sure things and the big draws. Then you push the messaging out to prospects and non-members. But they either don’t show up, or they show up once, and don’t show up again. They’re lost, and you’re left wondering why.
We can tell you why: Because you made an assumption. You created something you believed people wanted, and relied on confirmation bias to keep sticking with it.
But assumptions do not breed trust. In fact, they erode it.
Try this: List out your biggest marketing initiatives around your events. Beside each initiative, note the underlying assumption behind it. Then ask yourself: What if your assumptions are wrong?
To find out, you’ll need to do Step 2.
Trust Building Step No. 2: Start Listening Better
Most of the associations we encounter pride themselves on listening to their members. But when we help them pull back the curtain, we discover that they are mostly listening to engaged members.
In other words, they are overservicing the engaged, at the cost of missing out on what is driving (or not driving) the unengaged.
Think of it this way: Your association represents an industry. Your members likely only account for a small slice of that total industry. And your engaged members? They are a tiny slice of a tiny slice. It’s easier and more convenient to connect with that tiny slice, but it’s woefully incomplete.
You must talk to everyone. But here’s the caveat: You can’t talk to prospects or non-members as if they already trust you. To build trust among people who don’t know you very well, you must first listen to them. This is how you can discern what excites them, motivates them, frustrates them, and scares them.
You can use surveys as one of the ways you listen, but remember that surveys tend to be completed by people who are already engaged. You need to get beyond the usual ways of asking for feedback.
For example, you might segment interested prospects into strategic customer focus groups and try out different offers. Does pushing a gala get a good response? Do they click through when you talk about networking dinners? Certifications? Use data to listen.
Trust Building Step No. 3: Open the Gates
More than anything, to grow and stay relevant, you want to appeal to non-members. But when you lock up everything on your website and gate it for members-only, you’re signaling to those non-members you so desperately want that they’re not part of it.
We know the argument that associations make. That gating resources creates value for members. That access should be a member benefit, given only to those who pay dues.
But . . . why? After all, isn’t your purpose to serve the industry?
We need only to look back a few years, to the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when you ungated your best stuff and shared freely. Do you remember what happened? We do. Engagement was through the roof. Webinar attendance was setting records.
You doubled-down on your mission and threw open your arms for the good of people and the good of the industry. Why is that different now that people aren’t locked in their homes? Why are we back to gates and walls?
What would happen if you threw it open again? Would you lose members because they suddenly thought the value of membership had diminished? Or would you gain the trust of a whole slice of people who suddenly feel invited? Conventional wisdom says that trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. But if your association gets out of its own way, you can at least get started on the right path.
Recession coming? No, the labor market is strong! We’re about to have a soft landing. Although . . . inflation! It’s a long way from under control, so maybe we are headed straight for a recession.
We are on the brink of recession. We aren’t on the brink of recession. The true answer (which even the data heads don’t know) matters far less than people’s perception of whether we are.
Because what always goes with a maybe-recession is a certain-scaling back. Once the speculation starts, where do companies look to cut costs? Business travel. Training. Expenses where they can’t immediately trace the ROI.
And that’s bad news for your events this summer.
Or maybe it’s exactly the news you need to make some changes.
Here are 3 best practices we’re doing with our association clients to help them reach their numbers amid the recession chatter.
#1
Offer, Segment, Adapt
Recently, we promoted a special offer for a client who has an event in June. We sent emails and ran a social media campaign that advertised an early bird deal: Sign up by X date and you get X amount of dollars off your registration.
The offer wasn’t necessarily about getting people to sign up—it was still early, after all. The offer was mostly a strategy to see who would click. Tracking who clicked told us who was interested in the event. With this particular campaign, we had 1,600 people click.
Now, we had a large segment of very warm prospects. You can talk to people who’ve shown interest in a slightly different way than people who still aren’t sure who you even are.
Pulling out this segment of interested prospects helps us create a customized engagement strategy. With each piece of content we send to them, we could learn more about what gets them excited, and adapt accordingly.
The best part: If we just convert 30% of this one segment, we’ve helped our client nearly reach their attendance goal.
#2
Enlist the Early Adopters
The early bird bait may be all about uncovering a segment to market to, but some people will take you up on your offer. These are the early adopters. Maybe they are loyal members. Maybe they are willing to take a chance on you. Either way, they are a fantastic asset.
In thinking about them, remember one word: EARLY.
It stands for Early Adopters Really Love You.
Why do they love you? That’s for you to find out—by asking them. And specifically, asking them to share their story.
We heard from a vendor who mentioned they had just signed up to attend an industry association event. It wasn’t even on their radar, they said. But a colleague posted on social media that they had just signed up and couldn’t wait to see everyone. That one message not only inspired our vendor to sign up, but inspired at least 5 others, who posted in the comments—all within an hour—that they had just registered.
Both the early adopters and the early majority (a larger segment) can help you in this project. But you need to make it easy for them by making a specific ask, such as: Can you post one sentence on your preferred social network about why you are attending?
#3
Create a Landing Page That Cuts Through the Noise, Especially for Non-Members
Time and time again, we see associations that invest heavily in building great websites for their members. But so often, when non-members go to their site, they aren’t even clear if the event is open to them.
Non-members already have a hurdle to overcome (usually one involving cost). Don’t throw more hurdles at them!
It’s why you need to build out a simple “demo-style” landing page for your event. It should be a page that’s accessible for all, but optimized for non-members.
Think about when you are researching software. Are you ready to buy it the second you land on the page? No, you want a demo. You want to understand what you’re getting, in the simplest terms possible.
At Rottman Creative, we’ve taken this “demo” concept and reimagined event landing pages for several of our clients. After refining and tweaking, and we have a formula that works.
If you’re curious to learn more about landing pages or any of these strategies for changing the conversation from “Will there be a recession?” to “I’ll be there! Who’s with me?” . . . just drop us a line at: gary@rottmancreative.com or let’s talk!
We’ve debated, gone all-in on one and then the other, and here we are again. In this particular moment in time, data on one side, stories on the other, seemingly a chasm between them.
It’s time to close the chasm. To blend the science of conversion with the art of storytelling.
But how did the divide between narrative and numbers come to be? Where did we get the false assertion that we needed to cleave to one or the other?
In addition to being an agency committed to using a data-driven process for our clients, we’re also in the business of storytelling. That’s why we’ve thought a lot about the danger of de-prioritizing one for the other.
There’s been an evolution of how associations use stories and data in their go-to-market strategies. It’s never been more important to understand how to blend them. But to fully grasp the potential of this moment, we need to trace where we’ve been.
When Storytelling Saved the Day
With the Global Financial Crisis that swept across multiple industries in 2008, marketers saw the writing on the wall. Non-essential things were getting cut. Belts were tightening.
To release the purse strings, to move out of a mindset of scarcity, people needed something more. They needed to be inspired.
Having released the first iPhone the year before, that’s exactly what Apple was doing. They were spinning a story about a product that nobody had any idea they needed, even as the economy all around was teetering.
A few years later, marketing guru Simon Sinek wrote a book called Start With Why, based, in large part, on noticing the way Apple was able to captivate and reinvent itself through the decades. People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, he wrote.
This wasn’t a new idea, but it was the right idea at the right time, and it re-ignited the power of brand storytelling. Just about every marketing firm jumped on the story bandwagon. Inspiration was the name of the game.
We lived it, too, and we helped our clients create campaigns meant to inspire. As Millennials began to come of age, with their focus on mission-driven organizations, the storytelling frenzy only grew stronger. It was about authenticity and creating deep connection.
And Then the World Started to Shift
As social media increasingly muddied the waters of authenticity, storytelling started to feel too fanciful for a world grappling with what was true and what was fake. There was a pandemic and another economic crisis, but this time, it was data that seemed to be the savior.
What can you measure? What can you track? What can you see? It was the metrics that mattered, that would cut through the white noise and distraction.
Now, we’re slowly emerging from that epicenter of fear, but the landscape is different again. We’re forced to be constantly connected—and yet, we’re wholly disconnected from each other. We’re also distrustful.
Do we need stories? Do we need data?
Yes and yes.
But what we really need is discernment about how the two are connected.
The New, Data-Driven Storytelling
What we know now about storytelling is that it’s more trial and error than it is magic. Simon Sinek wasn’t wrong when he said that people connect with WHY an organization exists, more than the particulars of WHAT they do.
But it takes a lot of work to know what stories to tell around that WHY. It takes careful measurement to know which stories, told which ways, will convert people. And more than anything, in today’s environment, it takes building trust.
Finding the right story to tell can build that trust and inspire members and prospects to take action. But you can only find it if you know how to measure and track.
When we talk about brand storytelling now, what we’re really talking about is conversion.
We’d love to hear how you’ve used storytelling in the past, and how you plan to use it going forward.
More people quit their jobs in 2021 than in any year since 2001. While it leveled off a bit in 2022, the trend isn’t over. Some call it The Great Resignation. Others prefer The Great Reshuffle.
You can call it whatever you want. But one thing is clear: It’s likely degraded the quality of your database.
Those emails your association is sending? A huge percentage are going into a void, because so many of your brightest prospects have simply moved on. Prospect lists that may have been in peak condition in early 2020 are now antiquated, an artifact of data decay.
Oh, you say, but email forwards! Sure, emails get forwarded. Sometimes. Do you want to hinge your event on it?
How Bad is the Database Decay Problem for Associations?
Prospect databases naturally decay each year from your run-of-the-mill turnover. But the past three years have been anything but run-of-the-mill. We’ve seen estimates as high as 70% for B2B database decay rates.
Meeting planners know it’s happening. But associations? Too many haven’t opened their eyes. You know that you’re not getting the response rate you want, but you’ve chalked it up to Covid-19. And it IS related to that. But it’s related to a facet that we’re only now beginning to understand.
Some telltale signs that you have a prospect database problem:
You’re not getting the response you used to for offerings like webinars.
Your open rate has plummeted.
The only real engagement you’re getting is from members.
How to Stop Emailing Fake People and Reach New Prospects
First, you have to clean your data. Your software can help you do this.
That’s actually the easy part.
The harder part is figuring out how to engage a fresh crop of prospects. It can feel like starting over. And while that sounds daunting, it’s an opportunity.
Taking a fresh approach is how we helped a large global legal association increase their prospects by 56% between 2021 and 2022—while cutting the cost-per-prospect by nearly a third.
It’s also how we helped a large staffing association get their most conference attendees ever in 2022.
As you build your new database, we have a few tips for reaching and converting these new prospects.
Switch from content marketing to people marketing: If traditional content marketing is about volume, people marketing is about thinking like a prospect. You market to others how you want to be marketed to, and you avoid the things that annoy people. (Learn more about what it means to switch to people marketing.)
Do a content audit: With your people marketing frame of mind, look at the content you currently have, and ask yourself if it’s any good. By good, we mean does it tell a story? Does it inspire trust? Does it identify your value prospect at a glance? Ask yourself if the piece of content would be worth your time, and if not, toss it from the lead gen pile. (Learn more about the danger of wasting your prospect’s time.)
Refresh and repackage the content worth keeping: Can you create a webinar from an article that performed well on social? Build a resiliency toolkit from a series of blog posts? Develop a series of success stories from testimonials? Put together a preview of your event so that prospects understand what it’s like to actually be there?
Don’t Use That Outdated Campaign Strategy on Your New Database
There’s an old saying among gardeners: Don’t dig a fifty-cent hole for a $5 plant. In other words, don’t bother putting your expensive plant in cheap, nutrient-lacking soil.
Likewise, a fresh, clean database won’t do you any good if you put it in poor soil. It’s worth investing to make sure you are getting the most from that prospect list.
You need a branded, fully-automated, data-driven campaign. We’re talking about an intelligent, go-to-market plan that’s integrated across all touchpoints. In other words, a campaign that meets your prospects where they are, and responds to what they do.
Not sure what one of these plans looks like? Contact us and we’d be happy to show you.
If you’re like most associations, your member recruitment strategy probably goes something like this:
Work very hard to get the largest companies in your industry to join, because their dues are the highest.
Work even harder to get the medium-sized companies in your industry to join, because they are your reliable base.
Let the small companies just find you, because the combination of lesser dues + resources needed to serve them doesn’t always feel worth it.
We understand this approach. We also know that associations must do a delicate juggling act. You need to make your payroll to stay viable, but you’re also nonprofit, charged with representing the industry.
In other words, you’re supposed to be doing it all, but your staff lacks the time and resources. So, you adopt a triage mentality, and focus your efforts on what seems like it will produce the greatest rewards.
But what if we told you there was an easily available opportunity that didn’t make your life harder and wouldn’t add more work? One that would allow you to better represent your industry AND grab a boatload of dues-paying members?
The answer is behind door number three, where the small companies are hanging out.
We’re going to show you exactly WHY you should grab them and HOW to make it worth your while.
Why Your Association Should Actively Recruit Smalls
One of our clients is a large association in the human resources industry, with about 36,000 members, and an 88% retention rate. After some discussions about their membership goals, we helped them create a campaign that would specifically target smaller businesses in the industry.
They got more than 50 new members in a matter of two months.
Here’s what the Senior Vice President and Chief Membership Officer of the association told us the other day during our weekly check-in.
“Right now, we have so many applications coming in from new members that we can’t even process them all. And we are on course to set an all-time revenue high.”
There are so many things that are great about this. First, they have an influx of new people. New people bring new blood and new opportunities. Because the CEO of that $4 million company you just recruited might be the decision maker at a $25 million company in a few years.
You never know the energy and possibility that can come with ANY new member—and that includes one that is 10 times smaller than the largest organization on your roster.
Plus, when you have a rich blend of large, medium, AND small organizations in the mix, you’re much better able to uphold your mission of representing ALL voices in the industry.
And then there’s the most obvious thing: Smaller organizations are low-hanging fruit. No-brainer revenue. The benefits of belonging to your association far outweigh the dues for most of these smalls. You just need to take the time to articulate the right message to them.
How to Handle Smalls? Automate!
We know what you’re thinking: This all sounds good, but it takes effort to recruit smalls. And if we don’t put in the effort to retain them, they’ll leave after the first year and blow our retention rate.
We hear you, and you’re right. That is a challenge. Fortunately, there’s a great answer: Automation!
You know how we helped our HR industry association client get those 50 new members? We ran multiple digital campaigns for them throughout the year. That’s it. No heavy lifting required.
We helped them craft a targeted message. It required a modest initial investment, and then it ran itself—and it continues to run itself.
That same automation can work for onboarding and retention workflow. You probably can’t afford to hire a member representative who is solely dedicated to the smalls. But you can use modern technology to streamline the process.
Targeting small organizations allows you to grow your association, thoroughly represent the industry, and plant seeds for future growth.
We understand the challenges. But we truly believe this is one of the least-accessed, BEST opportunities right now for associations.
We’d be happy to bounce ideas around with you, and help you envision what a targeted campaign to the smalls would look like.
Recession is an economic concept, but it’s so much a part of the popular imagination that it’s also become a behavioral one. Even the word “recession” gives people a fright.
The experts may be debating whether we are officially in a recession, but people are already thinking differently about their money and how to spend it.
This applies to associations as much as it applies to consumer spending. Because the same people who buy consumer goods also make decisions about whether to renew their company’s membership, send employees to events, and invest in training or other professional development tools.
Whether your answer to the recession question is yes, no, or maybe so doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that your association is ready to respond to people’s behavior over the coming year.
We have 7 ideas for how you can adjust and prepare for another tumultuous season.
1. Find your sense of urgency.
Many associations don’t spend time thinking seriously about the fall . . . until the fall. Yes, summer is busy, and kids are most likely not even back to school yet. We know August can be a hot and lazy month. But what if you DID start now, instead of waiting until the fall? Get out ahead of a potential economic downturn by planning your entire marketing strategy around it, instead of waiting to see what happens.
2. Use data to flag your risks.
What story is your data telling you? Are you letting it guide your efforts? For example, people often sign up for membership just to get a discount for the annual conference. But then they don’t use any of the other membership benefits. So when the budget tightens, whether because of a real or perceived economic decline, what do you think is the first to go? That membership they barely used. Identify these members at risk of dropping off, flag them in your list, and market to them specifically.
3. Prepare to compete with an election for attention.
Between now and November 8, people will be inundated with nonstop messages from political campaigns. Emails, social media posts, videos, ads, texts, phone calls: Every channel will be jammed with political messaging. How will your messages stand out? You’ll never beat politics when it comes to sheer number of communications. How will you reach prospects and members in a meaningful way?
4. Think like a prospect.
We preach this in just about every newsletter. You need to think like a prospect. The marketing techniques that drive you crazy as a consumer? Don’t do those things in your own marketing! The endless email drip campaigns. The hard sell. The blanket messages that aren’t targeted to your behavior. You can’t stand these things, and neither can prospects!
5. Figure out how to offer a “sample” of your event.
We’ve been trained by retail and entertainment giants that anything worth our time comes with a preview, whether it’s a movie trailer, book or music sample, or list of reviews. Everything worth something now offers a meaningful window into the experience or a way to test before buying. Associations must begin offering the equivalent of the movie trailer. Otherwise, prospects fear you are wasting their time.
6. Keep communication jargon-free.
Lofty language that uses a lot of words winds up saying very little. Too many associations forego clarity in their quest to sound credible and worthy. But all those staid, insider phrases just come off like clutter. Instead, write like a human, talking to humans. Use clear, short, actionable sentences. Always check your reading level, and aim for no higher than Grade 8 (Flesch-Kincaid rates this newsletter as Grade 7, in case you’re wondering).
7. Train your resilience.
Resiliency is an interesting thing. It’s a mighty force that carries people and organizations through the ups and downs. But it’s not a given. You must cultivate it. What are you building right now that will last? What are you doing right now that will enable you to bounce back when the rebound happens? If someone asked you what makes your association resilient, would you be able to answer?
There’s a new fear in town. To be clear, our lives are already full of fear, thanks to two tumultuous years and a lingering feeling that the shoe is about to drop. But the generalized fear that comes with being a person these days isn’t actually what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about what your members and prospects are truly scared of when they see your marketing email, early bird offer, or social media post.
They’re afraid that you’re wasting their time. Squandering their attention. Making promises you can’t keep.
If we’ve learned anything the past few years, it’s that we don’t have to allow people trifling with our time. Plundering our calendars. Taking our attention for granted. We don’t have to put up with awkward social interactions or obligatory events. We barely even have to leave our homes and offices.
All we have to do is sit, click, and Zoom. And even then, we can probably multi-task and knock something else off our to-do list.
How Did Time Get to Be Like This?
Think about it: Do you even answer phone calls from numbers or names you don’t recognize? Our outlook has become, “If I don’t know you or have a reason to trust you, I assume you are wasting my time.”
What has happened to cause the erosion of trust, and the fear that others are wasting our time?
The simple answer is that we’re now conditioned to regard business-related events that require real-life interaction with suspicion. Or if not suspicion, second-guessing.
This is because we have learned to accomplish so many tasks virtually. Plus, we’re busy. There’s normal busy, and then there’s, “You need to do the job of three people” busy. Many people are stuck in the latter. Time away from the office is a luxury they can’t afford.
There is a more complex answer, too. And it’s that technology, media, and retail have trained us that anything worth our time (or money) comes with a preview, a list of reviews, or a “cancel at any time” option.
Want to start watching a new series on Netflix or Hulu? Watch a preview before you commit to even 30 minutes! Want to listen to an audiobook? Listen to a 4-minute sample first, to make sure the narrator’s voice doesn’t annoy you! Want to order a new air fryer, pair of pajamas, or phone case? Read reviews so you don’t set yourself up for disappointment!
Everything worth something now offers a meaningful window into the experience or a way to test it out.Everything, that is, except the products that most associations market.
How to Combat the Fear of Wasted Time
A decade ago, or perhaps even a few years ago, your organization could count on the benefit of the doubt.
Now you have to hustle in the marketplace, competing with, well . . . just about everyone and everything.
That means you’ve got to figure out how to tell the story of your event in a way that allows prospects to get a meaningful glimpse. In other words, you need to think about how to offer the equivalent of reading the book sample or watching the movie trailer.
Posting an agenda online doesn’t count. A couple of testimonials won’t cut it either. The same-old highlights reel isn’t enough.
How will you reach a jaded, exhausted, and skeptical population? How will you connect? How will you build trust, so that prospects know you value their time enough to offer them the same kind of ability to sample the experience?
We’ve seen the marketing that most associations are currently putting into the world, and we can tell you: 99% of it is missing this element.
How will you be different? How will you provide that missing piece?
Rottman Creative can help with your marketing. You just have to trust us.
We get stellar results for associations who are willing to think and behave differently. Give us a call and let’s start a project together now!
We’re starting to think that “content marketing” is dead. Or rather, it needs to die.
Why? Because too many associations have the wrong idea about how to use content to connect with new prospects. It occurs to us that the term itself might be the problem.
To be clear, content marketing is about creating and sharing pieces of compelling content that help establish your brand as helpful. This piece you’re reading is content marketing. So we’re clearly on board with the idea.
The problem is that, for many associations who do content marketing, the emphasis is usually on the content itself, not the person on the receiving end.
Content Overload is Not a Relationship-Building Strategy
How do we know associations are emphasizing content over people? Because when we dig into the practices and journey maps our clients create, we see very little attention paid to the fact that most people don’t want to be overwhelmed with content in their email inbox.
It’s all, Look at our content! Give us your email and we will send you so much content! Then we’ll ask what you think about our content! Then we’ll slice and dice and show you the same piece of content 7 different ways!
When it really should be, Hey, nice to meet you. You probably don’t want all this junk in your inbox, because you’re a person, not a robot. Let’s start a conversation that respects your time.
Consider how many people open their email each day, use the “shift” key to highlight a pack of emails, and delete them wholesale.
It’s what we do. So does your boss, your best friend from college, and the guy who sold you your mattress.
And you know who else does? All those prospects you forgot were people, who get irritated at the very same things you get irritated at.
Your content marketing is overloading people, instead of learning about them and meeting them on their terms.
What you need instead is people marketing.
Two Principals for People Marketing
People marketing is about making information more accessible and reducing the level of annoyance prospects feel. It offers content without overwhelm. It asks: What irritates you? And then it avoids that.
We’ve got two principals to help you understand people marketing. The first one is an old-school, universal truth and the second is based in behavioral science.
#1 Market to others how you want to be marketed to.
We all know the golden rule of treating others how you want to be treated. It’s elegant and beautifully simple. But when it comes to marketing, hardly anyone does it.
Ask yourself, what builds trust for you? What makes you engage instead of deleting, lean in instead of running away? Sure, some of it is topic related (people who are interested in sports read sports content, etc.). But much of it is behavior related. If people feel like you are inundating them and wasting their time, you’re gone from their inbox.
#2 Think differently about outcomes (and happiness).
Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling Upon Happiness, has written extensively about how bad human beings are at predicting what will make us happy and how long our happiness will last.
For example, positive events, like promotions or a new house, do add to our happiness, he says. But not as much as we think, and not for very long. What makes us most genuinely happy, and happy for the long haul, are social connections with others.
His work deals with individuals, but we think the findings generalize to organizations—since organizations are run by individuals. Especially the idea that when you focus so much on desired outcomes (because you’re certain they are the key to happiness), there’s a lot you might miss.
Associations can become so preoccupied with reaching short-terms goals that they compromise the very relationships they are trying to build. They think more content and more emails will create outcomes that bring happiness for everyone. But they miss what people want: connections.
In other words, beware of trading short-view actions for long-term strategy.
What Will Your People Marketing Look Like?
This is the question your association should be asking itself. Inside of it are the questions: How can you think more like a prospect? How can you create trust among people who don’t know you? How can you focus on people more than outcomes?
Rottman Creative helps associations like yours find answers to these questions.
So your in-person event is back on. Great! Now you need attendees. Here’s a list of proven failures that will most definitely NOT attract prospects. Take these tactics off your to-do list. Then implement a few of the surefire strategies listed below to build a high-quality prospect pool and get more people in the door.
FAILURE #1
Have no value proposition or differentiator
If you’re looking to deter prospects or get ignored altogether, having no value proposition is a great start. Afterall, professionals in your space have lots of events to choose from, so they can just choose a different one. Alternately, they might be satisfied with LinkedIn or Google.
FAILURE #2
Send a drip campaign with 5+ emails
Don’t stick with a “spray and pray” e-blast approach. Sending multiple impersonal emails is a proven tactic to take potentially interested people and chase them away.
FAILURE #3
Hire a famous keynote speaker who is irrelevant to your industry
Your association promotes itself as the best place to find industry-specific resources. Don’t hire a big name celebrity as your keynote speaker who knows absolutely nothing about your industry.
FAILURE #4
Use overly complex language nobody can understand
Long paragraphs, long sentences, and long words take lots of time and brain power to decipher. If nobody can understand you, they surely won’t know why or how to register for your event.
FAILURE #5
Create busy visuals nobody can decipher
Your event branding and logo shouldn’t be difficult to read. Using a plethora of colors and fonts adds to the clutter and is guaranteed to turn people away.
FAILURE #6
Use a generic event name that is meaningless to anyone outside your association
Don’t be afraid to use your association’s acronym as your event name. After all, if prospects have never heard of you before, they won’t be compelled to attend XYZ’s Annual Conference.
FAILURE #7
Wait until the last minute to create your event website
Your event’s website is a central hub that lets people get to know your association, see how they’ll benefit from your event, and actually register. If you leave off the value proposition, agenda, and registration links until a few weeks before your conference you won’t reach attendance goals.
FAILURE #8
Be so exclusive nobody thinks they are allowed to come
Don’t hide the fact that your event is open to the public, including people who are not members of your association. When people don’t feel welcome, they will definitely not investigate further.
5 Ways to Actually Attract Prospects
Aside from doing the opposite of the failures mentioned above, here are five ways to up your event game and attract more prospects.
SUCCESS #1
Tell your story
Your prospect might have no idea who you are or why they should care. You have to convince them to care. You can’t do that with a few dozen impersonal emails. Tell your story quickly and make it easy to take action on it.
SUCCESS #2
Craft a unique value proposition
If you can’t articulate in just a few words why someone should attend your event, you need a new value proposition. Focus on benefits and differentiators. In one sentence, explain why you are worth someone’s money and time away from the office.
SUCCESS #3
Speak like a human
Messaging should be authentic and value based. Write everything at a 7th or 8th Grade level for easy comprehension. Be friendly and inviting. Make sure everything makes sense to someone who has never heard of your association before.
SUCCESS #4
Be relevant
Take time to curate a truly relevant experience that addresses your audience’s current pain points. Conduct surveys and focus groups. Choose a keynote speaker who knows your industry inside and out.
SUCCESS #5
Keep it simple!
When it comes to your messaging, visuals, agenda, or anything else related to your event, go with the simplest choice. Cut the clutter. Stay on point. Promise select takeaways that matter to the segment of prospect you’re going after.
A good default strategy for event-related prospecting is to think like a prospect. Take some time to consider the types of messages and offers you prefer to receive from other businesses and organizations. Stick with those and leave the rest of the noise behind.
Raise your hand if this sounds like your association…
You need more prospects. So you offer up a nice piece of content in exchange for an email address. Congratulations, you found some interested people! Next, you fire off an automated drip campaign with three or four “canned” emails as follow up. The majority of your interested people promptly delete these emails and unsubscribe from your list. Very few engage further, and even fewer convert. Your association continues to struggle with membership numbers, and you are very tired of marketing that just doesn’t work.
But Why Doesn’t It Work?
Literally no one wants to be spammed with a bunch of emails just because they needed some information. Would you?
There’s a better way, and it starts by thinking like a prospect. If you yourself wouldn’t want a bunch of impersonal emails, irrelevant offers, or jargon-filled sales letters, your prospects won’t either. It’s time to imagine life from your prospect’s point of view so you can improve your marketing and get the results your association needs to thrive.
Here are four steps to get you started.
Quit bombing people with communications you wouldn’t want yourself.
In addition to the prospecting example above, your association might be guilty of some of these other marketing missteps:
You send members 20 or 30 emails about your annual event every year.
You continuously email 8,000-10,000 people when you only need a few hundred interested parties.
You send 20,000 direct mail packages and get less than 30 sign-ups.
Instead, let your people tell you what they want. Look at their online behaviors. As follow-up, create multiple workflows based on how people have engaged with your messages and offers. Personalize the customer journey as much as possible.
For example, if 50 people downloaded your content, send those 50 people a thoughtful direct mail piece. Don’t mail more than 300. Look at your list and whittle it down to the most likely prospects.
Shift how you think about your events and membership.
Thinking like a prospect means acknowledging that there’s a lot to be worried about right now. Things like war, Covid, and the economy add to the pressures of daily work. People might not have money or time to join your association or travel to your event, and they might have other concerns as well.
More importantly, they’ve figured out how to live without your event for the last two years and they’re still doing fine. Online resources have effectively taken the place of your association for many people. It’s not realistic to think that everyone will rush to your event simply because it’s once again occurring in person.
You will need to be patient as you entice people to attend or join. Given all of today’s challenges, it will take more time than you’d like to nurture your leads in a logical, thoughtful, personalized manner.
Make a dramatic change in what you say.
Speak in a conversational tone. After all, that’s what you prefer when others talk to you. Ditch abstract, overused words like “thought leadership” and “strategic connections.” Swap those for concrete terms that promise benefits. Focus on what sets you apart from competitors.
Communicate in words an eighth grader would understand. Yes, you are a professional organization with in-depth, complex information and resources. But your marketing has to be simple. It has to engage people quickly or they will hit delete and move on.
Rethink your use of marketing automation.
Marketing automation isn’t a “set it and forget it” tool. To be successful, you must set up multiple workflows based on your audience’s goals and pain points, your organization’s resources, and your users’ actual behaviors. Then you need to make adjustments as you go based on performance.
Ideally, marketing automation captures data that you can use to customize future communications and improve your numbers. It helps you reach more people with personalized messages and offers. Too often, however, associations use automation as a way to put their marketing on autopilot. At that point, it’s just more spam.
For every campaign you launch, stop and ask yourself what a member or prospect would want. Is it really another email? Or is it a phone call from a helpful human? Additional useful content? A direct mail piece? Something else?
Start Making Changes Now
Giving people individualized attention is hard to do, and there is no “golden ticket” that will instantly improve your numbers. But you have to start somewhere, and you have to start now. As the last few years have shown us, anything can happen. Better marketing now means your association will be poised to thrive no matter what the future holds.
Think like a prospect is No. 3 in our ebook, 3 Action Steps Associations Can Take to Achieve Goals. What are numbers 1 and 2? Download it and see.
The age of the hybrid event is here. As associations contemplate returning to in-person gatherings, the advantages of virtual—including serious time and money savings for your members—can’t be ignored. To engage the largest audience in the most personalized way possible, a hybrid event that combines in-person offerings with virtual ones is the way to go.
The hybrid model comes with some challenges, of course, including logistics, technology, engagement, and more. But the juice is worth the squeeze. Following a few best practices will help you navigate this new frontier to maximize the benefits and engage your base for years to come.
What is a hybrid event?
A hybrid event is any in-person event that has some online component. This could include a livestream of the in-person sessions, on-demand content, a gamification component, a remote keynote speaker, a Q&A with both in-person and online audiences, or any number of other possibilities.
There are no rules here and no audience expectations because everything is new. For example, you might discover that your event becomes 80% virtual and only 20% in-person based on your audience preferences.
What are the advantages of a hybrid event?
If your association is like most, you’re eager to replace lost event revenue from 2020 and fuel future growth by retuning to a full-fledged in-person conference and expo. Plenty of your members are chomping at the bit to get out of their homes/offices and connect in person once gain.
However, budget cuts and lingering fears related to COVID-19 mean people won’t be returning to your event in droves just yet. In-person attendance will likely be low for years to come. A virtual event offers an opportunity to serve your base with high-quality content from afar.
A hybrid event is the best of both worlds. It’s a chance to regain the magic of an in-person experience while engaging people virtually—and generating revenue on both fronts. Chances are you invested in virtual event infrastructure in 2020, so the potential for hybrid is already there.
What are some best practices for hybrid events?
1. Simplify your offerings based on your association’s differentiators.
It’s easy for your event to become a three-ring circus of sessions, certifications, whiz bang technology platforms, cocktail hours, rock bands, and more. Some of this was a risk before the pandemic. Now more than ever, your event (and all your association’s offerings) should focus on what you do best. What sets you apart from competitors? What is the highest-value service you provide for your members? What do you offer that people can’t find anywhere else? Highlight these differentiators in your event marketing as well.
2. Understand your audience.
The answers to a few key questions about your members and prospects will guide the decisions you make about your hybrid event—including the size of your venue, registration price, engagement strategies, and the percentage of your event that goes online.
Are your members and prospects ready and willing to travel again?
What is the No. 1 reason people attend your event?
Why might people NOT attend?
Do people place a higher value on your networking or your content?
Are people looking for certifications? Can these be delivered online?
How important is a hands-on, face-to-face exhibit hall experience?
What is the ROI of in-person offerings compared to virtual ones?
What does your association offer that can only take place in person?
3. Choose your tech last.
There are hundreds of tech solutions that you could include in your hybrid event. Most of them aren’t actually necessary, and some of them add unneeded complexity and the potential for technical difficulties. After answering all the questions in No. 2 above, choose the tools that will best serve your base. For more insights on technology, have a look at New Tech Won’t Save Your Crappy Marketing.
4. Focus on value.
A big-name speaker fills seats but may not offer insights your audience needs to hear. A well-known entertainer may get rave reviews from attendees without generating enough ROI for your association. Focus on value first. Ask yourself: Does this help people solve their challenges? Does it enable goals? Does it present new possibilities? Does it foster meaningful connections? Is it purposeful? Does it align with our cause? Also consider whether it generates ROI for your association.
Seize this Huge Opportunity
A hybrid event is a huge opportunity for your association to serve the needs of your members in a curated, personalized way while generating much-needed revenue. Amid today’s challenges, people are tackling more responsibilities than ever. Be part of the solution. Distill your event down to only the most powerful resources and deliver them in a way that honors people’s preferences. Cut everything else.
What to say visually and when to say it to reach your association’s membership and retention goals
These days, the social media canvas looks like a Jackson Pollack splatter painting. There are more fonts, colors, and graphics than ever. More politically charged messages. More impersonal ads. More videos. More virtual offerings. More noise.
Your audience has more going on too. More screen time. More responsibilities. More uncertainty. More stress. Amid all this “more,” people are craving, well, a little bit less—less clutter, less distraction, less dog and pony show, less B.S.
If your association wants to have any chance of cutting through the chaos to reach your audience—and reach your membership goals for the year—you have to strengthen and simplify your visual presence. Here are five best practices to help you fine-tune what to say visually and when to say it.
1. Take a minimalist approach
Simplify your branding to include only the most compelling, essential, easy-to-grasp elements. Go back to the basics and focus on composition, structure, and form. Take a lesson from history, when language was simpler. We heard about one designer who used ancient rune symbols from 150 AD for font inspiration.
2. Don’t be fooled by trends
Stay away from trendy design elements that can quickly be overdone. At the moment, everyone is jumping on the gradient bandwagon. You might think being trendy shows that your association is fresh and modern. The reality is that you’re just blending in with everyone else on social media, and your conversion rates will suffer as a result. A simple, clean, bold approach will go farther than the latest design fad.
3. Humanize your visuals
People relate to other people better than to impersonal organizations. Your visual branding must show your human side to attract members and prospects. A tip from neuroscience: Show people’s faces. Human faces enhance a website’s visual appeal, efficiency, and trustworthiness. One study determined that users find it easier to perform tasks on websites with faces.1
4. Go easy on the illustrations
Illustrations can be useful for depicting technical subject matter, complex emotions, or difficult topics. Use them sparingly, however, as too many cartoons can hurt your professional image.
5. Refine your timing
Recognize that people need different types, lengths, and formats of content depending on where they are in the buying cycle. Tailor your visuals and comms accordingly:
Awareness phase: Providing entertainment can capture your audience’s initial attention and entice them to view more of your message.1 From there, blog posts, social content and e-books can address an acute problem your audience is trying to solve. Keep things simple and fairly brief. People don’t necessarily know you or trust you enough to watch long videos, read lots of text, or interpret complex data.
Consideration phase: Provide meatier content to help people evaluate your association’s offerings compared to competitors. Use visuals such as graphs, infographics, and illustrations to aid comprehension of complex topics. Consider adding email marketing in addition to retargeting and social media ads.
Decision phase: Ask for action. By this stage, people have already made up their minds about your organization. They just need a nudge to convert or go another direction. Messaging and visuals at this stage should be clear, concise, brief, and straight to the point.
6. Be purposeful
Keep in mind that the wrong visuals can damage your brand and credibility. One study of Instagram posts by orthodontists showed that personal images of family members hurt the office’s credibility and decreased the likelihood of being selected by patients.2 Only include images if they truly show the value of your association.
The power of visuals
Don’t overlook the power of visuals in your membership and retention marketing. Great visuals communicate on their own—sometimes better than text. They can also work in harmony with your marketing copy to drive home key points. Fresh, bold, clear, simple visuals can make or break your campaigns and your goals for the year.
Sources:
Consumer Behaviour through the Eyes of Neurophysiological Measures: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends, Patrizia Cherubino et al.
The Effects of Images Posted to Social Media by Orthodontists on Public Perception of Professional Credibility and Willingness to Become a Client, Thiago Martins Meira, et al.
6 best practices for associations to enhance virtual offerings
As the pandemic continues, many organizations are looking for ways to replace lost event revenue, attract and retain more members, and better serve their base from afar. New technology seems like the perfect solution, and the possibilities are endless. You could do more on social media, revamp your website, create an interactive content library, or launch a series of Zoom events. You could even add artificial intelligence or virtual reality event environments.
But not so fast. While you have a golden opportunity to better serve your members during a time of disruption, you also have the potential to fail miserably. If your brand is a hodgepodge of messages and images, moving everything to a new platform means you will now have a high-tech hodgepodge of the same messages and images. New tech solutions only work when you have a solid foundation based on your audience’s needs and your organization’s core competencies.
In short, new tech won’t save your crappy marketing, but these six best practices can help you enhance your virtual offerings strategically to drive revenues, engagement, and retention.
1. Examine your audience
Be specific about who you serve. Know their job titles, years in the business, pain points, demographics, level of familiarity with your subject matter, preferred communication channels, and more. Define your audience’s primary archetype—that’s their universal character type—to help you further understand your base and how best to interact with them.
2. Articulate your value proposition
Once you know who you serve, take some time to define how you serve them. Be specific with tangible benefits. This is not your mission or vision statement. It tells your audience what’s in it for them. Here are a few real-world examples:
American Staffing Association: Create better lives, better businesses, and a better economy.
Intuit: Simplify the business of life. Ladders: Move up in your career.
Bitly: Shorten. Share. Measure
3. Develop standard messaging
Messaging includes two parts: how you talk (voice) and what you say (message).
Voice—If your brand were a person, how would that person speak? Conversational vs. academic, casual vs. formal, technical vs. accessible, funny vs. straightforward, edgy vs. conservative, etc.
Message—What information will you convey? Ex: Who you are, product/event descriptions, key member benefits, why join, etc.
First, define your voice. Next, develop a messaging tree with standardized language in that voice. A message tree can help unify your internal team so you can better convey your organization’s value to your audience.
4. Craft unified visuals
A solid brand has a unified look and feel. Be fresh and modern. Focus on people. Show you’re committed to diversity and inclusion. Avoid mixing cartoons with photographic images. Choose a limited number of fonts and colors. Take a minimalist approach. Your brand visuals should contribute to your credibility as an organization and reassure people that they’ve come to the right place.
5. Define your strategy
Sketch out a plan for attracting leads and nurturing them over the long term. Include key dates, your budget, formats, content, and offers. Know your goals and KPIs. Determine how you will score leads and follow up based on each score. Don’t launch a single promotion without knowing how it fits into the bigger picture.
6. Choose your tech
A wise woman once said, “Don’t doubt you can, just wonder why you want to.” There are lots of tech solutions out there with tons of features, but if your audience doesn’t need or want them you’re just wasting your time and money. A few considerations:
ROI—Does the solution generate measurable value (ex: increased traffic, clicks, likes, shares, lead forms completed, etc.)? Would a simpler solution generate just as much value?
Ease of implementation and use—Is it relatively quick to implement? Is it easy for your internal team to use? Is it quick and easy for members to take full advantage of?
Potential for bugs and problems—Aim for simple over complex. If your virtual reality event platform goes down the day of your event, do you have a backup plan? (This happened to one of our clients!)
You’ll notice that choosing your tech should be the LAST step. Don’t just jump on the latest high-tech trend. Solidify your value prop and branding first. Create a detailed strategy. Then make an informed decision on which solution will best help you achieve your goals.
Chances are your website started out great. It was simple, clean, and easy to navigate. But websites often take on a life of their own. Things get messy as you create more pages, add plug-ins, and post new content. Before long, your helpful online resource becomes a tangle of words, images, forms, and password-protected content. You, Dr. Frankenstein, have created a monster.
But never fear. Websites have a pretty short shelf life (or at least they should). If it’s been a few years since your organization has purposefully revamped your website—to throw out the old, clean up the clutter, and update it for modern times—it is critical to do so now.
Everything is virtual
In the post-COVID-19 world, your website takes on new significance. It is the home base for your brand, your mission, your offerings, and your community of followers. It could be years before people feel comfortable interacting in person once again. Until then, your website needs to do some heavy lifting to deliver on your promises, engage and connect people, provide products and services, and do so much more. And you can’t accomplish all of this with an outdated, ineffective site.
Sure you could go wild with high-tech features like virtual reality or artificial intelligence. We will likely see more and more advanced technology on the web in the near future. But for most organizations, this just isn’t necessary. Plus, it won’t make up for outdated content, confusing navigation, and incongruous images. Solidify the foundation first. Then think about adding bells and whistles.
8 ways to improve your website
Here are eight back-to-the-basics web improvements you can make now to help you engage people, convert prospects, and build loyalty in a virtual world.
1. Out with the old
Create a process for regularly retiring old offerings and outdated materials. Take a hard look at what is on your website to make sure it all still applies to what your organization delivers today.
2. Less is more
Part of your role as an organization is to curate resources and information because your target audience doesn’t have time to do it themselves. Your website should serve up only the most helpful, time- and money-saving, life-enhancing information, products, and services. Ask yourself: “What is the least people need to know?”
3. Freshen up your design
An effective modern website is fresh and clean. It has plenty of white space. Images are human, professional, diverse, and uncomplicated. Keep the number of fonts and colors to a minimum. Make it easy for people to see what they need and take action.
4. Simplify navigation
A beautiful website is useless if people can’t find what they’re looking for. Simply your navigation using these best practices:
Identify 4-6 buckets that your site’s content falls into for your homepage navigation headings.
Avoid making people click too many times to arrive at a desired resource. Aim to get people to their destination in three clicks or fewer.
Add quick links on your home page to the most popular areas of your site.
Enable keyword search for even faster navigation.
5. Update your copy
Edit references to in-person offerings that no longer exist or anything else that’s changed due to COVID-19. Then go deeper to make sure all your messaging is clear, concise, and aligned with your core brand.
Focus on benefits and value vs. features. Use action verbs. Answer your audience’s question: “What’s in it for me?”
6. Be smarter with user data
Turn your website into a data-gathering machine that helps you create laser-focused marketing. Capture information such as user demographics, behaviors, preferences, and topics of interest. Then, automate integration with your other marketing platforms for timely follow-up and targeted lead nurturing that drive conversions.
7. Consider UX
User experience, or UX, considers all interactions a user has with your organization and how each element involved shapes the perception of your brand. For your website, good UX design focuses on what the user needs and makes it easy and enjoyable to navigate your site.
8. Stay active
Designate personnel to maintain interactive components of your site. Regularly moderate discussion forums, job boards, chat boxes, or message boards, to ensure productive interactions and gain valuable insights into the mindset of your audience. This will also add an important human touch to your brand.
Don’t miss out
A fresh, modern, up-to-date website has so much value—in potential leads, sales, members, customers, credibility, brand recognition, and so much more. It’s worth investing time and money to transform Frankenstein’s monster into a purpose-built site that serves and delights your base.
Answer this question quickly, and in one word: What is the number one reason you believe people attend your event?
We would be astounded if your answer wasn’t networking.
We would be equally astounded if you agree with what we’re about to say next: Networking isn’t actually why people show up at events.
That’s right. It’s not about networking. Or at least, not about networking as you are defining it and creating messages around it.
Whether or not you agree with us about networking not being the top draw for events, it’s a bit of a moot point anyway, since we are living in the COVID-19 era, where events must be completely recast as virtual. So, if you’ve been counting on in-person networking as the draw, you have a problem.
But . . . did we mention networking was never actually the main draw? Before you insist loudly that we don’t know what we’re talking about, let us clarify something.
The anticipation of connecting with others definitely nudges members to register for events. But what really sells them and in particular attracts younger members is the notion of connecting with like-minded souls around a cause or movement.
The great news is that members can connect with one another around a common purpose without meeting in person. Is gathering in real time and space the ideal way to do it? Yes. But we’re all out of luck, because nobody of any real size can do in-person events right now. We are all starting from that same place of, Oh crap, what are we going to do?
What you are not going to be able to do is rely on your old messaging.
So, to recap before we move on:
Your old messages about networking won’t work now.
Your old messages about networking weren’t that great anyway, so don’t spend too much time bemoaning their fate.
If you can’t repurpose your old messaging, the only choice is to create new messaging. While we completely understand the level of stress this is causing, we are here to tell you it’s actually an amazing opportunity to be a leader and do things differently.
How will you show up for people?
Some people’s lives have been completely upended by COVID-19, devastated even. They have lost jobs, dreams, and perhaps even loved ones. In all of this tumult, people both need support and are eager to lend support to their peers.
Your members may have several places they go for professional support, but if your association isn’t the first stop, you are missing a big opportunity. While we may be starting to fatigue of messaging having to do with the coronavirus, your members still need that sense of connection to others, to know they are not in this alone.
This is the time to pull members in and ask basic things like: What do you need and how can we help? Working from a place of empathy isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. Because when the pandemic is over, people will remember who showed up for them.
That means that anything you were phoning in before, or, say, had a place on your website that performed this function but didn’t do it very well (i.e., job search, loan and grant resources, message boards, mentoring) should now be well-designed, easy to use, and highly robust.
Once you have re-established your association as a support system, not just a place to pay dues to, then you can start to ask bigger questions like: What do you care about in your work? What change do you want to make? Do you want to connect with other like-minded people and work toward that vision with us?
This may have been called networking in a previous generation, but the younger generation likens it more to joining a movement. They will be far more likely to join and to show up for you if you first show up for them.
You need a new playbook and new messaging
Traditionally, most associations come up with a few key messages around networking and simply repurpose them year after year. The same 30 percent of members show up, because they are probably going to show up no matter what.
But now, there is no more showing up in the traditional sense. Your event is no longer about a venue, a plane ticket, an app with keynote speakers and breakout presentations, and a nebulous promise of “networking opportunities.”
Your event can’t be what it was, but it also can’t simply be a series of Zoom presentations, interspersed with scavenger hunts and happy hours. We are already zoning out on Zoom. It’s not that the technology doesn’t work. But it’s not a 1:1 transfer. You can’t merely put in-person programming on a virtual platform and call it done.
You have to create a completely new playbook—a new way to do things, and new messaging that pulls people in and brings them together on a virtual platform.
So, how can you make people feel special, supported, and connected to something bigger? What can you create that reminds them of the purpose, the thing your association is collectively working toward?
Whatever was true before the pandemic about your association’s cause or purpose is still true, but what is the 2.0 version of it? Why is it more urgent, more important than ever, or more exciting than ever? Those things are where your key messages should flow from.
Purposeful gathering, rallying around a cause, making connections with others, learning and growing as a community, supporting each other’s careers and goals, and having fun together: These things are all essential right now. They don’t stop in times of crisis. They only grow more important.
As you rebuild your event and reframe the way you talk about your event, begin there.
Associations that experience a drop in membership often believe it’s because of price. They think some people just aren’t willing to pay the high cost of dues, events, and products. But that’s not really true. Price isn’t the problem. Value is.
People will pay a lot for things that add value to their companies, careers, and lives. What they won’t do is shell out money year after year without getting something real and valuable as a return on their investment. If you think your association has a pricing problem, what you really have is a value problem. And a value problem is really a value proposition problem.
Movie theater vs Netflix
Imagine you run a movie theater (assuming the pandemic is over). You’re focused on delivering the best possible experience to your customers—comfortable seats, the biggest screen, the best sound, the tastiest popcorn. You are hands down the best movie theater in town. But there are always some empty seats. What’s the problem? You’ve failed to realize that many people prefer to stay home and watch Netflix.
Too often, associations lose sight of what their members actually want. They endlessly promote networking, education, and certification, not realizing that members might need something else. Or, maybe, that they need the same things but packaged in a different way. It’s no wonder associations struggle with membership acquisition and retention. They’re too busy trying to cram people into their outdated value proposition when they should be focused on how to best serve members today.
How to fix your value problem
If people aren’t leaving your association now, they soon will be. When the recession hits, people will cut whatever they think costs too much. They might not renew their membership in your association because money is tight. What they’re really saying is the value isn’t there for the price you’re charging.
Logically, dropping membership is a terrible idea. Especially in difficult times, your members need you for your advice, resources, and access to a community of helpful, empathetic peers. Somehow you need to communicate just how much value you can add to your members’ businesses, careers, and lives. You must prove yourself so vital that people can’t imagine getting by without you.
Before you can do that, you need to dig deep to uncover what matters most to your members and prospects. Whatever that is might be different than it was a year ago, and it will likely change a year from now. A survey won’t tell the whole story; it’s too limiting. Instead, you need ongoing conversations and focus groups (easily conducted via videoconferencing during COVID-19). You need to keep asking “Why?” until you get to the heart of their goals, roles, responsibilities, aspirations, pain points, and challenges.
Why ask why
On a multiple-choice survey, your members might select education as the No. 1 reason to join your association. In a focus group, you can go deeper. Pose the question: Why is education important?
Imagine what your members might say: “I want to…”
make informed decisions that save my company money
stand out from colleagues and get a promotion
work more efficiently to improve my work-life balance
help my company innovate and advance in our industry
make the most of our limited budget to help more customers
understand how new laws apply to my business
Depending on what your members say, you might discover that “education” really means efficiency, innovation, career development, compliance, or something else. The more you ask “Why?” the easier it will be to understand your base and their most pressing concerns. From there, you can match your value proposition and your offerings to their needs. You can innovate wisely to stay relevant. You can also eliminate anything that no longer adds value, saving you time and money and helping your audience to see only those things that matter most.
It’s not about you
Trying to be a movie theater when your members want Netflix is a losing battle. Associations exist to serve members, not the other way around. Focus on value and your membership and retention goals will take care of themselves.
In the past, associations thrived on in-person events, networking, education, and certifications—the more the merrier. But for years there has been a shift away from this old thinking to a modern approach where digital is king and people are less enticed by “stuff.” This shift was happening gradually until COVID-19 slammed on the accelerator. What began as a strategy to attract younger members is now essential to serving members of all ages. Your old business model is officially broken, and engagement is about to take a nosedive. It’s time to learn from your younger members so you can fix your business model, drive engagement, and thrive.
What We Know About Younger Members
Younger members grew up with Google and are used to instant gratification.
They’re careful with their money and slow to make a purchase.
They value community and purpose.
They trust people more than corporations.
They’re highly adaptable and can react quickly to any crisis or disruption.
They live online and are comfortable working and networking virtually.
A New Reality for Boomers and Millennials Alike
When COVID-19 hit, even the Boomers had to pivot and adapt. Here’s what the new reality looks like for members of all ages:
Google is the go-to resource (and your biggest competitor).
Money is an issue for everybody as the next recession looms.
Community means more now than ever.
We can get by with less stuff in our lives.
We don’t have to be there in person.
We can adapt to almost anything.
We can learn to use new technologies and work virtually.
Just like that, your association’s old business model centered on in-person events and endless offerings doesn’t work anymore. But the need for resources and support hasn’t changed. You have a golden opportunity to reinvent your association and serve members better than ever before.
What’s Out? What’s In?
Fixing your business model is a matter of removing clutter and adding value. It’s not easy, but it’s the only way forward.
OUT: In-person only resources
IN: Digital everything
Crisis or no crisis, your members don’t always have the time, money, or inclination to travel to your annual conference or even attend a local networking event. You need digital resources people can access quickly on their own terms. Templates, content downloads, virtual networking, job boards, webinars, and podcasts are just a few ideas. Break your event into time-conscious virtual tidbits, such as hour-long webinars, information packets, or online discussion panels.
OUT: Too much stuff
IN: Real resources that answer “What’s in it for me?”
Consider the cereal aisle at the grocery store. There are 16 different kinds of Cheerios that water down the brand and overwhelm the consumer. Your association faces a similar problem with your events, certifications, and education. Don’t be Cheerios. Focus instead on your core competencies. What do you offer that your members can’t get anywhere else? Which events deliver the biggest return for your members’ time and money? Don’t worry about revenue. Worry about delivering actual value and the revenue will take care of itself.
OUT: Sales pitches and corporate speak
IN: Meaningful, authentic human connections
The days of slick sales pitches and impersonal “professional” language are over. People are tired of being sold to, and they demand authenticity and transparency. The voice of your association should be human, conversational, and personal. Tell stories. Create online communities. Whenever possible, connect members and prospects with each other and get out of the way. Third-party endorsements are far more powerful than messaging straight from your organization.
OUT: Impersonal communications
IN: Behavior-based communications that are mindful of the customer journey
Nobody wants another impersonal eblast. Instead, use marketing automation to deliver timely, relevant content through marketing automation. Let each individual’s browsing, email, and social media behaviors dictate the next steps in your messaging.
If you can master how to attract, engage, and retain your younger members, you can do it for anyone. Start by throwing out old thinking and extraneous clutter. Then, add in a modern digital approach that delivers value through authentic human connections and a personalized customer journey.
If you’re feeling the financial squeeze from cancelled or postponed events, buckle up. There’s more pain ahead as a recession looms large and fears abound. You need a proactive plan to replace lost event revenue so you can ride out the storm and ensure success into the future. Here are three essential steps to take right now.
1. Attract more members
There is power in numbers. The more people you can rally to your organization, the better off you will be financially in the long term. Invest in member acquisition now to ensure you have a solid base to sustain your association.
2. Focus on being a resource
Of course you need revenue to survive as an association, but focusing solely on money right now is insensitive and tone deaf. A phased approach to revenue generation is your best bet.
Start with empathy. Be a trusted resource for members in a time of crisis. Give things away for free if you have the means. Avoid overt sales pitches. Retaining your base and building a following now can ensure long-term loyalty that will turn into revenue later.
When things start to improve, you can be more aggressive with money-making initiatives, for example:
Simultaneous in-person and virtual events
Vendor-sponsored webinars or Twitter chats
Advertising (especially while webinar attendance is high)
Gated content for lead generation
Paid content or resources for direct revenue streams
3. Go virtual with your event
Transition your event to the virtual space so you can continually deliver value to your base, crisis or no crisis. Use these strategies to help you make the move:
Host smaller virtual events
Instead of transferring your entire multiday event online, consider breaking it into smaller sections, like webinars, livestream keynotes, and panel discussions. Many of your members simply don’t have time for a two- or three-day event. Smaller, bite-sized resources are more feasible, especially during a crisis.
Offer on-demand resources
On-demand webinars, information packets, resource libraries, or online portals can offer the same value as your in-person events with an added advantage: Each individual can choose when and how they want to engage with your association.
Build online communities
Your event gives like-minded people a place to belong. Foster meaningful online communities to maintain that camaraderie even when they can’t be together in person. Post open-ended questions to spark discussions. Share videos that showcase member success stories. Offer free downloads that solve pain points. Host virtual happy hours.
Be a conduit for connections
Your in-person event puts all your members, vendors, and industry leaders literally in the same room. While you can’t exactly do that virtually, your association can still connect the dots to help all your constituents get what they need. Job boards, Q&A forums, hotlines, virtual networking events, online marketplaces, and member portals can help people connect directly so they can learn, share, collaborate, and achieve their goals.
Offer insider deals
For many associations, the annual event is a place for special deals and discounts. Work with vendors and industry partners to make exclusive offers to your members and virtual event attendees. Offer free or discounted association membership to retain your base and ensure they will be around to make purchases from you down the road.
Replacing lost event revenue is a matter of identifying the high-value components of your association—the pieces that serve your members best—and repackaging them for easy, convenient consumption by the people who need them most. Focus on serving members and the revenue will follow.
We know how diligently associations are working to adapt during this pandemic and to engage members through virtual events. We commend associations for their resiliency and creativity!
But what’s next? It’s the question most of us are asking with a mix of trepidation and hope. We hope things will turn around, but we fear they won’t. We hope normal returns sooner rather than later, but we fear it won’t.
Hope and fear are necessary emotions for processing complicated feelings. They don’t help you come up with a good plan though. And what your association needs now is a good plan. Or put another way, a map that points the way to what comes after all of this.
We have some suggestions about who can lead you there, and what you can expect to find.
Young people are the bright spot
We hear all of the same things you hear about young people: they’re not joiners; they don’t want to pay for things; they can’t commit to one job or one organization; you can’t get their attention.
It’s not that we don’t believe these points. After all, we see the same data you see about Millennial job hopping. Rather, it’s that we know it isn’t the whole story.
When the coronavirus hit the U.S., there was an assumption for a few weeks that Millennials were defying the recommendations to stay home, especially as pictures of young people at parties and crowding Florida beaches started cropping up all over social media. Millennials were quick to point out the generational mistake: it was actually the oldest cohort of Generation Z that was partying it up. In fact, Millennials were growing increasingly frustrated with their Boomer parents who they felt weren’t taking the virus seriously enough (captured humorously in this “open letter” op-ed).
Even more interesting were the memes and Instagram graphics that Millennials and Generation X started posting to rally support and evoke the idea of duty. These posts said things like, “Your grandparents were asked to fight a world war. You are being asked to stay home,” or showed beleaguered healthcare workers on the front lines with captions like, “I stay home for them.”
There are, of course, individual and regional variations in how young professionals have responded (and continue to respond) to the COVID-19 situation, but the abiding response has been one of “We are in this together.”
Younger people may change jobs more often and be more reluctant to pay for a feature they can find for free, but they care deeply about being part of a movement. They care about identifying with a purpose greater than themselves.
And also this: they are adaptable, which is everything right now. For example, though young people deeply value face to face connection, they’ve embraced the virtual work arounds, eagerly participating in your Zoom happy hours, your webinars, and your cyber conferences.
This is the bright spot of this dark situation, because it means that younger people are ready to take up the mantle of your association. That is, if you give them something real and deep they can believe in—a true mission and purpose they can rally around.
Your plan for what’s next
Your engagement may be very high right now, because a crisis invites engagement and the desire to connect with one another.
What about when it passes? What will these younger members rally around next?
You can’t wait until the pandemic begins to lift to decide that rallying point—especially because it will likely leave a long, painful recession in its place. As hard as it is to think about what comes on the heels of this, you must start planning now.
FIRST, if you have an event scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2020, you must accept that it will be dramatically different than what you anticipated when you first planned the event—starting with the fact that it may not happen at all. Or if it does, some members still may not be comfortable traveling.
How will you replace that revenue stream? How can you still connect people around a message? Keep in mind that people will be fatigued from COVID-19 messaging by then. You need a NEW message—not a crisis message, and not the outdated value proposition you were using before the crisis hit.
What will that message be? How can it work either in-person or virtually? Be clear on that now, versus having to be reactionary and make decisions on-the-fly.
SECOND, what will you put in place now to ensure that your association is leading the way, rather than following or being reactive?
Our tendency when we see recession coming is to tighten our belts, to duck for cover and resort to a fear and scarcity mentality. Instead, how can you take this awesome engagement you have now and monetize and build on it? You can only do this successfully if you invest in true digital marketing tools right now.
We started our agency in 1999, which means we ran our business through two major recessions: 2001 and 2008. Both times, we saw it as an opportunity to pivot, to dive deeper into work that matters.
This is the same mindset we have now. We believe that a shifting economy is a chance to rethink everything. We know what this journey looks like, and we find ourselves once again staring down a path marked “before” and “after.”
Come with us to the “after.” You may not believe it, but it can be even better than the “before.”
Want a brainstorming call to talk about what’s next for your association? Schedule time to talk to us! We are sheltering in place, thinking hard, and creating some innovative and amazing campaigns for associations.
Amid all the chaos and heartbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are truly inspiring stories of people coming together to help each other. Your association can be one of those stories. This is your opportunity to be a resource to your membership, to add value to their lives and businesses, and to help them through this difficult time.
Here are five ways you can help your members during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
Provide COVID-19 information
Associations are reporting jampacked webinars with thousands of participants, a sure sign that your members are eager for information and guidance. Topics include CDC recommendations for hygiene and social distancing, how to apply for relief loans and grants, and how COVID-19 affects your industry specifically.
While busy webinars indicate increased engagement, you can do even more. Many members are focused on immediate business needs and don’t have an hour to spend on a virtual event. Use webinar content to create quick resources like checklists, flow charts, infographics, or tip sheets. Your busy members will be grateful for curated content that helps them navigate this situation.
To further drive engagement, include time for live Q&A or provide a post-event feedback forum. This will help you gauge what issues are most important to your members and assure them that you’re listening and responding to their concerns.
Offer teleworking resources
Many of your members find themselves working from home for the first time. Help them navigate this new frontier by providing resources on setting a schedule, using video conferencing, maintaining cybersecurity, setting teleworking expectations for employees, and more. Consider hosting a virtual networking event via videoconferencing to demonstrate best practices and answer any questions.
Discounted membership for next year
COVID-19 will no doubt leave financial damage in its wake for a lot of your members, causing many to rethink membership and event participation to save money. Stay ahead of what could be a mass exodus from your organization by offering free or discounted membership for next year. What you do now will determine the success of your organization in the months and years to come.
Host mini virtual events
Going virtual can help you serve members and recover some lost revenue from cancelled in-person events. But be mindful of people’s time right now. Avoid shifting your entire event to the virtual space. Instead, see what you can break into bite-sized content for smaller individual events, for example a livecast from your keynote, online panel discussion, virtual networking session, or pieces of helpful content in a digital resource bundle.
Give people a platform to help
People want to help, whether it’s by donating masks, offering free services, or mobilizing in their own unique ways. Your association can provide a platform to connect the dots. Consider creating a special website or communications channel, such as COVIDResponseTeam@YourOrganization.com, to answer questions or match needs with resources.
Rise to the challenge
Instead of letting COVID-19 or some other crisis cripple your association, you can rise to the challenge and help your members get through it too. As a member-driven association, you’re already an expert at bringing people together and rallying around a cause. Right now, overcoming COVID-19 is the cause. The more you can serve as a resource for people or even a place for them to voice their fears, the more likely it is that members will stay loyal to your association now and long after this situation is over.
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about with COVID-19, you suddenly find yourself working from home. That means carving out space for an office, troubleshooting Zoom meetings, and trying to stay connected with your team and your membership…not to mention actually getting some work done! For many, this new reality can be overwhelming.
If teleworking has you flustered, here are 5 best practices to help you preserve your sanity and improve productivity.
1. Rise and shine
Trading your commute for a brief jaunt down the hall might leave you feeling lost in the mornings. It’s a good idea to maintain your regular morning rituals, such as setting your alarm clock and getting out of your pajamas. Enjoy coffee or breakfast with your spouse, kids, or roommates for social interaction and to ease into your day. Without a drive, you might even have extra time for exercise, meditation or chores. Avoid heading directly from your bed to your computer, which can blur the lines between your personal and professional lives.
2. Get some space
If work is staring you in the face day and night, you’re likely to feel stressed and stretched thin. Create a dedicated office space that you can leave behind at the end of the day—even if it means closing your laptop and moving it off the kitchen table. Let your family know that they should respect your office space during the day. Put up a sign if necessary (ex: Shhh! Mary’s Working 8 a.m.-5 p.m.) To help you focus, avoid cluttering your home office with food, toys, laundry, or other distractions.
3. Keep a set schedule
The best way to be successful while working from home is to have a set schedule. Determine when you will start each morning, when to break for lunch, and when to call it a day in the evening. Begin each day by reviewing any upcoming meetings or project deadlines. Consider holding a daily morning huddle with your team to check in, stay connected, and help everyone stay on track.
4. Establish boundaries
When your work and home are one in the same, you might feel pressured to be available 24/7. That will lead to burnout in a hurry. Once you have a set schedule, share it with colleagues so they have realistic expectations about your availability and responsiveness. Don’t forget to keep your members and industry partners informed about your operating hours as well. At the end of the day, sign off any chat programs and silence your phone so notifications don’t intrude into your personal time. Avoid responding to communications after hours or on weekends.
5. Stay connected
The isolation of teleworking can take a toll on morale, and productivity can suffer as a result. Use technology tools, such as video conferencing, to maintain human connections. Try a phone call instead of an email for more in-depth conversations. Check in with members and industry partners. Consider launching a brief daily e-newsletter to share positive news. Your association is united by a common cause. Reminding everyone of that cause can lift spirits and rally your team to keep moving forward despite these difficult times.
Rumblings of the next global recession make headlines almost daily. If the predictions are true, associations could be headed for difficult times when it comes to member engagement and event attendance. To make matters worse, most association leaders use flawed logic when navigating an economic downturn. But not all the news is negative. An impending recession or other crisis is an opportunity to strengthen your association so you can thrive no matter what the future brings.
Here are five recession myths that hurt your association plus advice on how to shift your thinking to ensure resilience into the future.
MYTH 1: Your value proposition must change for a down market.
REALITY: Your association needs a strong value proposition always. “Things” like events, content, and thought leadership are easy for your audience to cut. However, it’s tougher to cut a cause and a community they are passionate about. That’s why you need a solid value proposition that answers the question: “What am I paying for?” Lead with your cause and prove you offer real, tangible value. Show you are a resource people can depend on. Emphasize the value of your network. Be so helpful that your base can’t imagine getting through a recession—or an average work week—without you.
MYTH 2: Associations should reduce programs that don’t produce revenues.
REALITY: Your members rely on your association for resources that enhance their careers and make their lives better. Some of these resources don’t generate measurable ROI for your association, yet they are invaluable to building trust with members, driving engagement, and creating loyal brand ambassadors. It’s a bad idea to cut programs based on revenues alone. It’s a great idea, on the other hand, to cut anything that doesn’t generate some sort of value for your members. A recession is an opportunity to examine your programs, services, publications, events, and other resources. Cut anything that could distract members from your core value.
MYTH 3: Low engagement is a red flag for a recession.
REALITY: Low engagement is a red flag that your value proposition is broken and your strategy is flawed. Many associations already see a drop in engagement, and a recession isn’t here yet. If one does arrive, engagement will get even worse and event attendance will decline along with it. Recession or not, now is the time to be proactive with modern digital marketing that differentiates your association, builds trust with members and prospects, and delivers value over time.
MYTH 4: It’s a good idea to decrease staff and marketing.
REALITY: Many associations think they need to lay off staff, eliminate outsourcing, decrease marketing funds, and review vendor contracts to cut potential excess from the budget. All of these are terrible ideas. Laying off staff means you will be less capable of serving your members’ needs. That can only lead to a drop in engagement and retention. Instead of decreasing marketing funds, you should increase them. Even if you see a lull in membership during the recession itself, you’ll be that much farther ahead when it’s over if you invest in marketing now. More people will know about you vs. competitors, and they’ll come to you first when they have money to spend.
MYTH 5: You should wait to see how bad things get.
REALITY: Don’t wait for disaster to strike before you take deliberate steps to strengthen your association. People don’t make the best choices amid chaos. Reactive mode is never as effective as being proactive. Right now is a great time to examine your value proposition, strategy, and prospecting efforts to make sure they all serve the needs of your current and future members.
The best way to survive a recession is to strengthen and improve your association before one hits. Know and articulate your solid value proposition, invest in marketing and prospecting—especially to find the next generation of leaders, and focus your efforts on resources that deliver real, tangible value. These are best practices for success regardless of current events.
What Does the Coronavirus Have to Do with Association Marketing? Answer: It’s always a good idea to prepare for the worst.
Today’s major crisis is the coronavirus. Companies around the world are implementing travel restrictions. Events are being cancelled. Chaos and fear are driving decision-making. Maybe the next cause for panic will be an economic downturn. Or perhaps something else will impact your membership, events, and revenue. Maybe it’s the cultural and generational shift happening among your members and prospects.
Whether it’s a global pandemic or something else keeping people away from your association and events, now is the time to be proactive. You must adapt and act to ensure your organization can thrive no matter what the future brings. Here are four steps to help you prepare for the worst:
1. Fix your value proposition
If you can’t prove your value, people will find it easy to cut your membership and events in uncertain times. They need to understand what they’re paying for and why they should care—regardless of what’s happening in the world. A solid value proposition must be based on your association’s cause, not on “stuff” like products or programs. Use our Value Proposition Checklist below to help you articulate your real, tangible value.
2. Amend your strategy
Crisis or no crisis, your audience is constantly bombarded with marketing and media noise. It’s totally unrealistic to assume people will find your association on their own. Even if you manage to get their attention, younger members and prospects generally mistrust companies and traditional advertising. They need time to do research and ask for advice before making a purchase. Your strategy has to include modern digital marketing based on delivering value, nurturing prospects through the customer journey, and building trust over time.
3. Ramp up your prospecting
Fight uncertainty with sheer numbers. When a crisis blows over, the associations who already invested in marketing and prospecting will come out ahead. When people aren’t scared anymore and they have more money to spend on travel and professional development, they’ll be back in force. And they’ll knock on your door instead of a competitor’s if you invest in prospecting now. Plus, with so many in-person events being cancelled, now is an especially good time to find and engage people digitally.
4. Be the solution to the crisis
In the case of the coronavirus, your members are probably suffering too. Travel restrictions and uncertainty affect their businesses as well. How can your association help? What resources can you provide to ensure they weather the storm? If in-person events are no longer feasible, consider hosting virtual events. If any sort of event isn’t serving your membership, find out what is. Be a resource to your members during difficult times so they’ll trust you to serve their best interests all the time.
Don’t hunker down
You might think it’s a good idea to hunker down in the face of uncertainty, to cut spending to the bare essentials. In fact, the opposite is true. Taking action now can assure your success for years to come. Fail to act, and you’ll face even more uncertainty ahead.
Complete the Value Proposition Checklist
Would you like your association to be resilient in the face of whatever the future brings? The first step is to articulate a solid value proposition based on your cause. Complete this Value Proposition Checklist to help you think through this process.
What is your cause, the reason your association exists?
Whom do you serve?
What is your audience trying to achieve in their careers and businesses?
What are their pain points, obstacles, or challenges?
How do you help them overcome obstacles or achieve their goals?
What are people paying for when they join your association?
If your association didn’t have a face-to-face event, what’s the most valuable thing you offer? (Hint: It’s not content or thought leadership.)
What does your association offer that can’t be found on Google?
This is the final installment in our series 6 Ways to Help Your Association Thrive. Once you have a cause, a plan, assets, prospects, and engagement, you’re ready for Part 6: Grit.
Why your Association Needs More Grit (And How to Get it)
It turns out, the one thing that separates truly successful people from the rest of the pack isn’t money or intelligence or access to resources. It’s grit, says theHarvard Business Review. A culture of grit at your association could be the difference-maker that helps you reach your goals for membership, engagement and non-dues revenue.
What is grit?
Grit is passion to throw yourself behind a cause you believe in and the perseverance to see it through no matter the obstacles. Employees with grit roll up their sleeves, put in extra hours, and refuse to give up even when things get hard. They tirelessly pursue new ideas and explore possibilities that will improve your association and make your members’ lives better.
Why does your association need grit?
Your budget, time, and resources are limited, but grit is not. A gritty association can accomplish more than a lackluster or disinterested one regardless of available resources. Grit helps you get more out of what you’re already doing—your cause, marketing efforts, prospecting, and engagement. It makes your association more effective at fulfilling your mission, more appealing to members, and more sustainable in the long run.
Need more grit?
You can create a culture of grit to become a more successful organization by fueling passion and perseverance within your team. If your association already shows a good amount of grit, you can build on that to generate even greater outcomes.
To fuel passion, take a step back and reconnect with the “why” behind your organization. What is your purpose for existing? Why was your association created? Make sure your team understands the greater purpose behind what you’re doing. Next, check in with individuals to determine if they have what they need to be successful. Empowered employees who feel valued are more likely to show grit, voice their ideas, and go the extra mile.
When it comes to improving perseverance, simply stay the course. Don’t give up when a few marketing campaigns perform poorly. Learn from the past and make adjustments to improve in the future. It could take months or even years to get real results. While that might sound daunting, consider the lifetime value of an engaged member. How much will they pay in dues over 10 or 20 years? How many events will they attend? How many other members might they recruit? Be in for the long haul and reap the rewards.
CASE STUDY: Association of Corporate Council
Our client the Association of Corporate Counsel wanted to increase membership around the globe. However, their prospect list was out of date and not converting well. To increase the prospect pool, we used ACC’s existing brand resources—reports, surveys, and infographics—along with lead generation forms on social media. At first, the results were not especially impressive. However, we made some changes based on performance analytics, and we stuck to the plan. It paid off. Over 18 months, we generated 2,000 prospects and 1,100 new members.
Got grit?
When your association shows internal grit, your members will take notice. Because of your passion and perseverance, they’ll be inspired to go beyond as well—to attend your events, renew their dues, purchase additional products, and do whatever they can to support your cause.
Take the assessment to find out how much grit you have. Your results will determine how much passion and perseverance you might need to ignite within your association to achieve long-term success and sustainability.
This is the fifth post in our series 6 Ways to Help Your Association Thrive. To get started, establish your cause, sketch out a marketing plan, find or create marketing assets, and build a list of high-quality prospects. Then you’re ready for Part 5: Engagement.
How to Drive Engagement with your Events and Programs
So your marketing efforts paid off and you have a list of high-quality prospects. Now what? How can you turn all that potential into actual outcomes for your association? You need to take deliberate steps to fuel engagement.
What is engagement and why do you need it?
Engagement is an emotional state that leads to a physical action. It’s when people care about your association so much that they feel compelled to attend your events and participate in your programs. But engagement is easier said than done. It’s a noisy world out there and people are busy and distracted. Your association must be so compelling and so valuable that people seek out your resources regardless of whatever else they’re dealing with.
As with prospecting, engagement doesn’t happen overnight. You must first build trust by nurturing your prospects over time with value-added content that solves their problems. An effective workflow might include a digital ad that leads to a landing page where visitors can download a piece of content. Once you capture an email address, you can follow up with an email drip campaign.
Giving away useful content is a powerful way to establish trust with your prospects. To drive event attendance, consider using one of these proven formats:
Behind-the-scenes video of your event setup
An interview with a past attendee
Case stories that show the ROI of your event
Photo collage of last year’s conference
FAQ sheet to address common inquiries
Article published by one of your speakers
Event ROI toolkit
Capture leads with gated content
Eventually you will need to capture an email address so you can follow up with a nurturing email drip campaign. Here too, you should lead with helpful content, not your event or programs. For example, you can offer a tip sheet with key takeaways from your event. At the end of the tip sheet, you can include a call to action. For example: Interested in gaining more insights like these? Attend our annual conference.
Don’t be a time suck
There is a perception across industries that trade associations take up too much time. People believe they must read lengthy content, volunteer for committees, travel, and invest time and money to get the most value from membership. And busy professionals, especially senior executives, just don’t have time for all that.
Because of this perceived burden, many will not even consider engaging with your organization. To combat this, you need to show that your association isn’t a time suck. In fact, you must prove that you can save people time through your resources, connections, events, and other opportunities.
Keep it short and sweet
The first step in saving people time is to keep your communications brief. Here are a few strategies to get you started:
Craft emails with two or three yes-or-no questions and a clear call to action button.
Create infographics with few words and lots of visuals.
Summarize report findings with concise bullet points.
Write whitepapers and articles with clear subheadings to help readers skim for key details.
Consider checklists and tip sheets instead of lengthier content.
Keep videos to 30 seconds or less.
Case Study: Plant tour promotion
Our client, the Manufacturing Leadership Council, offers exclusive plant tours as a member benefit. When traditional emails to promote the tours didn’t perform as well as expected, we switched our strategy. Instead of making a hard sell to sign up for a tour, we offered a useful download on how to improve company culture, which was one of the themes of an upcoming tour. The idea was that once the user downloaded the content, they would see firsthand the value of a plant tour and be inspired to sign up. As a result, the Council’s plant tour emails had the highest open and clickthrough rates of any campaign sent to members this year.
Ready to turn your prospect list into engaged event attendees and program participants? Download this free engagement workflow to get started. It will show you how to get attention, nurture your prospects, and generate actions using digital ads, landing pages, content, and emails.
This is the fourth post in our series 6 Ways to Help Your Association Thrive. Before launching your prospecting campaigns, first establish your cause, sketch out a marketing plan, and find or create marketing assets. Then you’re ready for Part 4: Prospecting.
8 Best Practices to Find More Association Members
It’s time to find your people and move them to act.
Prospecting is the process of building an audience and nurturing them toward taking an action, such as attending your events, joining your association, or purchasing products. While it takes time to raise awareness and build trust with your base, good prospecting pays off. Follow these eight best practices to get a list of high-quality leads who are ready and eager to engage with your organization.
1. Establish goals.
Before you begin prospecting, determine realistic goals based on your budget and available resources. Keep in mind that it takes time to build a high-quality prospect list—maybe years. Prospecting also requires follow-up, so consider your available personnel when setting goals.
2. Determine your most likely prospects.
Prospects can include known or unknown audience segments. Your known audience might be lapsed members, nonmember event attendees, or people who purchased your products. Chances are they’re already somewhat familiar with your organization, so these could be warm leads that are easier to convert.
Your unknown audience is totally new. You won’t know much about them, and you can’t assume they know about you. Digital marketing tools can help narrow audience criteria, for example by job title, SIC or NAICS code, company revenue, and/or specific zip codes. Targeting an unknown audience might take more time and effort, but it’s a great way to get fresh blood into your organization.
3. Stay focused.
You don’t need to run digital ads on five social media platforms at once. Greater reach isn’t necessarily better. Try to narrow your audience to begin with to make the most of available resources. Two or three audience segments can help you target your efforts, but more can become too complex to manage. Help your audience stay focused by promoting only one thing at a time.
4. Use a proven workflow.
Prospecting is rarely a one-and-done endeavor. Here’s an example of a proven workflow to reach people over time: First, launch a social ad with an offer, such as a free whitepaper. When users click to claim the offer, send them to a landing page (never your homepage or a generic webpage). On the landing page, you can give away the content for free or in exchange for an email address. Once you capture the email address, follow up with an email drip campaign to nurture your leads.
5. Match the marketing asset to the customer journey.
Assume that unknown users have never heard of your organization before. Articles, toolkits, and e-books are good choices for this group. For those further along on the customer journey, member stories, infographics on member benefits, or an ROI calculator will move them toward a decision.
6. Fish where the fish are.
Choose a platform based on where your audience is likely to spend time. For example, Facebook is the most popular social media platform overall in terms of sheer numbers. However, younger demographics tend to prefer Snapchat and Instagram. LinkedIn has comparatively fewer users but offers purely professional interactions that could be more likely to achieve your desired outcomes.
7. Deliver on your promises.
Make sure your sales team is aware of your prospecting efforts and prepared to follow up and field questions. If you promise a free trial, consultation, or other giveaway, give people what they asked for. If you’re seeing low engagement or a high number of unsubscribes, this could mean people aren’t getting the value they had hoped for.
8. Stay nimble.
Not every great marketing promotion yields great results. Track performance and be prepared to make changes based on your audience’s actual behaviors.
Don’t wait for membership to fall off before you start prospecting. Continuous prospecting can ensure the sustainability of your organization while fueling engagement and non-dues revenue. To get started, download the sample prospecting workflow below.
This is the third post in our series 6 Ways to Help Your Association Thrive. If you missed our earlier posts, you can read about your cause and your marketing plan to catch up.
How to Attract Prospects and Members with Marketing Assets
People are more likely to engage with your brand in exchange for something tangible and beneficial. That’s why a good content-based digital marketing plan requires supporting assets to maximize outcomes.
What is a marketing asset?
A marketing asset, often referred to generally as “content,” can be almost anything from your association that offers value to your audience. Traditional marketing assets include whitepapers, infographics, how-to guides, e-books, webinars, videos, checklists, podcasts, survey results, industry reports, and many more. Thanks to new technology, marketing assets also include interactive content, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, chatbots, apps, and others.
With so many types of marketing assets to choose from, how do you know which ones will work for your audience? The answer: the ones that give people what they need when they need it. Personalization is key to a successful content-based digital marketing campaign.
Here are a few considerations when determining your marketing assets:
Where are individuals in the customer journey? New prospects need different information than long-term members.
What’s going on in your industry? Tailor assets around current trends, technology, and industry events.
What are their goals? Offer tools that enable goals, help them develop professionally, or assist in planning for future growth and success.
What are their pain points? Provide information that will save them time and money, make their lives easier, or help them overcome obstacles.
How to personalize marketing assets
To effectively personalize your campaign, you may need to segment your list into two or three meaningful groups. For example, members, nonmembers, and sales reps. You can also use marketing automation to determine who gets what. For example, a workflow based on a series of if-then statements could trigger various marketing assets and follow-up communications depending on user behavior.
While personalization requires a little more work and forethought, the results are well worth your time. One research study from Experian showed that personalized email campaigns receive 29% higher open rates and 41% higher clickthrough rates than generic emails. Personalized marketing improves customer experience, which ultimately drives membership, non-dues revenue, and member engagement.
When in doubt, go visual and be quick
While your audience will have its own preferences, the current trend in marketing assets is to lean heavily on visual components. Additionally, keep in mind that time is always a concern for your members. Resources that save people time and are quick to digest are the most likely to generate outcomes.
Gated or ungated?
Gated marketing assets are those you give away in exchange for an action, such as providing an email address or starting an account. Gated content is a great way to build your prospect list. However, people won’t hand over their email address to just anyone. First, they need to trust that you offer value and that you won’t just spam them with more time-consuming emails.
When you give away your marketing assets with no strings attached, that’s known as ungated content. Ungated marketing assets demonstrate to your audience that you’re here to help, that you offer credible resources, and that you’re worthy of their trust. A good strategy to is to give away ungated content initially and eventually gate content to capture contact info.
How to get started
To get started using marketing assets to attract prospects and members, take a look at your existing materials. You might already have a stash of articles, interviews, infographics, podcasts, and more that can be used as-is or repurposed to support your cause and your marketing plan. If you need to create new materials, be sure they’re aligned with your existing brand’s look and feel for consistency.
Need more ideas for marketing assets? Download the checklist for 50+ ideas.
This is the second post in our series 6 Ways to Help Your Association Thrive. We’re covering six key marketing elements to help you reach your goals. If you missed our last edition, check out Part 1: The Cause.
How to Create a Digital Marketing Plan
Save time and money while boosting your marketing results with a quick and painless plan
So you know your cause, and you want to tell the world about it. You’ve got resources to share plus events to promote and products to sell. It’s tempting to blast your members and prospects with all these valuable things at once. But hold on a second…
Why you need a marketing plan
Getting attention and moving people to act involves a balance of timing, frequency, relevancy, and format. You need to meet your audience where they are or they won’t engage. Even a simple marketing plan can help you achieve better results while saving you time, money, and effort. Before you launch another promotion, stop and sketch out a plan.
Why your plan needs digital
You can’t improve results if you keep doing the same old thing. Now is a great time to embrace digital tools. Digital advertising and email automation enable precise audience targeting and follow-up based on actual user behaviors. With digital, you can customize each user’s experience with your brand to improve outcomes.
How to create a digital marketing plan
Planning a year of marketing might seem daunting, but it takes just seven steps.
1. Establish goals.
Set specific goals. If you want more members or event attendees, how many? What is your non-dues revenue target? Other goals might include web visitors or social media followers, email performance metrics, or improved member satisfaction. As much as possible, express your goals in hard numbers and concrete terms.
2. Get to know your audience better.
Dig deeper into your audience to improve your marketing like never before.
Consider three categories of data:
Demographics: age, gender, household income/company revenues, geography, years in business or profession, political affiliation, hobbies or special interests, etc.
History with your association: past purchase history, events attended, years as a member, volunteer positions, etc.
Data gleaned from online behaviors: web pages visited, articles or e-books downloaded, email opens, clicks etc.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a ton of data. With digital marketing, you will gain data as your campaigns progress. You can use what you learn to solidify and improve your efforts going forward.
3. Focus on value.
Go beyond networking, education, and certifications to focus on value. How will your association make people’s lives easier, save them money, or advance their careers? Brainstorm tangible benefits of your membership, events, products, and certifications. Calculate ROI whenever possible to prove you’re worth people’s time, money, and effort to engage.
4. Choose an engaging format.
Choose a format, platform, or channel based on your audience, goals, and budget. Some of the most effective strategies are email drip and nurture campaigns, social ads paired with helpful content (ex: whitepapers, e-books), and web retargeting. But you’ll need to test and track to see what works for your audience.
5. Create a marketing calendar.
Timing matters. Consider what else might be going on in your audience’s lives: holidays, industry events, competitor messages, other comms from your organization, etc. Schedule your promotions when they will have the least competition from other sources. Then make sure your team is aware of launches and prepared to field responses.
6. Execute.
Don’t fall victim to analysis paralysis. At some point you have to put your best foot forward and launch your initiatives into the world.
7. Track performance.
You must track performance and analyze results to know if your plan is working. From there, you can make adjustments on the fly or learn from past efforts to improve in the future.
Your cause is the driving force behind your organization, but without a plan you can’t reach your full potential. Adding digital marketing to your plan can further improve your results while saving you time and money. Ready to get started on your marketing plan? Download the free Sample Marketing Plan below to guide your efforts.
So you need more members. And more non-dues revenues. And you’d like to boost engagement while you’re at it. To reach your goals and truly thrive, you’ll need more than a nice website or a great social campaign. You’ll need six key elements working in harmony: a cause, a plan, marketing assets, prospects, engagement, and non-dues revenues. In this six-part series, we’ll cover all these essential elements so you can get maximum results for your association. Part 1: The Cause.
How a Cause Helps your Association Thrive
Get attention in a world of endless spam, robocalls, and popup ads
Do you ever wish you received more email spam, robocalls, or popup ads? Of course not. And your members don’t either. We all get too many emails and phone calls. We’re sick of slick sales pitches and impersonal advertising. By now your audience is hardwired to ignore most marketing messages—even the ones that could benefit them.
Considering all this, how can you get attention and compel people to join, attend, renew, and engage?
You need a cause. Give people a reason to care. Help them feel like they’re making a difference. If you can engage people emotionally in your cause, there’s almost nothing they won’t do to support it. If they feel needed and valued within your community, they will stick around year after year to work for your cause and sustain your organization. They will look forward to your communications and tell others about your important work.
Before you even consider your next marketing message, campaign, or platform, you need to determine your cause.
What a cause is and isn’t
Your cause must be a simple, powerful idea your audience can relate to and rally around. It’s more than a marketing theme, campaign, or tagline. It’s more precise and tangible than your mission or vision statement.
A cause is not simply donating a portion of your proceeds to charity or organizing a food drive. These might be worthy undertakings that contribute to your cause, but they’re details and they’re short lived. A cause is a big-picture, long-term value proposition that explains why you do what you do, what drives your organization, and what you’re passionately willing to work hard and even fight for.
Examples of great causes
REI: Get more people outside.
ServiceMaster: Because your customers and employees deserve a clean, safe and healthy environment.
American Heart Association: Save and improve lives by fighting heart disease and stroke.
Apple: Enhance lives through innovative technology.
National Alliance on Mental Illness: Build better lives for Americans affected by mental illness.
National Association of Manufacturers: Support the more than 12.8 million men and women who make things in America.
How to determine your association’s cause
Determining your association’s cause boils down to just two considerations: who you help and how you help them. Explore specifically who your audience is—job titles, location, age, gender, years in the profession, company size, etc. Then think about their biggest pain points and ultimate goals. Brainstorm how you solve these pain points and how you enable those goals. What is the most powerful resource you can offer people? How do you make a difference in their lives? Don’t get too wrapped up in minutiae. Think about the big picture, the 10,000-foot view of your industry.
For help on this process, download our free guide: How to Determine Your Association’s Cause. By answering just five questions you’ll pin down your purpose and articulate your cause.
The other day at the grocery store, I walked down the cookie aisle looking for a snack. Thinking of maintaining my healthy diet, I left without purchasing anything. Then I got to the exit, where a group of adorable young ladies were selling Girl Scout Cookies. I bought five boxes to support their troop. That’s the power of a cause. It transcends logic and taps into emotions to compel people to act. Only when you know your cause can you craft an effective plan for the rest of your marketing. More on that next time.
Need help determining your association’s cause so you can get attention and rally people to action? Download this guide and answer just five questions to get started.
I recently attended a fantastic retirement party for my old friend Ben. Every detail was perfect—the beautiful venue, gourmet food, live entertainment, and fun atmosphere. We almost didn’t notice the staff running around behind the scenes to make sure everything went off without a hitch. At the end of the evening, each guest received a special gift basket. We left feeling happy for Ben and lucky to know him.
Omnichannel marketing makes your audience feel like honored guests at a great party. When every interaction they have with your brand is positive and seamless, they’re more likely to join, attend, and engage.
Here are seven steps to help you execute omnichannel marketing that makes people feel great about your organization.
Get your entire team on board
You can’t have a seamless customer experience unless your company is unified internally. Make sure everyone knows your mission, vision, and purpose in addition to your current promotional offers and communications calendar. If a prospect calls to take advantage of an offer, your sales team should be prepared to deliver.
Know your audience
Take time to dig deep into what your members and prospects really want. What are their pain points? What can you offer that will help them save time and money, advance in their careers, or further their mission? If you’re not sure, conduct surveys, focus groups, or interviews to gain insights. Analyze data from past campaigns or consider having a data service enhance your list to go deeper.
Segment your list
It’s impossible to serve your entire base with the same approach. Segment your list by meaningful characteristics so you can tailor your messages and offers. Which segments you choose will depend on your organization and your audience. Company type or size, job title, geographic location, and member/nonmember are just a few possibilities.
Integrate channels and the customer journey
Consider all the potential ways your base might interact with your brand—in-person events, products, webinars, sales calls, direct mail, social media, and more. Then align your efforts to the customer journey. For example, prospects who aren’t familiar with your organization might need more industry reports, whitepapers, or webinars to believe in your credibility. Warm leads might benefit from a phone call or meet-and-greet event.
Put the customer first
To truly serve your base, you must put their needs and interests before your own. Give away information at first to build trust. Offer a free trial to prove you stand behind your products. These activities won’t instantly generate revenues, but they will build trust. And people need to trust you before they’re willing to join your organization, purchase your products, and tell others about your important work.
Use compelling formats and design
What you say matters, and how you say it is just as important. Choose formats and designs that grab attention and invite people to engage with your brand. Use clean fonts that clearly communicate. Choose bright, modern photographs and images with people. Select online platforms with built-in tools, such as lead gen forms, that make it easy for people to engage and raise their hands. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent and unified with your core brand.
Case Study: Omnichannel product launch
The National Association of Manufacturers asked us to raise awareness and drive engagement with a new suite of products. To help us determine the best channels, resources, and messaging for the campaign, we created six personas. Each persona provided details on personality traits, career aspirations, use of technology, and pain points for a key audience segment.
Guided by the personas, we developed an omnichannel strategy that included fresh graphic design, paid ads on Facebook and LinkedIn, automated email drip campaigns, and infographics and videos. We analyzed results as the campaign progressed and tailored our efforts based on user behaviors. As a result, leads for one product increased by 600% and traffic to the product’s webpage doubled.
Make good on your promises
High-caliber marketing and polished sales pitches amount to nothing if your members are ultimately unsatisfied. Omnichannel marketing means you follow through on your promises and then go above expectations. Provide connections, products, and events that your members actually want. Prove ROI whenever possible. Take every opportunity to make members and prospects feel like honored guests at a fantastic party.
My car died last month. I went online to see what my local dealer had available. I filled out a form with my desired make, model, and year along with my contact info. For several weeks I received social media ads for available vehicles that met my criteria. The dealership mailed me a Car Buyers Tip Sheet to help me make a decision. One day, I got a phone call inviting me into the dealership. When I went, they had three cars that met my specs ready for me to test drive. The salesperson was friendly and knowledgeable but not pushy. They offered competitive financing options, so I drove my new car off the lot the same day.
My car-buying experience is a great example of omnichannel marketing. The dealership made it easy for me to see my options, educate myself, and connect with an expert. They had resources for me at every step of my decision-making process. The result is that I’m satisfied with my purchase. I would buy from the same dealer again, and I would recommend them to friends.
What is omnichannel marketing?
While “omnichannel” might sound like just another bit of marketing jargon, it’s actually a very simple concept: seamless customer experience. “Omni” means all. Omnichannel means you look at all the possible ways your audience interacts with your brand and you make sure everything works well together. It goes beyond your marketing department to include your sales team, customer service, and in-person events. The result of well-executed omnichannel marketing is long-term member loyalty and increased engagement with your association.
How is omnichannel different from multichannel marketing?
“Channel” is just another word for format or platform. Are you reaching people via email, social media, direct mail, or cold calling? These are potential channels for your marketing efforts. “Multichannel” means you’re using multiple formats and platforms to connect with your audience. Most associations today use multichannel marketing. What’s often missing, however, is a holistic approach that considers all the touchpoints along the entire customer journey—from awareness to consideration to decision and, eventually, long-term loyalty and deep engagement. That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in.
Two keys to omnichannel marketing
1. Give the people what they want.
The idea of a traditional sales funnel doesn’t quite apply to omnichannel marketing. “A” does not necessarily lead directly to “B” and then “C.” Omnichannel marketing recognizes that some people move from awareness to decision quickly because of an urgent need. Others might need extra information and support during a long consideration phase. Some people might visit the same channel more than once or skip others entirely. Omnichannel meets people where they are and helps them in whatever way they need.
2. Be consistent in everything you do.
To ensure a seamless experience along this winding omnichannel journey, you will need to ensure brand consistency at every turn. Your collateral should maintain visual continuity in your logo, colors, fonts, look, and feel. Your voice should be clear and consistent, whether in social media, email, or direct mail. Your sales team should be knowledgeable about your association, products, and current promotions. Additionally, your in-person events should include everything your marketing promises.
Case Study: American Specialty Toy Retailing Association
To help the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association promote their annual conference and tradeshow, we used a variety of formats, including direct mail, social media, digital ads, and email. To maximize these channels, we segmented ASTRA’s list into meaningful categories—nonmembers, sales reps, and store owners. Next we considered available brand assets and crafted additional infographics and videos to fill in the gaps. From there, we developed digital workflows based on segments, the assets, and ASTRA’s goals. Users determined next steps based on the actions they took.
Our efforts nearly doubled the number of first-time conference attendees. The last piece of the omnichannel puzzle was that ASTRA’s event delivered on all the promises we made in the marketing materials, which is sure to fuel repeat attendance next year.
Why do you need omnichannel marketing?
It’s all too easy to turn people off. If my car dealer called me in but didn’t have any cars in stock that met my specs, I might never have returned. If the salesperson was slick and impersonal, I might not have made a purchase. Even if I had an okay experience, I might not recommend the dealership to others or become a repeat customer. Omnichannel marketing is a way to continually engage and satisfy your base even if they’re not quite ready to join, attend, or make a purchase. It takes time, but the results are quality prospects and satisfied members with a high lifetime value.
I’m terrible at golf. A few years back, I bought a set of really nice golf clubs. They’re top of the line, with high-quality craftsmanship and the best materials. I was totally convinced they would enhance my performance. I’m still terrible at golf. Without knowing the proper techniques or how to fine tune my swing, I can’t get the most out of my clubs.
When it comes to digital marketing, you can pay a lot of money for platforms and tools in the hope that you’ll automatically see improved performance on your campaigns and increased engagement among your base. The trouble is, digital marketing is a little bit like my golf game. Having the right tools is a good start. But using proven best practices and fine-tuning your efforts are the only ways to achieve your full potential.
Follow these best practices to execute an effective digital marketing workflow that generates results and strengthens engagement.
What is a workflow?
A workflow is a defined communication strategy based on your goals, your audience’s needs, and the resources you have available for marketing. It’s an automated process defined by if/then statements. Workflows are effective at building engagement because they help you deliver timely, relevant messaging and useful information to build trust with your audience over time. They can include any combination of tools—email automation, digital ads, lead generation forms, landing pages, content, and more.
Best practices for digital ads
Before you ever craft a digital ad, you’ll first need to establish your campaign goals. Do you want to increase event attendance? Find program participants? Boost web traffic or social media interactions? From there, you’ll need to look at your audience. What are their pain points and how will your programs or events solve them? No matter which platform you use—Facebook, LinkedIn, web retargeting, etc.—a good digital ad has an engaging headline and an eye-catching image. Its look and feel match the rest of your branding. It contains a clear, relevant offer and a simple call to action.
Some platforms offer ads with lead generation forms. These are automatically populated with a user’s name and email address. All the user needs to do is click “Submit” to receive your offer and opt-in to your list. To get the most out of your lead gen forms, keep them short and to the point. Don’t use too many form fields—first and last name, email address, and one additional qualifier are enough.
For either type of digital ad, you should determine what a good cost per lead is before you launch. That way, you can gauge performance and make adjustments along the way.
Best practices for landing pages
The number one best practice for landing pages is to use them. Never send traffic from your digital ads to your homepage. Make sure your landing page relates directly to what your ad is promoting. Use the same headline as your ad if possible, to avoid any confusion. The landing page’s look and feel should also match your ad and the rest of your branding. Keep the messaging short and simple, using bullet points to simplify your copy. Include a real testimonial to add authenticity to your offer. Don’t forget a clear call to action so people know what to do.
Best practices for email drip campaigns
Similar to digital ads, you should establish your campaign goals before you begin to craft an email. Keep your message short and simple here as well, and stick to one main idea to avoid confusing your audience. Engagement campaigns should focus on how your audience will benefit from interacting with your organization. Personalize the message using any available data, such as purchase history or past behaviors. Don’t forget to make an offer and include a clear call to action. Take time to craft a specific subject line that piques curiosity, promises a benefit, or excites your audience. Consider A/B testing your subject lines to see what resonates best.
Best practices for digital marketing overall
Be eye catching.
Keep your message clear and simple.
Personalize and humanize your message.
Include an offer and call to action.
Align look and feel with the rest of your branding.
Track performance and make changes if needed.
Case Study: Ending the Silence
The National Alliance on Mental Illness works to end the stigma surrounding mental health conditions. As part of this mission, NAMI created Ending the Silence, a program in which young people share their mental health stories with other youth. NAMI asked us to help find a steady supply of presenters for the program. We created a workflow that included a combination of digital ads, landing pages, and emails to tell human-focused stories and inspire young people to sign up to participate. Our efforts generated 500 leads, exceeding NAMI’s goal of 150.
Free Engagement Workflow
Throwing lots of money at your digital marketing might get you broader reach or access to more tools. But if you don’t follow proven best practices, chances are you’re missing out on leads and conversions. While you’re fine-tuning your digital marketing golf swing, download this free Engagement Workflow Template to get started on the path to better engagement and better ROI.
Angelo is a bus driver for a small tour company in Ecuador. Quite often the tourists’ breakfast comes with a side of papaya. Many of the tourists don’t like papaya, so they give it to Angelo, who says “thank you” and eats it. This goes on for years. More tourists, more papaya for Angelo. One day, someone says: “Wow, Angelo, you must really like papaya!” He finally confesses that he hates papaya. He only eats it to be polite to all the tourists who give him their fruit.
Your marketing content is a little bit like papaya. Too often there’s a disconnect between what your association provides and the resources your audience members actually want. If your content marketing isn’t performing the way you’d like, you may need to fix one or more of these common problems.
1. You don’t have a strategy.
If you’re pumping out lots of content without a plan, chances are some of your efforts are going to waste. Take time to craft a strategy based on your goals, resources, and budget in addition to your audience’s needs and wants.
2. Your content isn’t relevant.
No one wants their time wasted. Make sure you’re giving your audience content they can actually put to use. Segmenting your list into two or three groups and tailoring content accordingly can help you increase relevancy and results.
3. You need to adjust your frequency.
You can’t just bombard people. Chances are your members and prospects get too many emails and too many digital ads. Look at your association’s communications calendar, and schedule your promotions when they have the least competition from other messages.
4. People don’t trust you.
You have to earn people’s attention and trust. Consider giving away content with no strings attached initially. Eventually you can ask for an email address for follow-up communications. If your ad or landing page promises a solution, your content better deliver.
5. You don’t have a cause.
People need to know why they should care about your content, your mission, your organization, and your offerings. They need a cause to rally around. Ask yourself why your organization exists. Then make sure it’s clearly communicated in your marketing messages.
6. You forgot to include emotions.
Even if your members are technical experts or high-level professionals, they still need to be emotionally compelled to take action. Ensure your content contains a balance of logic, credibility, and—above all—emotion.
7. You need to adjust your format.
Don’t forget there are dozens of potential formats for content—from podcasts to infographic, reports, quizzes, checklists, and memes. Track engagement with your campaigns to learn which formats resonate best. Experiment with long vs. short formats, visual vs. text, etc.
8. Your audience is confused.
If people are opening your emails or clicking on your ads but not converting, it could be a sign that they’re getting lost along the way. Make it easy for them to claim your content by including clear call to action buttons or using prepopulated lead gen forms on your digital ads.
9. Your voice is impersonal.
People connect with other people better than with organizations. Communicate in a human, conversational tone to get the most out of your content marketing.
Case Study:
The National Association of Manufacturers asked us to help promote their Manufacturers Marketplace product. The challenge was that their target audience already received too many emails each day. We created a content strategy that included videos, infographics, and e-books. To personalize the content and increase relevancy, we created personas for key audience segments. Landing pages and prepopulated lead gen forms made it easy for people to take action. Our efforts increased leads for Manufacturers Marketplace by 600% and doubled the amount of traffic to the product’s web page.
Before you feed your audience more papaya, take some time to tune up your content marketing. Fixing even one or two of these common problems can dramatically improve your results.
I recently made the mistake of feeding a stray cat at the office. Now it comes back every day expecting more food. Yesterday, there were two cats outside my door. I may have created a monster…
Finding enough content for your marketing might feel like feeding hungry cats. Once you set things in motion, you need a steady stream of content to keep everyone satisfied. How can you possibly keep up? Here are 5 ideas to help you find, repurpose, or create content to feed your need.
1. Develop a strategy.
To accurately assess your content needs, you’ll first need a strategy. Who is your audience? What are their pain points? How can you help them? How often do they need to hear from you? Also consider your organization’s goals. Are you promoting a product or event? Do you need more members? What resources and budget can you dedicate to content marketing? The answers to all these questions will determine how much content you need and what types of content will yield the best results.
2. Mine your existing materials.
The easiest type of content to use is content that already exists. Take a look at your stash of marketing collateral, industry reports, whitepapers, images, infographics, audio or video recordings, and more to see what you might be able to use as-is. Keep in mind, however, that just because it exists doesn’t mean it’s relevant to your target audience. Only choose pieces that are actually useful to your base.
3. Repurpose existing content.
Repurposing content can save you time and effort compared to creating new pieces. Be creative. An infographic can become a video. An interview with an expert can become a podcast. An industry event can become a best practices checklist. We once created a series of short videos for a client using interesting facts from their annual report. Each video contained just one fact that we animated to add interest.
4. Beg or borrow content.
Look to partner organizations as potential sources of content. Their industry reports, infographics, PowerPoint presentations, webinars, or other current information might be relevant to your audience. And don’t be afraid to ask your contacts to be guest contributors to your blog or other publications.
5. Create fresh content.
If you want to maintain your place as an industry influencer, you will need to produce fresh original content at some point. You will likely need a combination of formats to maintain audience interest. Ideas for fresh content: Interview highly engaged members to discuss benefits of your association. Collect testimonials for use on social media posts or videos. Write how-to articles about your products. The possibilities are endless.
Here are just a few additional ideas:
Case study
E-book
Cartoon or illustration
FAQ sheet
Webinar
List
Quiz
Original research
Summary of original research
Annual report
Whitepaper
Survey
Timeline
Podcast
Email newsletter
Product review
Chart or graph
“Day in the Life” article
Resources list
Photo collage
Opinion piece
Template
Case study:
To help the National Association of Manufacturers promote their product NAM Energy, we developed a content marketing strategy that included a combination of new and existing materials. The NAM already had an energy-related fact sheet we were able to use by adding the NAM Energy branding elements to the document. We also developed an original infographic and three curated member stories that were featured on individual microsites. The result was a 1688% increase in total revenue for the product.
Content marketing works because it builds trust with your audience by offering something they need. It helps you fulfill an unspoken promise that your association is worth their time. With that relationship solidly in place, your audience is much more receptive to your hard sales pitches for products, events, and membership renewals. Find a way to feed the cats in your neighborhood and your association will see serious ROI from your efforts.
When my daughter was in fifth grade, she made a model solar system for the science fair. So did 15 other kids. Many of the entries looked sloppy or hastily put together. Some of the kids couldn’t explain their models very well. My daughter took home the blue ribbon. Her project stood out from the others because it was more detailed, had vibrant colors, and included an in-depth report.
Content marketing is a little bit like bringing a solar system to the science fair. Everyone is doing it. Not everyone is doing it well. Follow these 10 best practices to ensure your content marketing stands out from the crowd and actually converts.
1. Expand your definition of “content”
Go beyond whitepapers and blogs. Content can include podcasts, video, artificial intelligence, FAQs, memes, quizzes, photos, infographics, and more in addition to traditional formats like whitepapers, blogs, and reports. Anything that offers useful information to help your audience can be used in content marketing.
2. Choose the right format
Let your audience determine your format. If podcasts are your most popular offering, for example, do more podcasts. If your audience prefers substantive whitepapers and reports, focus your efforts there. If you don’t have much data on audience preferences, a good bet is to keep it brief. Start with short videos (less than a minute), infographics, checklists, Q&As, or memes.
3. Focus on the customer
Know your audience. What are their pain points? What keeps them up at night? What are their goals and aspirations? You can’t provide useful information if you don’t know what people want. Consider segmenting your list so you can tailor content to audience needs.
4. Offer something valuable
Once you’ve thoroughly considered #3 above, mine your existing brand assets for things people need. Do you have reports, articles, e-books, podcasts, whitepapers, or other helpful tools that will make people’s lives easier? Repurpose relevant materials, but generate original content if your existing stash doesn’t serve your base.
5. Use available data
Whenever possible, make decisions based on data. Look at past performance of emails, ads, and other promotions to see which topics and offers best resonate with your audience. Choose a marketing channel based on demographics or other insights you have about your prospects and members.
6. Schedule your content
Don’t just look at the content you’re launching. Look at what else your audience receives from your association. What other industry events are going on? Time your content when it will have the least amount of competition for attention.
7. Optimize for mobile
There’s a good chance most people read your communications on a mobile device. That means if your content is not mobile optimized, you are wasting your efforts.
8. Speak like a human
Avoid technical terms and industry jargon in favor of conversational, human speech. Your job is to get attention and engage people. You can always follow up later with more in-depth information.
9. Stay true to your brand
Your content marketing should be consistent, unified, and aligned with your existing brand. Consistency helps people recognize you and trust you, two key things that must happen before people will take action.
10. Include a call to action and make it easy to act
Clearly communicate what you want people to do—listen now, download this report, visit this site, etc. Make it easy for them to take action. Try prepopulated lead generation forms so all they have to do is click a button.
Case study:
We helped the Association of Corporate Council build a prospect pool and grow their membership with content marketing. To get attention and build trust, we used the ACC’s existing reports, surveys, and infographics combined with lead generation forms on Facebook and LinkedIn. As a result, we grew the prospect pool by 1400 new email addresses and gained over 600 new members new members.
There’s a lot of poorly executed content marketing out there. Unfortunately, it’s competing for your audience’s attention alongside your efforts. The good news is that it’s still possible to make content work for you—to get attention, nurture your leads into high-quality prospects, and convert them into members and loyal advocates. But if you want to take home the blue ribbon, you’ll have to be better than anyone else.
I was about to leave a dull party when I overheard the couple next to me talking about camping. “Where’s your favorite spot?” I couldn’t help asking. This sparked an hours-long conversation about parks, outdoor adventures, and the best gear. I ended up being one of the last people to leave the party, but not before I connected with my new friends on Facebook.
Conversation is a powerful way to engage people and build relationships, whether you’re at a dinner party or a sales meeting. But conversation alone is not especially beneficial to your association unless it results in action. You need to move from conversation to conversion.
Here are six strategies to help you converse and convert to attract prospects, acquire and retain members, and drive non-dues revenues.
1. Consider how people prefer to communicate.
Your audience spends a lot of time browsing social media and sending text messages. They’re chatting, snapping photos, and sharing links. Take your cues from your audience: Join them where they already spend time, and speak in human, personable language they understand. Use compelling visuals to complement your conversations.
2. Be brief.
Along the lines of #1 above, keep your messages short and sweet. If you can’t hook people quickly with something compelling, they won’t stick around to read any length of content. Be brief, especially when prospecting. Your job is to generate interest and get people to raise their hands. You’ll have plenty of time to provide more information once you’ve successfully snagged a new member or prospect.
3. Ask yes/no questions.
Do you need to grow your prospect list? Would you like to increase member acquisition this year? These are pointed yes/no questions that pique interest and spark conversation. Lead off your website content, sales letters, and social media posts with yes/no questions to generate dialogue. It will cause people to linger longer on your website, at your events, or on your social media feeds.
4. Encourage conversation among your internal team.
When your internal team is united and aligned with your mission, your members and prospects will have a better experience with your brand. Consider an in-house messaging platform to facilitate discussions and sharing among your team.
5. Go beyond content marketing.
Your content—such as whitepapers, webinars, articles, and e-books—is the professional face of your organization. But don’t forget the three-pronged approach to association marketing. You also need human and personal approaches to maximize your ROI. Stories, automated workflows, and quiz-style assessments can help humanize and personalize your marketing.
6. Ask people to join the movement.
Once you’ve engaged your audience in meaningful dialogue, encourage them to continue the conversation by joining your cause or movement. You can ask people to take a pledge, add their name to a list of supporters, or provide their email for further updates on progress toward your mission. Make people feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.
Conversation Case Study
We used this conversational approach to help the National Alliance for Mental Illness drive participation for their Ending the Silence program. In just 150 words each, we told stories of young people who went from struggling with mental illness to recovery and eventually becoming presenters who share their stories with others. We featured these brief, human-focused stories on social media to engage other young people in a dialog. We captured email addresses so we could follow up with additional communication that included yes/no questions, such as, “Ready to share your story of recovery?”
The age of information overload
On the surface, this conversational approach might seem too informal for a professional association. Your audience could include industry veterans or senior executives with advanced degrees. Don’t these people demand all the facts and figures before making a decision?
The truth is, people don’t need more information. Your members and prospects are already overwhelmed with ads, webinars, whitepapers, PowerPoints, and data of all forms. If they want more information, they can access it all at their fingertips, in seconds, without any help from you. What they really need is connection, a partner who can curate the most important information and offer specific resources based on their needs and wants.
And what’s the best way to know their needs and wants? You guessed it: meaningful conversation. But don’t stop there. Go for the conversion. Think about my dinner party, and don’t leave until you’ve established a way to stay in touch.
When I interviewed for my first job out of college, I had a strong resume and a few good references. But so did many other candidates. During the conversation, the interviewer and I discovered we were from the same small town. We spent the rest of the hour sharing stories about growing up there. The next day, he called to say I got the job.
I believe my success was due to three factors. I had a professional resume and a reference list of other humans willing to vouch for me. But what sealed the deal was my personal connection with the interviewer.
The same professional, human, and personal touches that got me my job can help your organization achieve your goals too. Apply this three-pronged approach to your marketing to get attention, engage your audience, and generate outcomes.
Prong 1: Professionalize
Professional marketing content includes whitepapers, surveys, reports, industry publications, and webinars. These pieces focus on facts and information. They contribute to your credibility while educating and assisting your target audience.
Professional content is a great tool for prospecting. For example, one of our clients, the Association of Corporate Council, has a collection of high-quality surveys and benchmarking reports. We use these pieces as lead magnets for ACC’s social media ad campaigns. Users can download the reports once they provide an email address. Our efforts so far have increased ACC’s prospect pool by 600 email addresses, gained 400 new members, and grown award nominations by 66%.
While this professional content has been an effective marketing tool for ACC, neuroscience tells us not to stop there. Aside from professional, logical information, people need an emotional reason to engage with your brand. For this, you’ll need stories.
Prong 2: Humanize
Stories humanize your brand by putting real names and faces to your association. They take your organization beyond facts and figures to show actual member benefits and ROI.
Our work with the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association is a great example of humanized marketing. To promote ASTRA’s annual conference, Marketplace & Academy, we crafted attendee stories and promoted them through digital marketing, email automation, landing pages, and other collateral materials. The result was a 23% boost in attendance each year for three years.
Professional, human marketing is effective. But if you want to go for the gold, you’ll need to personalize your efforts for each individual you’re trying to engage.
Prong 3: Personalize
Personalized marketing goes beyond “Dear <>” variable data and includes tailoring your messaging and offers based on what you know about your audience.
One way to achieve personalization is to create several defined communication strategies, called workflows, with if/then statements. Once you set workflows in motion, your audience behaviors trigger next steps. For example, if a user enters their email address to download your whitepaper, the action will trigger a series of follow-up emails with related content and offers.
In addition to the workflows we used to promote ASTRA’s Marketplace & Academy, we added further personalization by creating a quiz-style assessment called “What Kind of Specialty Toy Are You?” After each user answered a series of multiple-choice questions, they received a toy-themed personality profile based on their answers. The assessment encouraged interaction with ASTRA’s brand and reassured interested prospects that they had found a group of like-minded peers.
How to use all 3 prongs
Lots of associations offer plenty of professional, logical reasons why people should join their organization. Their communications are filled with facts and figures about member benefits. But if they don’t take steps to humanize and personalize their marketing, they could be missing out on new members, event attendees, and non-dues revenues. Much like my job prospects, you can’t reach your full potential without a human touch and a personal, emotionally engaging connection to your audience.
When I got my first manual camera, all my pictures came out blurry or dark. It took me a while to learn the balance between the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. These three elements come together in different ratios to create a nice picture. Now when I shoot, I change the ratios depending on how I want to portray my subject. Similarly, Aristotle tells us we need three components for a successful campaign: ethos, logos, and pathos. Much like in my photographs, you can use these three elements in different ratios to achieve a desired outcome.
When to use more ethos
Ethos speaks to the character and credibility of your message. Prospecting, for example, often requires a heavy dose of ethos to build trust with people who are unfamiliar with your organization. Prospects want to know how long you’ve been in business, how many members you have, and the breadth of your offerings.
When to use more logos
Logos includes facts and information to help your audience make a decision. Launching a new product or promoting a high-priced event often requires a lot of logos. For example, your event participants want to know ROI of attending vs the cost of registration and travel. People purchasing your products want to know features, costs, and benefits.
When to use more pathos
Pathos is the emotional appeal of your campaign. It gives people a reason to care. No matter what you’re promoting, your campaign must have pathos. An emotional appeal is an obvious choice for fundraising campaigns, but it’s also important for things like member acquisition. Consider that you’re giving people a place to belong, to collaborate, and to improve their businesses and their lives.
Case Study: National Alliance on Mental Illness
The National Alliance on Mental Illness asked us to help promote a new website for their Cure Stigma program. They wanted to raise awareness about their cause by generating 10,000 unique webpage views. We created Facebook ads using single images and PSA videos featuring NAMI ambassadors.
Ethos: NAMI is a nationally known organization with a long history and a good reputation. The NAMI name established the campaign’s ethos. We aligned the look and feel of the ads with the rest of the NAMI brand.
Logos: The PSA videos contained hard facts, such as that 1 in 5 people in the U.S. are affected by mental illness. The call to action was to take a quiz to determine whether users have stigma about mental illness.
Pathos: The images and videos provided a human touch to engage prospects emotionally. The dialogue was lighthearted and humorous.
This campaign is a great example of how to use a mix of ethos, logos, and pathos to raise awareness, engage prospects, and incite action. If even one element was missing, the campaign would not have been as successful. The result: We surpassed NAMI’s goal by attracting 13,600 unique webpage views in just one month.
Marketing Essentials Self-checklist
Use the checklist below to gauge whether your campaigns contain sufficient amounts of ethos, logos, and pathos to reach your audience and compel them to take action. You should be able to answer “yes” to at least one question in each section, more depending on your campaign and goals.
Ethos
Is the campaign’s look and feel aligned with the rest of your branding?
Is the information in your message reasonable, true, and accurate?
Does it contain verifiable information or testimonials?
Do you mention a keynote speaker or other expert affiliated with your organization?
If prospecting to an unknown audience, do you provide enough details to start building trust? (ex: years in business, number of members, breadth of your offerings)
Can you deliver on your promises?
Logos
Does your campaign include important dates, costs, facts, and figures?
Do you provide details on your event’s schedule or your product’s features?
Do you explain how to use your product or service?
Do you show return on investment for your events or products?
Is it clear how your audience can take action to claim your offer?
Pathos
Is your message written in an approachable, human tone with words a lay person would understand?
Does your message contain emotional words? (ex: vivid descriptions, sounds, or colors)
Does your message prove you understand and empathize with your audience pain points?
Does it include a story?
Does it excite your audience or tug at the heart strings?
Does it inspire possibilities?
Does it get people fired up so they want to take action?
Did you answer “yes” to at least one question in each section? If not, consider how you can fill in any gaps to build trust with your audience, appeal to their logical side, and engage them emotionally. You’ll need all three elements to create a compelling picture of your organization, product, or cause.
When my daughter was 10 years old, she came home from school one day with a sad, skinny puppy in her arms. All I could think of was how expensive, dirty, and difficult it would be to have a pet. Logically, adopting this stray made little sense. Plus, we’d never had a pet before. How could we possibly know how to care for it? But one look at my daughter’s face and I knew we would keep the dog.
The Art of Persuasion
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2000 years ago. Among the wealth of wisdom he gave to the world was the art of persuasion. He reasoned that every good argument includes three essential components: ethos, logos, and pathos—that is, credibility, logic, and emotion. These are often referred to as the Aristotelian appeals, and they still matter today.
When you launch a marketing campaign, you’re basically making an argument in favor of your organization, event, or product. If you present the right amounts of credibility, logic, and emotion, your audience will not be able to resist your offer.
What is ethos?
Ethos refers to the credibility and trustworthiness of your campaign. It goes beyond the message itself and includes the ethics and character of the sender as well as the “packaging” in which it’s delivered.
The sender
Your audience asks, perhaps subconsciously, if the message is coming from a reputable source, such as a well-known company or an influential individual. They might also care about the way you do business, for example with integrity, social responsibility, or eco-friendliness. Choosing a well-known keynote speaker for your annual conference is an example of the ethos of your event and your organization. Donating a portion of your profits to charity is another.
The message itself
Communicating accurate, verifiable information is a great start to building trust with your audience. Go one step further and deliver valuable, useful content that can make people’s lives easier. Testimonials, citations from experts, and helpful information all contribute to your message’s ethos.
The packaging
Have you ever bought a certain type of wine simply because it came in an attractive bottle? Similarly, your audience is influenced by the way your campaigns look and feel. They will notice if your images are professional, your content is error-free, your printing is high quality, and your branding is consistent across channels.
What is logos?
Logos refers to the logical aspects of a campaign. It includes facts, figures, information, and product features. If I’m shopping for a car, for example, the miles per gallon and the maintenance record can help me make a sound decision. If I’m considering joining an organization, I might want to know about continuing education credits and networking opportunities. Costs, terms and conditions, and how-to information are all examples of logical appeals.
What is pathos?
Pathos refers to the emotional appeal of your campaign. Your goal should be to excite people, tug at their heart strings, or fire them up to take action. You must prove that your organization understands audience pain points and is ready with solutions. Storytelling is perhaps the best way to reach your audience emotionally. It’s proven by neuroscience to engage the brain better than logic.
If you think your organization isn’t emotional, consider how you connect people, improve their careers, save them time, and make their lives better. Interview members and event participants to mine for emotionally engaging details about your association.
How to use all three appeals
Any effective marketing campaign will use all three Aristotelian appeals in varying proportions. Your audience and the product or service you are promoting will determine exactly what those proportions are. Prospects, for example, might require more ethos in your messages than current members. New product launches might need more logos to help people understand their value.
A good amount of pathos is mandatory in any campaign. Often, organizations get stuck on the logical side of their membership and products. They focus on the “what,” like features, facts, and figures. In reality, logos is often not as important as pathos. If all decisions were made purely based on logic, no one would own a sports car—and I wouldn’t have adopted a puppy.
When I was growing up, the only telephone in our house was a large rotary phone in the living room. It took forever to make a call by rotating the dial one digit at a time—especially when the phone number had lots of 7s, 8s, and 9s. But it got the job done and connected me to the people I needed to talk to. Today with my smartphone, I can check in with my family, order a pizza, and resupply my groceries in about the same time it would take to dial that old rotary phone.
Adding digital tools to your marketing mix is a bit like upgrading to a smartphone. If your goals include increasing membership, engagement, and non-dues revenues, it might be time to reshape your marketing with digital tactics. Innovative tools and technology can help you reach your objectives, often with a better ROI and less effort than traditional marketing methods.
Here are three tactics to consider.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing offers infinite possibilities for precise audience targeting based on your marketing objectives as well as a range of audience characteristics—from job titles to special interests, demographics, user behaviors, and more.
Ads for brand goals: Facebook, for example, allows you to create ads for specific goals, including brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions, and more. You can upload your existing email list to target your known audience or to create a lookalike audience with similar characteristics.
Lead ads: Some social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer lead generation forms for easy lead captures. When a user clicks on your ad, for example to download a whitepaper you’re offering, they see a form that is automatically populated with their name and email address. They click “Submit” to receive your offer, and you receive their contact info.
Pixel code: Digital advertising also enables precise retargeting. By placing a snippet of code on your website, you can display your messages and offers in users’ social media feeds based on what they viewed on your site.
Email automation
Once you’ve captured contact info through digital marketing, you can nurture your leads with automated email drip campaigns. Email automation is commonly used to welcome new customers or subscribers with a series of background information about your company. Other uses for email automation include event promotion, membership renewal reminders, or lapsed member campaigns.
Email automation helps you reach more people in a more personalized way than traditional one-off campaigns. It also takes some items off your to-do list by automatically generating messages based on user behaviors. Advanced analytics and reporting show you opens, clicks, and conversions so you can refine your messaging based on what resonates best with your base.
If your email list isn’t producing the results you need, or its performance has declined over time, your list might be out of date. Sending to an outdated email list can hurt your deliverability, return on investment, and online reputation. Consider having a professional service scrub it for nonexistent accounts and spam traps. If too much of your list is unusable, you might need to invest in prospecting efforts to build it back up.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation software is an efficient way to manage your contacts, leads, social media, email communications, and the customer journey. It can help you segment your list, personalize messaging, schedule ongoing campaigns, and track results with real-time reporting. A recent study suggests that using marketing automation to nurture your prospects could result in a 451% increase in qualified leads. It works because it lets your members and prospects tell you what they need, when they need it.
Another benefit of marketing automation is that it offers detailed analytics and reporting capabilities. You can track your campaign performance over time to determine what works and what doesn’t. These valuable insights can help you improve performance going forward.
Efficient, personalized marketing
Reshaping your marketing doesn’t mean throwing out everything you’ve done in the past. A traditional marketing method such as direct mail might still have a place in your marketing mix. However, if you’re looking for an efficient way to provide personalized marketing that raises awareness, builds trust with your base, and drives conversions, you should seriously consider one or more of these digital solutions. A rotary phone still makes and receives calls to help you communicate, but a smart phone can do so much more.
My neighborhood is crawling with door-to-door salespeople. They come selling everything from television and internet services to home security systems. They have a knack for ringing the doorbell during the last five minutes of my favorite show. I’ve never bought anything from these people. Even if I needed the products they peddle, these invasive tactics are not the best way to earn my trust or my business.
A lead generation funnel can help you avoid bothering your target audience in a similar fashion as my door-to-door salespeople. And it will likely lead to better results because it meets people where they are. Learn the five stages of the lead generation funnel and how you can use this model to generate warm leads for your organization.
What is a lead gen funnel?
An inbound marketing lead generation funnel helps you move prospects through the customer journey from awareness to consideration to decision. Thanks to digital marketing and marketing automation, you can offer each prospect a personalized journey through the funnel depending on their goals, needs, and pain points. Compared to outbound marketing or purchasing leads, this approach generates a list of people who actually want to hear from you. It creates better results than a traditional sales funnel while saving you time, money, and effort.
A lead generation funnel has five stages:
Raise awareness
Capture contact info
Nurture
Convert
Give the VIP treatment
Raise awareness
In digital marketing, the lead generation process starts with raising awareness. People typically learn about your organization from one of these three sources:
Your content (blog, social media feeds, website, landing pages, product trials)
Paid advertising (Facebook and LinkedIn ads, pay per click, web retargeting)
Earned exposure (shares, third-party reviews, referrals, word of mouth)
When outlining your goals, keep in mind that the funnel is always larger at the top. Only a fraction of your leads will convert to members, attendees, and product purchasers. It is important to build a large enough prospect pool to meet your goals. You might need to increase your awareness efforts at the top of the funnel to meet your campaign goals.
Capture contact info
The next step in your lead generation funnel involves turning awareness into leads. For this you’ll need lead magnets and a way to capture contact info, such as lead generation forms or landing pages.
Here’s an example scenario: A Facebook user clicks on your ad with a special offer for a whitepaper. The link takes them to a landing page, where a lead generation form already contains their contact info. All the user needs to do is click the “Submit” button to download the content. At this point, the Facebook user is now a warm lead that you can nurture and convert.
Nurture
Before you can effectively nurture your leads, you’ll need to score them. Try to determine where they are on the customer journey. How much do they know about your organization? How urgent are their needs? What are their pain points?
Assign a numerical value to your leads based on established criteria. You should seek input from your sales team to help you determine meaningful criteria. For example, a lead score of 1 might be an unknown user who downloaded an information product. A 5 might be someone with urgent needs who filled out a complete contact form. Next, define follow-up processes for each lead score. For example, the 5s might go directly to your sales team, while the 1s go to an automated email drip campaign.
Convert
At some point, you will need to make a hard offer to convert your prospects into members, event attendees, and product purchasers. Consider offering a free trial or discount code to entice people to take action.
Timing will depend on your organization and your offer. Joining your organization or purchasing your products and services involve a significant investment of time, money, and effort on the part of your prospect. They need time to get to know you, trust you, and understand your value before making a decision. This process could take months or even years.
Give the VIP treatment
Your job isn’t over when you’ve converted a prospect. To fuel your retention, engagement, and non-dues revenues, you will need to continually satisfy your base over time. Plan to use your marketing automation tools to provide relevant offers and useful content on an ongoing basis to make your members feel valued.
Lead gen tools
The best way to manage your lead generation efforts is with a marketing automation platform or CRM software. These tools help you to provide relevant, timely communications that are personalized to the individual depending on where they are in the customer journey. They also save you time and effort.
Why you need a lead gen funnel
An inbound marketing lead gen funnel puts control in the hands of the customer, who decides what they need from you and when. This is the foundation for a lasting relationship built on trust and value, not on sales tactics, one-off promos, or intrusive doorbell dings.
On the weekends, you can find me at the beach with my standup paddleboard. I love everything about the sport. When I see a Facebook ad for the latest SUP equipment, I pay attention. I click. I submit my email address. I welcome the content, special offers, and other marketing messages I get in return. Thanks to all that communication, I’m up to speed on the best the marketplace has to offer. When I make a purchase, I’m willing to pay more for high-quality products, and I feel great about my transactions.
Imagine if your target audience was this eager to hear from you. Getting people to join, attend, and engage would be easy. But too often, people are tired of being “sold” to. They are generally skeptical that a brand will deliver on its promises. They hesitate to provide an email address in fear of receiving endless spam in return. But they still need products, services, and the support of associations.
So how can you get prospects’ attention, earn their trust, and entice them to engage with your organization—and feel great about it? You need a fresh approach to lead generation that includes creating valuable content and using it to convert visitors into prospects.
Here are six steps to increasing leads and conversions using a content-based lead generation strategy.
1. Capture leads
About half of your website visitors will never return if you don’t give them a reason to do so. You need to capture at least an email address to be able to communicate with potential prospects and move them through your sales funnel. Given inbox fatigue and data privacy concerns, your prospects won’t give you their email address on a whim. They need to trust you first.
2. Entice prospects with a lead magnet
To start building trust with prospects, you should offer them something of value in exchange for their email address—or offer it totally free if necessary. Provide content that speaks to audience pain points and solves their challenges.
Examples of lead magnets:
Infographics
Whitepapers
Surveys
Reports
Webinars
Free trials
Any other useful information
3. Use lead generation forms
In addition to offering this content on your website, you can take advantage of lead generation forms built into social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Lead generation forms automatically populate with a prospect’s contact information. All the user needs to do is to click “Download.” They instantly receive your content and you gain their email address. Lead generation forms are easy for prospects and highly effective for marketers.
4. Harness the power of landing pages
Customized landing pages are a great tool for lead generation for two reasons: They allow you to capture contact information, and they help you upsell to visitors. Once you have a prospect’s attention using a lead magnet, you can encourage them to join your association, purchase your products, or sign up for your newsletter by clicking through from the landing page.
5. Score your leads
Lead scoring is the practice ranking your leads to sort out the serious buyers from the tire kickers and everyone in between. Marketing automation software makes lead scoring an easy process based on actual user behaviors.
Once your leads are scored, you can determine how best to follow up. Serious prospects with urgent needs might go directly to your sales team. The tire kickers might convert over time, so they can go into a sales funnel, where they will receive automated email drip campaigns to move them along the customer journey.
6. Be patient
This approach to lead generation is a proven winner. But don’t expect it to work in a month or two. People need time to get to know your organization and your value before they trust you enough to join, attend, or purchase. Building a high-quality prospect list and then converting prospects to members could take six months to two years. But the results are undeniable. According to HubSpot, businesses who use a content-driven lead generation strategy see 67% more leads per month than those who do not use content.
How You’ll Benefit
This approach to lead generation is good for your prospects and good for your business. It helps you meet people where they are and it saves you from spending too much time and money on less interested prospects. With enough time and effort, your prospects will be as happy and engaged as I am when I buy a new SUP.
My dishwasher died recently, and I had no idea where to begin shopping for a new one. I found a tip sheet online that ranked popular models, so I provided my email address and downloaded it. I received additional info in my inbox and, eventually, a discount offer. By then, I knew exactly which dishwasher to buy and how much I should pay. I’m happy with the purchase I made. If I ever need another home appliance I know where to go.
My dishwasher experience is a great example of inbound marketing. They caught my attention, captured my email, and moved me along the customer journey until I made a purchase. If your association needs to build a prospect pool for your marketing and sales efforts, inbound marketing beats “spray and pray” outbound marketing any day.
Here are the four essential steps to inbound lead generation so you can attract prospects and convert them into members and brand ambassadors.
Step 1: Attract visitors
You must be deeply familiar with your target audience if you hope to attract their attention. Ask yourself the following questions:
What does your audience value most? For example, affiliation, exclusivity, cutting-edge information, cutting costs, philanthropy etc. What are their personal and professional goals? What are their pain points? How can you solve them? What are the current hot topics in your prospect’s industry? Where do prospects currently get information or services like the ones you provide?
Once you know what your audience needs and wants, you can craft valuable content that meets them where they are and compels them to interact with your organization.
Step 2: Turn visitors into prospects
When you offer valuable content such as infographics, surveys, reports, e-books, webinars, and whitepapers, a few important things happen:
People are willing to give you their email address in exchange for something that will help them. You can capture contact info using landing pages or lead generation forms on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Your prospect is automatically a more educated buyer. They learn meaningful criteria to use when shopping around, and they shop based on value instead of the lowest price.
They see your organization as a thought leader who has their best interest in mind. They start to trust you. They are more receptive to your messaging, and they might even seek out additional content from you.
When one or more of these things happen, you have successfully converted your visitor into a prospect or even a warm lead.
Step 3: Convert prospects to members and attendees
Over time, you can move your prospects from consideration to decision by regularly delivering valuable information. People will gradually see your organization as a source of help and benefits, rather than another marketer trying to sell them something. Eventually, they will be receptive to sales messages because they trust that you have their best interest in mind. Make your prospects an offer they can’t refuse to convert them to members and event attendees.
Be aware that this process could take some time. Multiyear investments into your inbound marketing yield the greatest rewards because you can build on what you’ve learned each year to fine-tune your efforts.
Step 4: Give the VIP treatment
Your job isn’t over once you’ve gained a new member. To ensure long-term loyalty, continue to learn about your members’ pain points and communicate the ways you can solve them. With help from a marketing automation platform, you can make each member feel like a VIP by offering personalized offers and information. Members who feel valued and who continually benefit from your organization are more likely to engage and renew.
Why inbound works
Inbound marketing is a good strategy whether you’re promoting membership or a specific product—like my dishwasher. It works because you’re paying attention to what people need, delivering useful content, and providing valuable offers to build trust over time. This is not just a recipe for gaining prospects and members. It’s a strategy for creating loyal brand ambassadors who will sustain your organization into the future.
Several years ago, in a brief fit of madness, I asked my barber to give me a different haircut and change my hair color while he was at it. I wanted to try something daring and edgy. The result was laughable. I looked like an Elvis Presley impersonator. It was unnatural. People I knew didn’t recognize me. My wife thought I was having a midlife crisis.
Your brand is a little bit like a tried-and-true haircut. Sure, you need an updated look every once in a while, but a major departure from your established style confuses people, turns them off, and makes them question your judgement.
How to Find and Fix Brand Breaks
Ideally, every aspect of your brand—your messaging and visuals as well as your mission and culture—fit seamlessly into the bigger picture of your organization. In reality, however, a brand often has breaks. Brand breaks are areas where misalignment happens. Some are minor inconsistencies in font or color choice. Others are more significant, for example if your sales team makes a promise that your organization can’t deliver on.
Eliminating brand breaks and maintaining a consist brand story helps people recognize you, trust you, pay your dues, attend your events, purchase your products, and rally behind your causes. Follow these four steps to solidify and articulate your brand, fix any brand breaks, and maintain a unified presence that engages your base.
1. Investigate your brand.
Establish a baseline so you can recognize any deviations from the norm. Examine your marketing collateral, event branding, product offerings, sales tactics, and any other unique aspects of your organization. Consider your internal culture, procedures, and communication practices. Look at your marketing channels and platforms—your event, social media, ads, direct mail, website, and more.
Also consider these questions:
Why do you do what you do?
Who do you serve?
What value do you offer your base?
How do you solve their challenges?
What is your mission, vision, position, and brand promise?
2. Articulate your brand.
The easiest way to ensure consistency over time and across channels is to create a brand guide. This is a way to document every aspect of your brand, from your mission and vision to your fonts and colors. A typical brand guide might include the following:
Mission statement
Vision statement
Brand positioning statement
Brand promise
Fonts and colors
Voice and sample messaging
Sample graphics and images
Proper use of your logo
Product descriptions
3. Close gaps.
As you create your brand guide, look for anything that doesn’t quite fit with the big picture or any item that’s missing altogether. Check for outdated images, messaging, or offers. Is your logo clear and simple? Are your fonts and colors consistent? Has your mission or positioning changed since you were established? Can you fulfill your brand promise?
At this stage you can eliminate anomalies, revamp your look and feel, tweak or overhaul your messaging, add or subtract product offerings, or launch initiatives to bolster your internal culture.
4. Get your team on board.
Brand consistency includes rallying your team behind your purpose and aligning your internal culture with your outward-facing materials. Once your brand guide is complete, distribute it to your entire team and make sure everyone understands how to use it and why it’s important.
Make a plan to revisit your brand guide periodically and make updates as necessary. Being consistent doesn’t mean being stagnant. It’s a good idea to entice people with fresh messaging, visuals, offers and products as long as you stay true to your core brand.
Why all this matters Establishing a strong, consistent brand is worth your time and effort because it’s worth money. A study from McKinsey & Company suggests that companies with a strong brand are 20 percent more profitable than companies with a weak or inconsistent brand.
If you can’t clearly and consistently articulate your mission, for example, chances are your sales team won’t be able to convey your value to members and prospects. When people don’t see your value, they don’t pay your dues, attend your events, purchase products, or tell others about your organization. If people don’t recognize your organization, they won’t engage. If your brand is different every place people encounter you, they can’t trust you. Without trust, it’s nearly impossible to turn prospects into attendees, members, and long-term brand ambassadors.
The good news is a bad haircut or dye job isn’t permanent. With a little time, effort, and your trusty style guide, you’ll be looking fabulous in no time.
When I was a kid, Valentine’s Day was one of my favorite days of the year. I would spend hours decorating my little brown paper bag before taping it to my desk at school on the big day. There was always nervous excitement and uncertainty. Would I get lots of cards from my friends? Would I get the good candy? Or would I get a bunch of rocks?
Marketing to your members and prospects in today’s uncertain times is a lot like my Valentine’s Day bag. You make plans, put in effort, and anticipate good results. But sometimes you get more rocks than chocolates.
The Effects of Uncertainty
Even if your organization isn’t directly involved in political or economic discussions, your members and prospects are affected by uncertainty. As a result, they might hesitate to attend your events, join your organization, engage with your offerings, or purchase your products.
What’s more, heightened privacy concerns mean people are less likely to give you their email addresses. They’re also generally fed up with all the marketing noise that bombards them daily. You simply can’t continue the same old tactics if you want to reach your goals. It’s time to reshape your marketing to best serve your base.
A better strategy is holistic digital marketing that combines high-value content with drip and nurture campaigns. This approach builds trust with your audience over time and moves them along a customer journey from awareness to consideration to decision.
Follow these six steps to mitigate uncertainty and drive conversions with holistic digital marketing.
1. Craft your brand stories
People relate to other people better than to organizations. They value third-party endorsements over marketing messages any day. A great way to get attention and engage your base is to showcase other humans who benefit from your work.
Interview your most enthusiastic members. Ask them pointed questions:
Why join now?
What is the ROI of joining?
What is the biggest takeaway of being a member?
Craft these stories with simple, conversational language. Broadcast them through paid and organic social media, landing pages, and email campaigns to build trust and reinforce the value of your organization.
2. Consider the customer journey
Even the best message can be unsuccessful if people aren’t ready to hear it. Consider where your prospects are in the customer journey BEFORE you sketch out your marketing plan. Ask yourself:
Have they ever heard of your organization?
Are they familiar with your products and services?
What are their pain points?
How urgent are their needs?
Prospects who are not very familiar with your organization will likely need some high-level introductory communications at first. Others who are ready to purchase might need more in-depth content to help them make a decision.
3. Identify brand breaks
A brand break is when some part of your culture or marketing doesn’t align with your core brand. Do your emails have a similar look and feel as your website? Is your social media voice the same as your direct mail voice? Is your internal culture aligned with your external communications? Aim for continuity across channels. If you have too many brand breaks, you’ll lose people along the customer journey.
4. Prove the ROI of your offerings
People often need hard numbers to justify paying your dues and attending your events. Look for any opportunity to quantify the value of your products and services to prove they are a worthy investment.
Do your products save members money? How much?
Does your organization offer discounts on other products and services? How much?
Do you facilitate connections that lead to new business or new revenue streams? What is the potential revenue? Do you have a case story to cite as a concrete example?
5. Test and monitor
Digital marketing makes it especially easy to test and track the success of your efforts. You can measure web visitors, engagement with your content, form submissions, likes, shares, and lots more. Determine which metrics are most important to your campaign goals before you launch a promotion. For example, website visitors might be more important in raising brand awareness. Form submissions might matter more if you’re building a prospect list.
6. Fix areas with low conversions
Digital marketing also makes it easy to adjust campaigns on the fly, for example, by changing the offer, messaging, image, or platform. If your landing page receives a lot of traffic but few people fill out the form, this could be an indication of a brand break or poor alignment with the customer journey. For the most scientific testing, fix only one variable at a time.
Holistic marketing means you look at all the parts together, including your organization, story, products and offerings as well as your members and prospects, where they are, and what they need. The more you can align your communications with the customer journey, the more successful your holistic marketing will be even in times of uncertainty. Keep doing the same old thing, and you’ll miss out on members, prospects, and engagement—and the good chocolate on February 14th.
Do you have a solid marketing strategy? That’s a great start. But is your strategy aligned with a strong internal culture?
Your organization’s culture has a direct impact on the success of your marketing and your company as a whole. To serve others well, your team must be aligned with your purpose and unified in their actions. Your members and prospects must trust that you’re the same in front of an audience as behind the scenes. Trust is the foundation of lasting loyalty and long-term sustainability.
While the idea of culture might seem like an abstract concept that’s hard to pin down, it is a knowable thing that can be shaped and enhanced to fuel your success as an organization.
What is culture?
Culture includes your organization’s values, character, practices, and worldview. It guides employee behaviors and attitudes. Your organization’s culture should be unique, a differentiator that draws your base to you. It should reflect your purpose, why you do what you do beyond making a profit. To define your purpose, ask yourself: What is our reason for existing?
Your culture starts with your internal team, but it doesn’t stay there. When your leaders, sales team, marketing, and HR are all aligned with your purpose, your prospects and members can see and experience your culture too. Your culture becomes your brand. It’s how you make an emotional connection with your audience and start to build that all-important trust.
What is a brand?
Your brand is the outward manifestation of your culture. It includes your logo, images, messaging, and marketing collateral, but it’s more than that. It’s your authentic self you show to the world. It compels people to interact with your company and helps them get to know you, your purpose, and your culture. It inspires possibilities in your audience and incites action.
How to Start your Culture to Enhance your Brand (and your Marketing ROI)
1. Articulate your purpose.
Culture starts with purpose. Craft a short statement that illustrates your organization’s purpose. Distribute it to your team. Here are a few examples to get you started:
Apple improves lives through excellence and innovation.
United Way exists to help those in need.
Walmart improves lives by providing low prices.
Ben & Jerry’s thrives on being socially and environmentally conscious.
2. Define your long-view vision.
Before you outline this year’s marketing strategy, you need to know what you’re working towards over the long term. Identify goals for the next five to 10 years to get everyone on board the same train.
3. Align strategy with vision and culture.
Focus on your core competencies and key differentiators when planning your strategy. Keep your long-view vision in mind as you plan current marketing initiatives. Make sure you can deliver on your promises to foster trust with your base.
4. Engage your team.
When your employees are engaged, they go the extra mile for your organization. They put time and energy into innovative solutions that help you grow and thrive. By default, your prospects and members have a better experience with your brand.
5. Identify strengths and gaps in culture.
It’s okay if you discover that your culture and brand are not fully aligned or perhaps that your employees are not deeply engaged. Take some time to examine your internal culture for brand breaks, any place where your brand and culture don’t align. Also note when something is working well so you can do more of it.
6. Outline steps to close gaps and improve culture.
Once you know your strengths and opportunities, make a plan to close gaps going forward. This might involve creating new rules, metrics, and incentives to shape your culture. Change can be challenging for your team, so take a gradual, step-by-step approach.
7. Monitor progress and celebrate milestones.
Lasting cultural change can take some time, but the payoff is huge. It could mean the difference between success and failure for your organization. When you notice an improvement, celebrate it. Let your team know that they’re doing great things and it’s making a difference for your organization.
There is no difference between a brand and a culture. When your entire organization lives and breathes your culture, your members and prospects will feel it. They’ll be able to trust you, which is the first step to getting them to rally behind your causes and support your organization with long-term loyalty.
In the current climate of data breaches and over communication, people are more protective of their email addresses than ever. Online forms are seeing a 10 to 20 percent drop in conversion rates across industries.
While people may not readily provide their email address, they still seek information about your organization. They’re out there kicking your tires and poking around your website—even though they’re not exactly raising their hands to be contacted. How can you engage these potential prospects when you don’t know who they are?
Marketing automation to the rescue.
Using a combination of digital ads, landing pages, and email automation, you can move these prospects from awareness to consideration to decision. You can build trust by offering value at each stage of the customer journey. Over time, your efforts will compel them to act by filling out a lead form, attending your event, or joining your organization.
Try one of these three strategies to engage your unknown prospects:
1. Nurture your website visitors.
Using pixel codes, you can track where people spend time on your website. Sometimes you can match the user’s cookies with an email address to send targeted messages and offers. Even if you can’t make an exact match, you’ll gain valuable intel on what your audience is most interested in.
2. Retarget users where they spend time online.
Retargeting means you show digital ads to your website visitors elsewhere on the web. To be effective, you should tailor your retargeted ads based on the type of content your user views, such as pricing information or a specific offering.
3. Follow up on high-quality leads.
Savvy marketing automation includes tracking and scoring your leads to determine next steps for each individual. High-quality leads may warrant extra email communication, a special offer, or even a phone call to convert.
It’s about trust.
Marketing automation is more effective than one-off campaigns because it’s based on delivering value and building trust. Sure it takes more time, but the payoff is worth it: You get a group of passionate, loyal followers who are eager to hear from you and compelled to act, rather than hitting the delete button and moving on. Ultimately, it means people engage with your organization and spread the word about your important work.
Effective social media marketing involves tactics that cover each stage of the customer journey. During the awareness phase, your efforts will focus on generating traffic and expanding your prospect pool. For the consideration phase, you need tactics to educate customers and help you qualify leads. The decision phase requires specific offers and calls to action. Thankfully, there are a wealth of social media tools to help you precisely target your efforts based on your sales funnel and your goals.
Awareness
Social media can help you raise awareness and expand your prospect pool based on specific criteria, such as geography, demographics, online behaviors, past history with your organization, lookalike audiences, or other categories.
Organic tactics are a good place to start. You might try Facebook Live, social media contests, links to free content, YouTube videos, or regular posts on your LinkedIn or Facebook feeds. However, some platforms only show your organic posts to a small segment of your audience. You will likely need to include paid tactics in your awareness efforts also.
Effective paid tactics include sponsored content on LinkedIn as well as Facebook and Instagram ads. Note, however, that paid content doesn’t have to include a sales pitch. In the awareness phase, you should provide free resources and ungated content to spread the word about your organization and build trust with your potential audience.
Consideration
During the consideration stage, give your audience increasingly in-depth information to help them move toward a decision. Qualify and score your leads based on their interaction with your messages.
Organic social media tactics for consideration include
Sharing positive reviews on your Facebook page
Posting photos of your organization on Instagram
Participating in Ask Me Anything sessions on Reddit
Creating video testimonials from members and sharing across platforms
Making educational or how-to videos for use on YouTube
Conducting quizzes or contests to encourage interaction
Paid tactics include Facebook remarketing ads with details about your events and offerings. You can also use sponsored Facebook or LinkedIn posts with customer reviews or third-party blog posts.
In this stage, third-party content such as reviews, testimonials, articles, and photos can have a powerful effect on your target audience. By some estimates, user-generated content can lead to twice as many conversions as messages directly from your organization. Tap into the power of peer influence by recruiting and incentivizing social influencers who are willing to talk about your organization and your offerings online.
Decision
Leverage your social media efforts to nudge your prospects into action with specific offers and direct calls to action.
Organic tactics for the decision phase include
Inviting your social traffic to sign up for your email list
Hosting social media contests with promotions and purchase incentives
Running Facebook and Instagram ads with limited-time discounts or special offers
Linking to landing pages with gated content
You can boost many of the above organic tactics by paying for additional exposure on your existing social media platforms. You might also try Facebook messenger ads or Pinterest buy buttons.
Invest in your entire funnel
Don’t make the mistake of investing in only one or two stages of the customer journey, perhaps to save money or time. This could leave you short on prospects, qualified leads, and/or conversions. A better strategy is to map out your customer journey, including social media tactics for each stage. From there, use an automation platform to ensure customers receive what they need when they need it based on their actual behaviors. The efficiency and precise targeting will save you time and money while boosting your ROI.
Integrating with your overall marketing strategy
Not only is social media effective in moving people through your sales funnel, It can also enhance your other marketing efforts. For example, according to a study by Salesforce, your email openers are 22% more likely to purchase if they’ve also been reached with Facebook ads. Another study found that web visitors who have been exposed to your messages previously are three to five times more likely to convert than cold traffic.
One-off campaigns or clever sales pitches just don’t work anymore to convert prospects into attendees, members, and loyal brand ambassadors. People need time to get to know you, explore your offerings, understand your value, and come to trust that you will deliver on your promises. They undergo a journey from awareness to consideration to decision. Creating a customer journey map can help you take a more precise, strategic approach to guiding prospects along that journey.
What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a diagram of all the steps prospects go through when engaging with your organization. It includes how they first learned about you, the research and education they undergo in their decision-making process, and the action steps they take along the way—from signing up for your email list to attending your events.
At the heart of a customer journey map is the customer. To most effectively move prospects along their journeys, you must become very familiar with their wants, needs, and pain points. What are their goals? What keeps them up at night? Get to know your customer so you know how to help them.
What are the stages of the customer journey?
The initial stages of the customer journey are awareness, consideration, and decision. If you’re successful in these three phases, some members will continue on to become loyal brand ambassadors.
Awareness
This is where a customer first learns about your brand. They might have read one of your blog posts, seen a testimonial, viewed a Facebook ad, or heard about you from a colleague.
For most organizations, increasing brand awareness is an active pursuit. It might include the following tactics:
Publish free educational content
Create blog posts, webinars, tools, templates, or guides
Use video to inform while showcasing your authentic brand persona
Publish a free email newsletter
Promote content via social media posts and paid ads
Avoid making a sales pitch in the initial stages of the customer journey. This is your chance to engage prospects and build trust by providing valuable resources with no strings attached.
Consideration
Once a prospect is aware of your organization, they will likely undergo a period of consideration. In this stage, they’re not quite ready to take action, but they are interested in learning more.
Move people toward a decision by providing content that will help them see whether your organization can solve their pain points. Be aware that it could take a while—perhaps 10 or more touch points. This is still not the time for a sales pitch. Focus instead on your value proposition and what’s in it for the customer.
Useful tactics for the consideration stage:
Case studies, reviews, and testimonials
How-to content that showcases your events, products, and offerings
Demo videos, product descriptions, and data sheets
Social media ads that lead to free downloadable content
At the same time your prospects evaluate your organization, you should also evaluate your prospects. Qualify your leads in this stage so you know where to focus your time, effort, and budget.
Decision
How long the customer journey lasts depends on many factors, including the cost of your product, length of the engagement, complexity of the offer, and more. Regardless, at some point, you will need to make a pitch and ask for a decision so you and your prospect can move forward.
Useful tactics for the decision stage:
Ask your social media followers to sign up for your email list
Make limited-time offers that create urgency
Run Facebook ads that lead to landing pages with gated content
Send direct mail promotions
Call high-quality leads to make a personal connection
The tactics you choose may depend on the lead score of your prospects. For example, actively engaged prospects might receive additional communications and special promotions. High-quality leads might warrant a phone call or premium direct mail piece. Less active prospects might be moved to an automated email list.
Your guide to relationship marketing
Mapping the entirety of your customer journey may seem daunting, but don’t worry. You’re really just creating a simple guide for efficient relationship marketing. Start with the three broad categories: awareness, consideration, and decision. Then fill in each with details on goals, tactics, specific content, KPIs, and metrics for measurement.
Despite what you might have heard about the “selfie generation,” millennials are a powerful force eager to throw their passion and energy behind causes they care about. A recent report found that 85% of millennials donate to charity and 70% actually roll up their sleeves and volunteer their time. Millennials are also incredibly adept at raising awareness and rallying support via their social networks and digital influence.
You can harness these tendencies to benefit your association in untold ways, from gaining and retaining younger members to achieving more outcomes and long-term sustainability.
The first step in engaging millennials is to give them a cause to care about. Millennials (and many of your other members) are more likely to support a cause than an organization. Once you solidify your cause, there are a number of approaches you can use to reach this influential group of young people.
Embrace technology
Millennials are the first generation that grew up with technology at their fingertips. They get their news from social media, not newspapers. They sleep near their phones. They are accustomed to fresh, new information instantly—most often on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
The presentation and delivery of your messages are more important than content (at least initially). For starters, ensure all your content is mobile friendly. Video is a must. Include memes and engaging images as part of your strategy. Share links to useful information. Use microsites and interactive messaging. Be brief. Can you say something meaningful and inspiring about your cause in 10 seconds or less? That’s the length of a Snapchat video.
Deliver value
Millennials mistrust traditional advertising methods. A better approach is to focus on delivering value. Use content marketing to educate, inform, and entertain your millennial audience. Provide resources and tools that help them do their jobs better and change more lives. Prove your association offers value, and millennials will come to trust you, attend your events, and pay your dues.
How can you know what millennials value? Hire some. Put one on your board. Chat with them online. Assemble focus groups or conduct surveys to determine what their core concerns are. Find out as much as you can about which causes they support, how they get their information, and what’s on the horizon.
Leverage social media
Social media is powerful vehicle for promoting your cause and targeting specific audiences using paid ads. But it’s more than that. Millennials are highly influenced by the actions and opinions of their peers. They value third-party reviews and recommendations more than the content coming directly from your organization. Create a culture of social influencers by providing free resources and encouraging or incentivizing your members to talk about your cause online.
Offer a seamless user experience
Make it simple and intuitive to support your cause and your association. Include buttons along with your calls to action. Publish sharable content. Make it easy to leave comments and reviews. Enhance in-person events with digital content members can access at home. When millennials have a positive experience with your cause, they will continue to work hard to support it.
Keep it fresh
Live streaming capabilities are an indication of just how fast millennials like their information—as it is happening and not a moment later. How can you keep up with this need for speed? Publishing engines and artificial intelligence can generate content or answer questions automatically. You will also need to invest time and personnel to ensure a steady stream of personalized, meaningful messaging and resources to rally millennials to your cause.
For many associations, reaching millennials is a new frontier that requires significant time and effort. While this might seem daunting, it’s well worth the investment. Your organization will be rewarded with passion and energy for years to come.
If you’ve ever procrastinated on giving the-birds-and-the-bees talk to your kid or having an uncomfortable conversation with a friend, you know that we tend to put off difficult things.
We avoid difficult things in business, too. Often, we do the easy-to-understand thing over and over again, even if it produces poor results. The hard-to-understand thing promises better results . . . but it can feel so complicated!
We run into this thinking with associations when we talk about lead generation funnels and customer journeys. While no association executive has ever held their ears closed and said, “La la la, I can’t hear you!” when we talk about lead gen, we can tell from their frightened looks and body language it’s what they want to do.
If you’re afraid of a lead generation funnel, you’re afraid of the wrong thing. A lead gen funnel is the only thing standing in the way of your association becoming obsolete in the next five years. Tactics like random fishing on LinkedIn and buying lists to import into your database may have been effective once, but they no longer work.
You have to be smarter.
The good news is, we make it easy for you because we’ve done the hard work of engineering smart funnels that guide prospects along the journey they choose, so they wind up at your landing page, clicking “Join Now.”
Lead generation funnels solve a big problem for member organizations: They help you increase membership and event attendance. They do this by expanding your prospect pool, turning your prospects into qualified leads, and then turning your qualified leads into members.
A lead generation funnel is essentially a holistic, digital map that guides your prospects along a journey. It’s fully automated and built out using an “if/then” system.
For example:
IF a prospect clicks to watch a Facebook video, THEN they are taken to a landing page with a simple call-to-action to stay connected.
IF they enter their email on that page, THEN they go into a drip/nuture email campaign with its own set of “if/thens.”
IF they don’t enter their email, THEN they are re-targeted on Facebook, or perhaps another platform, and the process repeats.
A good lead generation funnel engages with multiple social media platforms and uses responsive list management software that ushers prospects through the journey.
Because it’s automated, after you create your funnel, all you have to do is hit “go.”
Know Your Numbers: Prospect Pools, Qualified Leads, and Conversion Ratios
A lead generation funnel helps you get clear on your numbers.
For example, do you have any idea how large your prospect pool is?
This is often the first stumbling block for associations. They have no idea what number they are starting with. Is it 500? 5,000? 50,0000?
This math matters, because you need to know how many people you’re starting with so you can keep track of the percentage of those people who become qualified leads, and then the percentage of qualified leads who become members.
These are your conversion ratios.
If you don’t know these ratios, you’re just guessing. And while guessing is a legitimate strategy on a standardized test when you don’t know the right answer, it doesn’t tend to hold up as a sustainable marketing strategy.
Your funnel will help to determine your ratios. You’ll be able to track how many people you are talking to each step of the way, so you know your numbers.
Conversion Assets: High Quality Content That Inspires
Your automation has to be spot-on, but your funnel is only as good as the content that feeds it.
You always needhigh-quality, sticky content, including captivating videos, well-written stories, and compelling graphics.
Though your prospect pool is large, you still need to think carefully about what will catch a prospect’s eye and hit their pain points. At each point along the way, you need strong conversion assets. These assets include landing pages, emails, videos, blog posts, social media posts, newsletters, webinars, and direct mail pieces.
Just because you’re introducing math into the mix, it doesn’t mean you can stop focusing on inspiring people. In fact, you need to focus even more strongly on inspiring people.
More than anything, you need to shift your thinking from one-off campaigns to a holistic approach that blends extraordinary storytelling with the best that marketing automation can offer.
Why put it off when it can make all the difference for the future of your association?
Instead of spinning around in overwhelm, let us walk you through what a lead gen funnel could look like for your organization. Contact Us Today >
Your members want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They want to make a difference in the lives of others. Sure, your organization has offerings to help them make a difference—education, conferences, certifications, and networking. But, increasingly, these are not compelling enough reasons to pay dues, travel to your events, sign up for workshops, or spend time on your networks.
People need a more powerful reason to engage. They need a cause.
When people care about a cause, they are willing to throw their passion, energy, time, and money behind it. There is almost nothing they won’t do if they think it will make a difference. This is a powerful force your association can tap into to drive outcomes, build long-term loyalty, and ensure sustainability.
What defines a cause
A cause is a simple, easily understandable, highly relevant idea that members can embrace, rally around, and spread. It’s more than a short-lived marketing campaign or slogan. And it’s more powerful than any event, product, or certification you can offer.
A cause must be something your members truly care about, and it must have movement behind it. The goal is to unite people and incite action to change more lives. Your members, especially the millennials, are more likely to support a cause than a particular organization.
Great examples of current cause marketing include REI’s #OptOutside campaign and Walgreens’ Red Nose Day. Even Apple taps into this idea with its focus on innovation and lifestyle versus actual products.
How you can use cause marketing
Cause marketing starts with values, not a sales pitch. People are naturally drawn to individuals and entities that share their values. To identify your association’s underlying values, consider why you do the work you do. Next, match your values to audience values, goals, and pain points. From there, you’ll need to incorporate these ideas into your messages and offers.
Here are four ways to let values drive your cause marketing:
1. Use “because”
The word “because” can help you connect the dots between your association’s values and those of your audience. Consider the difference between the sentences below. The first one merely states a feature, while the second one inspires possibilities.
Attend our conference for exclusive networking opportunities.
Attend our conference because you’ll connect with industry veterans who are eager to help you.
2. Include compelling visuals
Really show people what it’s like to support your cause by including dynamic, original visuals in your campaigns. Images with emotion move people while they tell your story. Be sure to choose visuals that are in line with the rest of your brand’s look and feel for continuity.
3. Don’t make it about you
Keep the focus on the audience and the cause, not on your organization. It doesn’t matter if your association is the biggest or oldest or if your offerings are the best. People really only care about the benefits that result from your efforts. Answer these questions: How will your association, conference, or offerings change lives? Who would be affected if your organization didn’t exist?
4. Prove your value
If you can’t prove that your cause is making a difference, people won’t support it. Track progress toward goals and celebrate major milestones. Publish your successes on social media and in your marketing campaigns. Show people their efforts generate real results and they’ll keep up the good work.
It’s time for new tactics
Many marketing tactics that worked in the past just aren’t resonating these days. No matter how great your message or offer is, people are tired of yet another sales pitch. They also have too many alternatives at their fingertips when it comes to information, training, and thought leadership. It’s often hard to justify an expense, like attending a conference. But it’s much easier to justify supporting a cause you believe in. It’s for the good of the world, after all.
Cause marketing is especially effective when it comes to reaching millennials. This generation values social responsibility. They want to make a difference. Millennials are passionate, energetic, and dedicated, but only if they really care. Give them a reason to care. Give them a cause they can rally around. (More on how to reach this key group next time.)
In fashion, everything old becomes new again. Thin ties were out, and then back in. Glasses were oversized, then small, and then large again. Right now, the 1990s are having their renaissance, with rompers and high-waisted jeans all the rage.
The idea that everything becomes new again works beautifully for the runway.
It does not, however, work so well for associations and membership organizations.
The 1990s are definitely not back in again when it comes to thinking about why people join and engage with your association. However, a lot of associations are stuck there.
What do we mean by stuck in the 1990s?
We mean focusing all marketing and outreach efforts around education and networking. We mean laying out everything you offer in a direct mail piece or an email that essentially says, “We’re the only ones who have this! Come and get it!”
A few decades ago, when there wasn’t as much to compete with, people simply joined the association their mentor, boss, colleague, or previous person in their job joined. People followed the path set before them. Join this association. Here are the benefits. This is what you do.
This mindset was fairly standard, and it worked pretty well. For a while.
It doesn’t work anymore though. The most obvious reason it stopped working is that there are far more channels to compete with now. Professionals can get education through webinars. They can hear thought leadership by watching TED talks, reading blogs, or listening to podcasts. They can network through social media.
Essentially, your association is competing with what they can access on their phones.
The second reason, and the one that associations struggle even more to understand, is that the marketing tactics that worked on Baby Boomers do not connect nearly as well with Millennials, or even the younger side of GenXers.
These populations are looking for something else.
What are they looking for? This is one of the questions keeping leaders of membership associations up at night.
Luckily, we have the answer.
Cause Marketing for Membership Organizations
We’ll get right to the point: Your association needs a cause.
By cause, we mean a simple, easily understandable, highly relevant idea that members can embrace, rally around, and spread.
A cause is not the same thing as a marketing campaign. A campaign is short lived, and usually has a clear beginning and ending. A cause, by contrast, is about the long view.
The right cause inspires people and spurs action. Unlike education and networking, which are plentiful outside of your association, your cause is unique to who your association is and why it exists.
A cause is an idea, which you articulate in a succinct phrase. It’s more than a slogan. A cause must have movement behind it. It must direct what your association focuses on, how you allocate your resources, and how you bring new members into the fold.
Millennials are not a shallow, entitled group, despite how much other generations like to pick on them. They are incredibly savvy and unapologetically passionate—but only about things they truly care about.
To get them to care about you, you need a cause that speaks to them.
But first, you have to get their attention.
Reaching a Millennial Audience
Can you communicate something valuable and inspiring related to your cause in 10 seconds or less? That’s the length of a Snapchat video. We call it the “Snapchat test.” It doesn’t mean you only ever have 10 seconds, but it’s a good idea to start thinking along those lines.
In fact, you most likely need to rethink your communication approach altogether, if you are still using tactics from the 1990s (or even from the 2000s or early 2010s).
In 2023, effective marketing is about using one channel to lead, and another to follow up. Just like a smart phone can “hand off” to a computer, or a tablet can “hand off” to a television, you need a strategy for “handing off” content between platforms.
The key is that you need to tweak your communication plan based on how your audience is behaving. Their next moves after engaging with your content determine your next moves.
That might look like . . .
Leading with a Facebook video, and remarketing on Facebook again to people who have shown interest.
Leading with a LinkedIn post and then retargeting on Facebook to those people who showed interest.
Leading with a Snapchat video, and then retargeting on Facebook.
Leading with digital and then following up with marketing automation.
All of your association’s thoughtful and strategic work in articulating your cause will be lost if you go back to a 1990s way of trying to reach an audience. Today’s audience simply isn’t in the same place as your audience used to be, and they are not behaving in the same way.
Your association has to LEAD if you want to attract Millennials, and then—just as important—you need to FOLLOW them where they go and keep the conversation going.
In other words, you need long-view thinking (a strong cause to rally around) with shorter-view action (using the latest tools and content platforms).
Wear all the high-waisted jeans you want, but 1990s marketing best practices are not coming back. It’s time for your association to embrace the NOW.
If you are the leader of a membership organization, your single most important priority right now is to develop and articulate the cause that your members and perspective members can rally around.
Do you know it? Can you write it on a cocktail napkin? Can you get it across in 10 seconds?
Need help? Borrow our brain, and let’s see if we can come up with it together.
If you’re like most professional organizations, you put on your professional hat when you get to the office every day. You’re in the trenches, focused on finding new members, boosting attendance numbers, growing your prospect list, and analyzing the data. You’re up to your elbows in opens, clicks, and conversions.
When the numbers aren’t what you want, you try new messages and offers—you send more and more emails. Despite all your efforts, your numbers still disappoint.
So what’s the deal? There is a disconnect.
Talking to your members and prospects as if they are data points or retention numbers is cold and creates detachment. Communications that are purely professional don’t inspire people. They don’t empathize with pain points or let people get to know you. What’s missing is the human element. You must cross over—shift from professional to personable to engage people and build lasting loyalty.
“Forward movement is not helpful if what is needed is a change of direction.”
This shift is more than just the way you talk to people. It involves being mindful of your members—even when you don’t immediately profit from doing so. It means taking a holistic approach that considers the bigger picture and meets people where they are.
The great news is that once you make this shift, all your numbers will dramatically improve. People will feel valued. They will feel accountable to you, another human. As a result, they will join, renew, attend, volunteer, and engage. They will bring others into your fold. They’ll roll up their sleeves and rally around your initiatives.
You must be real and transparent if you want people to engage on a meaningful level. If you can’t shift your thinking to forge authentic human relationships— nothing else you do will matter.
Once you establish your holistic email marketing strategy and set your campaigns in motion, you will need to monitor performance to see if all your hard work pays off. Common email metrics such as deliverability, opens, clicks, and unsubscribe rates are good starting points to measure performance. But these metrics only tell part of the story. Also consider your specific goals, such as growing your subscriber list, increasing event attendance, or converting prospects into members. If your email campaigns aren’t performing to expectations, examine individual metrics as well as the big picture to see where you can improve.
Here are six common email issues and what you can do to boost your results using a holistic approach.
Poor Deliverability
If your deliverability rates are low, chances are your list is outdated or it was purchased from a less-than-reputable source. The highest quality list is one you create organically by asking people to opt-in—through in-person events, digital advertising, or other marketing efforts. It’s virtually impossible to have successful holistic email marketing without a clean list of interested members and prospects.
Too Few Clicks to Landing Page
If your landing page didn’t get as many views as you would like, you may need to work harder to drive more traffic there. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to send more emails. Research from Informz suggests relevancy, rather than frequency, has a greater impact on click rates. Examine your message to make sure it resonates with your audience and aligns with the customer journey.
Other factors such as time of day and day of the week also affect open and click rates. Experiment or A/B test to maximize your results once you have your messaging dialed in. Some marketing automation platforms have an optimization tool that automatically sends emails based on a subscriber’s past behavior.
High Unsubscribe Rate
Generally speaking, your unsubscribe rate for each campaign should be less than 1%. Any more than that could indicate that the people on your list did not formally subscribe—or that they subscribed with certain expectations that aren’t being met. Revisit the criteria for placing someone on your list. Set clearer expectations by revising any communications that encourage people to opt-in.
Low Conversions
If people were moved to click on your email but didn’t convert on your landing page, it could mean your offer was not compelling enough. Ask yourself: Is this offer relevant to the target segment? Does it enable their goals or solve a pain point? Is it aligned with the buying cycle? Is the timing right? Keep in mind your offers might vary depending on the segment. Determine what matters most to each segment, and tailor your offers accordingly. Feature only one call to action in each email to avoid confusing your audience or losing people along the way.
Few New Leads
If your email campaign didn’t generate as many new leads as you would like, give people a reason to share your content. Consider providing a link to a free download that’s worth forwarding on. You might also incentivize your message. For example, offer a two-for-one registration special if a member attends your event with a colleague.
Disappointing Membership or Attendance Numbers
If your email campaign didn’t generate enough members or event attendees, you may need to revise your automated workflows. Consider adjusting your offers, timing, frequency, or other factors. Examine lead scores and segments to help you optimize your message and formats.
Keep in mind that email is only part of your overall holistic marketing strategy. The success of your email campaigns is linked to the rest of your branding efforts—including your digital advertising, collateral, direct mail pieces, and in-person events. You might need to tweak your other efforts to maximize results from your email campaigns.
The Big Picture
Analyzing individual metrics is essential to optimizing your email marketing performance. But don’t forget to look at the big picture as well. Segmentation, personalization, and automation improve email results across the board but only when they’re well informed and well executed. Spend some time getting to know your audience and their behaviors. Based on the data, ask yourself if your segments are meaningful categories that help you focus your efforts. Verify that your campaign themes are relevant and inspiring. Consider whether you communicate the measurable ROI of your events and offers. Determine your timing in light of the customer journey as well as other industry events.
Examining these global considerations—and making adjustments based on your analysis—will not only improve your holistic email marketing. It will improve all your marketing and engagement efforts. When all your initiatives are integrated to present a seamless brand experience, it’s easier to rally your base into action—to attend your events, volunteer for committees, or achieve breakthroughs in your industry. Your goal with email and other channels should always be thoughtful communications that show your value while enabling your audience’s goals.
In a perfect world, every marketing email you send would be a personalized, one-to-one communication based on everything you know about your recipient. It would provide meaningful information and just the right offer to meet their current needs. While it’s not practical to send everyone on your list a personal email at every step of their customer journey, holistic email marketing is the next best thing.
Holistic email marketing puts the customer first. It lets the member or prospect tell you what they need when they need it so you can deliver a seamless brand experience. This customer-first approach also benefits your organization and your industry. It can dramatically improve your email campaign results while fueling engagement, event attendance, membership, and retention. Getting started with holistic email marketing requires three components: segmentation, personalization, and automation.
Segmented Audience Targeting
To provide the most relevant, timely email messages and offers, you will first need to look at your audience and group them into meaningful categories, called segments. Research shows that segmented email campaigns achieve better results than mass emails.
Consider dividing your list based on a contact’s defining characteristics, such as industry, job title, geographic location, or lead score. You can also segment based on an existing list, such as past event attendees. Another approach would be to segment by actions taken, for example, a form submission or purchase made. You will also need to determine where individuals are in their customer journey: Are they new to your organization? Are they first timers or veteran event attendees? Has their membership lapsed? Is it time to renew?
6 Types of Personalized Communications
Once you establish your audience segments, the next step is to personalize messages for each group. Personalized emails are immediately more relevant to your audience. They reduce perceived information overload, and they boost engagement. Depending on your audience segments, you might send one of these six emails tailored to the customer journey.
Welcome emails—provide background information for those new to your organization; include offers that reassure their intent and encourage them to engage
Lead nurturing—help people move through the buying cycle by sending regular messages that show your organization’s value and promote year-round engagement
Event promotion—send registration emails, special promotions, and post-event follow-up to drive attendance and encourage repeat attendance
Inactive subscriber campaigns—target individuals on your list who haven’t opened or clicked in a while with messages and offers that compel them to re-engage
Membership renewal messages—send emails based on when individual memberships expire to fuel your retention efforts
Lapsed member campaigns—schedule a drip campaign to invite lapsed members to rejoin your organization, attend an event, and engage with peers again
To achieve the greatest results, you should pair each email with a custom landing page that has the same look and feel, messaging, and offer as your email. The landing page should also present an easy way for your audience to take action. For example, include an obvious button to click or form to fill out. Make only one offer to avoid overwhelming people or losing them along the way. Also ensure that your landing page is mobile optimized for efficient navigation.
Marketing Automation
The third component in holistic email marketing is automation. Holistic email marketing takes cues from your audience members’ actual behaviors to determine next steps—such as a phone call, direct mail piece, or another email message. To streamline this process without draining your staff resources and budget, you can use a marketing automation platform, such as Informz.
Using marketing automation, you can set up custom workflows, schedule emails, and score leads as they come in. Once you establish the workflows, the platform takes care of the next steps automatically. You monitor performance as you go and make adjustments to headlines, copy, offers, and visuals as needed.
Why Holistic Email Marketing?
Simply put, people are more likely to engage in issues that matter to them personally. Before you launch another email campaign, ask yourself, “How can we help our members and prospects achieve their objectives?” Quite often, the answer to this question will vary based on your individual audience members. Some need to become aware of your organization and its benefits. Others seek specific tools to advance their careers. Perhaps others need a little nudge to re-engage with your organization.
Holistic email marketing helps you reach all these individuals with relevant, personalized messages no matter where they are in their customer journey. The result is eager, engaged members and attendees that work hard for your organization year after year.
Once you’ve outlined your holistic digital marketing strategy, it’s time to choose the platforms and tools that will propel your organization toward your goals. A combination of retargeting, email marketing, segmentation, and automation is effective for reaching members and finding new prospects.
Retargeting and Prospecting
Depending on your goals, you can use retargeting to reach existing members (a.k.a. known users) or lookalike audiences based on your current member profile (a.k.a. unknown users). You can focus your efforts on a single platform, such as Facebook, or use web retargeting for a potentially broader reach.
To achieve results for web retargeting, you will likely need to enlist the help of a partner, such as AdRoll, for sufficient purchasing power. For many associations, Facebook offers more affordable solutions and better results.
Facebook Retargeting
Facebook is the most popular social media platform (with nearly 2 billion users!) and it offers great potential to reach your target audiences and convert users to members and attendees. With Facebook’s custom audiences and lookalike audiences, you can segment ads, measure conversions, and optimize campaigns. New features, such as audience insights, offline events, analytic reports, and product catalogs offer additional opportunities.
Segmentation
Before you launch any campaigns, consider segmenting your list into broad categories. Segmentation contributes to holistic marketing because you can use it to tailor your messaging based on what the individuals in your audience need to hear.
For your retargeting efforts, segmenting increases the relevancy of your message and boosts response as a result. For email marketing, segmentation leads to higher opens, clicks, and conversions. How much higher? MailChimp estimates that segmented email campaigns see a 14.31% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher click rate than non-segmented campaigns.
To take advantage of the benefits of segmentation, first define your segments. Consider categories such as first-time and repeat attendees, members and prospects, stage of the buying cycle, age, demographics, or location. Aim for no more than three audience segments (any more than three can be too complex to manage). Then, on a per message basis, determine whether each promotion goes to a specific segment or your entire audience.
Holistic SEO
Another component of holistic digital marketing is your search engine optimization. While SEO of the past was centered around keywords and backlinks, today’s SEO is all about relevancy to the user. It is increasingly content-driven. For best results, your content should be integrated with your other digital marketing efforts, such as your social media marketing, web retargeting, and email campaigns.
Marketing Automation
Integrated marketing is made infinitely easier with a marketing automation platform, such as Informz. Marketing automation can help you segment your list, personalize messaging, schedule ongoing campaigns, and track results with real-time reporting. Holistic marketing is customer-focused, and marketing automation provides insights and tools to personalize your efforts based on customer needs.
Measure for Success
As a best practice, you should continually evaluate performance and make adjustments based on actual campaign metrics to ensure your desired outcomes are being met. Below are three digital marketing KPIs that are especially relevant to associations.
Conversions—new members, subscriptions, class enrollment, etc.
Expanded brand awareness—number of ad impressions, site visitors
Digital marketing offers a wealth of possibilities that support holistic marketing. With the right tools in place, you can segment your list and customize your message based on deep audience insights. You can track campaigns, messages, and offers as well as where each individual is in the buying cycle. Most importantly, you can access advanced data and analytics to guide your efforts today and next year. As a result, your audience enjoys a seamless customer experience—they get what they need when they need it. At the same time, you gain loyal followers who rally around your cause and sustain your organization into the future.
Digital marketing offers endless possibilities to get your messages in front of members and prospects. It’s tempting to jump on the latest trend, platform, or technique to cast a wide net. The result, however, can be a hodgepodge of offers and images that don’t support your core value proposition and don’t speak to individual customer journeys. Poor ROI and low engagement are the inevitable outcomes with this approach.
A better idea is to take a holistic approach to your digital marketing. Holistic marketing looks at the big picture of your brand and how all the pieces work together. It inspires and engages your audience through consistent, unified messaging that meets people where they are in the buying cycle. Holistic digital marketing will tell you where to focus your online efforts to maximize your resources, budget, and outcomes. Here’s how to get started.
Take inventory of your brand ecosystem
Before you can take a holistic approach to any marketing—digital or otherwise—you must take inventory of all aspects of your brand. Consider your digital platforms, such as your website and social media feeds. Add in your organization’s assets, like your events and membership. You will also need to consider your audience and segments as well as your budget and the timing of your initiatives.
Establish Objectives and KPIs
Before you ever brainstorm a campaign, establish objectives and KPIs to measure progress. These will help you know where to focus your energy and budget. In addition to your attendance, membership, and retention goals, your digital marketing objectives might include click-though rates, reach, impressions, and conversions (ex: downloads, purchases, form submissions).
Analyze Past Performance
Take a look at your past digital marketing initiatives and try to extract key insights. Was there a particular offer or message that resonated with your audience? Did a specific platform gain more traffic than others? Which information piece was downloaded most? Were there any flops? Knowing where you’ve been can help you determine where to go next. Quantify results whenever possible (ex: cost per click, lead, or conversion).
Examine Your Audience
Next, take an in-depth look at your audience. Besides the standard audience analysis (who are they, what do they care about?), holistic digital marketing requires a few additional questions.
How do people access your content and messages? (ex: mobile vs. social, Explorer vs. Chrome)
Which social media platforms do they prefer?
What communication formats do they prefer? (ex: email, social, SMS, direct mail)
What are they actually reading? (ex: blogs, whitepapers, microsites, event info)
What insights can you gain from available data? (ex: age, geography, demographics, member/non-member, etc.)
Give the People What They Want
Tailor your efforts based on the answers to these questions. If your audience prefers a mobile experience, your website design must be responsive and optimized for mobile users. If they spend more time on Facebook than Twitter, don’t worry about advertising on Twitter. If they convert more often over email, allocate additional resources to email.
Optimize Your Budget and Timing
Choose digital strategies based on how you can best move people along their customer journeys within your available budget. Time your initiatives with the buying cycle as well as your organization’s calendar and other industry events (ex: conferences, course offerings, changing regulations, membership renewal deadlines).
Maintain Consistency
Whichever strategies you settle on, keep in mind that holistic marketing is a 360-degree approach to reaching your audience. Its success depends on consistency online and off. To build trust and recognition among your base, your digital assets should match your real-world assets—not only in look and feel but in voice and personality as well.
Monitor Performance
Track KPIs over time to gauge the success of your digital initiatives and timing. Did you meet your goals and objectives? Make adjustments as needed—in real time if possible, or use your findings as benchmarks for next year.
Holistic digital marketing makes it possible to reach your audience with the right content on the right channel at the right time. It helps you get the most out of your budget while minimizing staff time and resources. What does that look like in practical terms? Tune in next week for Holistic Digital Marketing Part 2: Platforms and Tools.
Imagine how effective your marketing would be if all your channels worked seamlessly together—reinforcing your core brand message and promoting key campaigns to engage and inspire your audience. A holistic marketing strategy can achieve this precision. It thinks through each aspect of your marketing and figures out how all the pieces work together. As a result, you’ll provide a meaningful, consistent member experience that rallies people to your organization, drives engagement, and ensures a loyal long-term following.
4 Components of Holistic Marketing
Effective holistic marketing includes four essential components to help you see the big picture of your brand: relationships, integration of all brand touch points, your internal team, and marketing performance.
Relationship marketing
Given the overwhelming amount of marketing noise your members and prospects face every day, you need more than a slick website or a great offer to win their trust and loyalty. Relationship marketing helps you build meaningful engagement with current members and establish rapport with prospects. It requires you to reach people where they are and provide relevant info, connections, and tools that will meet their individual goals and challenges. Sure, this takes time and effort, but the payoff can be huge.
Cultivate relationships and people will join, attend, and engage because they’re internally compelled and inspired to do so—not because you’ve pushed them or “sold” them on anything. Connect with people on multiple levels: as individuals, based on what they do, continuously over time, directed towards an outcome, everywhere they are (marketing mix). Do this and you will have a steady supply of brand ambassadors who roll up their sleeves to further your industry and organization.
Integrated marketing
Most people aren’t ready to join your association the first time they hear about you. They need time to get to know you, explore your offerings, and understand your value. Individuals undergo a journey from awareness, to attending your events, to joining as a member. Eventually, they might also become loyal long-term followers.
Integrated marketing means giving members and prospects what they need when they need it to continue on their customer journey. Integrated marketing is about more than just splashing the same slogan, identity, and colors on every marketing channel. It weaves a coherent story through everything the brand does. No matter where someone encounters your organization or where they are in their customer journey, they should get the same seamless brand experience and the same authentic brand story.
To achieve integrated marketing, align your message, communication, and brand images across all marketing channels—online and off. Use marketing automation technology to facilitate this process and to create a cohesive marketing plan instead of silos.
Internal marketing
Internal marketing means all departments within your organization are aware of the marketing plan, work to support it, and have access to spreadsheets, calendars, communications, timelines, and budget. Everyone on your internal team must understand your overall vision as well as your individual promotions, standard messages, and current offers. Your team should be deeply familiar with the full range of your offerings and how members benefit from each one.
When your whole team knows the big picture and works toward a common goal, everyone wins. Your members and prospects get a consistent brand experience that meets their needs, and you save time and money by streamlining your efforts.
Performance marketing
To know what’s working you must track marketing performance and measure progress toward your goals. Key performance indicators are measurable values that show you how effectively your association is achieving key objectives. Establish KPIs and measure campaign performance to inform next steps, make better decisions, overcome challenges, and achieve your overall mission. KPIs maximize your budget and staff resources while generating better results. They help you use real-time data to make smart decisions for your marketing and your long-term sustainability.
Establish your goals first. Then assign objectives and KPIs. Once you define these parameters, you can begin brainstorming the individual strategies and campaigns that will propel your organization forward.
Why do you need holistic marketing?
With holistic marketing, you can go beyond simply promoting your organization and your offerings. You can rally your base to join together, form a movement, and further your mission. Holistic marketing is a surefire way to inspire and compel people—rather than push them or convince them. While it takes a little more work up front, over the long haul you’ll have a much easier time meeting registration, membership, and retention goals. As an added benefit, you’ll save time and money by integrating your efforts and streamlining your internal processes.
“People don’t do anything unless they’re inspired. But once they are inspired there is almost nothing they will not do.”
Are you struggling to attract millennials? Are you stuck on the membership acquisition and retention roller coaster? Are you unable to get out of “reaction” mode when the latest marketing tool or social media platform comes along?
If you answered yes to any of these questions it comes from the failure to spark inspiration in your members. Inspiration is what helps associations grow, thrive, and changes lives.
From the very beginning we have said that people need to be inspired to act. Surely though, there was more to this than a gut feeling. Could there be a science behind inspiration? Data? A meaningful and agreed-upon way to define this seemingly unknowable abstraction? We took a step back and realized that we needed a deeper understanding of what moves people. We set out to understand it—not just at the level of the heart, but scientifically.
Inspiration is a concept that floats around in space, finds its way into lines of poetry, buddies around with muses and supernatural beings, and is plastered all over social media. But what does it truly mean to inspire, or to be inspired? What do associations need to do to inspire members? And what do inspired members do that non-inspired members don’t do?
We took on these questions with purpose and focus. And we found answers.
Inspiration is not unknowable. It is quite knowable. It’s replicable. It’s scalable. And it is science. In our findings, we discovered that there are certain things that MUST be in place for inspiration to occur, and there are certain ways that inspiration actually moves people toward things. We understand why those millennials aren’t interested, why associations can’t get themselves off the rollercoaster, and why they spin their wheels with their marketing efforts.
When people are inspired, they take action, they get things done, they connect and come together—not because you convince them or push them or pull them, but because they just can’t help themselves. They’re internally compelled to make things happen. This is the “almost nothing they will not do” stage. And it’s far more powerful than any ho hum marketing piece or sales pitch can achieve for your organization. Inspired members are unstoppable. They go out of their way to help your organization achieve goals and pursue new horizons. They spread the word about the great work you do. They feel fulfilled while they actively work to fulfill your mission. Spark the fires of inspiration and the possibilities are endless. Fail to inspire your base, and your organization can not thrive.
We realize these things, and this is the crux of what you need to understand: Your marketing has a big job to do. It must harness the specific things research shows are needed for inspiration to happen. It must rally your base and connect people—to make a greater impact for long-term sustainability. INSPIRATION is how you get off the roller coaster. INSPIRATION is how you bring in the next generation and continue to change lives.
If we were fierce in our pursuit of inspiration before, now we are positively ferocious. Our rallying cry is, “Hell Yeah!” Let’s go find out what your members and your organization are capable of.
KPIs, or key performance indicators, can help you track the success of your event, marketing, and organization so you can make smart decisions to reach your goals. They can also help you identify gaps and make improvements as you go. The trouble is, there are lots of potential metrics to track, and not all of them are truly meaningful indicators of performance. Tracking the wrong metrics can lead to you to make uniformed decisions or worse—misinformed decisions. How do you know where to focus your attention?
Here are a dozen examples of KPIs especially suited for associations that hold events.
Use these as inspiration, but keep in mind your KPIs must be aligned with the specific goals of your event and your organization.
1. ROI:
Revenue from registrations, revenue from sponsors, total costs and cost per attendee
Why it matters: At the end of the day, your event and organization must be financially sustainable if your mission is to continue.
2. Event satisfaction:
Feedback from after-event surveys, repeat guests, how many signed up vs. actually showed up, first-time attendees
Why it matters: If the KPIs show that your attendees are overwhelmingly satisfied with your event, perhaps you need to focus your efforts on raising awareness through marketing. If your attendees were dissatisfied, you might focus on improving your event experience before turning to promotion.
3. Engagement:
Attendance numbers; number of people who registered but didn’t show; social media mentions, comments, and clicks
Why it matters: Engagement is often viewed as a subjective concept. These KPIs provide an objective way to measure member and attendee engagement using quantifiable data points.
4. Web traffic:
Number of visitors, which channels they came from, search queries
Why it matters: Monitoring web traffic provides baseline information about the size of your audience, where they spend time online, and what they care about. This can help you decide what content to feature on your site and where to promote it.
5. New leads:
Number of new leads (not just new contacts) and each lead’s source
Why it matters: See where your leads come from so you know where to invest more of your time, effort, and budget (and where not to).
6. Visitor-to-lead ratio:
Compare number of site visitors to number of new leads
Why it matters: If you get lots of visitors but they don’t take any action, that’s a sign that your visitors didn’t find what they’re looking for. It could mean your Facebook ads are targeting the wrong audience, for example. It could also mean your website isn’t compelling enough, doesn’t provide key information, or is difficult to navigate.
7. Landing page conversion rate:
Percentage of people who come to a landing page that complete a form
Why it matters: People who arrived at your landing page were compelled to click on something to get there. If too many leave without taking further action, it could be a sign your offer isn’t strong enough or isn’t aligned with their customer journey (or you don’t have an offer at all). It could also indicate a lack of trust—they might be worried about how you will use their contact info.
8. Lead-to-member/registration ratio:
How many leads you generate compared to how many join your organization/register for your event
Why it matters: If you generate lots of leads but acquire very few members, it could be an indication that your marketing offer was too general (ex: a free promotional item vs. a free whitepaper). For events, this could be a sign that you haven’t proven the ROI of attending.
9. Email metrics:
Delivery, open, click, and unsubscribe rates; number of subscribers
Why it matters: Email metrics help you to gauge whether your messaging and offers resonate with your targets.
10. Blog metrics:
Number of visitors to your blog, click-through rate, number of subscribers to your blog
Why it matters: If your blog traffic is light, your content isn’t resonating with your audience. Click-throughs can tell you what people were interested in to guide future content and offers.
11. Search engine optimization:
Backlinks, keyword ranking
Why it matters: SEO is especially important to find new prospects. The higher your keywords rank, the more likely you are to get organic traffic.
12. Diversity:
Age, gender, ethnicity, bilingual
Why it matters: If you want more millennials, for example, you need to monitor your audience makeup today and as you launch new campaigns and event offerings. Explore the relationship between attendee diversity and your campaigns to see what resonates with people of various backgrounds.
While you might not monitor all 12 of these KPIs, you will need to track more than just one or two. KPIs are most meaningful when considered in combination with one another and as part of your larger brand strategy. For example, you can look at attendance numbers in light of your web traffic, landing page conversions, and email performance to find where people are dropping out of your sales funnel.
Without well-defined goals and corresponding KPIs, you can only guess at the success of your marketing campaigns, your events, and your organization’s progress toward your mission. With KPIs, you can use quantifiable data to make informed decisions that fuel attendance, engagement, and long-term sustainability.
Do you know if your event marketing is working? Which promotions were the most successful? Is your association reaching attendance, member acquisition, and retention goals? Are you making real, quantifiable progress toward your mission?
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measurable values that show you how effectively your association is achieving key objectives. They can help you gauge what’s working and what’s not so you can make adjustments along the way. Tracking KPIs allows you to use real-time data to make smart decisions for your marketing and your long-term sustainability.
How to Use KPIs
KPIs can help your association focus on common goals and ensure those goals stay aligned within your association. The first step is to determine what your goals are. Next, choose KPIs for each one so you can measure progress. For example, associations who hold events often focus on improving lead generation, event registration, brand awareness, and member engagement. If we match each of these goals with KPIs, it might look something like this:
Best Practices for KPIs
How do you determine which metrics are meaningful for your organization? Effective KPIs align with the long-term mission of your organization, not just this year’s event. They should be measurable and have easily obtainable data that is reliable and accurate. Mostly importantly, they should be actionable, allowing you to make changes to your event, marketing, member offerings, and operations based on the actual needs and behaviors of your audience.
Be realistic when choosing your KPIs. If it’s expensive or difficult to monitor a KPI, then you likely won’t be able to track it over the long term. If your KPI is not clearly defined, you also won’t be able to extract meaningful data. If you can’t act on the information, there is little point in tracking it.
KPIs for Events
Effective KPIs for your event marketing and your event itself might include member acquisition and attendance numbers, social media traffic, or the number of people who requested follow-up information. The most insightful KPIs are dynamic. They consider multiple metrics within the context of your larger brand ecosystem. For example, you already measure event attendance. However, comparing the number of people who registered to the number of people who actually attended might identify a gap in your marketing. Looking at when all these individuals registered could lead to additional insights. (We’ll cover 12 common KPIs for event marketers in our next blog post.)
Track Your KPIs
Once you’ve established your goals and corresponding KPIs, you will need a way to track these with a real-time reporting tool. A software platform can help you manage KPIs from a simple dashboard. It can also help you track campaign performance, create reports, and make adjustments to your marketing to ensure your reach your goals. Plan to review KPIs with stakeholders on a weekly basis. Stay nimble, and be prepared to make changes based on what you learn.
Without established KPIs you can only guess at the effectiveness of your marketing and overall organizational strategy. With KPIs you can know definitively what’s working and what’s not based on quantifiable data. You’ll know exactly where to invest in your event and your organization to ensure long-term sustainability.
So your event had great attendance and you saw a surge in membership. Feedback was positive and you feel triumphant. Great! Now what? What happens next is sometimes…well, not much.
After the excitement of your event, it’s easy for people go back to their regular routines and forget about your organization. The crickets start to chirp on your social media feeds. Email opens and click-through rates drop. People just aren’t engaging like they did in person.
If you can keep the momentum going, people will continue to engage, connect, and work toward your mission over the long haul. Even better, it will be easier to get them to register for your event next year. How can you do all this? You need a comprehensive engagement plan.
Here are Five strategies to maintain the community, camaraderie, inspiration, and engagement of your event all year long.
Use marketing automation
The Association Engagement Survey with Access Intelligence suggests that your event attendees are the most engaged people in your organization. These individuals are already convinced of your value and will need less attention throughout the year. New prospects, by contrast, will need to be informed, inspired, and reassured before they take action. To communicate effectively with all your audience segments, you’ll need to personalize your campaigns and align them with the buying cycle. A marketing automation platform, such as Informz, can help. Informz lets you create, schedule, personalize, and track your campaigns to ensure timely, relevant communications before, during, and after your event.
Get more face time
Supplement annual national events with smaller regional affairs throughout the year. This might mean you host mini conferences or workshops in a few centrally located cities. It could also be much simpler. Consider sponsoring a team for a 5k or organizing a neighborhood cleanup day. These simple events can facilitate powerful connections among members by bringing them together for a common cause. If all else fails, organize regional happy hours for some liquid inspiration. More face time equals more opportunities to connect and engage.
Build online communities
It’s not enough to have a social media presence. People need to interact—with each other and with your organization. Post a mix of original content, quizzes, motion graphics, videos, live streaming, affiliate articles and information, and promotional ads. But don’t stop there. Pose open-ended questions to encourage conversation, and be sure to respond when people ask you questions. In addition to social media, consider other year-round networking opportunities using your event’s mobile app, a LISTSERVE, Basecamp, or other platforms that facilitate connection and idea-sharing.
Recruit brand ambassadors
Gather your pilgrims, your most devoted members and attendees. Ask them to promote your event and your year-round offerings in their own circles, online and off. Give them an opportunity to share their experiences through member-curated stories and testimonials. Create a referral program with incentives to attract likeminded colleagues. For example, you could craft an email that’s meant to be forwarded to a friend. Offer a free online workshop for joining as a new member and give one to the member who made the referral. Your brand ambassadors put their reputation on the line by promoting your organization. Reward their loyalty with recognition and the occasional goody.
Encourage audience participation
People feel more engaged in your organization and your event if they have a say in the decision-making process. Ask for input on anything from the event theme to the food you serve and the music you play. Take a poll on which speakers to invite. Ask for volunteers to serve on committees or teach sessions. The more deeply people get involved, the more likely they are to become brand ambassadors and repeat attendees.
For year-round engagement, people need to hear from you on a regular basis. But that’s just the first step. They need personalized communications and face-to-face opportunities that offer value, reinforce connections, maintain the momentum of your event, and enable their goals. Go beyond an event marketing strategy. Sustain your organization 365 days a year with a comprehensive engagement plan.
According to the Email Statistics Report, the average person received 90 emails per day in 2016. That’s a lot of clutter to cut through if you’re a marketer. To get attention and to maximize your ROI, you need to go beyond impersonal e-blasts and one-size-fits-all marketing. A better strategy is to take cues from your audience and your data to craft purposeful content for a range of digital touch points. Then optimize your efforts through automation and a CRM platform. When all the elements of your digital marketing environment come together, that’s when the magic happens. You’ll increase engagement and move more of your base along their journey toward event attendance and membership.
The member journey
Most people aren’t ready to attend your event or join your organization the first time they hear about you. They need time to get to know you, explore your offerings, and understand your value. Individuals will undergo a journey from awareness, to attending your events, to joining as a member. Eventually, they might also become loyal long-term followers and brand ambassadors. But how much time do they need? What exactly do they need to know? And when do they need to know it? Answering these questions requires a solid grasp of the entire digital marketing environment. This includes in-depth audience knowledge as well as integrated brand touch points.
Meet them where they are
A solid digital marketing strategy begins by knowing your audience—not just their demographics or purchase history but characteristics and behaviors that help you speak to them. Start by assigning archetypes, or personas, to your audience segments. Archetypes are defined categories centered around value and purpose. You can also segment your audience based on known behaviors, such as members, non-members, veteran attendees, or new attendees. Also consider where individuals are in the buying cycle and how much they already know about your association. All this information helps you tailor your messaging and tactics so you can provide timely, relevant marketing communication that engages your base.
Bring all brand touch points together
Digital brand touch points include stories, videos, retargeting, emails,ebooks, white papers, landing pages, and more. Your audience might encounter any or all of these items depending on where they are in their journey. It’s important to present a unified look and feel in all your branding as well as complementary messaging. It’s also critical to include a mix of content types to cater to various communication preferences. But how do you know which tactics to launch, to whom, and when?
Why you need marketing automation
Marketing automation allows your audience to tell you what they need. To get started, you create several defined communication strategies, called workflows, based on your archetypes, audience segments, and any data you’ve gathered. Once you set your workflows in motion, your audience behaviors trigger the next steps. One example would be an individual who sees your Facebook ad then clicks to download your white paper on business finances. This behavior then triggers an email promoting the finance track at your annual conference. If this person decides to register for your event, they will receive information about other offerings at the conference. If they don’t register within a week of your first email, they automatically receive a discount code in a follow-up email. The more that people interact with your brand touch points, the more you learn, and the more likely it is that you can continually deliver communications they find valuable. The result? A recent study suggests that using marketing automation to nurture your prospects could result in a 451% increase in qualified leads.
Tracking success
It’s important to track campaign results, examine key performance indicators, and understand your data. By leveraging real-time pre-event marketing data, you can use relevant member or prospect behaviors to trigger lead scoring and follow-up activities for cross-selling and upselling. Combining data-driven insights with automation technology will help you personalize their journey toward attendance and membership—and you’ll see increases in both as a result. Use a customer relationship management program to monitor your data and effectively track and score leads. If you can’t monitor results, you won’t be able to calculate campaign ROI and you won’t know what’s working (and what’s not). Marketing automation isn’t something you can set and forget. You must keep an eye on the data and adjust your workflows based on actual behaviors.
Up your marketing game
In today’s world of flooded inboxes and information overload, you need to up your marketing game if you want sustainable membership and event attendance. Improve your marketing using automation and integrated brand touch points to guide more people through their customer journeys. Rottman Creative can help you cut through the clutter and drive event attendance with purposeful digital marketing. Contact us today to learn more about marketing automation.
Strategic event marketing is about inspiring and connecting potential attendees. It goes beyond facts and “stuff”—all that networking, education, and certification you offer. People need to understand your event’s value on an emotional level. They must see a measurable return on the time, money, and effort they invest to attend. This is all within your grasp if you have a solid marketing strategy.
Use these four pillars as the foundation of a purposeful marketing strategy that drives event attendance and member engagement.
Product (your event)
Your event is a product, and it should be marketed as such. There is a buying cycle, and your marketing must support it. You need to inform the unaware, inspire the interested, and reassure the intent to guide prospects along a journey toward registration and membership.
Like any good product marketing, your messaging should focus not on the features (sessions, experts, certifications) but on the benefits your attendees will realize.
How will their lives be better or easier by attending your event?
What goals do they have that your event will enable?
What pain points will it take away?
What’s the ROI they can expect from attending?
These are emotional issues for your audience, so to be effective you need to have empathy for their situation—no matter where they are in the buying cycle. For example, someone who is brand new to the industry might be feeling in over their head. They lack experience and expertise. They’re hungry for resources and connections. To effectively reach this individual, you must first raise awareness that you exist. Next, demonstrate your offerings and value through compelling storytelling. Lastly, reassure them that they’ve come to the right place—a place where like-minded people collaborate to solve their most pressing issues.
If you host an annual event, it’s easy to keep churning out the same marketing year after year. To really inspire and connect people, you must take a fresh approach. Every year is a new product launch. Every year you must ask yourself how you can align your marketing with the buying cycle to address current audience needs and emotions.
Story
Neuroscience tells us that stories have the power to inspire and connect your attendees. Storytelling goes beyond facts and logic to engage the limbic brain, where most of our decisions are made. To truly resonate with prospects, branded attendee stories must show new possibilities and enable goals. They must address pain points, challenges, and questions attendees might have. To find juicy story content, identify a handful of people willing to give you an hour or two of their time. Choose a mix of new members, veteran attendees, and maybe even a curmudgeon who wasn’t so quick to see your value. Come prepared with questions, but don’t be afraid to venture off the map. Sometimes your best stories come from unscripted conversations.
Once you have enough information, craft the entire story. You can always use shorter excerpts depending on your platform. For effective stories that inherently increase connection among readers, follow the universal story structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. (Read more about The Anatomy of a Story and see an example.) The best stories create a sense of urgency with the reader to incite the desired action.
Sustainability
For your event—and your organization itself—to be sustainable, you need to create pilgrims, not tourists. Pilgrims engage. They attend your event year after year because they are internally compelled to be there. Tourists, by contrast, come to look. They leave without contributing and do not return. Again thinking of your event as a product, it’s much easier to up-sell, cross sell, or get repeat business from an existing customer. If you can continually inspire your members and attendees, you’ll have a much easier time filling seats year after year. As a bonus, your devoted pilgrims will be more likely to engage.
Strategies for driving sustainability:
Craft timely, emotionally engaging marketing communications aligned with the buying cycle. Use marketing automation to ensure you are most responsive to prospect/attendee needs based on actual behaviors.
Provide exclusive event offerings people can’t get anywhere else (ex: face time with experts, hands-on learning, exclusive products, event-only specials).
Create meaningful event activities that allow inspiration and creativity through in-person connection and collaboration (ex: social outings, informal networking spaces, roundtable discussions, business incubators).
Provide unique promotional items with an engagement component (ex: Encourage attendees to share an image on social media wearing your association’s branded clothing).
Fear
Besides the cost to attend, fear is why people do not register for your event. Pre-event stressors and on-site stressors prevent people from registering altogether, or they prevent people from fully engaging while there. You must prove that the benefits of your event are greater than people’s fears. According to the Attendee Research Report, 1 in 4 attendees thought their last event was stressful. To address stressors and encourage people to overcome them, you need to be empathic in your communication efforts. To do that, you must first understand their fears.
Pre-event stressors include time away from work and family, cost and hassle of travel, and even what to wear. On-site stressors might be the crowds, not knowing anyone, or selecting which sessions to attend. General fear of the unknown can put a serious dent in your attendance numbers.
Focus on the fears most relevant to your audience, and take steps to address them.
A few suggestions for overcoming fears and proving value:
First-time attendee breakfast or mentor program
Early bird discounts, giveaways, or special drawings to offset costs
Clear communications about how to get to the event and where to stay, including any travel promotions
Detailed event schedule and layout to help attendees navigate your event and take full advantage of all offerings
Online forum for people to connect ahead of time
Pre-event social media conversations or webinars to break the ice between attendees and your organization
Suggested dress code (ex: “Our attendees typically wear business casual attire.”)
A mix of structured and informal networking events to cater to introverts and extroverts
ROI toolkit to help attendees weigh the costs versus the benefits
It’s not enough to host a great event.
You need a comprehensive strategy to inspire and drive people to attend. Plus, you need them to come back next year. Use these four pillars as a guide to identify and close the gaps in your current marketing strategy.
In a world of content overload, motion graphics cut through the clutter with bite-sized content that grabs attention, evokes emotions, and incites action.
So why aren’t you using them? The Association Audience and Member Engagement Study indicated 84% of associations don’t use motion graphics. If you want to improve attendance, membership, and engagement—as well as SEO, web traffic, and social media reach—it’s time to try new tactics. Motion graphics are proven to generate outcomes without draining all your time and resources.
What are motion graphics?
Motion graphics are animations or static images brought to life through design to create the illusion of motion. They’re often paired with audio to form engaging multimedia clips.
Compared to static text or standard presentations, motion graphics give your audience a better understanding of your association and your brand. They’re inherently more engaging than other formats because they “show” instead of “tell.” Motion graphics allow you to present complex information in a short, simple way. An added advantage is that they’re easily sharable, not just on the web and social media but at your events and in apps.
Cost effective
“It’s hard to recruit new audiences with a very limited budget,” noted one association director in the engagement survey. With motion graphics you don’t need expensive equipment and camera crews. You just need a motion graphics designer, who can use your existing brand images and collateral to craft original animations. Because the ideal length of a motion graphic is just a few seconds, these projects are less complex and time-consuming to execute than videos. As a result, they tend to be more affordable than video.
Broad appeal
“One of our pain points is creating content that attracts a wide variety of audiences,” noted another survey respondent. A robust marketing plan must include a range of tactics to engage your audience segments and inspire them to take action. Adding a motion graphics component to your plan is a great way to mix up your content delivery and reinforce brand touch points.
Best practices
Given viewers’ short attention spans, it’s essential to capture attention and deliver your message as fast as possible. Just how fast? According to Facebook, only 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will continue watching for at least 10 seconds. Only 45% continue watching for 30 seconds. A study from Locowise determined viewers watch videos for about 18 seconds on average, even though the average video length is nearly a minute. It’s vital to include the most important information within the first three seconds of your motion graphic if you want to keep your audience captivated.
Expand your efforts
Nearly 90% of associations surveyed in the Association Audience and Member Engagement Study indicated some interest in using more video in their marketing. However, many stated they lack the resources to expand their efforts. Motion graphics can be an simple, effective solution at a fraction of the effort and time of video.
Ready to engage your audience with motion graphics? Contact Rottman Creative today to add this compelling tactic to your marketing plan.
If you struggle with event attendance and membership acquisition, chances are the problem isn’t your organization, your member benefits, or your event itself. The issue is that not enough people know your VALUE. They need to fully comprehend what’s in it for them, or they won’t be moved to act. While there are lots of ways to communicate value to your target audience, there is only one that’s proven effective through brain research: STORYTELLING.
Why storytelling?
Humans make decisions in the limbic system. That’s the emotional part of the brain, not the logical one. That means if you want people to register for your event or join you as a member, you need to appeal to their emotions. Facts and logic won’t cut it. Storytelling that includes rich, sensory details actively engages the limbic system and inspires people to take action because they feel compelled to do so.
The proven effectiveness of storytelling should make it a no-brainer when it comes to event marketing. But, most organizations aren’t taking advantage of this format. According to the Association Audience and Member Engagement Study, only 33 percent of associations use storytelling to promote events.
Not coincidentally, the study participants cited numerous challenges related to demonstrating event value and retaining members. “We struggle with conveying a clear value of networking,” said one. “We need to create a distinct reason for our attendees to join once they agree to attend,” said another. Answers ranged from communicating value to capturing attention and encouraging engagement—all things storytelling can help with.
How to start telling stories
Your members are a gold mine of stories. You just need to do a little digging. First, identify a handful of people who might be willing to give you an hour or two of their time. Choose a mix of new members, veteran attendees, cheerleaders, and maybe even a curmudgeon who wasn’t so quick to see your value. Next, come prepared with questions, but don’t be afraid to venture off the map. Sometimes your best stories come from unscripted conversations. It’s a good idea to record the interview so you don’t miss any juicy details.
10 questions for better member stories
Here are 10 questions to get you started telling curated member stories. Be sure to tailor questions slightly depending on whom you’re interviewing. For example, a veteran attendee may need slightly different prompts than a first-timer.
What’s your situation? Tell me about yourself and your business.
What are your biggest challenges and concerns?
How long have you been a member, and how did you first hear about the association?
Why do you go to the event? Variations: Why are you going for the first time? Why do you go to this event on a regular basis?
What do you do to prepare for the event?
How do you justify time away from your business? Variation: How do you describe the benefits vs. the cost of attending?
Who do you meet there and how do you meet them?
Do you have any advice for other attendees? For first-time attendees? For veteran attendees?
How do you benefit from the event? Variations: What do you take away from the event—literally and figuratively? What’s your biggest takeaway?
Is there anything else you would like to share?
How to structure your story
Once you have a repository of information, write out the entire story. (You can always shorten it to fit your marketing needs later.) A good story follows a traditional structure. It has characters, a setting, rising action and conflict, a climax, falling action, and an ending. Within this framework, your stories should show members you understand their pain points and that you have solutions and resources to resolve their challenges.
Marketing tactics
Authentic stories from real people resonate in a world of information overload. Stories inspire and connect your base. But storytelling itself isn’t a marketing tactic. It must be aligned with digital media to help you reach membership and attendance goals. Just a few ideas for incorporating storytelling into your marketing mix: blogs, automated emails, micro sites, videos, Facebook Canvas, and Facebook Ads.
Einstein defined insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Chances are you’ve been using the same strategies over and over again while membership and attendance stay flat or, worse, decline. If you’re among the majority of event marketers not using storytelling, now is the time to start. If you already use storytelling, perhaps it’s time to infuse some life into it with richer sensory details, more colorful characters, and a complementary digital strategy.
Don’t let another year go by with ho hum marketing results. Contact Rottman Creative to curate your member stories and turn them into dynamic digital marketing that drives membership, attendance, and engagement.
Facebook is the ideal platform for event marketers. You can use it to find new prospects and drive attendance among existing members. You can build excitement around your conference and inform attendees of speakers, special events, and exclusive offerings. In short, promoting your event on Facebook will get more people in your door AND those people will be primed and ready to engage. Thanks to smart customizations and audience targeting, you can deliver personalized marketing messages aligned with your buying cycle. Even if you’ve never tried online advertising before, these five steps will have you running effective campaigns in short order.
Step 1: Use Facebook Ads to retarget known users and find new prospects
Facebook Ads are a great way to reach your audience outside of email and direct mail. They offer efficient personalization not possible with these other channels. To get started, use the Power Editor. Consult Facebook’s library of tutorials, including videos, to help you take full advantage of all the platform’s features.
Once you get the hang of things, you can use Facebook Ads to align your communications with your buying cycle. For example, people who already registered for your event don’t need to see ads that ask them to register. Instead, you could show them an ad about your keynote speaker. You can introduce your organization and event people who don’t know who you are. You can also retarget visitors to your website or Facebook page, to reassure their interest and encourage them to register.
Step 2: Install the Facebook pixel on your website, create custom audiences
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that helps you track and target visitors to your website. Don’t skip this step! The pixel makes laser-focused ad campaigns possible.
To install the Facebook pixel, log on to your Facebook page and navigate to the Ads Manager tab. Click the button that says “create pixel.” Once your pixel is generated, paste that snippet of code in the
tags on each page of your website—including any “thank you” pages that appear upon form submission.
Create custom audiences
Four types of custom audiences help you reach the people most likely to attend your event:
Customer file—upload your existing email list, which Facebook will match to user profiles
Website traffic—target people who have visited your website or specific pages (based on insights from the pixel)
App activity—reach out to people who have taken specific actions on your app
Engagement on Facebook—connect with people who have already interacted with you on FB
Use these audiences to craft highly personalized ads based on your buying cycle. You can also create lookalike audiences from your custom audiences. That means you can ask Facebook to find people with similar interests and behaviors who might be interested in your event. Lookalike audiences are a quick, easy, and cost-effective way to grow your base and drive attendance.
Custom conversions
A feature called “custom conversions” helps you target prospects who have already taken some action. That might be someone who signed up for your newsletter and was redirected to a “thank you” page (i.e. a conversion). You can optimize your ads for this conversion, so Facebook will show your ad to people most likely to convert again.
Step 3: Make a Facebook page for your event, or create an event through your main page
A special event page ensures that members and prospects focus directly on your event and its offerings—instead of getting distracted by other content. You can also create an official Facebook event from your main page for easy promotion.
For either option, follow these best practices:
Choose a high-quality photo in line with the rest of your branding
Use a clear, descriptive but short event name
Add specifics on location, date, and time
Include the ability to register (Facebook calls this “Buy Tickets”)
Add any FB page you manage as a co-host to expand who sees your event details. You can also add vendor and speaker pages so your event will appear on their calendars also.
Include keywords to help people find you
Write a brief description that explains the value of your event
Step 4: Create a content calendar
Plan your Facebook content to help you stay focused. Include a mix of blogs, images, videos, status updates, opinion polls, and a few outright promotional messages. Craft posts about individual speakers , workshops, or special events to get your fans excited. Ask open-ended questions to encourage dialogue and feedback. Post regularly for best results. Don’t forget that your Facebook presence is an extension of your brand, so your messaging, images, and offers should be consistent with the rest of your branding and marketing.
Step 5: Monitor and evaluate your efforts
Facebook offers infinite possibilities for customizing your messaging, images, offers, and formats. But none of that matters if you don’t track what works and what doesn’t. Use the platform’s reporting features to see how many people saw your ads, how many took action, and what actions they took. Edit or turn off ads that aren’t performing to your expectations. Consider increasing your budget on ads doing exceptionally well. Use what you learn about your audience’s likes and dislikes to adjust images, messaging, and offers going forward.
Don’t miss out on attendees and new members
If you’re not marketing your event on Facebook, quite simply, you’re missing out. Your members and prospects are already there, hanging out and hungry for engaging content and offers. Leverage this smart platform to reach your base, find new prospects, and drive event attendance.
Facebook Canvas is an immersive storytelling platform you can use to communicate with your base, drive event attendance, and build brand loyalty. It’s more than an ad; it’s an interactive marketing experience. Canvas is simple to set up, but before you start placing buttons and adding images you need a plan. It’s a good idea to outline your key points and basic story line first.
The look and feel of your Canvas should be in line with the rest of your branding. This is especially important if you’re also running Facebook ads. All your online branding should match so users recognize you no matter where they encounter your brand.
Customize your story
The possibilities for customizing your Canvas are endless. You can select a range of styles and colors using easy drag-and-drop tools. Available components include button, photo, text block, video, and header. These can all be used more than once throughout your Canvas. A good strategy is to include a mix of content, high-quality images, and video to engage your users. As with any effective marketing piece, don’t forget clear calls to action. Keep things short and to the point so you don’t lose your audience. A general rule is to include only one or two key points in each Canvas. You can always create more than one for your event.
Create a custom audience
Once your Canvas is complete, you should create a custom audience in Facebook for people who have opened and/or clicked on any links in your Canvas. This allows for precisely targeting these individuals based on their interests and behaviors later on. Canvas is exclusively a mobile platform. That means when you set up your Canvas you will need to select “mobile only” in the ad set process.
Ideas for associations
This exciting new medium has endless potential for marketers. It is especially well suited for associations. Consider using Canvas to promote the following:
Curated member stories, to inspire attendees
ROI Toolkit, to prove the value of your event
Membership, with a sign-up form at the end
Overall conference, with a call to register at the end
Canvas allows you to go beyond traditional advertising formats to truly engage your base with compelling stories and relevant offers. It also helps you track user behavior so you can more precisely focus your marketing efforts going forward.
Navigating digital advertising platforms can be confusing and expensive. You might end up spending a lot of money and getting very few results in return. But online advertising also offers a huge opportunity to reach a specific audience with relevant messages and offers. For member organizations, that means discovering more potential members and event attendees. We recommend Facebook as the place to start for affordable online advertising that gets results.
Follow these five steps to ensure you see ROI on your Facebook marketing dollars.
1. You need a strategy.
Launching an ad and hoping you get overwhelmed with responses sounds great, but it’s unlikely to happen without a comprehensive marketing strategy. As with any good campaign, start by establishing the objective. What do you want to happen as a result of your efforts?
When it comes to digital advertising, consider one of these outcomes:
event attendance or membership
clicks to website or video views
conversions on your site
page post engagement
likes
app installs
brand awareness
local awareness
offers claimed
product sales
lead generation
Be specific and quantify your objective. How many more clicks do you want? How many new members do you need to sign up?
The next stage of your strategy is to select your ad set. We recommend using Facebook’s Power Editor over its Ads Manger for this step as well as the rest of your campaign. Here you’ll decide whom to target, how much you will spend, the timing of your campaign, where the ads will appear, and how they will be optimized. You can always make adjustments to these settings later on based on campaign performance.
Only after you’ve established your strategy, objective, and ad set should you proceed with creating visuals and messaging for the ads people will see.
2. Use segmented custom audiences
An especially useful feature of Facebook advertising is the ability to target individuals who are already on your contact list in addition to new prospects. To take advantage of this option, you will first need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website and upload your segmented email lists. This allows you to retarget ads to your site visitors as well as the people on your email lists. You can even create a custom audience for every page of your website.
Throughout the entire process you have the ability to customize ad sets based on budget, placement, timing, and optimization. You can also tailor your ad images and messaging based on your audience segments. All this adds up to precisely targeting known users and prospects with highly relevant content based on their actual interests and online behaviors.
3. Use custom conversions.
Facebook’s custom conversions help you target visitors to your website who ended up converting (filling out a form, registering for your event, making an inbound inquiry or purchase, etc). To use custom conversions, it is best to have a landing page directly on your site. Here’s an example:
If a user wants to sign up for your newsletter, they visit www.yoursite.com/newsletter. Once they submit their email address, they are redirected to another landing page saying, “Thanks for signing up.” That might be www.yoursite.com/newsletterthankyou. Because Facebook Pixel is already on your site, Facebook can optimize for this conversion when running your ads. It will target these users who have already interacted with your brand (and who we know are more likely to convert again in the future).
4. Don’t forget to test.
One of the great advantages of digital advertising is that you can make changes instantly based on performance. A good strategy is to A/B test images, video, and copy to dial in a winning combination. You can pause or revise ads that are underperforming or increase your budget on ads doing especially well.
Facebook has a range of features, such as image carousel or Canvas, that you can test to optimize your campaigns. For the best results, test only one item at a time. For example, use the same copy with two different images to see which image performs better. After a week, turn off the ad with less activity.
5. Review your stats.
Facebook advertising is not a “set it and forget it” tactic. It’s important to monitor your campaign statistics from BOTH Ads Manger and Power Editor. Ads Manager allows you to see key insights on performance, demographics, and placement. Power Editor provides more specific info on your click-though rates, or CTR, and the average cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. Once you evaluate campaigns using multiple data sets, you can make informed adjustments to boost performance going forward.
Why Facebook?
Compared to web retargeting, Facebook offers more affordable solutions and better results for associations to reach their audiences and convert users to members and attendees. Contact Rottman Creative today to get started using this platform.
Lots of associations focus on the numbers. How many members do we have? How many people attended our event? While a strong base of members and attendees is essential to your long-term sustainability, don’t overlook an even more important element: engagement.
If you’re rolling your eyes at what sounds like just another corporate buzz word, give us a moment. Engagement is a knowable, measurable component that can directly improve your event and your organization overall.
What is engagement?
True engagement includes two parts, involvement and commitment. When people are engaged at your event, it means they’re both mentally and physically present. They set aside their phones and their work to listen, connect, participate, and share ideas. Some will even volunteer, join committees, publish papers, present sessions, and host webinars. Engaged members further the life-changing work of your organization by getting involved and committing to your mission.
Chances are not all your members are fully engaged, and that’s okay. There are various defined levels of engagement, as you’ll see in the Engagement Path below. All levels are important to your event and your organization.
At the bottom of the Engagement Path are the Outliers, people who are aware of your organization and are following or observing your activities and communications. Reaching Outliers relies heavily on technology—web, email, and social media—which allows you to reach a broad base with a light touch. Little interaction or engagement take place at this level, but you are beginning the important work of raising awareness and reassuring interest.
At the top of the pyramid are the Agents, individuals whose personal and professional mission are aligned with your organization’s mission. Agents are compelled to connect and contribute to achieve breakthroughs and change lives. Proceeding up the pyramid requires more intense effort on your part, too. Communications take the form of personal connections, face-to-face interactions, and top-notch events. You reach a smaller group but forge higher-quality connections here. The farther up the pyramid you go, the more likely it is that you’re engaging members, driving brand loyalty, and creating Agents.
If you’re like most associations, the majority of your members fall somewhere in the middle, in the Tribe level. Tribe members might comment on your social media posts or attend an event or two. They follow your organization’s activities and communications, but they aren’t yet the loyal Agents you need to thrive. This middle ground is prime territory for increasing engagement.
How to fuel the transition with engagement marketing
You can transition members from the bottom or middle to the top of the Engagement Path by following the Engagement Marketing Cycle. This journey has three stages: elements of build awareness, manifestation of inspiration and transition to reassurance
Elements of build awareness: Identify your mission by focusing on the one thing of most value you need your audience to know. Develop a strategy that clearly communicates your value proposition. Spark inspiration and engagement by creating a unified brand experience.
Manifestation of inspiration: Launch segmented campaigns using storytelling and compelling triggers and targets to drive membership, attendance, and engagement. Focus on the buying cycle to decide who needs to hear from you and when. Deliver on your brand promise with relevant offers, a killer event, and year-round opportunities for members to connect and engage (ex: online forums, regional events). Follow up on member case stories and publish your successes to reinforce your value proposition.
Transition to Reassurance: Evaluate your initial campaigns and the level of engagement of your base. Be nimble and ready to make changes if necessary. You must reassure your audience that your organization and event will enable their goals and open them to new possibilities. After your event, identify what worked and what could be improved for next year.
When we combine the Engagement Path with the Engagement Marketing Cycle, it looks like this:
Increasing engagement doesn’t happen overnight. Each step is equally important and takes time to achieve. You’ll likely have a constant flow of members moving through all the levels at any given time. You’ll also find yourself starting the Engagement Marketing Cycle over again each year to drive membership and event attendance. The important thing is to keep working on moving individuals to an engaged state. That way you’ll always have a solid core of committed, involved individuals to sustain your organization.
Where to start? Take the Engagement Assessment to find out how your organization rates on the Engagement Scale. You’ll learn your Engagement Gang profile and next steps to transition your members from non-engaged to engaged. Click here to take the assessment now.
How can you increase membership and attendance? How can you fuel engagement at your events and throughout the year? When it comes to marketing, what really grabs attention and compels people to take action? Rottman Creative exists to answer these questions and more for member associations. We provide marketing solutions that drive attendance and customer engagement by increasing brand loyalty. Our strategies are based on research and neuroscience, and they generate measurable outcomes for our clients.
Our codified methodology is successful because it’s based on how the human brain works, not on the latest marketing fads. To add more firepower to your marketing, we also focus on the buying cycle to deliver the right messaging to the right audience segment at the right time. All our insights add up to increased attendance and as much as 23% increased engagement for member organizations.
Why engagement?
We know engagement is more than just “showing up.” It’s about more than attendees. You need members to set aside their phones and their everyday tasks so they can focus on your event and the value they can give to it and get from it. You need individuals who are compelled from within to take action, work together, and tackle the hard stuff that leads to success in your field. And you need everyone to come back next year and do it all over again. The sustainability of your organization depends on engagement.
Why neuroscience?
The way to achieve engagement isn’t by adding more programming, speakers, certifications, and other “stuff.” It turns out humans are hardwired to connect, and we feel engaged when we make high-quality connections. We also feel engaged through storytelling, not primarily through straightforward facts and information. The research tells us that human beings make decisions in the emotional center of the brain, not the logical one. By tapping into human nature and the latest neuroscience, Rottman Creative can more effectively target and engage your base.
TNT, triggers and targets
To move interested parties through your buying cycle—from being aware or interested to actually taking action—you need compelling triggers and targets in your marketing communications. Triggers might be your products, events, and special offers. Targets include whatever you want your members to do, like register for an event or make a purchase. We’ve mastered triggers and targets to drive acquisition, retention, attendance, and ultimately engagement.
Not another Cheerios!
We’re careful not to overwhelm your audience with too many triggers/targets and too much stuff. Our approach is to focus on the one thing of most value your members need to know. Consider for example Cheerios. At one time the Cheerios brand included 16 different varieties of basically the same cereal. Rather than increasing sales and brand loyalty, Cheerios experienced a decline in both areas. Their brand became watered down with too many choices, and their customers got lost in the clutter. Cheerios is now moving toward a less complex brand with fewer options. We believe associations should take a lesson from Cheerios, to simplify and focus on one core value proposition.
Why Rottman Creative?
Choose Rottman Creative as your engagement marketing firm if you want measurable outcomes—like increased attendance and engagement—based on neuroscience and a proven, codified methodology. We guarantee our discovery & strategy work, so if you’re not satisfied, you get your money back. Contact us to get started with your engagement marketing plan today.
Nowadays you can’t have a conversation about event marketing without mentioning digital. As part of the Engagement Assessment Survey, we asked association executives how they’re using digital tactics to enhance their membership, attendance, and engagement marketing. The results show that while tactics such as email are widely adopted, other digital marketing opportunities are underused.
Take a look at the survey findings below. Then consider how you might enhance your existing digital efforts or add a new channel to drive attendance and engagement.
Importance of Email Marketing Automation
Survey Question: How important is email marketing automation?
Email marketing automation is extremely or very important to a total of 71% of associations, according to the survey respondents. The remainder, over one-quarter, say it is somewhat or not very important. An additional survey question revealed that nine out of ten associations use an email service provider to execute their email automation.
Use of Video or Motion Graphics
Survey Question: Do you use video or motion graphics in any of your online membership or event attendance marketing?
Video in particular has emerged rapidly over the past few years as a key medium for communications and marketing, and today over half of associations are using video in some form in their membership and attendance marketing. The use of motion graphics is more limited. According to the findings, only 16% of associations use motion graphics currently.
Interest in Using More Video or Motion Graphics
Survey Question: What is your level of interest in using, or starting to use, more video and motion graphics in your marketing?
The level of interest in using more video and motion graphics in marketing is somewhat mixed. The survey found 47% of associations have a high or extremely high level of interest, although 40% say their interest level is moderate or somewhat moderate.
The main perceived challenges to using more video and motion graphics are by far budget and other resources.
How Video and Motion Graphics are Used in Marketing
Survey Question: In which areas do you use video and motion graphics related to marketing?
Video and motion graphics are mainly used on association or event websites; although 61% use some in social media posts. The findings show video and motion graphics are more often used as part of attendance marketing than membership development communications.
Your digital strategy
First things first. If you’re among the 29% of associations who are not using email automation, it’s time to get on the bandwagon. Email offers a relatively low-cost way to stay in touch with customers and prospects, build loyalty, and drive event attendance and engagement. Automating your email with help from an email service provider further streamlines the process without costing you significant time and resources.
If your email program is humming a long, you might consider adding video or motion graphics to your marketing mix. We know users engage more with visuals than with text, and they respond better to videos than static images. If you’re already using these tactics on your website, consider incorporating them into your social media posts, marketing emails, or event app. Get even more mileage by including videos and motion graphics in presentations or at your event itself.
Yes, budget is a concern when it comes to digital marketing. But video and motion graphics don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Consider setting up a story booth or appointing a roving reporter at your next event. For many member organizations, short, authentic video testimonials from attendees can be more powerful than expensive promotional segments produced and polished in a studio. Motion graphics are an affordable way to bring your existing library of photos and images to life with a little help from a motion graphics designer.
Next-level digital marketing
Once you have a solid foundation of messaging, videos, and motion graphics, you can put this collateral to use in social media marketing. Facebook’s latest advertising platform, Facebook Pixel, helps you use data-driven, personalized messaging to raise brand awareness, attract new audiences, and convert browsers into attendees.
It’s easy for associations, or any business really, to get lost in all the trendy, newfangled digital marketing opportunities. Don’t be daunted. Start with just three tactics—email, video, and motion graphics—then build on this foundation as your budget and resources allow. Digital isn’t going away. The sooner you embrace it, the sooner you’ll attract more members and attendees and build engagement throughout the year.
Need help navigating the brave new world of digital event marketing? Contact us today to get started.
Attract younger members. Encourage repeat event attendance. Build passion and engagement among members. Change more lives. Every member organization faces these challenges and more when it comes to marketing for membership, attendance, and engagement. According to the Association Engagement Survey, most associations expect these challenges to continue. (A whopping 58% are pessimistic about the future of their events.)
Take a look at the survey results below that address common marketing challenges and the overall outlook for events. While it’s true these can seem like pretty daunting obstacles, everything’s not all doom and gloom. A fresh engagement marketing strategy can help you conquer these hurdles and keep your event growing and thriving.
Biggest Membership Marketing Challenges – Association Executive Quotes
Survey Question: What is your biggest membership marketing challenge?
Select responses from association executives:
“Attracting younger and more ethnically diverse members.”
“Continually demonstrating the value of an intangible product to potential buyers.”
“Conveying value of networking.”
“Engagement.”
“Finding prospects outside core membership.”
“Getting leadership to understand there are more pockets of potential members that represent different areas of the profession that have been overlooked in the past.”
“Knowing why people attend our meetings and figuring out how to attract new attendees.”
“Marketing to the youth.”
“Reaching members who are disengaged/transactional.”
“Redefining and persuasively communicating a robust membership value proposition.”
“Relevance and value proposition.”
“Retaining new/younger members and getting first time members to commit for more than just one year (those that join just to attend the annual meeting).”
“Retention after year two.”
“The right design to grab attention enough that a prospect is enticed enough to call about membership and review our programs.”
“Thinking of membership marketing as its own program.”
Biggest Audience Development and Attendance Marketing Challenges – Association Executive Quotes
Survey Question: What is your biggest event audience development and attendance marketing challenge?
Select responses from association executives:
“Convincing leadership to market/advertise outside of our in-house efforts.”
“Creating content that attracts a wide variety of attendees.”
“Engaging younger members to participate/attend.”
“Find out what their needs are and how we can improve our event.”
“Getting awareness of our events to people outside our membership.”
“Growing the audience and engagement.”
“Having so much for so many audiences and not being able to properly segment and target communications.”
“Having the time to implement a targeted marketing effort.”
“Helping people make the business case to attend.”
“Keeping them after the join as a result of attending a meeting. Engaging them with a local chapter and getting them to purchase other products/services.”
“Proper messaging — to register vs. once registered.”
“Reaching new audiences.”
“Understanding why people attend and figuring out how to get new attendees.”
The Growth Outlook is Mixed for Associations’ Largest Events
Survey Question: What do you see as the trend and outlook for large, leading association conventions, exhibitions, conferences, and other events in terms of growth and relevance?
Association executives disagree on the outlook for their largest events in terms of growth and relevance to their markets, although the majority are pessimistic. Consider that 39% say large association events are experiencing flat growth and have a stagnant outlook, and 19% say large events are getting smaller and are less relevant. On the other side, 28% have a positive outlook and say their largest events are growing. Lastly, 15% of the survey respondents are unsure about the outlook for growth and continued relevance.
How to conquer challenges
You might assume from these survey findings that events are losing relevance and fading away. But this is far from the truth. The real issue is that organizations aren’t proving the ROI of attending their events—and attendance and engagement suffer as a result.
Additional findings from the Association Engagement Survey indicate that many associations lack a clear acquisition and attendance marketing strategy—or they have a tired, worn-out strategy. Many ignore storytelling as a powerful engagement platform—even though it’s a proven winner. Other organizations know their value but lack a clear value proposition. These findings suggest that associations have plenty of opportunities to improve outcomes.
So what can you do? Let’s focus on that 28% of association executives who say their events are growing and thriving. These individuals prove that events can be successful. For your events to thrive, too, you need an effective engagement marketing strategy that demonstrates the value of your event. It starts with a clear value proposition. It also includes regular and relevant contact using compelling triggers and targets, curated member stories, and an authentic, human voice.
Overcoming challenges to improve attendance and engagement is well within your grasp. Contact us to get started crafting an engagement marketing strategy today.
Storytelling is a proven technique for sharing information, bringing people together, inspiring action, and exploring possibilities. Recently, neuroscientists have shed new light on this ancient platform. It turns out our brains engage more fully with stories than with information alone. We feel what the characters in the story feel—in both a tactile and emotional sense. This deep connection actually influences our behavior.
It only makes sense, then, that if you want to attract people to your event and encourage them to engage while they’re there, you should use storytelling. But, it turns out that many event marketers ignore this powerful marketing tool. The recent Association Engagement Survey reveals that only one-third of associations use storytelling in their event marketing. That means many are missing out on countless potential attendees as well as the contributions these individuals could make to their event and their mission.
Here’s the Storytelling Survey Questions and it’s Findings:
One-Third of Associations Use Storytelling as Part of Their Membership Marketing Approach
Survey Question: Does storytelling play a significant role in either your membership or event attendance marketing?
Thirty-three percent of associations say storytelling plays a significant role in their membership marketing, and 30% say they use this approach in their event attendance communications. Thirty-nine percent say they do not use any storytelling techniques currently.
Now, let’s switch gears slightly for a minute and consider this engagement question and its findings:
Event Attendees are Somewhat More Engaged than Many Association Members
Survey Questions: How would you rate your members’ engagement with your association overall on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 equal to the highest level of engagement? (And) How would you rate your attendees’ engagement with your association event on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 equal to the highest level of engagement?
The survey asked association executives to rate the level of their members’ and event attendees’ engagement on a 10-point scale. As the table shows, event attendees are considered to be more engaged. This makes sense as events often attract the most active members and important association management meetings are held in conjunction with the main programs.
How Storytelling and Engagement Work Together
Given the relatively low number of associations who use storytelling (about one-third), it’s not surprising that member engagement tends to be moderate to low and is only somewhat higher among event attendees. There’s room for improvement here! People need to be inspired to act, and one of the best ways to do that is through storytelling. Below is a sample story structure to get you started, along with some examples of where to use stories in your marketing.
Start Telling Stories
You likely won’t have any trouble getting those 8s, 9s, and 10s from the survey to attend your event and be engaged. However, most of your members and prospects will need some nudging to be inspired to attend and to be engaged while there. Your event marketing must prove that the value gained by attending is greater than the money, effort, and time it takes to get there. How can you do that? As the neuroscientists tell us, you can’t simply present a logical cost-benefit analysis. The numbers alone are just not inspiring or compelling enough to win over all those people rated a 5 and below. You need storytelling as part of a fresh engagement marketing strategy.
Begin with a compelling value proposition that proves the ROI of your event. Then collect curated member and attendee stories that demonstrate this value. Once you have stories, you can distribute them on the web, in email, on micro-sites, via digital marketing, and through direct mail to inspire and engage your base.
Need to increase attendance and engagement? Contact us today to add strategic storytelling to your marketing plan.
You’re probably investing significant time and resources to increase event attendance. Great! But are you also leveraging your event to increase overall membership? Do you know which areas of your conference and your marketing to enhance in order to drive attendance and member acquisition?
Rottman Creative recently partnered with Access Intelligence to find out how associations drive membership, event attendance, and engagement. The findings reveal a disconnect between what associations know about their attendees and how they use these insights to drive membership and attendance. Here’s a look at a few key findings we discovered:
Less than Half of Associations have a Clear Membership Acquisition Strategy
Survey Question: Do you feel your association has a clear membership acquisition and growth strategy?
Only 44% of association executives surveyed say their organization has a clear membership acquisition and growth strategy. And a similar percentage – 43% – say they do not have a strategy. The rest of the respondents are unsure if they have a clear strategy or not. The survey found similar segments of associations saying the same about their event attendance marketing approach: 46% say they have a clear event attendance marketing and growth strategy, 42% say they don’t have one at all, and 12% are unsure. These findings show many associations need to revisit their strategic plans. Many simply have their membership acquisition process on autopilot, following the same script year-after-year.
Most Associations are Missing Opportunities Tied to their Events to Increase Membership
Survey Question: Do you feel that your organization misses opportunities to increase membership related to your event attendance marketing and engagement? If Yes, please explain what’s missing:
Fifty-eight percent of association executives say their organization is missing opportunities to increase membership related to their event attendance marketing and engagement process. This is particularly an issue because one of the main goals of hosting events is to increase membership. Essentially over half of associations are saying a key aspect of their events is not effective, or at least would benefit from new strategies and approaches.
What’s missing? Here are select responses from association executives:
“Connection to membership value.”
“Focus is on attendance, not membership value.”
“Missed opportunity to promote association via social media, targeting a younger audience.”
“More targeted messaging to different demographics and groups.”
“No strategic plan. Staff resources limited.”
“We don’t have a complete marketing strategy.”
“We don’t use the most effective tool ‘word of mouth’ effectively.”
“We need to expand to a broader audience.”
Nearly 80% of Associations with Events Have a Good Understanding of Why Their Attendees Attend And What they Value
Survey Question: Does your organization have a good understanding of why attendees attend your events and what they most value?
Seventy-nine percent of associations with events say they understand their attendees’ motivations to participate in their events. This compares to 21% that do not have a good understanding of these motivations or say they are unsure.
Besides Growing Total Attendance, Associations use Events to Increase Membership
Survey Question: Which of the following best describe your overall attendance marketing goals for your largest, most important event?
It’s no surprise that most association events have a goal to increase attendance, but the other top goal is to use events to increase total association membership. Following these top two attendance marketing goals is to drive total exhibit-floor traffic and attendance numbers for exhibitors.
Enhance Educational Sessions is the Main Tactic to Achieve Attendance Marketing Goals
Survey Question: What has your organization been doing more recently specifically to reach event attendance goals?
To reach their attendance marketing goals, associations are mainly enhancing their educational sessions and providing more networking opportunities. The top three attendance marketing tactics found in the survey are: (1.) adding educational sessions, 57%; (2.) reviewing attendance marketing tactics and processes, 53%; (3.) adding networking opportunities, 51%.
What’s Next?
You likely have a good understanding of your audience and what they need and want. But if you find your organization among those without a clear strategy—or perhaps with a tired one on autopilot—it’s time to take action. It is tempting to add more educational sessions, different speakers, or more exhibitors. But first, let’s take a step back.
Members and prospects don’t want more stuff. They want measurable value. A savvy engagement marketing plan begins with an irresistible value proposition that proves the ROI of joining your organization and attending your event. Once you have a clear value proposition, you can build on it to drive membership and attendance with compelling engagement marketing.
Looking to increase event attendance and member acquisition? Contact us to help you develop a value proposition and a complete engagement marketing strategy.
Attendees don’t buy products (a.k.a your event). They buy outcomes. They don’t really care what you have to offer. They care what’s in it for them. If you can’t prove the outcomes of attending your event, your marketing will have to work much harder to drive attendance. It will cost you more time and money to get people to register. You will also have a difficult time getting people to engage during your event—no matter how many great things you offer.
When you promote your event you’re asking people to spend their M.E.T. (Money, Effort, and Time) to attend. In exchange for these three valuable resources, your attendees expect another M.E.T. in return, something Meaningful, Eventful, and Thought-provoking. But you need to go further. You need to quantify these ideas to show an actual return on investment.
Imagine if you could tell prospects, “Attendees on average see a $3000 increase in sales after they put our ideas to work.” Or maybe it’s, “Attendees save an average of $5000 on products and freight thanks to show-only discounts.” These real outcomes would be powerful reasons to register for your event—and to be engaged while there. An Attendee ROI Toolkit can help you craft a strong value proposition like these that proves the value of your conference and encourages attendance and engagement.
How much ROI is enough?
On average, your attendees should realize a return on investment between 3:1 and 5:1. That means if they spend $1000 in travel, lodging, and registration, they should see $3000 to $5000 in return.
Depending on your organization and your event, ROI might take one or more of these forms:
increased customer acquisition
boost in sales
efficiencies gained
costly mistakes avoided
deals closed
product or freight discounts
connections created or nurtured
free or discounted coaching, tools, or information products
free or discounted continuing education credits and certifications
While there will always be immeasurable benefits of attending your event, many of the items above are quantifiable. A little research will tell you how much consulting and seminars cost compared to your event offerings. Check in with vendors to see what show-only discounts they’re offering. Find out how much continuing education credits cost from other sources. Add up the monetary value of free tools and resources. All these data points will help you create a no-brainer value proposition to include in your toolkit: Attending our event will make/save you X in money, effort, and time.
How to assemble the ROI toolkit
You can further demonstrate your event’s value by asking prospects a series of questions that get to the heart of their unique situations. Start by walking them through their event-related expenses, from registration to travel, lodging, and food. Create a simple worksheet with a grand total at the bottom. This is your number to beat.
Demonstrating value is the more difficult portion of the toolkit. In fact, many conferences that already have an ROI toolkit fall short of showing actual value based on real data. You need to be so convincing that only a fool would say no. Stick to hard numbers whenever possible. And avoid silly or trivial items, such as “Free cocktail reception, $50 value.” Employers don’t send attendees to conferences for free booze.
Here are a few value-based questions to get your prospects thinking:
Connections
Who will you meet with at the conference?
Are there relationships you can initiate or cultivate?
Is there business you can close?
Challenges
What challenges are you trying to solve?
What resources does this event provide that will solve these challenges?
How much would you spend on these solutions (trainings, consultation, info products etc.) from other sources?
Opportunities
Does the conference offer discounts you plan to take advantage of? List the approximate savings if known.
Are there other opportunities in the conference city that you can leverage while you’re there (ex: site visits, client meetings, etc.)?
What resources does this event offer that you can’t get anywhere else?
These questions will help prospects (and their employers) see the tangible and intangible benefits of attending your event. To encourage repeat attendance, you might consider surveying past attendees to show actual ROI. Here are a few example queries:
How much did you save thanks to product discounts at the conference?
How much did you save on freight at the conference?
Did you receive any free tools or resources? What is their approximate value?
Did you notice an increase in sales after you implemented ideas from the event? How much?
Did the connections you made save you from making costly mistakes? How much did you save?
ex: switching service providers based on the recommendation of a colleague saved me $100/month.
Have attendees or prospects fill out the toolkit online. That way, you’ll not only convince them to attend in a convenient survey-style format; you’ll also gain a huge amount of information. From there you can craft strategic engagement marketing that will prove the measurable ROI of your event and its Meaningful, Eventful, and Thought-provoking value.
Benefits this year and next
As an added bonus, an ROI toolkit helps attendees come to your event primed and ready to engage. Since they’ve already anticipated what your event offers and how they will benefit, attendees are more likely to connect, learn, and engage. As a result, they are more likely to see maximum value from your conference AND register again next year.
Need an Attendee ROI Toolkit? We can help! Contact us to learn how you can ask the right questions to create an ROI toolkit that drives attendance and engagement.
Let’s face it. Attending your event is expensive. There’s travel, lodging, and registration costs plus time away from the office. Even if your event is really great, people might not attend because the costs are just too high.
You know your event offers so much value—so much education, career-advancing certifications, connection, and inspiration—that people would be foolish not to attend. Yet your numbers aren’t what they should be, and the people who do attend aren’t fully engaged. There’s a disconnect between the value you offer and the attendance and engagement you see.
So what’s an organization to do? You need to prove that the ROI of attending your event is higher than the cost. You need a value proposition to close the attendance and engagement gaps.
What a value proposition is
A good value proposition solves problems for your members and prospects. It overcomes impositions. It clearly illustrates the benefits of your event. A thoughtful value proposition that speaks to audience pain points sets you apart from competitors. It doesn’t “tell” why you’re better. It “shows” why you’re better using concrete data points.
What a value proposition is NOT
Don’t confuse a value proposition with a tagline, slogan, brand mark or conference theme. While these feel-good items can help you brand and market your event, they don’t show value or ROI. Similarly, a “Why Attend” letter that summarizes benefits and conference offerings is not a value proposition. This piece might come close to addressing your value, but chances are it lists too many “things” like sessions and networking opportunities. These things are not compelling enough to offset the costs of attending. You need more value.
Elements of a value proposition
If all this sounds a bit daunting it’s because you’re starting to see just how important a value proposition is to the success of your event—and to the sustainability of your organization. But don’t worry.
There are only three main elements to a good value proposition:
Advantage statement. Concisely state how people will benefit from attending your event. Be specific. If you have hard data, such as improved sales, money saved, and customers gained after attending, your value prop will be that much more compelling.
Substance claim. Tell people what you have to offer, to whom, and why. This will reinforce your value to members and quality prospects. At the same time it will weed out people who aren’t a good fit.
Hero image. The human brain processes images better than text. Create a unique visualization of your advantage statement to grab attention and encourage action.
Thought-provoking questions
To cover all the elements above, you have to ask the right questions. There is no substitute for knowing your target audience.
Here are a few sample questions to get you started:
What are attendees trying to get done at their jobs?
What obstacles keep them from getting it done?
What do you offer that will remove their obstacles or alleviate pain points?
What gains or benefits will they achieve by attending your event?
The answers to these questions will not only improve the way you market your event. They will also help you provide a valuable event experience that meets audience needs, solves their problems, and removes obstacles to their success. In other words, they will help you deliver on the promises in your marketing and fuel engagement at your event.
Have you M.E.T. me?
Your members and prospects spend Money, Time, and Effort to attend your conference, and they expect to see real value in return.
As you begin to craft your value proposition, consider these three questions your audience might have:
Money: Does the value I gain exceed my out-of-pocket costs of attending?
Effort: Is it worth the effort of leaving the office and traveling cross-country?
Time: If I show up and be present, will I be rewarded for my time?
If your conference value proposition does not answer these three questions with a resounding YES, then who will attend your event and engage with your organization? If you can’t demonstrate in your marketing that your event has measurable ROI, then people won’t come. If they do come, they won’t be present and engaged.
How to gauge engagement: The phone check
Your event attendance and member engagement are directly related to your ability to demonstrate your event’s value. Look around the conference floor at your next event. If you see too many people on their phones, it means they’re not engaged with you. Instead, they’re engaged with their technology. They are not present, and they won’t retain any of the information your events provides.
People engaged with their phones can’t see the value in your event (even though they were compelled to register and attend). You’ll have a hard time convincing these people to give up their money, effort, and time to attend next year. Your event—and your organization itself—will not be sustainable if people aren’t engaged. Your value proposition is the place to begin remedying this situation.
Need a value prop? We can help!
Rottman Creative has developed a series of questions to identify your audience needs and how your event will meet them. Once you answer the questions, we can help you develop a value proposition to prove the ROI of attending. Contact us today to get started.
Email marketing represents a big opportunity to drive event attendance and encourage engagement. As a platform for communication, it remains king across all generations. The recent Association Audience & Member Engagement Study shows that 56% or more of Millennials, Gen Xers, Boomers, and Matures prefer email over any other channel. If you’re getting just ho hum results from your email, you’re missing out. Here are seven proven strategies to improve your email marketing to get attention, drive event attendance, and build lasting engagement.
1. Relevant Messaging
Effective messaging has only one specific trigger and one target per email. Triggers include your products, events, and special offers. Targets are whatever you want your members to do, like register for an event or make a purchase. Choose triggers and targets based on what you know about your audience and where they are in the buying cycle. Avoid blasting your audience with too many offers at once because people will get lost in the clutter and won’t take any action. Mastering triggers and targets drives acquisition, retention, attendance, and engagement.
2. Distinct Brand Voice
Developing a distinct and unique brand voice is essential to effective engagement marketing, in your emails and across all your platforms. Try a conversational, human tone to best reach members. It should be authentic and approachable. From there, neuroscience tell us that stories inspire more than facts. Consider adding curated attendee stories to your engagement marketing mix.
3. Free Resources
A little extra insight goes a long way when it comes to email marketing. We use www.subjectline.com to test the effectiveness of email subject lines before hitting send. We also use World Data’s B2B and B2C Email Marketing Calendar to identify top performing dates as well as the poor performing ones to avoid. For instance, the calendar suggests you should avoid sending promotional emails on Mondays and Fridays, when readership tends to be low.
4. Email Marketing Automation and Email Service Provider (ESP)
The Association Audience & Member Engagement Study shows that 72% of event marketers see email marketing automation as either extremely important or very important. However, many fall short in using automation to its full potential to generate, track, and score leads. Seize this huge opportunity by investing in improved email automation. (We’ll show you how!) Additionally, if you aren’t already using an email service provider—start today. An ESP can help you create, schedule, personalize, and track your campaigns more effectively than your in-house email system. It can also send a larger volume.
5. High-Quality List
Without a high-quality list, even the best marketers will see poor email results. Take a look at the date contacts were added to your list, the size of your list, and the number of opens and clicks. You could be experiencing poor deliverability if your email addresses are very old or if contacts haven’t opened one of your messages in six months or more.
If your list is too small, you might also be falling short of your full potential. To increase your email list, consider purchasing a list from a trusted provider. The best lists, however, are those you create yourself using one of these methods:
create lookalike audiences within Facebook and target ads to them
encourage current subscribers to share with friends and colleagues
offer freebies such as an e-book, whitepaper and webinars on your website in exchange for email addresses
When building your list, keep in mind that it is always easier to engage someone who already knows about you or is interested in what your organization offers. Think about it: It’s easier to sell salad dressing to someone who already eats salad!
6. Segmentation
Creating smaller, specific lists from your larger database is a proven best practice for more effective marketing. Segmentation allows you to send relevant messages to different audience members depending on their unique situations. You could segment based on any number of factors, but here are a few ideas relevant to event marketers:
last year’s attendees
members who have never attended
lapsed attendees (members who attended in years past but haven’t attended recently)
Once you establish your segments, you should tailor the language of your message to appeal to each segment.
7. Optimal Structure
Images, graphics, and a responsive layout can affect open and click-through rates—which are directly related to member engagement, brand loyalty, and event attendance. It’s a good strategy to start with a white background and a one-column format for your content area. Add compelling images to draw attention, and embed videos for increased engagement. Consider creating a standard masthead for your event to connect the dots among messages. For a more effective call to action, use graphics instead of hyperlinks.
No matter the content, it is absolutely essential that you create an adaptive and responsive email for a range of technology outlets. This will ensure that your message is powerful and professional whether a prospect views it on a desktop, phone, or tablet.
When done well, engagement marketing means connecting in relevant, meaningful, interesting ways with audiences who want to hear from you. If you can pull this off (and you can!) everything changes.* Not only will attendance and membership increase but members will be more engaged. People will put down their phones, they’ll be truly present, they’ll connect meaningfully with like-minded colleagues, and together they’ll dig in to make things happen for your organization. Your email marketing is a key component in driving this deep engagement before and during your event and all year long.
Footnote: “Engagement Marketing 101 (Redux)”, Marketing Daily, April 18, 2012
Meet Engagement Alice. She’s one of the profiles you might see after taking the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment. If you’re an Engagement Alice, chances are you’re not meeting attendance goals, people aren’t opening your emails, and your website isn’t as sticky as you’d like. While you might feel a twinge of despair if you fit this category, don’t worry. You have tremendous potential to improve event attendance and member engagement. And we’ll show you how. Come on! A wonderland of engagement awaits!
Where to Begin?
Your first thought might be to increase the frequency of your marketing, update the look of your collateral, or add more speakers and certifications to your event. Not so fast. While killer event marketing and programming can help drive engagement, you ultimately won’t achieve sustainability unless you lay a solid foundation first. Let’s take a step back.
Clarity
The first step to increasing member engagement is to get 100% clear on the “why” behind your organization (NOT the “what” of speakers, certifications, etc). What is the purpose of your organization? More specifically, what is the ONE THING of most value that you need your members to know? If you aren’t clear on your purpose, your members won’t be either.
Strategy
Once you’ve established your “why,” you must clearly communicate it to your membership. You need a step-by-step engagement strategy of triggers (juicy offers), targets (calls to action), and tactics (emails, direct mail, etc.) that will light a fire in your members, encourage them to attend your event, and engage them to work together towards your mission.
In this stage we’ll take a look at your email marketing, social media strategy, web site, and other collateral to identify areas for improvement, tactics to add or subtract, timing, and your buying cycle. For example, are you sending the right messages when your members need to hear them?
Event Experience
Once you have a strong foundation, a clear purpose, and an effective engagement strategy, you must deliver an incredible event experience. Otherwise, your all efforts will have been wasted. It’s not enough to have continuing education credits, certifications, and notable keynote speakers. These are all things your members can consume without actually furthering the mission of your organization. You need to create an environment of high-quality connections and engagement to accomplish real outcomes.
Consider these ideas to improve event experience and create an environment that encourages engagement:
comfortable, inviting spaces for casual networking between sessions (Smell the coffee—and the inspiration—brewing!)
brain teasers, puzzles, and games scattered throughout your event to spark connection
engage the five senses: food, music, lighting, and signage should match the look and feel of your branding
special events to encourage high-quality connections: painting lounges, cooking lessons, and improv comedy workshops are just a few ideas
active outings to foster collaboration: rock climbing, go-carting, or a friendly softball game
a post-conference party on the last day to keep the momentum going long after your event is over
Engagement starts with inspiration
You can’t push people to do anything—that simply doesn’t work. Great marketing and events pull people in. They inspire and compel passionate individuals to come together for a common purpose. They encourage members to be present, participate, and get down to the business of changing lives through hard work and dedication. Your organization can achieve this level of engagement. In fact, you can’t survive without it. So how do you get started?
Take the Engagement Assessment
Find out where you rate on the Engagement Scale. Once you know where you are in terms of engaging members, we can help you craft a plan to increase event attendance and member engagement AND achieve long-term sustainability for your organization.
There’s an old saying, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” If attendance and engagement are low, they’ll stay low unless you make a change. Don’t wait for another event to flop before taking action. What’s more, once you achieve engagement your event attendance, membership acquisition, and retention rates will take care of themselves.
Join us on a journey down the rabbit hole to find out what you can do to drive attendance and engagement starting today.
Meet Luke Brandwalker, one of the profiles you might see when you take the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment. If you’re a Luke, the forces of connection and engagement are strong in your organization. You event is well attended and members really dig in to achieve breakthroughs in your industry. Chances are good, however, that you see a lot of gray hair when you look around the room. How can you foster engagement and sustain your organization into the future? You need the Millennium Falcon…er…Millennials. You need Millennials. And we know how to find them, engage them, and sustain your organization for decades. Hop in! We’re off to a galaxy not so far, far away.
Kids These Days…
We know, we know. Everybody is talking about Millennials. It’s almost like we’re observing a new species or dissecting aliens from another planet. The perception is often that “young people these days” aren’t as dedicated, driven, respectful, or productive as past generations. Or “back when I was young” things were different. Millennials just can’t seem to put down their phones long enough for a “real” conversation. They’re lazy and entitled. They can’t keep a job…The list goes on.
You might not be thrilled at the prospect of engaging with these lazy, entitled hooligans. But writing off the next generation will cost you big. If you don’t learn how to communicate with Millennials and, more importantly, ENGAGE them, your organization can’t survive. A closer look at just who Millennials are—and the significant value they can bring to your organization—is the key to your future sustainability as an organization. Ignore them at your peril.
Why Millennials might just be your ideal members
Pew Research defines Millennials as anyone currently 18 to 34 years old. At 86 million strong, they’re the largest generation in the U.S. and the largest share of the American workforce. They have some powerful common traits you can definitely put to use in your organization.
They’re driven by passion, not profits. We know that for your event to be successful, you need people to feel compelled, inspired, and engaged—not forced or motivated and not driven by “stuff” they can acquire. About 60 percent of Millennials are entrepreneurs, and many identify as social entrepreneurs. That means they work to positively influence the world even if it means making less money as a result. They’re really not “entitled,” many faced a tough job market right out of college and were forced to make their own way in the world. Imagine if you can harness this drive for your organization.
They care about community.
Sure, Millennials tend to have a better work-life balance than their parents, but that’s because they value community, family, and time for recreation and creativity. They’ve come of age in a time where busting butt at the office isn’t rewarded with overtime pay, a pension, or even job security. They’re happy to put in their 9 to 5 day, but then they’re off to an after-work activity or event (maybe yours).
They’re drawn to companies that give back.
About a third of Millennials say they will boycott a company based on their convictions. That means if you can’t prove your value and resonate with their worldview, you’re out. However, Millennials prefer to associate with companies and organizations that have a culture of giving back. (Not a bad fit for your life-changing mission, right?) They value authenticity, so an annual day of volunteering isn’t going to cut it. They want to see real change over the long term. If you can effectively communicate your purpose and value to this crowd, they will get engaged and stay there.
They love technology.
I can hear you saying that this is not a positive attribute. But just think for a minute…Millennials are the most tech-savvy generation to date. More than 85 percent own a smart phone, and they rarely put it down. They even sleep near their phones! They’re also socially connected, with an average of 250 Facebook friends each. All this adds up to countless opportunities for you to engage them 24/7—via email, apps, mobile advertising, YouTube, or social media. And when you do reach them with relevant content, they can share it with hundreds or thousands of people faster than the speed of light.
The problem with Millennials
As you might now see, “the problem with Millennials” is largely one of misunderstanding. Don’t mistake differences in values and communication preferences for negative character traits. The truth is you need Millennials, and the sooner you understand them—and how to engage them—the sooner you’ll see attendance numbers, engagement, and goal achievement increase at your event, throughout the year, and into the next decade.
Take the Engagement Assessment
Ready to defeat the dark side and solve your gray hair dilemma for decades to come? Find out where you rate on the Engagement Scale. Once you know where you are in terms of engaging members, we can help you craft a plan to increase event attendance and member engagement AND achieve long-term sustainability for your organization.
Meet Christopher Connectus, one of the profiles you might see after you take the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment. Like the famous explorer who came before him, Christopher seeks new horizons and untold treasures. He knows his purpose. He even set out in the right direction. But this Christopher hasn’t quite reached his destination…yet.
If you’re a Christopher Connectus, you probably have an established brand, clear purpose, and a solid membership list. But you might be falling short when it comes to opens, clicks, event registration, and repeat attendance. It’s time to fine-tune your strategy and your marketing communications to reach the New World of engagement. Come on! We’ve got the map!
What are Triggers and Targets?
To move interested parties through your buying cycle—from being aware or interested to actually taking action—you need compelling triggers and targets in your marketing communications. Triggers might be your products, events, and special offers. Targets include whatever you want your members to do, like register for an event or make a purchase. Mastering triggers and targets drives acquisition, retention, attendance, and ultimately engagement. To get started, follow these five steps:
1. Review your past email or direct mail campaigns.
Make a list of any triggers (or offers) you used in the past.
Your list of triggers might include:
continuing ed credits or a certification program
in-person workshops or online webinars
pre-conference sessions
networking events
pricing promotions, like group discounts or early registration specials
keynotes, lunches, outings, or other conference offerings
2. Ask yourself if your audience really cares about the items on your list.
Are they exclusive to your organization? Are they so compelling people will take action to avoid missing out? Add or subtract items to your list based on where you members are today—in terms of their careers as well as where they are in your buying cycle. For example, do you have a compelling trigger for a new member who is not very familiar with your organization? If not, you might add a new member orientation trigger. Don’t worry if your triggers only apply to some of our audience. You can always segment your list later.
3. Tell people what you want them to do.
Once you’ve established your unique triggers, you need to compel your audience to act on them. For this you need targets. If you don’t tell people what to do, they will do nothing, and your campaign/event/membership/engagement will suffer as a result.
Here are five common targets for event marketing campaigns:
Register
Sign-up
Tell someone else (word of mouth)
Visit the website
Make an inbound inquiry
4. Identify the most effective tactics to deploy your message.
For a lot of Christophers, direct mail and email are proven standby tactics. Consider social media, including video content, to build engagement around your brand. If you master these tactics, move on to next-level ideas like microsites or virtual reality experiences.
5. Consider WHEN people will be most interested in your triggers and targets.
Focus on two types of timing: event related (before, during , and after your conference) and the buying cycle (new member, first-time attendee, brand ambassador, etc). It’s also important to consider the frequency of your communications. Generally, people will need to hear from you regularly over a period of time before they’re moved to act.
What Does This Have to do With Engagement?
If you want a successful event that inspires people to connect and work hard to change lives, you have to get them there in the first place. The only way to do that is to create compelling marketing messages that move and inspire people to act. But that’s only part of the solution. You need people to care. They need to be fully present at your event. You need momentum to carry you through the entire year. You need pilgrims who return year after year to be uplifted.
Effective triggers and targets show your base that you know them and care to serve their specific needs. They prove you have killer event offerings and a community of people who can help them achieve their goals. They also show your brand personality, the human side of your organization, which is what people really connect to. Ultimately, solid marketing convinces people of your value, not just of the “stuff” they can snag at your event. If you can’t prove your value, engagement can’t happen.
Take the Engagement Assessment
Ready to explore the New World of engagement? Find out where you rate on the Engagement Scale. Once you know where you are in terms of engaging members, we can help you craft a plan to increase event attendance and member engagement AND achieve long-term sustainability for your organization.
Introducing Julius Seizer, one of the profiles you might see after you take the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment. If you’re a Julius Seizer, you rule at engaging members and driving event attendance, but chances are you struggle to break the acquisition and retention cycle. Your event might be full of first-timers and tourists, who come to consume your offerings and leave without furthering your mission. For long-term loyalty, repeat attendance, and overall sustainability you need to boost engagement. It’s time to seize your current momentum, build on existing strengths, and make some important tweaks, particularly in the area of high-quality connections. Carpe diem! Let’s get started building your engaged empire today.
What is Engagement?
We know engagement is more than just “showing up.” It’s about more than attendees. You need participants, volunteers, mentors, contributors, and word-of-mouth marketers. You need members to set aside their phones and their everyday tasks so they can focus on your event and the value they can give to it and get from it. You need individuals who are compelled from within to take action, work together, and tackle the hard stuff that leads to success in your field. And you need everyone to come back next year and do it all over again. So how can you reach that level of sustainable engagement?
Interestingly, the way to achieve engagement isn’t by adding more programming, speakers, certifications, and other “stuff.” It isn’t by having the best food or the coolest venue. Yes, of course, you need high-quality offerings to have a great event, but all these things will come to nothing if people don’t connect.
Hardwired to connect
It turns out human beings are hardwired to connect. When we connect we feel engaged. But not just any connection will do. Psychologists tell us there are two types of connections: high quality and low quality. High-quality connections allow us to fully express ourselves, they withstand setbacks, and they open us up to new possibilities. They also spark action and creativity.
Event marketers need high-quality connections for lots of reasons. Here are just a few:
attract and retain new members, even millennials
break the acquisition and retention cycle
build loyalty and encourage advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing
increase productivity and creativity to achieve goals and work towards your mission
drive engagement that sustains your organization for decades to come
If your event suffers from low attendance, poor feedback surveys, lack of engagement, or general lack of progress, you probably have too many low-quality connections. Even if your event is well attended this could be the case. Low-quality connections kill engagement, close minds to new ideas, and actually damage your organization.
How to build high-quality connections
Building high-quality connections (and eliminating low-quality ones) might sound daunting. The good news is that, as a Julius, you already have a well-oiled machine to help you. A few tweaks will get you on your way to connection and engagement. Try these four items for starters:
Boost your brand experience.
As we mention above, you do need a killer brand experience to attract people to your event in the first place. As a Julius Seizer, you’re doing a lot right in this area. Focus now on ways your event can help people connect. Do you have comfortable seating for casual networking? Do you have interactive sessions, like roundtable luncheons or panel discussions? Do you have a new-member orientation to welcome first-timers into the fold? Consider adding an online component to connect members before, during, and after your event—event-specific hashtags, online forums, or LISTSERVs are just a few examples.
Spread the word.
Consider energizing your marketing communications with more compelling triggers and targets to raise awareness, reassure the interested, and prove the value of your event. If your marketing is limited to email and direct mail, consider adding a channel or two. Social media, microsites, print collateral, virtual reality experiences, and YouTube can all help your members connect with each other, your organization, and your mission.
Time your communications with the buying cycle.
Your organization already has fantastic tools and resources that your members can use to change more lives. It’s up to you to connect each member with the help they need WHEN they need it. Strategic pre-conference communication not only gets members in the door; it shows your value and helps them see why they’re there. And don’t stop communicating just because your event is over. Maintain momentum and engagement throughout the year with regional events, active social media use, and regular progress updates.
Let your hair down.
Build engagement with a culture of authenticity, openness, and vulnerability. You can encourage authenticity with storytelling, idea sharing, group activities, and unscripted networking events. Unlike relationships, high-quality connections can occur in an instant—like in the hallways between sessions. If you build a culture of openness, you’ll increase the number of opportunities members have to connect with one another on really meaningful levels. Compare this to forced networking that simply encourages people to exchange business cards. Which one sounds more promising for your organization’s goals?
Motivation vs. Inspiration
It’s hard to convince or motivate anyone to do anything. For real engagement, your members need to be internally compelled and inspired to take action. High-quality connections entice members attend your event year after year and contribute while they’re there—not because they need a certification but because they might miss out on valuable interactions with their friends and colleagues. If you foster high-quality connections engagement will follow, and your event attendance, member retention, and goal achievement will all take care of themselves.
Ready build engagement and sustainability? Take the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment to see where you rate on the Engagement Scale. From there we’ll help you forge a plan to rally the troops, engage your loyal followers, and sustain your empire for decades.
Introducing Clark Kentington, one of the profiles you might see after taking the Rottman Creative Engagement Assessment. Clarks come to us with at least some foundation to build on. They might be a startup with a clear mission but no strategy. Maybe they’re an established organization who needs a fresh approach. Perhaps they have a great event that nobody attends or emails nobody reads. For lots of reasons, the Clarks aren’t achieving their full potential, but they’re ready to make changes to get there. If you fit this category, it’s an exciting place to be! From here you can flex your marketing muscles, boost engagement, and rescue yourself from another ho hum year. We’ll show you how.
Where to Begin
We talk a lot about Clarity, Energy, and Spark—and for good reason. If you don’t have a clear mission, a savvy engagement strategy, and an exceptional event experience your organization will not thrive. In fact, it might not even survive. But how exactly do you develop these key items?
How to define a clear mission
When your organization was formed, the founders had a clear purpose. Over time that mission might have gotten crowded out by “stuff” like webinars, speakers, certifications, and networking events. Today you know WHAT your organization does, but do you know WHY? Do you know the ONE thing of value you offer to your members?
To find out, you need to strip away all the stuff—the continuing ed credits, the keynotes, the seminars. These are all things that members consume without actually engaging in the mission of your organization. This is not sustainable. Take a look at these example missions for inspiration:
teach people how to be leaders
ensure no child goes hungry
achieve breakthroughs in cancer research
challenge the status quo
enhance childhood development
To truly engage, you also need to know your members. Who are they? Why do they join? Why do some attend every year while others come once and never return? Formal and informal investigation can shed some light on this for you:
What are members talking about on social media? in focus groups?
What did they say on your last post-event survey?
Who are they? (ex: age, gender, demographics, job title, years of experience, etc.)
What do they care about?
Which archetype do they fit into?
Simon Sinek tells us “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Steve Jobs said, “Marketing is about values.” Walk through these steps to clearly identify your mission (just the ONE), and you’ll find your “why.” Engagement begins with a clear purpose. Without clarity, the rest of your efforts will fail.
How to create an engagement strategy that actually works
After clarity comes energy. Your strategy is your energy source, the engine that drives engagement (and thus, attendance, acquisition, and retention). It’s fueled by your clear purpose but, in addition to the “why” we discuss above, your strategy must also take into account your buying cycle. It’s not enough to have great messages and campaigns that articulate your mission. These items must be aligned with the buying cycle to foster engagement.
The first stage of the buying cycle is raising awareness. If you’re a Clark Kentington, chances are you’ve got this stage covered. You have a database of members and interested prospects. But this list itself isn’t worth much. For real value, you need to move to the next stage of the buying cycle: engaging the interested. Imagine what your organization can achieve if you rally all the troops around your mission. With the right strategy, the possibilities are endless.
One or two campaigns and a handful of social media posts is not an engagement strategy. Interested parties need to hear from you multiple times—at the right times—before they’re compelled to take action. (Notice they’re not being “convinced’ or “motivated.” Your job is to ENGAGE them to want to take action.) We will help you identify objectives, craft a strategy, and determine timing based on your annual conference and other industry events.
Along with proper timing, it’s essential to tailor your communications to audience needs. A new member requires more information about your event than a repeat attendee, for example. A C-level executive needs different offers than an entry-level employee. You can achieve an added layer of precision in your communications by segmenting your audience and tweaking your messages accordingly.
How to spark action with killer brand experience
Your event is your mission brought to life. Here, too, the goal isn’t attendance numbers or a certain dollar amount; it’s connecting passionate individuals so they can change more lives. Read more about how to craft powerful sensory event experiences here. The big idea is to create an environment that encourages high-quality connections and engagement by incorporating all five senses. Do this, and the numbers will take care of themselves.
Take the Engagement Assessment
Ready to step out of the phone booth and soar to new heights? Find out where you rate on the Engagement Scale. Once you know where you are in terms of engaging members, we can help you craft a plan to increase event attendance and member engagement AND achieve long-term sustainability for your organization.
When we talk about your audience’s level of inspiration, we’re really talking about how engaged they are.
Do members just show up for your event…or are they fully present? Do they simply pay dues every year…or do they actively work towards your mission? If your members are not engaged, your organization will eventually cease to exist.
While you might have a sense that your members are engaged (or not), you can actually measure engagement using tangible data points. What you discover can help you improve your marketing, events, and the sustainability of your organization.
Here’s an idea of what you can measure to determine engagement levels:
total number of members
attendance at your annual event and percentage of members who attend
when and where people register (early bird, on-site, etc.)
email open and click-through rates
Google Analytics on your website
YouTube subscribers, Twitter mentions and retweets, Facebook likes and shares
Reasons why members attend/perceived value of your event
Member satisfaction with events and programs
A word of caution: Don’t mistake quantity for quality. A high rate of retention, for example, is not necessarily indicative of high engagement. Members might renew year after year because they get something—access to a directory, continuing ed credits, or discounts on certifications. None of these “things” sustains your organization or encourages members to work together to achieve your goals. High retention rates are a good start, but if you don’t inspire and engage your base, your organization can’t survive.
Along the same lines, the above metrics don’t carry equal weight when used to measure engagement. Email opens, for example, are important but not as telling as, say, clicks or social media shares when it comes to actively engaged members. Learning how to put a value on each data point can help you more precisely measure member engagement.
So where to begin? The Engagement Assessment will help you measure your engagement in terms of attendance, email and online presence, social media interaction, member satisfaction, and more.
Once you know where you are on the Engagement Scale, we can help you form a strategy to improve your score, build on existing strengths, or work on sustaining your organization for the next generation.
If you’re interested in how other associations with conferences are working to increase engagement, click here to take a short survey. In exchange for a few minutes of your time, you’ll receive a copy of the report and a sample marketing plan at no cost.
After the Assessment: Next steps to improve your marketing
You found out how your organization ranks when it comes to creating an engaged membership that actively works toward your mission. You looked at attendance, your event experience, email, social media, and your website. Now what?
Now the exciting part begins! Now we can use where you are to help you get where you’re going. Whether you scored high or low on the Engagement Scale, chances are there’s something you can do to improve your event experience and the way you market it. The ultimate goal is a sustainable organization of engaged, passionate members working together to achieve big things.
Attendance
Examining attendance numbers can help you break the cycle of acquisition and retention. How many people attend your event? Are they members or non-members? How many are first timers? Analyzing who registers can identify opportunities and timing for targeted, emotionally engaging marketing. It can help you plan your spark (a.k.a. your brand experience) to facilitate high-quality connections (1) between members.
When people register can hint at the perceived value of your event. If most of your registration happens during the early bird discount period, it’s an indication that members undervalue your brand experience. If many people register onsite, you may need to create more compelling offers to encourage advanced registration.
A look at repeat attendance can indicate member engagement and willingness to work toward your organization’s goals. If most of your attendees are first-timers, that’s a sign you’re not retaining attendees year after year. You may need more compelling speakers, special events, unscripted networking opportunities, and certifications to create more pilgrims and fewer tourists. You may also need to better explain the “why” behind your event, in addition to the “what.”
Event Experience
Is your conference viewed as the must-attend event in your industry? Are people excited and engaged while they’re there? If not, don’t worry. There are lots of ways to up your event experience and its perceived value.
What do attendees see and hear upon entering your conference? Do the food and drinks contribute to your brand’s personality? Is there comfortable seating for casual networking between sessions? Deliberately plan every detail to engage your audience in the emotional center of the brain, where 90% of decisions are made.
That might mean adding an ice cream social or a night at the ballpark instead of a forced networking event. It might include a video booth for capturing testimonials. Perhaps some of your sessions can be restructured as roundtables or panel discussions for increased engagement. Also think about relevant promotional items that can extend the shelf life of your marketing.
When it comes to substance, you want top-notch leaders with big ideas to keynote your events. Your sessions should address real issues your members face. The best way to know what members want most is to connect regularly through surveys, online forums, focus groups, interviews, and social media. What keeps them up at night? Which certifications do they need? Having excellent, irresistible offerings will compel and inspire attendance, rather than trying to motivate and push people to register.
Email
Email “blasts” are a thing of the past. A more effective approach is to create specific, compelling triggers (juicy offers) and targets (desired action) based on defined audience segments. You can use your current open and click rates as a baseline from which to measure your improved results—and to gauge your campaign performance compared to other organizations who hold events. (More on increasing the success of your email marketing in a future post.)
Social Media
It’s great to keep an eye on your social media followers, likes, and shares. But if you truly want an inspired, engaged audience, you need to encourage conversations and high-quality connections. Regular social updates with images, video, and relevant content can raise awareness, reassure interested parties, encourage engagement, and build long-term loyalty as part of your larger marketing strategy. A conference-specific hashtag can build excitement around your event. Keep the conversation going by responding to comments. Social media is an especially effective tactic for connecting with tech-savvy millennials. It’s well worth your time and resources to create a dynamic social presence for your organization.
Website
Your website represents a huge opportunity to engage members and encourage them to take action. But you’ll have to go beyond a one-sided presentation of information. Inspire members and prospects by emphasizing the “why” vs. the “what” of your organization, focusing on a clear mission, adopting a minimalist approach to text, and engaging emotions with storytelling. A responsive, adaptive design is most effective for reaching people across devices. You can use your current metrics of visitors, page views, time on site, and bounce rates to measure your progress.
Take the First Step
It’s easy to feel discouraged if you think you have a long way to go on the road to engagement. But, really, you should be excited and encouraged. Improvements in any one of these areas can have a major impact on your member acquisition and retention, event attendance, and overall engagement of your members. Each step you take contributes to building a vibrant membership that’s willing to work toward your mission and explore new possibilities for your organization.
Ready to take the first step? Let’s get started!
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
The perfect scenario for your organization: Your event attendance and membership are at all-time highs. Attendees are engaged and eager to connect. You’ve broken the cycle of acquisition and retention. Your members are so passionate about your mission that they tell others about your organization. You’re growing sustainably and changing more lives than ever…
Not there yet? That’s okay! You are not alone. Most associations with events are challenged to increase attendance and engagement.
Chances are your members and prospects are engaged on some level. But how much? Is it enough to sustain your organization into the future? And how might you move closer to this perfect scenario from wherever you are right now?
Our proprietary Engagement Assessment will ask you questions to help you rank your event’s performance.
The Engagement Assessment
It turns out, engagement is a knowable and measurable thing. We’ve developed an Engagement Assessment specifically for member organizations that regularly hold member events. Why do you need engagement? So you can improve attendance, build more excitement around your event, and drive stronger membership acquisition and retention. These targeted questions will help you identify your association’s score on the Engagement Scale.
Once the Engagement Assessment reveals your current level of engagement, you can better judge which areas of your marketing you most need to strengthen. No matter where you’re starting, we have resources to help you create a strategic engagement marketing plan that’s focused on outcomes.
Where Are You Right Now?
If you’re lost on the highway, you can’t head in the right direction until you know exactly where you are. The Engagement Assessment can help you find out where you are in terms of engaging and inspiring your membership. It subdivides the engagement-generating capabilities of your event category by category to identify your pain points and get you on the path to solving your most pressing issues. The assessment is completely free. If you need assistance from there, we can help you create a roadmap to get you where you want to be. Heck, we’ll even put gas in the car. C’mon. Get in! Let’s go find engagement.
Click here to take the free Engagement Assessment. You’ll have it finished in less time than it takes you to get a coffee at Starbucks. Based on your score, you’ll gain access to resources that can help you inspire your members, break the acquisition and retention cycle, and build lasting engagement. If your score reveals there’s room for improvement, just imagine the possibilities! If your score suggests that your association is strong and your members are highly engaged, you can build on that to sustain your organization for the next generation.
Millennials. You know you want them. They’re young, they’re tech savvy, they’re socially aware, and they’re eager to work for a meaningful cause. Snag Millennial members now and you’ll have a passionate, inspired base for decades to come. But just how can you gain and retain more Millennial members? Start by knowing your audience.
Who Are Millennials?
The folks at Pew Research classify Millennials those currently 18 to 34 years old. At 86 million strong Millennials are the largest generation in the U.S., and they make up the largest share of the American workforce. This group is the most educated generation in American history. It is also the most diverse, with 42 percent identifying as non-white.
About 60 percent are entrepreneurs. They’re making their own way in the world following the economic collapse and poor job market they faced out of college. Many Millennials identify as social entrepreneurs who work to positively change the world and give something back—even if it means making less money as a result.
Millennials are more connected to technology than any previous generation. More than 80 percent have a Facebook account with a median of 250 friends. About 85 percent own a smart phone, and they use apps over general web browsers by a ratio of 2:1. Many Millennials communicate via texting or online chat, even with their parents. They’re also more likely to sleep near their phones! Mobile and social marketing are huge areas of opportunity for marketers who want to reach this group.
What Do They Care About?
Millennials tend to be socially aware and prepared to act. Seven in 10 see themselves as social activists. Four out of five say they’re more likely to purchase from a company that supports a cause they care about. Three in four believe corporations should create economic value for society by addressing its needs. Additionally, about a third will boycott businesses based on causes they care about.
Millennials demand authenticity. They are drawn to organizations with socially responsible initiatives, but only if they’re genuinely doing good for people and not just for show. For example, a company should go beyond a single day of volunteering or writing a check to charity. Millennials prefer a culture of giving back and want to see actual results. (Not a bad fit for your life-changing mission, right?)
Among causes important to Millennials is environmental responsibility. Millennials are willing to pay more for eco-friendly products. They take buses and bikes more often than other generations, and they tend to work for environmentally responsible companies.
Millennials also value community and family (perhaps the result of moving back home during the recession). Their quality of life includes earning a living wage, but they also value time for recreation. Many cite the need for creativity in their work.
Know Your Base Specifically
Now that you know a little more about Millennials in general, up your marketing game by looking specifically at your own members and prospects. Here are just a few ways to get to know your younger base:
assemble focus groups
conduct feedback surveys after your event and throughout the year
track the results of your marketing promos to determine which offers, visuals, and messages resonate with this segment
perform demographic or data analysis
monitor attendance at specific events, workshops, and sessions to determine topics of most interest
capture attendee stories and experiences with a video booth
You don’t need hard data to know your Millennials. There’s a lot to be said for simply paying attention at your event. What are people talking about? Where are they spending their time between sessions? What questions are they asking at the Q & A? This abstract information-gathering can provide tremendous insight on how to serve your younger members.
Next Steps for Gaining and Retaining Millennials
Being a purpose-driven organization means you’re already a good fit for Millennials. They’re eager to make a difference in the world, and your organization can help them accomplish this. It’s a matter of connecting the dots: Raise awareness among Millennials, connect them to other inspired individuals, and continually reinforce your value through clarity, energy, and spark (a.k.a. your mission, strategy, and brand experience).
Awareness and HQCs
Simple as it might sound, one way to have more Millennial members is to go out and get them. Visit universities, speak to young professionals groups, purchase mailing lists based on age, and target the children of your gray-haired members. Once you get their attention, encourage high quality connections (1) through online forums, social campaigns, new member orientations, mentorships, or volunteer opportunities. Reassure their interest with inspiration:
Be Clear In Your Mission
Research shows Millennials like to see an organization focused on one specific mission, rather than spreading resources too thin to make a difference. Focus your mission, then clearly communicate it to your Millennials. Explaining the WHY behind your organization, not the WHAT, is especially important to this young generation.
Have Energy In Your Strategy
Use technology to your advantage. You can’t ignore social and mobile. Keep in mind most Millennials access the world via their smart phones, mostly on apps. Traditional advertising might not work. Maybe it’s time your organization had an app. Maybe you need a YouTube channel. Once you determine your triggers and the desired target actions you want your Millennials to take, consider a tech-savvy tactic for delivering your message.
Ignite the Spark Through Brand Experience
In addition to great sensory brand experience, consider a philanthropic or eco-conscious component to your event. This could be as simple as adding recycling bins to your event space or choosing promotional items made of recycled or reusable materials. Take it one step further and organize a river cleanup or longer term project that gives back to your community.
Why You Need Millennials
Millennials represent an ideal type of member for your organization. They are young and have the potential to be members for decades. They’re already inspired to change lives, willing to work toward a cause for personal fulfillment, and eager to connect. You just might have to text them to get their attention.
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
Imagine your event is THE place for connecting—for meeting like-minded individuals who are open to new ideas, ready to work together to change lives, eager to mentor others, and excited about new possibilities for your organization. Imagine your members faithfully attend year after year, and they tell others about your life-changing mission. They even bring Millennials. Imagine event attendance and membership are at all time highs…These wonderful things are the results of inspiration and high-quality connections, or HQCs. The sooner you connect people for productive, inspiring, uplifting purposes, the better off your organization will be.
What are High-Quality Connections?
Certain connections are just plain better than others. Some people lift us up while others drag us down. Some people put us at ease while others put us on edge. Psychologists distinguish human interactions as either high-quality connections, HQCs, or low-quality connections, LQCs. HQCs allow us to fully express ourselves, they withstand setbacks, and they open us to new ideas. In simpler terms, HQCs are strong, powerful, and sustainable. Much like inspiration, they make us open to new possibilities at the same time they spark action and creativity.
Here are just a few reasons why you need HQCs:
attract and retain new members, including Millennials
break the acquisition and retention cycle
build loyalty and encourage advocacy
increase productivity and creativity to change more lives
sustain your organization for decades to come
Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
LQCs by contrast kill inspiration and engagement, close our minds to new ideas, and leave damage in their wake. Consider how just one “bad apple” can destroy team morale in the workplace. Now think about how lots of these LQCs might affect the success of your event—in the form of poor attendance, lack of participation, failed networking events, and more.
HQCs vs Relationships
HQCs are not the same as relationships. Relationships are close bonds between people and include family, friends, and partnerships. They’re a powerful source of information, social support, and even health. But relationships are formed over long periods of time, and most people have relatively few truly meaningful relationships in their lifetime—perhaps as few as six. It’s simply not practical for your members to forge relationships in order to reach their goals and work towards your organization’s goals. You need action now.
HQCs can be created in an instant—in the hallway between sessions, for example. These micro-moments are defined not by their length of time but by their positive regard, mutual benefits, and sense of possibility. Luckily, people have room for lots of HQCs in their lives.
How to Build High-Quality Connections
Now that you know you want them, let’s talk about how to get them. Here are four pathways to forging HCQs with and among your base:
Be Engaged.
When members are engaged, they’re truly present at your event. They listen and participate, volunteer, teach, mentor, and contribute. They don’t just come for a certification and leave. You can encourage engagement with a killer brand experience at your event, and you can continue to engage throughout the year through your marketing. Communicate regularly with compelling triggers and targets. Broadcast emotionally engaging success stories and major milestones. Consider conducting feedback surveys or focus groups so you can continue to deliver what your members need most.
Enable Goals.
Your organization already has the tools, the people, and the knowledge to help your members achieve their business goals and change more lives. The trick is to make sure each member gets the help they need when they need it. Raising awareness is a good first step. For example, if you have a special session for CEOs, send them a personal invitation. Consider a new member orientation to help first-timers take advantage of all your organization has to offer. Don’t let connectivity end on the last day of your conference. Host regional events or maintain active online forums so members can help each other throughout the year.
Be Authentic.
Unless members are their true, vulnerable selves, HQCs can’t happen. Authentic storytelling is one way your organization can foster a culture of openness and vulnerability. Any forum that incorporates idea sharing is another (ex: panel discussions, roundtable luncheons, and Q&A sessions). Also consider unscripted networking events that allow members to let loose a little. A cocktail hour, golf outing, or game night might provide an arena for authenticity.
Enable Teamwork.
Connect inspired individuals to make even more magic happen! Consider creating an online forum before your event with different groups for CEOs, entry-level associates, or first-time attendees. Launch social media campaigns with event-specific hashtags. These pre-conference virtual meetings can help people connect better and faster in person. Interactive sessions at your event can facilitate teamwork by grouping people based on a particular issue they would like to solve. Incorporating a community project into your event can also build a spirit of teamwork.
High-quality connections are an essential part of the Inspiration-ConnectionDuality™. Humans are hardwired to connect, and we connect to feel inspired. As a purpose-driven organization you can fuel that basic human need and harness it to achieve your goals. Imagine the possibilities of creating HQCs among hundreds of inspired individuals!
Are you ready to tap into the power of HQCs? Let’s get started!
The words motivation and inspiration are often used interchangeably to mean “something that makes someone want to do something,” (seriously, that’s Webster’s definition). At Rottman Creative, we think there are important differences between these ideas. You need inspiration—not motivation—to drive event attendance, inspire brand attachment, and reinforce high-quality connections (1).
Motivation
Motivation involves an external force nudging someone to take action. It’s often a short-term state of being, and the end result is a given objective. For example, you might be motivated to lose a few pounds because your pants are too tight. Your members might be motivated to attend your event because they need continuing education credits to keep doing their jobs.
The trouble with motivation is that when the nudging stops, so does the action. Once your pants fit, you abandon your diet. Once your members get their CCE credits, they stop attending your event. They aren’t called to work toward your mission or advocate for your organization. They get some “stuff” and then they go away.
Inspiration
Inspiration, on the other hand, involves being called from within to a higher purpose. It’s often long lasting, and the end result is personal fulfillment. Compared to our pants example, you might be inspired instead to adopt healthy habits so you can live longer. Your members might be inspired to go from attendee to presenter or mentor.
Inspiration is a win-win: Members get things that improve their businesses and their lives at the same time they work toward fulfilling your mission and improving the lives of others. This scenario is far more powerful and beneficial over the long term than simply selling a one-time certification or workshop.
How to Inspire
For your organization, inspiration is better than motivation because it opens members to new possibilities, enables goal attainment, and fosters long-term brand loyalty and advocacy. In more practical terms, members who are inspired go beyond simply paying dues or showing up for your event. They set aside their phones, engage in mutual idea-sharing, actively participate, and tell others about it in person or through social media.
Inspired members strengthen and sustain your organization. Here’s what you can do to move from motivation to inspiration:
Tell Stories
Success stories inspire because they show us what’s possible. Sharing a past attendee story demonstrates to your other members that they can achieve similar growth, success, connectivity, etc. (Brain research supports this idea that stories, not facts, move people.)
For your organization, tap into the experiences of past attendees whose lives have been impacted by your event. Did they make a connection that skyrocketed their success? Did they solve a particular challenge by attending your conference? Broadcast these stories before, during, and after your event to foster inspiration on a brain-deep level. Read more about the power of storytelling.
Communicate Regularly
Even pilgrims go to church on Sundays. While inspiration comes from within, your members will still need to be kept aware of special offers, annual events, and any important accomplishments of your organization. Stay in touch throughout the year with a mix of marketing tactics: Newsletters, promotional emails, direct mailings, and sharable content can encourage action and advocacy.
Foster Brand Attachment
We know that emotions—not facts—drive most decisions. When members are emotionally invested in your organization they attend repeatedly, tell others, serve on committees, and achieve milestones. Research tells us that brand attachment is the single most important indicator of whether a person will buy a brand. Read more on how to create brand attachment.
Encourage Connectivity
When your members feel connected, they are compelled to attend your event year after year—not because they need a certification but because they might miss out on valuable interactions with their friends and colleagues. Planned/forced networking doesn’t necessarily lead to high-quality connections that inspire your members. Sometimes the most meaningful connections happen over coffee or in the hallways between sessions.
Consider how you might encourage connectivity through unscripted networking at your event. Lounge areas with comfortable seating, an outing offsite, an ice cream social, a photo booth, or a game night are just a few ideas.
Motivated members might pay dues and even register for an event. But after they get what they want, these tourists will be gone and you will be back on the acquisition and retention rollercoaster. Inspired members, however, are compelled from within to help your organization achieve goals and pursue new horizons. They spread the word about the great work you do. They feel fulfilled while they actively work to fulfill your mission. Maybe your organization can survive on motivation, but it can’t thrive without inspiration.
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
So far, we’ve debunked the myth that inspiration is unknowable. We’ve shed light on the powerful Inspiration-Connection Duality™. And we’ve helped you get a clearer picture of clarity, energy, and spark—the three key elements your event marketing needs to inspire members.
Our goal is to help you understand how to use inspiration as a best practice for your association. To that end, it’s time to talk about how inspiration translates into something tangible. In other words, how do you rally inspiration and turn it into action? Because if you want to build a more sustainable organization, you need people taking action at the right times.
INSPIRATION NEEDS A TRIGGER.
Research has found that people in an inspired state feel a sense of possibility. Psychologists call this goal enablement. It means that an individual feels enabled to make something happen for him or herself. That’s exciting stuff! But it needs direction.
To start, it needs a trigger. In the most basic sense, your brand is the trigger, or the thing your members connect this feeling of goal enablement to. But within the broad category of your event brand, there are many types of triggers. Think of inspiration triggers as the fence posts of your marketing campaign: they are the teasers along the way that support your overall message. You’re always trying to pull some sort of trigger when you communicate with members.
Let’s look at three types: product-driven triggers, networking triggers, and unique triggers.
Product-driven triggers are the traditional nuts and bolts of your event, and include:
Education (workshops, sessions, tracks)
Certifications
Pre-conferences
Before we move on to other types of triggers, let’s do a quick review of the elements of inspiration:clarity, energy, and spark. It’s not nearly enough to send a bland, business-as-usual email about the different tracks your event has, and call it a trigger. If you’re following along, then you know you have to build your marketing campaign around your mission (channeling clarity). Each email or direct mail piece you send that uses one of these triggers has to tie back to that notion of clarity. Likewise, you want to ensure that you’re following the strategic plan you set in place, and building the energy. And finally, the mention of a trigger alone is NOT a spark. You have to create the spark with captivating visuals, imaginative and concise prose, and a well-executed design.
In other words: keep everything you’ve already learned about what inspires members in the forefront of your mind as we move on to the other triggers!
Networking triggers including facilitated networking opportunities and organic networking opportunities. We say “facilitated,” because that’s the lingo associations use; but in fact, it’s really forced networking. It’s planned. As much as we advocate careful planning, you can’t actually “plan” connections, and you certainly can’t force them. In our work with associations, we’ve discovered that the higher up members are in an organization, the less likely they are to derive any benefit from the forced networking. Organic networking is a stronger trigger overall—the more opportunities you can create for it (and the more compelling stories you can tell around it), the better.
Your organization also has unique triggers. Unique triggers are triggers that are tied to your specific event. There are generally two categories of unique triggers: pricing promotions and special events.
Pricing promotion triggers could include:
Group discounts
Membership specials
Early bird rates
Giveaways and add-ons
First-time attendee promotions
Save the dates
Lapsed attendee discounts (someone who has attended in the past, but not for a few years)
Special event triggers are those pieces that are distinctive, and even exclusive, to your event. This includes the popular outings or related sporting or other events that always get a large draw. Special event triggers are terrific opportunities, because they tend to be the things your attendees naturally look forward to, and tell other potential attendees about.
Examples of special event triggers:
Keynotes
Opening sessions
Special interest groups (sigs)
Luncheons
Closing sessions
Concerts
Golf outings
5k run/walk events
“Night at the . . .” events (ballpark, racetrack, museum, etc.)
Fun and lively networking events (game night, art night, movie night, etc.)
SET CLEAR TARGETS.
If your triggers are the fence posts, then your target is the gate. It’s where you want to lead members, and what you want them to DO in the inspired moment. You’ve given them a trigger (a hint about the possibility that awaits at the event) and now, they need to act in a specific way.
There are five common targets for event marketing campaigns:
Register
Sign-up
Tell someone else (word of mouth)
Visit the website
Make an inbound inquiry
In every piece of communication, make sure that your target is clear! The copy and visuals both need to support the target, and lead people organically to the conclusion that this is the action they need to take.
Organize your marketing segments.
The last piece of the trigger/target puzzle is around the idea of marketing segmentation. Just because your members and potential attendees tend to be like-minded doesn’t mean the same exact message will resonate with all of them. You may have the same trigger and the same target, but you need to spin it slightly differently among your groups of constituents.
Profession/career type/degree type/membership type
Purchasing behavior (the “givens”—the 20 to 30 percent who always register, the potential customer, and the repeat customer)
At Rottman Creative, we talk endlessly about inspiration. Our motto is that it’s yours for the taking, and you have to pursue it fiercely, as if your organization’s future depends upon it (because it does). You may look at everything we’ve outlined above and say, “But this is all process stuff!”
Exactly. Because it IS a process—but it’s a process with purpose, backed up by the Inspiration-Connection Duality™. This process is what brings your marketing meaning, order, and peace—which is vastly different than the anxiety, chaos, and despair that aimless, uninspired, unconnected event marketing creates for associations.
ATTRACT PILGRIMS, NOT TOURISTS.
What you’re really doing with this process is creating an inspired journey for your people. You have to lead them through the process with purpose, because purpose attracts purpose, and aimlessness attracts aimlessness. It’s not just about the numbers you get at your event this year, it’s about next year and the year after that and the year after that, and so on.
For sustainability, you need more than casual tourists, who drop by from time to time. You need pilgrims—people who are deeply connected, and come year after year, as if making a pilgrimage. Every association lists “how do we find these people?” as the million-dollar question they’re struggling to answer! The answer is far simpler than most associations realize: you harness a process. However, just because the answer is “simple” doesn’t mean it’s “easy.” It takes WORK!
Are you ready to do the work of creating inspired journeys for your members and attendees?
If this piece has inspired YOU, we encourage you to pass it on to someone else you think can benefit. Forward this newsletter, or share on social media. Let’s start an inspiration revolution!
Knowing how to usetriggers and targets in your event marketing will result in inspired members ready to create high-quality connections (1), fulfill your mission, and ultimately become brand advocates for your organization. Once you’ve clearly established your targets and the triggers that will make them happen, you’ll need to sort out tactics and timing for delivering your messaging. You will also need to examine your audience segments to create optimal conditions for inspiration.
Your Tactical Toolbox
Determining the marketing tactics that you will use for your event will depend on your event, your audience, your message and timing. Common marketing tactics include websites and microsites, print and web ads, social media content, direct mail and email. When deciding, ask yourself do I achieve a better ROI with direct mail or email? Are my members more likely to respond to a print ad or a social media promotion? Do we need to urgently communicate with our base? Knowing your audience and examining the results of past promos will provide insights to help determine which tactics to use.
When the Time is Right
Now that you’ve decided which marketing tactics to use, you have to decide when to use them. There are two types of timing that you want to identify (1) pre-event, onsite and post-event, and (2) where they’re at in the buying cycle.
Most of the marketing tactics you choose will be pre-event, but it’s a good idea have a variety. For example, social media efforts during your event (onsite) can increase engagement and facilitate high-quality connections OR you could send a follow-up email (post-event) thanking all the attendees for attending! Which tactic you choose depends on where they’re at in the buying cycle. Is your goal to inform the unaware, inspire the interested or reassure the intent? Or it is to get them to make a purchase (i.e., register for your event).
Determining your marketing tactics and deciding on the timing will take time, but if done right the inspiration is endless!
Success Through Segmentation
Perhaps the word “segmentation” draws a collective groan from your marketing department. It’s easy for organizations to assume their audience members are basically the same. After all, everyone is united around your mission. But when it comes to communicating triggers and targets to your base, there are some important differences that can help you increase attendance, boost engagement, and create long-term loyalty. We’re not necessarily talking about having a dozen triggers for one promotion. In fact, success could very well result by having just one that’s tailored slightly to a few groups. Let’s look at three potential ways to segment your audience:
Archetypes: Knowing your members’ archetypes — broad categories centered around values and purpose — is key to providing truly compelling messaging that triggers inspiration and generates the desired target action. Read more about how we identify archetypeshere.
Profession, Position, or Membership Type: Breaking down an audience by these types of segmentation can make the individual your marketing to feel valued; that the message was geared directly towards them. For example, distributors won’t necessarily get inspired by the same ideas as manufacturers. To segment try swapping out the names (from distributors to manufacturers) and tweak the message to be more clear.
Purchasing Behavior: You likely have loyal members who take action with little to no effort on your part. These people are the pilgrims who faithfully attend your event year after year. They simply don’t need as much encouragement from you. Similarly, there are those who are ready to buy. These people have been informed and reassured already; they’re just waiting for the right offer from you. Your potential customers, by contrast, will need to be informed, reassured, and encouraged. Your lapsed customers, who attended in the past but have been absent in recent years, will likely need some re-inspiration to convince them to come back. Crafting the right message that is specific and segmented can play a big role in getting them to take action towards the target object.
Triggers and Targets in Action
Here’s a look at a practical example of trigger and target objects in action:
Annual Conference
1. Determine the marketing tactic:
Email #1: Registration is now open!
2. Determine the timing:
Pre-event; inform the unaware and inspire the interested.
3. Determine segmentation and messaging:
(A) Last years attendees – “Looking forward to seeing you again this year…!” (B) Attendees who didn’t attend last year, but have in years past – “We missed you last year…!” (C) People who have never attended the event – “Make this the year to attend…!”
4. Determine the trigger object and the target object:
Trigger = Early registration discount Target = Register today
The big idea is that these are all tangible, concrete steps you can take to create inspiration. By mapping out the marketing tactics, knowing your segments and identifying the triggers and targets your marketing will have meaning, order and peace.
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
Step one in conference marketing is to create an inspired state for your members.
Inspiration is not as mysterious as you might think. That’s excellent news, because if you are going to attract millennials to your events, focus on stabilizing your organization’s lifecycle, and move your event marketing from reactive to proactive, you’re going to need inspiration! In fact, make good friends with it now.
As we wrote about in the last newsletter, we’ve done the research on inspiration. The heavy lifting through the fields of psychology, business, and organizational leadership. We have some key findings to share with you—both from this research, as well as from our own learnings as an event branding agency in this business for the long haul.
Inspiration is the first part of the buying cycle.
You’ve built a product for a target audience . . . or, to frame it so it’s more relevant for associations: you’ve built a conference for your members. Great! Except, who cares? Literally, who will care? You have to inform the unaware. Any association with an email list has that task mastered. How do you move members (particularly those elusive millennials) from “I know about this event,” to “I want to attend this event?”
That is where the buying cycle gets exciting, because it’s the point at which you have to inspire the interested. And by “exciting,” we mean, if you don’t do it, forget all of it. It’s do or die. If you don’t inspire your members about your event, why will they care? And if they don’t care, why will they come? And if they don’t come, they miss out and you miss out. No one connects, and no loyalty or affinity is built. No joy. No lives changed. And then it’s back to the drawing board for the next event.
So yeah, inspiration is pretty damn important.
Inspiration is a process (which means it can be replicated).
As a brand, as an organization with a life-changing product, you have to deliberately encourage inspiration. Yes, deliberately. There’s nothing in the definition of inspiration that suggests it need be haphazard. To inspire someone is to mentally stimulate them to do something. What’s magical about that? Everything and nothing.
What’s not magical is the work you have to put into your marketing to make it inspiring. It’s like the oft-quoted line from writer Peter De Vries: “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” Your association needs to approach inspiration as a discipline, as a best practice, as a habit.
We’re going to explain some of that best practice in a moment. But first, let us tell you what is magical: the effect that inspiration has upon people. Inspiration awakens people to new possibilities, and it diminishes their worry over the more practical concerns that tend to bog them down (like registration fees and travel costs). It pulls them forward to something better.
Inspiration is not the same thing as motivation.
Before we go on, there is one thing to clear up (because it has tripped us up in the past, too). “Motivation,” as a concept, is often about the things you should do. You should eat more leafy green vegetables. You should shop local. You should like us on Facebook. Nothing kills that awesome moment of inspiration like a list of the things you should do. Something may be of a motivational nature—like a terrific attendee story. But if you set out with this idea that your members just need to be motivated, all you will wind up doing is giving them a list of shoulds. You’re pushing them, rather than pulling them in. Push millennials, and they’re on to the next thing.
To inspire members, your event marketing needs three key things.
Research from the University of Rochester found that inspiration has three overarching qualities, which we have translated into the three elements of an inspired state: clarity, energy, and spark. These three elements correlate directly to marketing.
Clarity comes from your MISSION. Focus on the one thing with the most value.
Energy comes from your STRATEGY. Your strategy outlines how you will fulfill your mission.
Spark comes from the EXPERIENCE. The experience brings your mission and strategy to life in your content, so it becomes real.
Start with CLARITY
When the founders of your association first came together, they had a clear purpose, whether it was five years ago or 105 years ago. Assuming your association has grown (if it’s large enough to be hosting a conference, then it must have grown), and new people and ideas have come on board, you’ve had to add on a lot of “stuff.” That means speaker series and webinars and luncheons and certifications and any number of other things—things that are VERY important. But they are WHAT you do, not WHY you do it.
WHY your event exists—or, the ONE thing with the most value to your members, attendees, and supporters—is driven by your mission. And most of the time, that mission gets diluted in the marketing, overshadowed by all of the WHAT stuff.
Let’s put it this way: does Cheerios really need 13 different types of Cheerios to reach consumers? (Check the cereal aisle; we’re not making it up!) Does that much brand dilution help them? Similarly, do you need 13 busy, overdesigned callout boxes and bullet points? Or, do you need a clear understanding of exactly what your mission is and why potential attendees would care—and a marketing campaign built around that? We’re banking everything on the latter approach being the one that works.
Is your mission 13 different types of Cheerios, or is it ONE thing? People can’t be inspired when there is nothing but noise, “WHAT” stuff, and options coming at them. Has anyone ever been inspired in the cereal aisle? Clarity is what causes people to feel the transcendence associated with inspiration—and to make clarity bloom, you need smart, curated, concise, well-edited marketing pieces, that are beautifully minimal in all the right places.
Build the ENERGY
Inspiration moves people toward a vision or idea. If your mission is the thing that gets their attention and helps your members feel that moment of transcendence, your strategy is like the engine that moves them. You build the energy of inspiration through the ways in which you communicate to your members and articulate your mission.
Don’t mistake us: the mere sight of a strategic plan is not an inspiring thing (we’ve created enough of them to know)! Rather, the momentum comes from the choices you make in your marketing. It’s the voice you develop to talk to members. It’s being clear on your attendee archetype (read more about our work with archetypes here). It’s the decision to welcome vulnerability and humanness into your marketing, instead of thinking you should stay above it. It’s awfully hard to move people from high above. Get down in the trenches with them and connect with them emotionally.
Create the SPARK
You can’t force someone to be inspired. You have to evoke it. You have to spark it. The spark comes from the way your content marries the strategy and the mission. Said another way, it’s how you bring the experience of the event to life.
Your association’s conference is not merely a set of dates, a venue, and an agenda-at-a-glance. It is about the larger experience, from the smell of breakfast to the sights and sounds of networking spaces to the feelings evoked in the sessions themselves. It’s sensory, to be sure, but it’s also related to the way the event makes them feel about their life. As any savvy brand knows, you are always selling a lifestyle. Hollister is selling the idea of Southern California surf culture (no matter that they’re headquarter in Ohio), Lexus is selling the idea of luxury, and Harley-Davidson is selling the idea of freedom, or as Harley’s CMO Mark-Hans Richer says, “We’re not really about transportation; it’s not about getting from point A to point B. It’s about living life the way you choose.”
What experience are you evoking? What lifestyle are you selling? It’s the job of your content to tell this story in rich visuals and sharp prose. Millennials are especially eager to understand the story behind the experience. The days of the old boys club and the secret handshakes are fading (exponentially more each year). The old loyal guard: by all means, treat them well! But don’t expect them to create sustainability for your organization.
Have clarity around your mission, harness energy in how you talk to your members and potential attendees, and then spark a desire in them to be part of event experience. These are the elements of an inspired state. Will you take the time to harness them in your marketing, so that you can truly inspire your members to action? Your next conference—and the future of your association—depends upon it.
Once you’ve achieved CLARITY in your mission and ENERGY with your strategy, there’s one last element that’s absolutely essential to inspiring your membership: a SPARK that evokes inspiration by providing members with an experience of your brand.
A memorable, positive brand experience inspires people to forge high-quality connections (1), explore new possibilities, and work towards goals. Additionally, it will help break the cycle of acquisition and retention because your members will become loyal advocates for your organization.
Your annual event is your biggest opportunity to create a spark. It’s your strategy coming to life. It’s also your chance to set up optimal conditions for inspiration, engagement, and—ultimately—mission fulfillment. Recent research suggests that the best brand experiences are multisensory.
Engage the 5 Senses
Consider what people will see when they walk through the doors of your exhibit hall. What will they eat and drink that might help them associate your brand with value? What kind of music will you play in the lounge areas—upbeat techno or smooth jazz? Will they connect better sitting in rows or roundtables? Consider whether your crowd is more interested in the smell of flowers or fresh-baked cookies. Do you have an interactive element, such as game playing or team activities? Every detail should be a spark of inspiration that offers value to your audience AND reinforces your mission.
Does this mean you need a sound and light show to attract Millennials, for example? Scented candles in the restrooms? Extra fuzzy couches? That depends on your Millennials. Nonetheless, your event does need to be welcoming, engaging, positive and memorable in order for it to be a spark of inspriation. Some gimmicks might be necessary, but avoid sensory overload. As we’ve mentioned so many times, you have to offer value for inspiration and connection to take place. If not, you’re just part of the babble.
It’s important to note that creating a spark of inspiration is not a passive endeavor. You can’t simply wait for members to show up and have whatever incidental experience with your brand. It’s your job to intentionally and deliberately craft a brand experience that will engage your members and move them to action. It’s within your control to encourage insporation to happen. (Cue Jack London and his inspiration-seeking club).
Use Brain Power
Sensory experience is backed up by some pretty convincing brain research. Science tells us that 90% of decisions are made in the emotional center of the brain. We also know that storytelling will get you farther than language when it comes to engaging people emotionally. Accompanying visuals are better than stories alone. And other sensory items—such as scents, textures, and music—can further enhance your message and create that spark of inspiration your organization can’t live without. What’s more, sensory items are powerful triggers of memories. You can use the same colors, visuals, smells, or textures in your marketing after the event to continue to engage and inspire members throughout the year. (Check out our past work on sensory marketing HERE.)
Learn To Surf
For a lesson in brand experience, take a look at clothing retailer Hollister. Walk into any Hollister store and be instantly transported to a beach in Southern California. Each store looks like a beach shack, complete with palm trees, beach balls, and sections for “Dudes” and “Betties.” Television screens display real-time surf conditions from Huntington Beach pier. The air is scented with the brand’s signature fragrance (available for purchase, of course). A curated collection of beach tunes plays over the speakers (also available for purchase). All indicators suggest to the shopper they have entered an authentic SoCal surf shop.
Hollister’s brand experience not only creates a spark that entices customers to purchase; it inspires them to adopt a lifestyle. In addition to making repeat purchases, loyal customers advocate for the brand through their appearance, behavior, music and even their smell. The interesting part? Hollister is not really a surf shop. It’s a division of Abercrombie & Fitch dreamed up in an office in Cleveland, Ohio.
The secret to success? It comes from a clearly crafted story, a well executed strategy, and an engaging in-store experience. The brand is so successful at moving people to purchase that Hollister’s sales have outplaced those of actual surf companies.
We’re not suggesting you fabricate a story to please your members. Chances are your organization was founded on a pretty incredible authentic story anyway. The key is to bring it to life with clarity, energy, and spark. If Hollister can be so successful with a fabricated brand experience, imagine how you can move and inspire your base with an authentic one.
All 3 Elements of Inspiration
Communications coach Carmine Gallo once said “Steve Jobs does not deliver a presentation. He offers an experience.”
Great brands and business success stories don’t happen by accident. The savviest marketers craft a story around their mission, they know their audience, and they execute a killer strategy that will engage and inspire. Lastely, they carefully and deliberately create a multisensory brand experience in which inspiration can take place. They feed inspiration by engaging all the senses. They fan the spark into flames by delivering value. And they achieve results in the form of loyalty, retention, and advocacy.
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
How to Cut Through the Babble Instead of Becoming Part of It
Walk down the cereal aisle in any grocery store and you’ll be bombarded by countless boxes in a rainbow of colors. While there are dozens of brands and flavors, they all contain basically the same stuff—sugary junk food that doesn’t nourish and leaves you feeling hungry in just a few hours. Adding another brand or flavor to the cereal aisle won’t help matters. It will just add to the clutter.
Event marketing often falls into a similar situation. Organizations promote dozens of products—networking, education, and certification among them—but they don’t articulate any VALUE to their membership. Members get so lost in the clutter that none of the messaging sticks and they’re left…well…hungry for real meaning and value.
Want to connect with more members? You don’t need another cereal box. You need LESS STUFF. Your members need CLARITY, not clutter. A minimalist approach to event marketing, believe it or not, will result in more inspired members, higher event attendance, and better fulfillment of your organization’s mission.
Identify One Thing of Value
We know inspiration can’t exist without clarity, a way of seeing things in a new light that compels people to take action. For your organization, that means clearly conveying your mission to your membership. The best way to achieve this clarity is to strip your messaging down to the bare bones. What is the one thing with the most value you want them to know? Once you determine what that one thing is, remove any “noise” from your marketing that might distract your audience. If your messaging doesn’t tie back to your mission, it’s clutter.
Know Your Archetypes
I can hear some of you saying “But our members are so diverse! How can we deliver one message that is valuable to everyone?” Start by defining your audience’s archetypes. You might be surprised that most of your members fit into one or two defined categories that will help you speak to them in meaningful ways. You can always craft variable messaging based on membership status or event attendance, but these details are secondary to archetypes.
Another strategy for determining the one thing of value is to look at your single biggest pain point (or Super Problem, as the pros say). If your greatest concern is reaching Millennials, for example, create a clear message the illustrates the value of your mission to this particular audience. Staying clear and focused on one issue can help you avoid the clutter trap.
How to Achieve Clarity in Your Marketing
Clearly communicating your mission is essential to the first two phases of the buying cycle—raising awareness and inspiring the interested. Present a confused or cluttered message early on and people simply can’t connect with you. They’ll get lost along the way! The key to a clear message that hooks and inspires your base is to know your audience well and to concisely articulate how your event will benefit them.
Take for example, the 99U conference by Behance. Tired of hearing babble about idea generation at conference after conference, the folks at Behance wanted to see some action and results. Their solution was to develop an event around the mechanics of idea execution. The simple value proposition of the event is basically, “Let’s actually get something done,” as opposed to, “Come get certified, see speakers, network with professionals, and attend happy hours.” The former promises value. The latter, stuff.
TED Talks are another great example of clarity and simplicity in action. Experts who could speak for hours are given just 18 minutes to present an idea, engage the audience, and demonstrate the value of their work. TED Talks are wildly popular with hits in the millions because they’re relatively short, accessible, and engaging even to a layperson. Sure, the experts have more to say. But if the speaker raises awareness and inspires the interested, mission accomplished. We can always dig deeper once we’re inspired if we want to learn more and take action.
Taglines are also a nice model for clarity and simplicity. Consider Nike’s three-word mantra “Just do it” as opposed to something like “Best-in-class apparel and equipment for today’s top athletes.” When it comes to inspiring your base with your mission and your event, you want the TED Talk version, the tagline version, the version that focuses on actual value in a clear, simple way.
Not the Kitchen Sink
You might think that paring back or eliminating elements from promotions is a terrible idea. After all, your organization is doing some pretty exciting things, and you want to tell the world! Resist the urge to include everything and the kitchen sink. Keep in mind that a clear, minimalist approach doesn’t take away meaning. It simply helps you get to the main point with laser focus—to cut through the babble and inspire your membership by delivering value.
Enough with the Stuff!
Modern consumer culture buys into the lie that accumulating things will make us happier, better people. We have a passion to possess as much as possible, rather than focusing on what makes us feel fulfilled. This “more stuff” idea spills over into our roles as event marketers. We often assume more is better when in fact LESS might be just what you need to go from Ho Hum to Hell Yeah. Clarity is key to inspiring your members, fostering high-quality connections (1), and advancing your mission.
(1) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Rottman Creative goes after inspiration with a club.
We feel a level of intensity around inspiration that’s as wild and untamed as Jack London’s Yukon Territory. Everything we have always done has been about chasing inspiration. We said from the very beginning, people need to be inspired to act. It’s who we are and what we do for our clients.
Something interesting happened though. The more we worked to infuse inspiration into event marketing campaigns, the more we found ourselves talking about connection. Our clients needed to inspire their members. But equally important was their members’ need to connect. Connection, we saw, was the twin desire of inspiration. People inspire to connect, and they connect to be inspired.
This Inspiration-Connection Duality™: it’s big, it’s powerful, and it’s part of every buying cycle.
We have been living it and sharing it. We know that this duality is what helps associations grow, thrive, and change their members’ lives. When new clients would come to us, as part of the discovery phase, we’d audit their past marketing, and we could plainly see the campaigns that worked and the campaigns that didn’t. They would talk to us about their struggles to attract millennials (and their fear of being unsustainable without them), about being perpetually stuck on the membership acquisition and retention roller coaster, and about their inability to get out of “reaction” mode when the latest marketing tool or social media platform came along. We could plainly see that their problems were failures of inspiration and failures of connection.
Surely though, there was more to this than a gut feeling? Could there be a science behind it? Data? A meaningful and agreed-upon way to define this seemingly unknowable Mobius strip linking inspiration and connection? We took a step back, and realized that we needed a deeper understanding of this Inspiration-Connection Duality™. We set out to understand it—not just at the level of the heart, but scientifically.
First, we dove into inspiration, a concept that floats around in space, finds its way into lines of poetry, buddies around with muses and supernatural beings, and is plastered all over Pinterest. But what does it truly mean to inspire, or to be inspired? What do associations need to do to inspire people? Then, we turned our brains to connection, the domain of quantum physicists, biologists, and psychologists alike. How do people connect? What are the elements of connection? Why is there so much disconnection? And what do inspired and connected members do that non-inspired and non-connected members don’t do?
We took on these questions with purpose and focus. And we found answers.
Inspiration is not unknowable. It is quite knowable. It’s replicable. It’s scalable. And it is science. The same is true of connection. We are, in fact, wired to connect. Yet so often, we belie our own DNA, our own atomic structure, and find ourselves disconnected.
In our findings, we discovered that there are certain things that MUST be in place for inspiration to occur, and there are certain ways that inspiration actually moves people toward things. (1)
We also found that elusive bridge between inspiration and connection. We knew the connection piece was central, but we struggled to articulate its relationship to inspiration—knowing only it was part of this duality. We now understand not only the role of connection, but also what creates the high-quality connections that make events thrive—and the low-quality connections that detract, leaving damage in their wake.(2) We understand why those millennials aren’t interested, why associations can’t get themselves off the rollercoaster, and why they spin their wheels with their marketing efforts.
We realize these things, and this is the crux of what you need to understand:
Your event marketing has a big job to do. It must harness the specific things research shows are needed for inspiration to happen. Do this, and you’ve enabled people to create the all-important high-quality connections. And THAT is? the formula for greater impact and sustainability. THAT is how you get off the roller coaster. THAT is how you bring in the next generation and continue to change lives.
If we were fierce in stalking inspiration and connection before, now we are positively howling. Our own call of the wild is, “Hell Yeah!” We will bring what we have learned to every association that is brave enough to hear it and join us in our howl! And, as always, we will bring this knowledge to bear on every piece of marketing we do for our clients. That’s not a promise we make lightly. Get your club and let’s go! We have some inspiration to chase, and some connections to make.
Hell Yeah!
(1) Thrash, T.M., & Elliot, A.J. (2003). Inspiration as a psychological construct. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 871-889. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.871
(2) Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. (2003). The power of high-quality connections. Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline, 3, 263-278.
This is the first of several pieces we will write about inspiration and connection. Our goal is to help you digest it in pieces, in nuggets that you can relate to with your own brand and event. What’s ahead in the coming months? Here are just a few of the topics we’ll be diving into.
The three key ingredients you absolutely need to inspire members.
Understanding the role of trigger objects and target objects in inspiration.
What’s The Inspirational Scale and why should your association care about it?
The bridge from inspiration to connection that all associations need to cross.
What are high-quality connections, and how do you harness them for your marketing?
The true cause of low-quality connections (and the damage they do to your members and your event).
Tap into the Power of Human Connectivity to Attract Long-Term Members
In their book The Blue Zones, authors Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain identified regions of the world where people live exceptionally long lives, many over 100 years. Not only are people living longer in these regions; they have fewer illnesses and enjoy more quality years of life. Once the authors narrowed down these “longevity hotspots”—from Japan to California—they looked for common characteristics that contributed to people’s long lives. They discovered just six key factors, one which was social engagement.
Hardwired to Connect
From our early origins, human beings have been herd animals, wandering in groups before eventually creating settlements and cities. Congregating kept us safe from predators, starvation, and the elements. Even with these ancient pressures long gone, we still feel the need to gather today—in churches, in stadiums, in book clubs, at sci-fi conventions, and in member organizations. We need to belong. And, according to the The Blue Zones, we’re better for it.
Among many benefits, including health and happiness, being part of a group makes us feel secure and more likely to show our true colors, thus facilitating even deeper, more meaningful connections with others. Vulnerability researcher Brené Brown put it this way: “Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.”
Belonging Hypothesis
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary developed a “belonging hypothesis” that suggests humans are hardwired to form bonds and are reluctant to break them. That means once you hook a member, you’re likely to keep them. The psychologists also pointed out that people prefer a few close relationships rather than many casual friendships. You must prove your value to members or they won’t have room for you in their circle.
Baumeister and Leary suggest two criteria for developing a sense of belonging:
frequent, positive interactions with the same individuals
engaging in these interactions within a framework of long-term, stable care and concern
Note that frequency alone isn’t enough to draw people in. Interaction with your members must be positive, and you must exhibit stability and genuine concern for their interests (not just furthering your own). If you’re pumping out regular e-blasts without considering the needs of your base, people won’t feel connected to you. They won’t let you in their loop and they won’t join yours.
Inspiring Connectivity
Our need to belong and connect is one reason member organizations exist. You offer security, support, and concern for people who are looking for those same things. People thrive in groups—but not just any group. That’s where inspiration comes in. Tell your stories, resonate with audience worldviews, draw people to you, and you’ll build positive, beneficial connections that last for years and years.
We’re often told “A picture is worth 1000 words,” but we seldom stop to think about why that’s true.
Psychologists explain that when we see an image, our brain automatically places it in a greater context. We look for related objects. We scan past memories to draw associations with the image and make connections. We see a scene, not just an object. This phenomenon, known as Perception of Scene Gist or Scene Perception, explains why images are powerful triggers of emotion, connectivity, and decision-making.
Research conducted in 2008 by psychologists Monica Castelhano and John Henderson indicated that color further enhances our understanding of a scene and the speed of our understanding compared to black and white images.
Additional research shines light on just how powerful visual communication is compared to text:
Visual Power By the Numbers:
90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual
40% of people respond better to visual info than text
70% of all your sensory receptors are in the eyes
People remember 80% of what they see and do and only 20% of what they read
Color visuals increase willingness to read by 80%
Our tendency toward visual communication is reflected in our current social media habits. Primarily visual platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest are among the fastest growing social media outlets today.
Every minute of every day:
8333 videos are shared on Vine
3472 images get pinned on Pinterest
216,000 images appear on Instagram
72 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube
All this data adds up to a pretty compelling case for a strong visual presence, online and off.
But where to begin?
Your visuals are an extension of your authentic brand story—a story you carefully construct to attract like-minded members and invite them into your loop of connectivity and inspiration. While consistency is important to ensure brand recognition, it doesn’t necessarily create a powerful, emotional connection with your audience. Choose images that do some “heavy lifting” to draw in members and inspire them with visual stories.
When you move your brand to online spaces, it’s wise to remember that human nature hasn’t changed but technology certainly has. To some extent, each platform influences our stories and our visual communication. You must remain true to your brand story, but you also have to satisfy algorithms to ensure your content actually gets viewed.
On Facebook, that means you need video. Recent changes announced by the platform suggest that images alone won’t help your business page views. Video proves your relevancy and increases your exposure. Videos on Facebook are shared 12 times more often than links or text posts combined.
Regardless of the platform, compelling visuals encourage sharing, a.k.a. the sincerest form of flattery. This is another opportunity for you to fuel the loop of connectivity and inspiration.
Don’t be afraid to update your images. You risk breaking the cycle of inspiration and connection when your look is outdated or irrelevant. If members can no longer relate to what they see, they’re not likely to tell themselves—or anyone else—a good story about your organization and its value.
You Still Need a Story
Of course visuals alone won’t draw members to your organization or fill your seats for a specific event. You still need stories to continue the loop of connection and inspiration. Google’s current algorithm actually favors web pages with 500 words of text or more and blog posts with 1600 words. Along with the search engines, human beings also need written content to help understand your greater brand story and the value you offer—to answer their question: “What’s in it for me?”
But words alone can’t accomplish all this either. Compelling, consistent visuals are an essential piece of your brand story. Combined with vivid storytelling, they make for seriously effective marketing as well as member engagement and connectivity.
You don’t want just anyone to join your organization. You want the right people who are eager to connect with your help. They are looking for you, and they’re hungry for inspiration and connection (even if they aren’t fully aware). Your brand visuals are a huge indicator that they’ve come to the right place, that they’ve found their tribe, and that great things are about to happen. If you’ve been getting just average results from your marketing, it might be time to up your visual game.
How to Drive your Organization’s Life-Changing Work by Harnessing the power of Connections
Did you know you have traditional intelligence, emotional intelligence, and connectional intelligence? Researcher Erica Dhawan partnered with business strategist Saj-nicole Joni to identify how relationships can drive innovation and breakthroughs. What they discovered was connectional intelligence.
Beyond IQ and emotional intelligence, connectional intelligence relies on conversations and community to generate results. The team explains that while connectivity is an innate characteristic in humans, connectional intelligence “requires intentional use to be unlocked.”
Here are a few ways you can use your connectional intelligence to rally members, drive attendance, inspire connectivity, and achieve your organization’s goals:
1. Know your audience AND the current situation in the industry.
To rally people around a cause, you need to know a lot about them, what their concerns are, and what’s going on in the industry and in the world around you. Identify how what you’re doing fits into the bigger picture. Dhawan calls this idea “understanding your context.” For example, if your members struggle to do business in a particular arena, do they need PR and marketing help or do they need to lobby community leaders for a better business environment?
2. Don’t be afraid of difficult conversations.
our organization exists to change lives. You can’t accomplish meaningful outcomes if you don’t dig deep to get at the heart of your members’ concerns. Ask tough questions. Investigate. Take feedback to heart. Rehashing the existing conversation isn’t enough. Talk about the topics people are afraid to bring up. Be vulnerable and be amazed at what you uncover.
3. Invite people into your loop.
Once you’re clear about your context and mission, get others on board. Engage people emotionally with dynamic storytelling campaigns over email, direct mail, and social media. Sponsor events that matter to your membership. Ask for volunteers. Encourage participation at your annual events or at smaller local events throughout the year. When people feel connected they’re more likely to be inspired by your message, which fuels a cycle of connection and inspiration.
Using your connectional intelligence means you’ll have to cut through the “noise” of competing marketing messages and demands on your members’ time if you want to be heard. Knowing your audience and telling stories that resonate with their worldviews is a great start. Once they’re listening, your job is to continually inspire and connect so you can further your organization’s core mission.
Consistent branding is essential to connect all the people and parts of your organization. You need the same look and feel whether your members find you online or in line for the restroom. Consistent branding tells your members they’ve come to right place. But that doesn’t mean they’ll actually feel connected and inspired when they get there.
Once you have an established brand and an authentic brand story, it’s time to invite your members into the loop, where they can forge an emotional connection with your organization and each other. You need this connectivity not only to fill seats and build lasting loyalty but to inspire members and enable the life-changing work of your organization.
Here are 5 ways to get connecting:
1. Go beyond branding.
If your event theme is superheroes, imagine how connected everyone would feel if you handed out superhero capes for your opening reception. Promotional items have a shelf life that your other collateral probably doesn’t have. Wearables and vehicle decals are like little lighthouses for your organization. Get the most bang for your buck by giving true conversation pieces that unite your members.
2. Build online communities, not just online presence.
Your website is a repository of information—events calendar, key personnel bios, your mission statement, maybe even a blog. It is NOT inherently a place for people to forge meaningful, productive, emotional connections. For this you will need a forum that allows for conversation. Consider social media, a LISTSERV, Basecamp, or other platform that permits an exchange of ideas rather than a one-sided presentation of facts.
3. Organize special events at your conference.
Your whole tribe is already in town for your event. Why not make the most of it by adding unscripted networking opportunities? You might schedule a happy hour at a local watering hole or organize a first-timers orientation to welcome new members. Consider an “after dark” concert or entertainer to extend connectivity into the evenings.
4. Organize special events throughout the year.
Supplement annual national events with smaller regional affairs throughout the year. This might mean you host mini conferences or workshops in a few centrally located cities. It could also be much simpler. Consider sponsoring a team for a 5k or organizing a neighborhood cleanup day. These simple events can facilitate powerful connections among members by bringing them together for a common cause.
5. Tell stories. Before, during, and after events and throughout the year, tell stories.
Share them over email, on your website and blog, through the mail, and on social media. Feature your members, your staff, and anyone else touched by the work your organization does. Remember that when people hear a story they actually feel as though they are experiencing the events for themselves. Maintain a regular schedule to remind members of your value all year long.
It is interesting to note that we often use the verb “forge” when talking about connections. Forging connections implies effort and action. Connections don’t just happen; they must be made between your members and your organization. How will you fuel the fires of connectivity?
Every year, the folks at TED Talks award a $1 million TED Prize to “a leader with a bold, innovative vision for sparking global change.” The money is intended to help winners “inspire the world” by making one ambitious “wish” come true. Past winners include an undersea explorer, educational researcher, epidemiologist, and astronomer, among others. The 2015 prize went to a storyteller, Dave Isay of StoryCorps.
Everyone Has a Story
StoryCorps collects and archives 40-minute interviews between two everyday people, usually friends or family members. Any topic is fair game. The project is based on the premise that everyone has a story and every life matters. Interviews might include general questions, such as a child asking a parent, “What’s the best advice you ever got?” They might be more specific. In one interview, a mother recounts her journey crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Another features the story of two parents who lost their son to a rare childhood illness.
To date 60,000 interviews with more than 90,000 participants have been recorded. Currently story recording is limited to select locations in the U.S. The TED prize will help Isay expand StoryCorp internationally.
If you’d like to hear some of the stories, you can tune in weekly to NPR. You can also visit www.storycorp.org to browse featured stories. The interviews are so important to American history they’re all stored in the Library of Congress. Isay suspects he curates the largest collection of the human voice every recorded.
Do Stories Really Matter?
It might seem like stories couldn’t possibly be as important as environmental conservation, modern medicine, or scientific research. Here’s an explanation from StoryCorps’ website that sheds some light on just how powerful stories are:
“We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters. At the same time, we are creating an invaluable archive for future generations.”
Isay imagines incredibly powerful applications of storytelling—resolving wars, documenting history, combating prejudice, sharing wisdom, and more—all possible through simple, authentic human connectivity.
Why You Should Take Notice
It’s remarkable that the 2015 TED prize recognized the value of storytelling and its potential to change the world. We should take notice. Imagine how collecting and documenting your organization’s stories might change your community, your industry, or an even larger circle. Imagine if you could preserve the collective wisdom of your grey-haired members who are about to retire and take all their knowledge with them. Or maybe you should preserve the perspective of the next generation—to determine how you can best serve them. Who might you attract? How many lives might you change?
Drive Attendance at your Next Event with a Visually Compelling Fact Sheet
1. Data is intimidating.
Data alone won’t fill seats at your event. You need to create a story around your data so members can easily grasp it and act upon it.
2. Most people are visual learners.
Research suggests that color visuals increase willingness to read by 80%. Visuals also boost retention and are more persuasive than words alone.
3. Simple is better than complex.
Engage your audience instantly by breaking complex facts and figures into bite-sized nuggets of information. Members can always ask for additional details if they want to learn more.
4. Time is limited.
Not only do people have the approximate attention span of a goldfish, but they’re constantly bombarded with marketing messages. You need to get your point across quickly, before your audience moves on to something else.
5. Your brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.
Continuing the conversation on neuroscience marketing, it’s wise to at least consider how the brain processes stories vs. information, visuals vs. text, etc. Adding a compelling visual piece to your marketing mix might be just what you need to get and hold the attention of your members.
6. People are looking for infographics.
Between 2010 and 2012, search volume for “infographic” increased 800% on Google. The format has gained so much popularity in recent years, you’ll find dozens of infographics about the effectiveness of infographics.
7. Increase traffic.
Visuals are inherently more shareable than reports, brochures, or direct mail pieces. Produce a great infographic and your members won’t be able to resist sharing it with friends and colleagues.
An infographic is a lovely compromise that delivers hard facts in a user-friendly visual format. Data is a good start when it comes to assembling an infographic for your event. Attendance numbers, retention rates, and numbers from feedback surveys can make for good infographics. But adding quirky details, like how many gallons of coffee were consumed at your event, can add a human element that resonates with your membership.
Dick’s Sporting Goods Takes Storytelling and Storymaking to a New Level with a Recent Series of Commercials Featuring the Tagline, “Who Will You Be?”
The full length commercial runs for about a minute and speaks to the audience with direct, almost prodding questions and statements:
Who will you be…when the choices you make make all the difference…The true tests, they don’t come easy. And they won’t last long. But that’s why you’re here, for these very moments…because there’s nothing that tests you like sports…
Engage the Senses
The images are close shots of athletes playing softball or hockey, running a football in the rain, lifting weights, or icing muscles. You can see the exertion and intensity on their faces, the grime on their jerseys. The visuals alone would tell a powerful story even if there were no narration at all.
The music adds to the emotional effect of the piece. It gradually builds before dropping off instantly to end the commercial in a moment of silence. The parting image is a young boy gazing at a trophy case. The question returns: Who will you be?
Inspire Your Audience to Action
This combination of storytelling, compelling visuals, and emotionally gripping music—all crammed into a one-minute spot—would make for a respectable commercial on its own. But the fact that the central message of the piece evokes audience emotion and kindles the imagination puts it over the top. This commercial literally has infinite possibilities because every audience member can make up his or her own story to answer the question: Who will you be? This promotion makes people believe they could be Olympians, professional athletes, the strongest in their class, the fastest at the marathon. Anything.
It’s Not About You
There isn’t one occurrence of the word “we” (as in Dick’s) in the entire commercial. The company’s logo appears at the end for one fleeting second. But the ideas and inspiration set forth in the commercial are more than enough to send us all running to the nearest sporting goods store (Dick’s hopes we’ll run to their stores).
The larger campaign includes eight additional commercials about 15 seconds each featuring specific sports. These mini moments don’t allow for the same storytelling arc and emotional ride as the longer piece, but they do pique interest and they’ll likely be useful for Dick’s to target specific markets by sport.
Hats off to Dick’s for a masterful storytelling effort. This approach caught our attention, and it must have struck a chord with audiences, too. #whowillyoube was trending on Twitter the day the commercial was released.
How might you prompt members to imagine amazing possibilities with the help of your organization?
Brand loyalty is great. It makes your members renew year after year and sign up for your annual events without fail. Brand loyalty means members choose to spend their valuable time and resources on your organization instead of a competing alternative—whether it’s another organization or simply staying home to run their businesses. You need brand loyalty. But you need brand attachment more.
According to emerging research, people can form emotional connections with brands the same way they do with people. Emotional brand attachment is the single most influential factor in driving sales—even more than overall satisfaction.
Why You Need Brand Attachment
Members with brand attachment not only come back year after year to attend your events, purchase your products, and renew membership dues. They become brand ambassadors who are highly likely to recommend your organization to others. Emotionally attached members promote your brand for you with invaluable third party credibility. They bring friends and teammates to your events and encourage colleagues to join your organization instead of competing alternatives. Investing in brand attachment has endless possibilities for ROI.
How Can You Build Brand Attachment?
Leading this exciting research is JoAnn Sciarrino, researcher and the Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Sciarrino suggests there are three key elements to brand attachment: affection, connection, and passion.
Here are three ways you can use these key elements to emotionally engage your membership:
1. Know your audience.
Find out what your members’ affections, connections, and passions are. What keeps them up at night? What problems are they solving? Which important causes matter to them? The more you know your membership on a deep, meaningful level, the more you can focus your marketing efforts to forge emotional connections.
2. Craft your story.
Once you know your audience, craft your story in a way that resonates with them. What does your organization offer that will solve audience problems? Who are the unique individuals they can expect to see at your events? How is your organization changing lives? Highlight specific members whenever possible. Be authentic, but always keep your audience in mind when crafting your story.
3. Raise awareness.
A great brand story isn’t worth much if nobody knows about it. Optimize your story for your website. Tailor content for social media platforms, marketing collateral, and direct mail promotions. Craft compelling videos. Gather vivid, illustrative images. Tell stories. Promote your events beforehand to drive attendance, and broadcast your successes afterwards to drive brand attachment.
Building brand loyalty by providing value to your membership is a great start. Take your organization to the next level by forging emotional connections that create lasting brand attachment.
Forbes says 2015 is the “Year of Video Content Marketing.”
So just how powerful is video? Consider these stats: YouTube has more than 1 billion users. Facebook reports that videos are shared 12 times more than links and text posts COMBINED. Twitter users share more than 700 videos EACH MINUTE. Recent research suggests videos—not images—get viewed more often on Facebook business pages.
The challenge for many organizations is to find new, engaging ways to reach audiences while satisfying increasingly complex social media and search engine algorithms. Video seems to be the solution.
What does all this mean for your organization? Is it time to rent a news van or schedule time in a recording studio? Thankfully, adding video to your marketing mix can be fairly simple and affordable. In fact, you don’t even need actual footage.
Try one of these simple strategies to set your brand (and your membership) in motion:
Animation and Motion Graphics
Got a great brand story but no video footage? No problem. A compelling script can be the start of a great, affordable animated video. Photographs can be transformed into engaging motion graphics. Take a look at these examples for inspiration:
A recent episode of the sitcom Modern Family was filmed entirely on iPads and iPhones. If cell phone footage is good enough for primetime TV, surely your organization can put it to use as well. Here are a few examples of top-notch videos filmed on smart phones:
All the rules of good marketing apply to your videos. Be concise (and often brief). Less than three minutes is a good rule of thumb. Some great vines are only 6 seconds long. Be authentic: Video is just another piece of your brand story. Be engaging: If you don’t move people in the first few seconds, they will move on. Possibly forever. Be informative: You’ll rarely see marketing videos go for the hard sell. Offer interesting, informative content to keep your audience interested and encourage them to share. Don’t forget your contact info and a call to action at the end.
How to Engage all the Senses to Reach Audiences Emotionally
“Ignore neuroscience at your 2015 marketing campaign’s peril,” says a recent article from Bizcommunity.com. The article cites work by researcher Colleen Backstrom, CEO of neuro-marketing agency Kaleidoscope, who suggests you’ll need more than just words to reach your audience.
Get Emotional
We know 90% of decision-making comes from the emotional center of the brain. And we know that storytelling emotionally engages the brain better than language alone. Backstrom suggests that in order to build trust with our audiences, we need to go beyond words and even beyond stories. We need to engage all the senses.
Get Visual
First, she says, you need compelling visuals to make your brand “sticky” in the minds of your audience members. It turns out our brains process visual information better than text. Backstrom cites the infographic as an especially powerful format given that the average attention span of an individual is around eight seconds (roughly the same as that of a goldfish, in case you were curious).
Get Scented?
You can incorporate other senses as well. The music you choose in your videos, at your events, and on the web affects customers on a brain-deep level. Consider fast vs. slow music, classical vs. dance tunes, and whether you want your audience to feel energized, relaxed, rebellious, solemn, or something else.
Some companies are even incorporating smell into the mix by infusing spaces with subliminal scents. Sounds crazy? Think about how the scent of fresh-baked cookies makes you FEEL. Textures, too, are important. Consider your business card and the impression heavy card stock makes vs. flimsy paper, smooth vs. textured finish, traditional rectangle vs. die-cut shape.
Get Noticed
All these sensory details provide cues about your brand to your audience’s brains. Of course in an increasingly digital word, it can be tough to incorporate tactile, sensory elements in your marketing mix. So use them when you can. Consider the sounds and music in your videos or the paper and printing techniques in your direct mail pieces. Incorporate deliberate sights, sounds, and even smells in your event spaces. These sensory details have the potential to reach your audience where it matters—in the emotional center of the brain.
In an effort to make its pages more engaging to users, Facebook might not be showing your business page postings as much as it used to. A recent blog post from the social media giant says the change is part of an ongoing effort to make the site’s news feed better—including reducing the amount of purely promotional posts.
Even if you’ve been posting meaningful content, it’s likely you’ve seen a drop in the number of people who see your posts this year. While the Facebook announcement does acknowledge the importance of business pages as consumer resources, you will likely need to adjust your strategy if you want to continue to reach your base.
Not to worry. There are some simple steps you can take to get noticed, reach people, and continue to build your brand on social media.
Ask for an email.
Use your social media to encourage members to sign up for your mailing list. Getting audience emails and/or mailing addresses allows you to control who gets to hear from you and how often with no restrictions on content.
Play by the rules.
Follow Facebook’s Page Posting Tips and Best Practices for maximum exposure and generally sound ways to communicate with your base on the platform. Tips include posting consistently, targeting based on demographics, being timely, and saving promotional content for ads.
Add video.
While the Tips and Best Practices suggest including high-quality images with your posts,a recent investigation by analytics company SocialBaker reveals that posting a photo might actually hurt your chances of getting seen. According to the report, videos will get you more eyeballs.
Pay to play.
Facebook offers two ways you can pay to increase your visibility. You can “boost” an existing post by paying a fee, or you can purchase ads. Both of these services allow you to target a specific audience based on age, geography, interests, and lots of other criteria using a pre-set budget you determine.
Rather than feeling punished, use these changing algorithms as motivation to up your marketing game. If you’re constantly hitting up your membership with promotional offers on Facebook, maybe it’s time to purchase some ads or develop informative content instead. All good marketing should truly engage your audience with compelling content, thoughtful conversations, dynamic visuals, and meaningful interactions—on social media and off.
I hope by now I’ve convinced you just how important storytelling is for your organization. But getting started with a robust storytelling marketing program probably seems a little daunting. Sure, you’re familiar with the history of your organization. You might even know some great stories about your coworkers. But how do you uncover those really juicy member stories…the ones that illustrate the life-changing work you’re doing…the ones that offer invaluable third party credibility to your organization?
Here are three strategies for snagging truly compelling member stories. Try one out at your next event.
1. Solicit stories after conferences or events.
You might already have a feedback survey in place to follow up with members after events. But if you don’t ask for a story, you won’t get a story. Simply stating, “Tell us a story about your experience at our event” won’t likely get you any usable material either. People need a little coaching. Consider a thought-provoking prompt to get them talking. For example:
Tell us about a member you met at the event who gave you an idea you can use in your business. Do you plan to stay in touch? How? What session had the best information? Why? Did you connect with someone new during this session? Tell us about your experience. What advice would you give someone who is considering attending the event next year? What is the “must see” attraction at this event? Why?
2. Solicit stories during conferences or events.
Deploy teams of roving reporters with thought-provoking questions to get members talking. Ask for a video statement whenever possible. Sometimes these off-the-cuff, in-the-moment stories are the best ones you’ll get all year. And members will appreciate the direct interaction with your staff. Try these questions to get members talking:
Why did you decide to attend this year?
Can you share a big idea you’ve picked up at the conference already?
Have you made any connections with other members that will help you do business?
What is everyone talking about this year? How do you think it will affect the way you operate?
3. Get creative.
The University of Alabama decided to capture campus experience using a photo-booth style device called “The Box.” Part marketing tool, part historical record, The Box provided the space for storytelling (and storymaking) to happen. The results were infinitely more authentic and telling than any responses the university would have gotten on a multiple choice survey. Consider setting up a testimonial booth at your next event, or imagine a more creative strategy to capture stories while delighting your members.
The stories are out there, and most of the time members are dying to share them. When you get a good story, don’t keep it a secret. Share it in your marketing pieces, on your website, and via social media. The members you feature will feel flattered, and others will be encouraged to share with you, too. If you don’t get anything good, up the ante. Offer an incentive, such as entry in a $100 gift card drawing, to encourage participation.
Physically engage your audience to get more from your marketing.
As a limited-time holiday promotion, coffee shop chain Caribou Coffee printed the opening lines of various feel-good stories on their beverage cups. Customers were encouraged to go to the web to learn the ending of the story that began on their cup. The chain’s current promotion asks customers to submit “what you stay awake for” via numerous social media outlets. The best answers will be printed on forthcoming cups.
The McDonald’s “Signs” commercial we’ve mentioned previously is another example of interactive storytelling. Then there’s the Heinz 57 ketchup bottles with a QR code that leads to an online game of Trivial Pursuit. Families are encouraged to play while they await their food orders at restaurants.
Cross-Channel Interaction
Encouraging people to move from one channel to another can get you added mileage from your marketing promotions. On a very simple level, it causes people to linger longer with your brand. Beyond that, moving your base online from offline puts them in a place to share your stories socially.
Another important aspect of these campaigns is their interactivity. An old school direct mail technique is to have audience members move a sticker from one part of the mailer to the reply card. This simple interaction leads to a boost not only in response rate but in sales closed. It seems that people who physically interact with a brand feel more connected to it and are thus more likely to make a purchase.
While an element of interaction might seem like a gimmick, it could be just the thing your organization needs to connect with your membership. It’s easy to delete emails, toss junk mail, and forget about TV commercials. It’s harder to forget about a story that hooked us on one plane and moved us to action on another.
A Win-Win
Take the current Caribou Coffee promotion. This interactive storytelling as a marketing technique is a stroke of genius. The brand gets priceless word-of-mouth marketing and the people who provide it feel like they’ve won something. Same goes for the interactive ketchup bottle. Heinz facilitates family fun at the same time it drives traffic to their web site.
Imagine how you might create a similar win-win to engage your audience and create greater brand attachment.
As you look around the room at your annual conference, there’s a good chance you’re seeing more and more gray hair. This realization is probably followed by a sense of panic. What will happen to your organization in just a few years when the bulk of your members decide to retire? How can you attract and retain a younger base? And how can you preserve the knowledge and experience of your veteran members?
Step away from the panic button. Consider implementing a few of these ideas to attract younger members and keep your organization thriving.
Stay connected on social media
Social media is a one-to-one, 24/7 link between you and your base. While you might not see a concrete ROI in terms of new members signed up or conference registrations paid, the connectivity social media affords is invaluable. Your events happen a few times a year at best. Stay connected year round with a strong social media strategy.
Freshen up your visuals
Feature younger people in your membership brochure, on your website, and in any of your other marketing collateral. Seek them out for testimonials and success stories. Aside from showing younger faces, it might also be time to freshen up your logo or other visuals with a more contemporary look.
Actively recruit younger members
Fish where the fish are. Speak to your local young professionals group, purchase a mailing list based on age, or look for partner organizations with your desired demographic. Consider reaching out to university students to generate enthusiasm for your organization and your industry. A little investment now could pay off for decades to come.
Encourage involvement
Invite new members to serve on committees and get involved. Pair newbies with veteran members to make them feel welcome and to pass down that valuable knowledge and experience. Consider hosting a new member cocktail hour or open house to encourage connectivity beyond your annual events.
Explain the why
Lots of today’s young people want to be involved in something that matters. Share your authentic brand story and explain the reason why your organization exists. People of all ages will be drawn to you.
Some organizations dismiss social media or an updated look as unnecessary. They think, “We’ve never needed it before and we’re doing just fine.” But as your membership nears retirement and attendance numbers dwindle, you’ll need ways to reach new people—and the value they’ll bring for years to come.
A great image can do a lot for your organization. It can portray your personality, tell your story, and rally your members around your organization. It can build loyalty, raise brand awareness, live in infamy on social media, and pay dividends when it comes to engaging and retaining members.
They both show the same individual, Todd Anderson, CEO of Hub Hobby Center. The first is a corporate headshot that looks polished and professional but doesn’t tell us much about Todd’s story, industry, or capabilities.
The second image is more illustrative. There’s Todd, now wearing bunny ears, surrounded by people, and deeply engaged in an activity. This image tells a story about what it’s like to attend an ASTRA conference. Given the bunny ears, this obviously isn’t a traditional business conference. The background is crowded, implying a good turnout. People viewing this image might feel like they’re missing out on a lot of fun if they don’t attend, that perhaps “everyone” will be there so they should go too.
In combination, these two images work together to suggest that serious business happens at an ASTRA conference, but some major fun and connectivity happen too.
Show and Tell
It’s worth mentioning the importance of original photography and design. Because your visuals do so much heavy lifting when it comes to showcasing your organization and events—your story itself—stock photography will almost always fail at projecting your authentic brand personality.
You have limited space to visually represent your brand. Make every image count by choosing photographs and graphic elements that do some real work. Show and tell members why they must attend your event and what they’ll miss if they aren’t there.
These days, data is big business. You have unprecedented access to information about your audience’s location, age, income, education, and employment history. But it goes further than that.
Like never before you have purchasing habits, personal preferences, values, affiliations, and routines—all trackable via social media, rewards programs, location markers, and more. Big players in the industry are incredibly adept at piecing together all your data to more effectively market to you. (Target took the prize in this arena when it accurately predicted a customer was pregnant before she announced it to anyone.)
Personalization Potential
Variable data print, email, and web advertising allow marketers to customize messaging down to the individual. A simple example: If you frequently buy chicken from your grocery store, you’re likely to get a coupon for chicken in your next circular. Since I like steak and buy that frequently, I’ll get a coupon for steak.
With all this personalization made possible through data, marketing is more engaging than ever, right? Wrong. It turns out data isn’t enough to reach people on an emotional level. Remember that our emotions are responsible for as much as 90 percent of our decision-making abilities. In other words, a coupon for chicken won’t cut it. While this type of personalization is a great start, the effectiveness of data is vastly enhanced when accompanied with artful storytelling.
Find the Story
What story could chicken possibly have, you ask? Well, for starters there’s a great American tradition of family meals around the dinner table—the place where events of the day, stories, and information are shared. Perhaps chicken is a healthy alternative to hamburger. There’s a story there. Knowing your audience and telling compelling stories that resonate with their worldviews is the key to marketing success. The data helps you get to know your audience, but unless you forge an inspiring emotional connection, you’re wasting your efforts.
Your organization has a story. Each of your events has a unique story. Use your data to know your audience, but use emotion to truly engage, inspire, and connect.
We’re pleased to unveil a brand new rottmancreative.com! Here’s what prompted our change and how we went about crafting a more inspiring site:
Rottman Creative exists to connect the unconnected, to inspire people to act. We accomplish this by reaching people on an emotional level with dynamic visuals and relevant compelling content. We create event brands that attract people, light them up, and connect them to the event, the organization, and each other.
The “old” rottamncreative.com wasn’t actually old—just over a year. But when we took a step back and asked ourselves if we were “walking the walk” when it came to connecting and inspiring people with our own brand, we realized we fell short. We had plenty of content, but not much connectivity. And there wasn’t enough visual appeal to engage visitors and encourage them to click through and stay a while.
Visual Storytelling
The next version of our site had to include a strong visual component. We engaged a photographer to shoot our portfolio pieces in interesting settings with complementary colors and textures. As opposed to including a slider of digital pieces, this approach added depth to our work by providing real-world context and thought-provoking settings. The photographs hint that each piece has a story.
Large environment images greet you when you visit the home page. These big simple visuals represent our passion, inspiration, and thought process—images include everything from worker bees collaborating in a hive to a perfect surf wave beckoning me catch it.
Simple Structure
When it came to the site’s structure, our approach was to simplify the interface to make all parts of the site easy to access and navigate. Our blog, newsletter, and portfolio are the three core areas of our site; we wanted visitors to seamlessly navigate each and realize at a glance that all three are connected.
We used a combination of the large environment images and smaller tiles throughout the site to complete the bigger picture of our capabilities. This visually interesting format is an emerging trend in web design—and we think it will be around for a while because it’s so compelling.
There is still plenty of content on our site, but the new format connects it more coherently. The next phase of our rollout will include “Front Row” content streams that link our work to the big ideas behind it. This feature will really show you how our work demonstrates our core beliefs in connectivity, inspiration, vulnerability, and storytelling.
Please have a look at the new rottmancreative.com. Click. Read. Stay a while. Be inspired.
In the last newsletter, we talked about how to use storytelling in your event email marketing.
Definitely do that. But don’t stop there.
If you haven’t caught the first two newsletters in this three-part series on using storytelling in your event marketing, you can find the first one here and the second one here.
THE MAIN IDEAS WE WANT YOU TO TAKE INTO THIS NEXT DISCUSSION ARE:
Traditional messaging around NEC (networking, education, and certification) has grown stale, and to capture people’s attention these days, associations need messaging that shows these things, rather than simply tells about them.
Marketing an event is about connecting the unconnected. It’s about pulling people in. It’s about creating a horizontal movement of people talking to people.
Storytelling is a perfect vehicle to do this, because stories from real people are what create that movement-and ultimately, what make those connections.
Stories hit people in the emotional center of their brain, where decision-making is strongest. Good stories cultivate three essential things research has told us are central for converting people from onlookers to registrants: passion, connection, and affection.
We’re going to look at six different areas where you can use storytelling:
email
direct mail
web site
video
association magazine
social media
Email
We already covered email in detail in the last newsletter, when we talked about finding and mining the stories, interviewing people, using your brand archetype to create the voice of the story, and how to write and design these story-based emails. Because it’s so important to most associations’ events, there are just a few things we want to reiterate about how to use storytelling in your email campaign.
Make sure to use a well-designed, fully-branded HTML-based template. Even the best story can fall flat if it’s simply pasted into a text email and mass-emailed out.
Whether you choose to lay out the entire story in the body of the template or use a teaser paragraph in the template that links through to the entire story on a landing page on your website, your email template needs to be responsive and adaptive for mobile phones.
Take the time to create compelling emails and get it right, because this can be a great jumping off point for other mediums.
Direct mail
If email content is king, direct mail is first in line to inherit the throne. Direct mail has a tangible quality to it-and if you do it correctly, it can have a huge impact on your event registration numbers. Stories are the fodder for your direct mail-and if you’re doing justice to your email campaign, you’ve already got a great start.
Hit people with story-based direct mail in the early stage of the buying cycle. Build the passion for the event, piece by piece. This means that you’ve got to have your stories ready to go, so that you can spin them into direct mail. As with email, you want the stories to jump off the page, with captivating photography and bold graphics and callouts.
Bring storytelling into your postcards and teaser mailings. Do a series of postcards, each featuring a different story, or a mailing that wraps a few of them together.
Populate your most important piece of direct mail-your registration brochure-with stories, rather than just facts about speakers and sessions. Keep the “schedule at a glance,” but rethink how you present the highlights.
Remember, “affection” is one of the key feelings brands need to channel. In those most crucial print pieces, make sure to have current attendees tell other potential attendees about their affection for the event, and why they love it.
Web site
Storytelling has a much wider use than your event marketing campaign: you can bring it into multiple areas of your web site, from blog posts to testimonials. There are a few things we definitely recommend for your site.
Lay out your email stories into a well-designed PDF, put it on your site, and direct people to download and share. PDFs are less tangible than direct mail, but they still create nice stand-alone pieces.
Use storytelling at point-of-registration. Plenty of associations sprinkle testimonials throughout the event pages of their site. But as we said in the last newsletter, one-sentence testimonials aren’t very compelling. Repurpose quotes and pieces of stories to use as testimonials on your site. You can also repurpose them into blog posts.
Video
You can go huge with storytelling for video (a video crew, lighting, locations!) or do something simple, like motion graphics, whiteboard animation, sketch videos, or video testimonials.
If you choose a more graphic treatment of video, you still need to pull out the story. Moving words and pictures around, while nice to look at, isn’t necessarily telling a story. You can keep the treatment simple: still or motion images with quotes, mixed with dynamic B-roll images and voice over and/or music.
The best stories are character-driven, and that’s true for video as well. Whether it means pulling together video testimonials from attendees, or telling a story through the eyes of a specific person, let the people in your videos be the star: that’s what your audience will connect with.
Use video to try something new and fun. Think your organization is too set in its ways? Take a look at what GE is doing with its “Datalandia” video campaign. Who would expect that from GE? Take a lesson and surprise people. Shake it up a bit. Just keep it story-focused.
Social media
Storytelling for social media is a visual game. This is where you really need to employ photography, especially for the more visual platforms, like Facebook and Instagram.
Social media platforms are perfect for storytelling-just don’t try to create a one-size-fits-all post (what works well on Instagram isn’t what works well on Twitter). We’ve written in depth about the different platforms and how to tailor your content for each in this newsletter [link to social media newsletter].
Social media is a chance to show a little more of your association’s personality and tell your own stories through slice-of-life images and clever captions. Create a balance of event stories and association stories.
Let those personal connections really shine through in your social media content. People look to social media to connect with other people. Most of your posts aren’t asking people to buy: they are forging connection through stories of people.
Magazine
Your association magazine is tailor-made for storytelling. Association members routinely cite the association magazine as one of the benefits of membership. They are primed to read stories on the pages of your magazine.
At a minimum, create a spread for each story (maybe even a double-spread, depending on how in-depth the story is). As with your direct mail pieces, create strong headings and bold graphics to keep readers interested.
You can run and repurpose stories all year long-not just during the registration push. (Remember, you’re teasing passion.) Create a regular column in each issue that features an attendee story-framed around what “objections” that story helps to overcome, or what elements of the event the story highlights. Not every story has a “register now” call to action.
So, how do you use storytelling to market your event? Find the stories that hinge on passion, connection, and affection. Shape the stories. And finally, integrate the stories into every single piece of content your members, constituents, and potential attendees interact with.
We’ve discussed in the past just how powerful emotions are when it comes to making decisions. Figuring out the emotional reasons people attend your events can help you market more effectively and fill even more seats. While fear and greed are the two most common emotional triggers in marketing, there are dozens of other emotions you can use to move your audience to action.
Below are a few examples of emotions your members might be feeling. Imagine how you can use these to craft more effective messaging and promotions:
Fear and Insecurity
Members are worried they’ll miss out on key information that could help them be more successful at their jobs and, by extension, their lives. They’re also worried that “everyone will be there” so they should be, too, or risk missing out on key insights and experiences that could help them in the future.
Vanity and Exclusivity
Members want to hobnob with the leaders in their field. Your annual conference is often a who’s who of your industry. The conference might be the only time members get face time with these luminaries. Then they can go back to work and tell everyone whom they met and what they learned from such an exclusive opportunity.
Pride and Passion
Certain members are your cheerleaders. They love your association and are proud to be part of it. They feel connected. They want to connect with other tribe members to forge new connections, renew existing relationships, participate in the conversation, and generally support your association. They would miss your annual conference like they would miss their daughter’s wedding.
Security, Confidence, and Value
Members know your conference is the source of the latest information, trends, techniques, research, and thought leadership. They also know that if they attend, they too will know the latest information, trends, techniques etc. and they will be better at what they do because of it.
Greed
Your conference has the goods, and your members want the goods. These might include exclusive information from panel speakers, access to industry partners on the showroom floor, and irresistible giveaways and incentives. Members appreciate that what you offer enhances their lives, so they attend your conference to get more of a good thing.
More Emotional Triggers to Consider
optimism
pessimism
embarrassment
revenge
stickin’ it to the man
complacence
love
envy
desperation
benevolence
boredom
sadness
wit
shyness
whimsy
guilt
disgust
patriotism
anger
Get to know your audience. What keeps them up at night? If fear isn’t a strong emotion your audience members experience, don’t use fear in your next postcard or email campaign. If you know that the majority of conference goers are repeat attendees, use pride and passion to your advantage.
It’s okay to promote your expertise, but it’s much more powerful to sell your attendees on how your expertise will solve their problems and enhance their lives.
Homing in on a primary emotional trigger means your marketing efforts will resonate with your members, connect with them “where they live” emotionally, and move them to book a seat.
So, you’re ready to leave “NEC” mania behind? Ready to stop hinging everything on the same one-note message of Networking, Education, and Certification-and instead, embrace a storytelling approach?
Great! We can help. Let’s review quickly why we’re trying to hammer home the storytelling message, with a story of our own. It should sound familiar.
Once upon a time, associations were central parts of people’s lives, because there was less competition, fewer alternatives for learning and connecting with peers, no web, and no insta-anything. There was one message from above, and one place to show up. But now, we live in a new era where competition and options are plentiful, and there are many places to show up. A time when people are talking to each other, and ideas are spreading horizontally-versus from the top down. Recession or no recession, these old ways of talking to people . . . Come for networking, education, and certification! . . . have simply grown stale and are losing effectiveness. They don’t forge the three things absolutely needed to make people feel an emotional attachment to your event brand: passion, connection, and affection. What best forges those things, deep in the emotional center of the brain where most decisions are made, are stories.
With that, here we are in 2014, ready to tell stories. The communication vehicle that associations use more than any other is email. So that’s where we’re going to start. In fact, the rest of this article is dedicated to creating compelling story-based email campaigns.
Finding the Stories
If you’re going to turn stories into emails, you first need the stories. They most likely wonít be apparent until you start looking. In fact, the stories you think you need to tell when you first start this process may not wind up being the best ones.
Mining stories is a journey of discovery, and you need to approach it with an air of fluidity, where nothing is a foregone conclusion.
This is why third parties are so helpful for story mining and development. They assume nothing and see possibility in everything-and because they don’t know your “star” members (the ones who sign up the second registration opens), they cast a wide net.
When we start working with an organization, the first thing we do is request every single recent survey or feedback form we can get our hands on. For story mining, we are most interested in the qualitative data: the comments attendees make, the anecdotes they offer, and the hints they drop. We start to see little bits and pieces of stories take shape. Little nuggets of passion, affection, and connection. We know what we’re looking for, and it involves a certain kind of enthusiasm and specificity, and another crucial element: experiences that can be used to counter objections.
As an association, you have to be very clear on the reasons people don’t come. The objections. The best stories answer those objections, not with bullet points, but with concrete experiences. By telling the stories of your attendees, you are letting them talk to one another-instead of you talking at them. Youíre creating horizontal, peer-to-peer movement and elevating personal experience.
What does this look like, practically speaking? Well, instead of sending an email that simply lists the sessions, send an email where an attendee shares the story of how a session impacted their life and business. Instead of an email with a general message of: ìCome for the networking!î try sending an email where an attendee recounts how a conversation in the hallway wound up opening a major door for them.
Identifying the attendees to interview is the first make-or-break point. The second is knowing how to pull the story out of them. Again, this is where a third party is so helpful, because they come to the conversation without preconceived ideas. Plus, attendees/members tend to open up more to someone from the outside. They donít take shortcuts to explain things. They start from the beginning, which means there are many more chances to find the real story.
Finding the Voice of the Stories
It would be wonderful if we could tell you that good stories simply wrote themselves. But they don’t. It takes forethought and careful attention to voice. Remember voice? We’ve written about it many times. It’s not an area to compromise on, or just phone in.
The voice of the story begins with identifying your brand archetype (something we discussed in detail here). What are those timeless stories your brand taps into (healer, hero, ambassador, etc.), and what is the language around that story? What is the personality of your conference? Write dry, boring stories and no one is going to read them.
You’re looking to present lively characters and specific experiences.
If the only thing you say in the story is: “John Smith enjoys the networking, education, and certification options of the XYZ Event,” don’t even bother. You need to show what that looks like, rather than simply saying it. What makes this person tick? What challenges did they face? What problems did the event solve? What surprises did they encounter there? Remember, your glue for creating brand attachment: passion, affection, and connection. Those things should come through in the voice of your story.
A few more quick tips:
We usually advocate writing these kinds of attendee stories in third person, with plentiful quotes. But you can incorporate first person (testimonial style) as well. Remember, you still have to craft these first-person pieces: one-line testimonials (“The conference was great!”) are useless.
Keep your stories in the present tense (use past tense only to recall a past event), because present tense keeps the story present.
Use active voice. Passive voice drains energy out of a story, and makes it sound academic rather than conversational.
Presenting the Stories for Email
So, you’ve found your stories to share and youíve written them. Now itís time to think about the visual element! These are NOT simply text emails. You should design a fully-branded HTML-based template.
There are two main ways to approach designing these story-based emails:
Lay out the entire story (usually between 300 – 500 words) in the body of the template.
Have a teaser paragraph in the template that links through to the entire story on a landing page on your website.
We’ve done it both ways, and there are pros and cons to each. On one hand, why interrupt someone’s reading experience by taking them away from the email: why make them go somewhere else? One moment of hesitation or disruption, and you might lose them. On the other hand, directing them to your website puts them right at the point of registration. They are one click closer.
You don’t have to do it the same way each time: you can test out each way, and see if one generates a stronger response. However, if you do option #1, you definitely need an email template that is both responsive and adaptive. With so many people reading emails on their smart phones, you need an email template that reads correctly-in essence, re-configuring itself for the smaller screen, without losing anything (and still being readable, i.e., it’s more than just a miniature version of the email). Of course, for option #2, it’s important to have a responsive and adaptive website, because readers will also click through on their mobile phone.
The lesson? You can’t escape being responsive and adaptive, no matter how you go about it. Itís a design investment well worth it!
As for the design of the email itself, a few tips we have:
Ask your attendee for a nice headshot. Casual shots-even ones taken at the eventóare best because they feel conversational and showcase personality more. Stuffy, boardroom shots often feel too formal.
Create a bold heading for the title of the story.
Break up the text with pull-quotes, blocks of color, and additional pictures. And of course, always include a clear call-to-action.
We also recommend designing a downloadable PDF for your website. This is a chance to expand beyond the limits of a template. Make this a piece people truly want to share.
So, before you send your next email promoting your event, ask yourself: is there anything in this email that will create brand attachment? Is there anything in this email that makes an emotional connection? Is this email a story about what happens at this event, or a directive to register, based on logic and facts?
We know storytelling works. And we know email works. Blend them together, and make your marketing start working better for you.
Next up: how to integrate storytelling into the rest of your event marketing, including direct mail, website, video, association magazine, and social media.
Our lives used to be ruled by something we called NEC. Networking, Education, Certification. We preached it to clients, defended it at all costs, and executed it over and over again. NEC was the be-all, end-all marketing formula for events. People showed up at events for these three reasons. Create nice visuals around them, list the details, and that would fill the seats.
“How long can I keep putting that message out there? How many years can I do that before it’s stale?” This became the great debate. “It will never get stale,” we said. We were so certain. A few years later, we realized that we were wrong. Dead wrong.
The Message is Stale, Not the People
NEC is what people want at an event: that part is right. The wrong part, the staleness part, is in the message. The way associations present NEC. They shove it out in front, and say the same things over and over again. We have networking, education, and certification! Do you want to register now?
Does this ever work? Yes, it does. People can form connections to events for their own reasons, even when the marketing is completely uninspiring. But . . . and this is a very important BUT . . . it works less and less with each passing year. Itís certainly not something to bank on. Because everybody in this space has NEC. And because increasingly, people are looking for something more extraordinary. They are looking for experiences and connections that will enrich their lives.
Your event is a product, plain and simple. It’s a product you have to sell.
Hitting people over the head with the facts and stats and bullets is not a relevant way to sell things in 2014. It’s stale. But your people arenít stale. They are continually seeking, continually looking for inspiration. You have to inspire them to choose your offering above other offerings-or the perennial favorite choice: nothing at all.
We believe that storytelling is what needs to replace NEC. Storytelling is trending right now: we know that. We’ve gotten the webinar invites, heard the keynote speakers, seen the books, read the blog posts (and written some of them). But stories are more than hot commodities. More than hype.
Telling stories-the right stories-is a proven way to connect with your base. Or as we say, to connect the unconnected. It all relates to how our brains are wired. When you hit people with NEC, you are hitting them in the logic center of the brain: the pre-frontal cortex. It’s where executive function comes from, and we couldnít do taxes, make lists, or create spreadsheets without it. But gut decisions don’t live there. Inspiration doesnít bubble up from there.
For that, you need to hit the emotional center: the limbic brain. That’s where memories are kept, and emotional connections are spun. It ís actually where the majority of decisions are made (up to 90 percent, neuroscientists say).
We may rationalize the decision after itís made. But more often than not, it starts with the gut. So you want people there in the moment of decision about your event. Stories are what take them there.
There is really interesting recent research about brand attachments, by JoAnn Sciarrino, a former executive VP for BBDO North America, and the current Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She says that how emotionally attached someone is to a brand is the single biggest indicator of whether that person will buy that brand (far more than likes or shares in social media).
The three feelings that really form the “bonds,” if you will, are passion, connection, and affection. Sciarrino has measured this, and found that when people feel those three things, they form an attachment.
This is the basic science of why stories are so powerful for brands. Told appropriately, stories rouse passion, forge connection, and generate affection. You want brand attachment so that people buy your event? Storytelling is your glue.
Everyone is Talking the Talk: Let’s Walk the Walk
The association arena is talking about storytelling. Even the heads of associations are touting it, such as in this video. But talking about it and doing it are two different things.
You need to do it.
We have a whole series of newsletters in the works on how to use storytelling to market your event. Because it’s more than just saying: “Hey, try telling a story.” There is a good deal of strategy behind it. Right now, we’re imagining that you have questions. What kind of story? Whatís it about? What form does it take? What do I do with it?
We have some really good answers for you, and weíll be sharing them in the next three newsletters. But first, gather your answers to these questions. Are you ready for a fresh way to market your event? Can you leave NEC marketing behind, even as its siren song calls to you? Are you committed to engaging the next generation (and for that matter, the current generation)?
Embracing a “yes” to all of these questions will make the journey more seamless, more interesting, and definitely more fun. Be on the lookout for part 2, where we’ll dive into how to use storytelling in your email marketing.
Are you ready to start connecting the unconnected?
“Those who tell the stories rule the world.”-attributed both to Plato and Hopi Native Americans
Storytelling is a craft as old as humankind. It long predates the written word as a form of communication, a way to record history, and a method for teaching. It links us to our ancestors and to each other. Despite its name, storytelling is an interactive communication form in which we SHOW others something important by illustrating a scenario, rather than simply TELLING them facts and figures we think they should know. The results of good stories are “sticky” lessons and information that strike us with awe, stay with us, and move us to action.
Why it Works
At its core, storytelling works as a marketing tool because of the way our brains are wired.
It turns out that the part of the brain that processes emotions is the same part that makes decisions-that’s the limbic system. While it seems counterintuitive, appealing to your audience with facts, figures, and other generally credible and logical information is not enough to really “sell” them on your association or your event. You absolutely must appeal to emotions if you want to propel your base toward action. Engage your membership emotionally with brand storytelling and watch how many seats fill up at your next event.
What is Storytelling?
A story has characters. It has conflict and color. A vivid setting. Tension. A plot twist. It involves looking audience members in the eye and saying, “Have you ever?” or “Do you know what I mean?” And they wait on the edges of their seats for these brilliant details, twists and turns, points of connection, climaxes, and resolutions. A story can be as simple as a joke or as complex as an epic tale. Ultimately, a story has an ending-one that leaves us laughing, crying, smarter, wiser, or filled with wonder. Stories are memorable. Some, unforgettable.
Know Your Archetypes
One reason storytelling is timeless is that basically we keep telling the same stories over and over again. We’re accustomed to tales of good vs. evil, creation, humans vs. monsters, a hero on a journey, and lots of other familiar plot lines. These classic storylines are called archetypes. They serve as frames upon which we can hang a given cast of characters and send them along more or less the same path with the same outcome as many characters who came before them.
Consider these textbook examples of stories that employ archetypes:
“The Chronicles of Narnia” books by C.S. Lewis are a fantastical retelling of Christian biblical stories using talking animals. They contain a creation story, a hero’s journey, monsters, villains, and more classic archetypes.
The movie “Apocalypse Now” is a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s book “The Heart of Darkness,” set during the Vietnam war rather than during the Imperialist expansion into Africa of the late 1800s. Archetypes employed include the hero’s journey, the everyman, and good vs. evil.
The “Star Wars” movies are a classic example of the battle between good and evil, just like Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” from 1667.
Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Shrek movies 1 though 4 all use the hero’s journey archetype.
Characters themselves can also be archetypes. In fact, your brand likely fits a character archetype that you can use to your advantage. (We’ve talked before about the patriarch, the advocate, and the caregiver.) A few more examples of character archetypes include: the hero: Indiana Jones, The Lone Ranger, Katniss Everdeen the everyman: Mr. Smith (the one who goes to Washington), Orphan Annie, Frodo Baggins the villain: Lex Luthor, Voldimort, Wicked Witch of the West, Hanibal Lecter the creator: Steve Jobs, Victor Frankenstein, Pinocchio’s Geppetto the jester: The Fool in Hamlet, Dori in Finding Nemo, any role played by Jim Carey
Whether characters or storylines, archetypes provide familiar patterns that tug at emotions and hearken back to our most basic human instincts and desires.
They help us as brand storytellers know what kinds of stories to tell, what tone to take, and what kind of words to use. Similarly, they help our audience connect with us on a deeper level because, in a sense, our story is already familiar to them.
How Does Storytelling fit into Marketing?
As marketers, we strive to connect with our audiences in meaningful ways. We tap them on the shoulder and say
“Do you need what we offer? Would you like to connect with us?”
Too often, we recite information-facts, dates, keynote speaker names, panel topics-that we want our audience to know. (As a test, take a look at your web content. How many times do you use the word “we” vs. the word “you.”)
A better approach is one of storytelling, of relating vivid details of real human beings, their successes and failures. Good storytelling is an authentic exchange of conversation, emotions, and key information, always keeping the needs of your audience in mind. This is both and art and a science. It’s also a soft sell. Once they’re fully engaged and struck with awe and wonder, your audience will come to you on their own because they’re educated, informed, and connected.
Storytelling vs. Strategic Storytelling
Bill Baker of BB&Co eloquently makes a distinction between storytelling and strategic storytelling. He notes that storytelling generally involves a company or organization spilling out whatever it wants to brag about. Strategic storytelling, on the other hand, is savvy marketing that relates to your audience on a one-on-one level and “establishes context and relevance for your message.” (View his entire article here).
According to Baker, strategic storytelling can “shape the way people think, focus their understanding, and compel them towards desired actions.”
Where to Start
Customer testimonials are a type of story, but standing alone these don’t do all the heavy lifting to actually tell your story. Collect these and other attendee experiences, employee anecdotes, case studies, and company history.
Often, the reason why your association was founded, a hurdle overcome, or a problem you’re still solving make excellent, compelling stories. Consider also your audience, what they need to hear, and problems you can help them solve. Choosing an archetype that represents your brand will also help you determine what kinds of stories to gather and how to tell them.
Weave all these threads together for a strategic story that SHOWS the world what your association is all about.
Engage your audience emotionally by including bits of your story in emails, postcards, your website, events, and in your face-to-face interactions. Then stand back and watch as this interactive, collaborative approach fills seats, attracts new members, and builds long-term loyalty.
Measuring Results
While storytelling, ancient archetypes, and emotions might seem very subjective and nebulous when it comes to measuring effectiveness, it turns out there’s some pretty concrete science behind all this connection and emotion.
JoAnn Sciarrino, a researcher and the Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, developed a way to measure brand engagement by analyzing social media conversations.
By looking at the words people used in association with a given brand, a.k.a. the stories being told, Sciarrino was able to determine to what extent people were emotionally attached to the brand.
Her findings concluded that an emotional brand attachment had a higher correlation to sales than any other factor-including overall satisfaction, willingness to recommend, likes, shares, and a host of other metrics.
Brain Science
Sciarrino reminds us that emotion resides in the limbic part of our brain, the same part of the brain where 90% of our decisions are made. A neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio first discovered the connection between emotions and decision-making when he studied people with damage to the limbic brain. While they basically seemed normal aside from experiencing no emotions, Damasio’s subjects had difficulty making even simple decisions-such as whether to have chicken or turkey for lunch. Damasio’s research suggests that human beings depend on emotion to make decisions. All this science tells us that we can’t ignore emotion when it comes to connecting with our base. If we want people to take action by joining our ranks and attending our annual events, we must create an emotional connection with our brand. And storytelling is a proven, measurable way to do so.
People Relate to People
The fundamentals of storytelling, much like the pirate’s code, are more like guidelines than actual rules. Not all stories have a villain, a love story, a journey, or even a happy ending. But all good stories are “true” in the sense that they are authentic. All good stories evoke a sense of wonder and connection. Storytelling works because people relate to other people, and they connect with brands primarily on an emotional level. The end goal of storytelling is timeless inspiration. And while that might sound like a lofty goal, it’s certainly an attainable one. What’s your brand story? How might you use it to inspire your base?
Let’s start with an idea that you know is true, but may stress you out to think about nonetheless. It’s this:
SOCIAL MEDIA IS A POWERFUL MARKETING TOOL FOR YOUR EVENT.
If you’ve read anything about social media, heard any story about it on the radio, or generally not been living under a rock, inside a cave, or on a deserted island, you know this is true.
But we’re beyond it being true. What we want to address is the “powerful” part. Because that’s where we have something to add to the conversation—something we see that many organizations still aren’t grasping. Social media isn’t powerful just because it’s a giant microphone. The power doesn’t even come from the fact that these are billion dollar platforms with social reach unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s not the platforms themselves that are the source of the power.
The source of the power comes from the inherent desire baked into all forms of social media, and that is the desire for human connection. That’s why social media has taken off: because people inherently want to connect to other people.
If you can work social media through the lens of connection, it will feel more natural, take on a stronger purpose, and ultimately, be a lot more fun for your association.
In case you’re not sold yet, here’s one more truth: there are too many options and ways to spend time today. The existence of your association is not nearly enough.
It won’t survive or thrive if it’s not a vehicle for connecting people.
In fact, if you want to be sustainable for the future, you need a system that doesn’t just help you connect with people, but also helps empower those people to reach out and keep making more connections.
How handy that social media exists. Honestly, it came right in time for your organization.
Clusters are Out: Micro is In
The age of social media represents a fundamental change in where power is clustered.
A better way to say it is that social media has “unclustered” power. No longer do large corporations and brands hold all the cards. We’re entering an age when individuals, especially individuals working together, can do what only big brands and corporations used to be able to do, like influence.
Your members, supporters, and fans have more power than you.
That’s not something to be feared. Rather, it’s a tremendous opportunity—if you use it effectively.
Let’s talk quickly about how NOT to use social media. First, it’s not a dumping ground for existing content. It’s also not a place to make endless sales pitches. And it’s definitely not a rinse-and-repeat, one-size-fits-all operation.
The advice we used to give (that we were passing on from the social media experts) was to pick one platform and do it well. That’s not really enough anymore. It’s not that you have to tackle every single platform out there. But you do need to develop a consistent social media voice across your platforms, and then share your best stuff, tailored to fit what that platform is truly about.
We love the advice from Gary Vaynerchuk in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: “Stop thinking about your content as content. Think about it, rather, as micro-content—tiny, unique nuggets of information, humor, commentary, or inspiration that you reimagine every day, even every hour, as you respond to today’s culture, conversations, and current events in real time in a platform’s native language and format.”
In other words, if you are only using social media for an endless series of updates and calls to action, pushing your Facebook feed through to Twitter, or pinning images of your own brand to Pinterest, you’re missing the opportunity.
Addressing the nuances of every platform is more than we can tackle in this space. But we’d like to share a few tips about the social media platforms we know that associations are using most.
Twitter: Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me . . .
We’ll start with Twitter, because it seems to be the preferred platform for many associations.
We suspect it’s because Twitter is safe. It’s fairly easy to spin out Tweet after Tweet as tangible evidence that you are doing something regular on social media: Look, we’re Tweeting! We’re telling everyone about our event!
The problem is, with so many people talking, there is a big listening problem on Twitter. Even the most robust feed doesn’t translate into engagement if you’re not actually engaging.
This is because Twitter is less about the content itself, and more about coming up with unique takes on what’s going on—not just in your industry, but the trends at large, from world news to pop culture.
For associations, this is a great opportunity to add relevancy, engage directly with followers about the stuff they care about, and show that you have a distinct voice and place in their world.
How can you do that? First, always pay attention to what’s “trending.” Instead of Tweets that are just links to your association’s latest blog post or early-bird rate offer, pull from what’s trending and find ways to offer your own fresh take. Sometimes it’s directly related to your association. Other times, only tangentially. But that’s sort of the point. It’s a conversation, and not every Tweet is the zinger. Build interest through engagement and insight. And only then should you bother to promote anything.
Facebook: I Like You; Do You Like Me?
What Facebook has on its side is mass appeal.
But more and more, that appeal isn’t coming for free as Facebook is transforming itself into a paid advertising platform. The first thing to understand is that you probably will have to pay to be seen on Facebook now. But anyone can tell you that. Let’s talk about how to craft the right kind of Facebook posts worthy of sponsoring.
If Twitter is your take on the conversation, Facebook is the love fest of sharing: a picture-based storytelling platform. It’s visual stories, with bright, interesting, and real color commentary.
It is not:
Links with poor context.
Things that should really just be Tweets.
Beauty shots of your product or spreads from your magazine.
At the root, Facebook is being part of the community in a deeper way; it’s about cultivating friendships through sharing.
Most importantly for associations: it’s about exposing the human side and showing a piece of who you are.
That starts with compelling images that show something real. Something interesting. For example, one of our association clients usually gets 15 or so likes for Facebook posts. When they posted pictures of staff wearing Halloween costumes, they got 150 likes. Does that translate directly into more seats being filled at their event? No, but it’s part of a relationship-building process that does translate into that. More likes means more visibility, which can lead to more engagement, which leads back to more visibility. But it all comes from being real.
Large, good quality images that show the people-side of what your association and event is about: that’s what Facebook is for. And think carefully about the status update that goes with it. Remember your social media voice, and always offer interesting, funny, or informative commentary, with a link.
Pinterest: The Middle School Locker
This all-visual platform is a great chance to connect to your members’ and supporters’ aspirations and interests.
Pinterest is less about your brand, and more about creating a vision board around what your organization is about. It’s a chance to have fun (yes, fun is allowed). For example, perhaps you know that a lot of networking at your event happens on the coffee breaks in between sessions. You might create an entire board around the idea of “coffee breaks”: beautiful images of coffee, interesting quotes about coffee, strange collections of coffee cups . . . you get the idea.
Pinterest is all about the re-pin (which keeps original image links in tact). This means you don’t need to necessarily spend a lot of time creating your own images. Just make sure to tag your images with interesting and relevant hashtags. And, like Twitter, offer your take on the image and provide context.
Instagram: Life, Only Better
Instagram is similar to Pinterest in that it’s 100 percent visual. There is a realness about Instagram—even through the filters—that Pinterest sometimes lacks, because it’s about photography and slices of life, versus aspirational ideas.Instagram has the quality of an old-time print campaign. If Pinterest deals in products and ideas, Instagram deals in moments.
And that’s where associations can really capitalize—because events are full of Instagram-worthy moments.
In our view, Instagram will only grow in popularity, because it is so easy to story tell, and to invite others in to story tell with you (through the hash tag). Instead of the thumbs up for like, Instagram uses the heart: click it and you fill the empty heart. If that’s not a metaphor for what associations need to do, then we don’t know what is!
LinkedIn: Calling All Thought Leaders!
In Jab, Jab, Jab, Vaynerchuk says that if Facebook is the dining room where we entertain, then LinkedIn is the library, where we go for resources and to get deals done. Associations have already embraced LinkedIn, but not necessarily for what LinkedIn is becoming, which is a place where thought leaders gather and share ideas.
It’s no longer just job seekers and networking and group discussions. LinkedIn is bringing back the idea of long form copy, and they’ve been working hard to encourage content creation. Both trade and consumer brands are embracing LinkedIn (we heard an executive from Coca-Cola recently talking about all of the traction they are gaining for their Journey magazine by using LinkedIn). Take a look at what LinkedIn is doing (if you haven’t yet), because it’s an emerging opportunity for associations.
The channels of social media each represent opportunity. We know that many of them are already part of your marketing plans. Move the effort from repurposing your content and hitting your followers with an endless stream of offers and updates to creating quality micro content, meant to engage without asking anything in return.
When you approach social media that way – as a means of talk to your people in the very ways they are self-selecting – you’ll find they listen much better.
We may be the busiest, most distracted species on the planet. But strip away our phones, our houses, and our machines, and we are just people, hardwired to connect.
In fact, human beings are made for connection. Neurobiology tells us that our brains are full of mirror neurons—little pieces of brain magic that allow us to match a person’s emotional state as we’re interacting with them (you feel inspired, I feel inspired; you are worried, I am worried). With each beat, our hearts literally send out signals of connection that are actually able to be measured.
Step back from biology and look to the heavens, and the science of connection gets even weirder. In fact, the very universe in which we live seems to be held together by strange phenomena, where particles at opposite ends of the universe are entangled and mirror each other—what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”. (We’re not making this up! Watch the wonderful Tom Shadyac documentary I Am for the most concise discussion of human connection we’ve ever seen!)
Forget biology and theoretical physics, and just look at technology.
The web has connected humanity like nothing before.
And social media has added another layer of connection—every new portal built with the promise of better and better ways to connect us.
We are itching to connect. At every moment.
And yet, for associations, there is so much disconnection happening—right in front of you. Even as your members’ hearts are sending out signals, hoping to be mirrored and entangled, the loop isn’t making its way back. Even as you use the very technology built to connect the human race, there is more and more disconnection. The loop is broken.
We know exactly why it’s broken. You won’t like the answer. You probably won’t even believe us at first. But we’ve seen too much and been in this industry long enough to know that there is no way it isn’t the answer.
The answer is that your association is afraid. Terribly, terribly afraid. Which means that when you reach out to members with your marketing, more often than not, you are operating from fear. And fear will cause disconnection every time.
Let’s Back Up: This Isn’t a Blame Game
The most helpful thing to do as we begin this discussion is to remove blame and judgment from the equation. We’re not passing judgment on your association, or finger pointing. This fear business has mutated its way into the DNA of the association industry, and no one person or association caused it.
We want to help your association—truly. We’re not interested in calling you names and making you feel like crap. But we can’t help if we also operate from a place of fear, and only tell you what you want to hear. In these last few years, we’ve been aligning more and more with truth telling. And now, we’re taking it to a new level by calling your association on its fear (which also means confronting our own, since our livelihood depends on you and your industry colleagues hiring us).
We may be the busiest, most distracted species on the planet. But strip away our phones, our houses, and our machines, and we are just people, hardwired to connect.
In fact, human beings are made for connection. Neurobiology tells us that our brains are full of mirror neurons—little pieces of brain magic that allow us to match a person’s emotional state as we’re interacting with them (you feel inspired, I feel inspired; you are worried, I am worried). With each beat, our hearts literally send out signals of connection that are actually able to be measured.
Step back from biology and look to the heavens, and the science of connection gets even deeper. In fact, the very universe in which we live seems to be held together by strange phenomena, where particles at opposite ends of the universe are entangled and mirror each other—what Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”. (We’re not making this up! Watch the wonderful Tom Shadyac documentary I Am for the most concise discussion of human connection we’ve ever seen; find it here, or catch it on Netflix streaming.)
Forget biology and theoretical physics, and just look at technology. The web has connected humanity like nothing before. And social media has added another layer of connection—every new portal built with the promise of better ways to connect us.
We are itching to connect. At every moment.
And yet, for associations, there is so much disconnection happening—right in front of you.
Even as your members’ hearts are sending out signals, hoping to be mirrored and entangled, the loop isn’t making its way back. Even as you use the very technology built to connect the human race, there is more and more disconnection. The loop is broken.
We know exactly why it’s broken. You won’t like the answer. You probably won’t even believe us at first. But we’ve seen too much and been in this industry long enough to know that there is no way it isn’t the answer.
The answer is that your association is afraid. Terribly, terribly afraid. Which means that when you reach out to members with your marketing, more often than not, you are operating from fear. And fear will cause disconnection every time.
Let’s Back Up: This Isn’t a Blame Game
The most helpful thing to do as we begin this discussion is to remove blame and judgment from the equation. We’re not passing judgment on your organization, or finger pointing. This fear business has mutated its way into the DNA of the association industry, and no one person or association caused it.
We want to help your association—truly. We’re not interested in calling you names and making you feel like crap. But we can’t help if we also operate from a place of fear, and only tell you what you want to hear. In these last few years, we’ve been aligning more and more with truth telling. And now, we’re taking it to a new level by calling your association on its fear (which also means confronting our own, since our livelihood depends on you and your industry colleagues hiring us).
“But We Have to Look Professional”
For most associations, the crux of the fear is this: we are a professional organization, and we can’t appear to be anything but professional. Your worth, your membership retention, and your events are all tied up in this idea of professionalism. The problem is that most associations we’ve encountered have a very narrow definition of what professionalism means.
It means not stepping outside of what is sanctioned or expected. It means the lowest common denominator. It means walking only as far as the accepted edge, and not sticking as much as a pinky toe over it. It means pulling back, building walls, and drawing distinct boundaries around personal and professional.
In your marketing, it means being guarded and thinking you have to talk to people in a stiff, formal way—instead of a human, conversational, and lively way. It means being careful about what you show. It means repurposing the same marketing and the same ideas over and over again—because you know that although they don’t get very good results, at least they don’t offend anyone. It means relying on posting links on Twitter instead of telling stories about people. It means a well-manicured appearance that is mostly just . . . uninspiring.
It hardly ever means being truly human, and connecting at the level of imperfection, messiness, and emotion. Because to do that is to be vulnerable, and in most associations’ eyes, vulnerability = weakness.
But here is the central problem. Among people, it’s vulnerability that truly forges connection.
Here is a piece of truth we will not back down from: An association that operates from fear, constantly checks itself, and hides behind accepted norms about professionalism CANNOT connect. All you can do is create professional-looking disconnection.
Anything But Vulnerability, Please!
It would be great if you just believed us now.
But we sense you need more.
Let us introduce you briefly to researcher and storyteller Brene Brown, who changed our view on vulnerability dramatically (along with the almost 18 million other people who have watched one of her two TED talks, here and here.). Her work on shame and vulnerability is groundbreaking, and it applies to business as much as it applies to things like relationships and parenting. Because her research is about people, and every single organization is made up of people.
One of Brown’s central points is that the myth that vulnerability is weakness is profoundly dangerous. It stifles people and organizations. Because without vulnerability, there would be no innovation and no creativity. In fact, she says, vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage, because it means stepping out and being seen. It means risking failure. It means putting forth a human face when it’s easier to hide behind something else. But it’s that very risk that makes people connect.
After her TED talks exploded, Brown got offers to talk to organizations all over the world. They wanted her to talk about innovation, creativity, and change—but not vulnerability. Not possible, she told them, because vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
So yes, it would be convenient to avoid vulnerability. But if you want your association to be relevant for the future, you can’t. You. Can’t.
Here Comes the Bravery Part
So what does leaving fear behind and getting comfortable with vulnerability look like for your association?
Well, we can tell you what it has looked like for us.
It looked like nearly losing our business six years ago, and one by one, letting loyal employees go as the recession strangled us. It looked like putting family vacations, eating out, and anything that wasn’t an absolute financial necessity on hold. It looked like pacing the floors at 3 a.m. wondering how it was possible we had depleted all of our savings, but trying to shield our worry from the three bright-eyed kids at home.
It looked like climbing out from under a pile of rubble and loss to start again from scratch, but this time, digging down deep and asking hard questions about why we were in this business. It looked like making a counter-intuitive decision to narrow our focus, and work with the people we thought we could make most difference for: associations and non-profits. It looked like investing in support we were afraid to invest in (like high dollar business coaches that we absolutely could not afford), saying things we were afraid to say, and putting things out there before they were perfect.
The thing is, without failing so spectacularly and painfully, we would still be operating on the surface. Without that experience, we wouldn’t be able to understand what’s under the surface, and to look at organizations and see clearly what needs to be fixed.
Ultimately, the result of all of that vulnerability is that now—for the clients who will listen to us and trust us—nobody does it better in this space. Nobody else gets the whole picture of talking about WHY you do what you do—and how that forges real emotional connection—better than Rottman Creative. And the only reason we get it is that we went through emotional and financial hell, and came out on the other side with a new sense of purpose.
And here we are again, being vulnerable in front of the very people who send us the checks: telling you that your association is so mired in fear, it hurts us to see it. And it’s affecting everything from how you run your meetings to how many people show up at your conference.
STOP BEING SO AFRAID! It’s time to truly connect. Our hearts and souls know it. Particles at opposite ends of the universe know it. Why don’t you know it?
Ask yourself: what could stepping into vulnerability look like for your association? We’d love to dive deep with you and figure it out. In fact, we challenge you, right now! Show this article to your boss, and say: “This article is talking about us. What should we do about?”
We can’t wait to see which association is brave enough to take the challenge, let their guard down, and market their event on a personal level. Who will do it?
Marketing is the BRAIN of inspiration. It gets its blood supply from the brand (the HEART), but it operates as its own little command center.
The fact is, you can inspire haphazardly (the nature of viral videos, produced with no game plan in mind, is proof of that). But if you’re trying to ensure the sustainability of your event, we recommend something a bit more thought-out.
Connect the Neurons
What makes for a strong brain is a system of well-developed connections among neurons. And to create those clear pathways, you need strategy.
A strategy—organized into a comprehensive marketing plan—is the key to using your marketing to inspire. And we’re not talking about the same old marketing plan you’ve used for two years where you just plug and play dates. We’re talking about one that’s current, robust, self-reflective, and takes into account the way your members want to be communicated to (not the way you want to communicate to them).
Make the Brain Work
When we work with associations, we spend a lot of time upfront setting the strategy, and we are painstaking in our discovery efforts—digging deep and asking the tough questions. We’ve found that the raw material for inspiration is usually found in the answers to those tough questions.
For example, we are working now with the Door and Hardware Institute (DHI) to market their summer convention. The strategy we created for them isn’t just a column of dates and email topics. Rather, it’s a story that begins with a thorough overview of the event, and contains a clear vision of what we want to happen (the objectives), a discussion of what we know about their members (the leverage), an analysis of what we’ll use to craft the message (the raw materials, including the voice and archetype), and careful thought about how we’ll tell the story (the messaging and copy points). The deliverables are last—because the deliverables don’t even matter if the strategy isn’t based on how to move members.
The brand is the beating heart at the center of inspiration. In the same way that your heart pumps blood to the rest of your body, your brand pumps enthusiasm to every area of your marketing.
Heart-Based Connections
All parts of inspiration channel connection—specifically, how you connect to your members.
But it begins with making a heart-based connection with members. Connection doesn’t start in the logic center of brain: it starts in the heart.It starts in the emotional center. It starts when members connect to your WHY.They can’t make that connection if your brand isn’t radiating that WHY. Talking only about WHAT you do (speeches, certifications, training, tracks, networking) will inform your members—and for the die-hard members, that’s enough. But it won’t move the masses. And it definitely won’t inspire them.
This is why so many associations are in a permanent state of cardiac arrest. The enthusiasm isn’t flowing. The channels for inspiration are blocked—clogged with plaque, in the form of too much WHAT stuff.
Do a Heart Check
You can’t build a brand around something you’re not completely, 100 percent clear about.
And you can’t keep trying to build a heart from WHAT. You’ve got to go deeper to find the inspiration.
Before you launch any campaign, write any email, create any brandmark or event theme, grab a clean sheet of paper and fill in these blanks.
We exist because _. The difference we make in members’ lives is _. If we weren’t here, would our members miss us? Why?
Inspiring your base starts with escaping the same old safe scripts and coming up with truthful, raw, and compelling answers to these questions. It means going to a more vulnerable, human place (we’ve noticed these are very uncomfortable places for associations to hang out).
Associations host events to change lives. So what IS that change? What happens at your event that can’t happen in the same way anywhere else? These first two questions on the list are deal-breakers. They’re elementary. But the third is actually where to start if you’re struggling. Because people will never miss what they can’t connect to in the first place. They won’t miss the difference that’s never pointed out to them.
Since we’ve been communicating our “Inspire Your Base” message, we’ve noticed an evolution in how people are responding. The responses have moved from, “No thanks, we’re good just doing what we’ve always done,” to “Yes, we DO need to inspire our base. But how exactly do we do that?”
In fact, the number one question we get is: “How do we actually inspire people?”
For us, it goes like this: Inspiration is the place where brand, marketing, content, and design intersect and relate. Each one of those elements — brand, marketing, content, and design — is a living, breathing system, interrelated and interdependent on each other. If inspiration took human form, it couldn’t live without each part working together. In fact, the best way to truly explain is with a quick anatomy lesson.
The brand is the beating heart at the center of inspiration. In the same way that your heart pumps blood to the rest of your body, your brand pumps enthusiasm to every area of your marketing.
Heart-Based Connections
All parts of inspiration channel connection—specifically, how you connect to your members.
But it begins with making a heart-based connection with members. Connection doesn’t start in the logic center of brain: it starts in the heart.It starts in the emotional center. It starts when members connect to your WHY. They can’t make that connection if your brand isn’t radiating that WHY. Talking only about WHAT you do (speeches, certifications, training, tracks, networking) will inform your members—and for the die-hard members, that’s enough. But it won’t move the masses. And it definitely won’t inspire them.
This is why so many associations are in a permanent state of cardiac arrest. The enthusiasm isn’t flowing. The channels for inspiration are blocked—clogged with plaque, in the form of too much WHAT stuff.
Do a Heart Check
You can’t build a brand around something you’re not completely, 100 percent clear about. And you can’t keep trying to build a heart from WHAT. You’ve got to go deeper to find the inspiration.
Before you launch any campaign, write any email, create any brandmark or event theme, grab a clean sheet of paper and fill in these blanks.
We exist because _.
The difference we make in members’ lives is _.
If we weren’t here, would our members miss us? Why?
Inspiring your base starts with escaping the same old safe scripts and coming up with truthful, raw, and compelling answers to these questions. It means going to a more vulnerable, human place (we’ve noticed these are very uncomfortable places for associations to hang out).
Associations host events to change lives. So what IS that change? What happens at your event that can’t happen in the same way anywhere else? These first two questions on the list are deal-breakers. They’re elementary. But the third is actually where to start if you’re struggling. Because people will never miss what they can’t connect to in the first place. They won’t miss the difference that’s never pointed out to them.
Have your answers? Then let’s move on to the more cerebral aspects of inspiration.
Marketing is the BRAIN of inspiration. It gets its blood supply from the brand (the HEART), but it operates as its own little command center.
The fact is, you can inspire haphazardly (the nature of viral videos, produced with no game plan in mind, is proof of that). But if you’re trying to ensure the sustainability of your event, we recommend something a bit more thought-out.
Connect the Neurons
What makes for a strong brain is a system of well-developed connections among neurons.
And to create those clear pathways, you need strategy.
A strategy—organized into a comprehensive marketing plan—is the key to using your marketing to inspire. And we’re not talking about the same old marketing plan you’ve used for two years where you just plug and play dates. We’re talking about one that’s current, robust, self-reflective, and takes into account the way your members want to be communicated to (not the way you want to communicate to them).
Make the Brain Work
When we work with associations, we spend a lot of time upfront setting the strategy, and we are painstaking in our discovery efforts—digging deep and asking the tough questions.
We’ve found that the raw material for inspiration is usually found in the answers to those tough questions.
For example, we are working now with the Door and Hardware Institute (DHI) to market their summer convention. The strategy we created for them isn’t just a column of dates and email topics. Rather, it’s a story that begins with a thorough overview of the event, and contains a clear vision of what we want to happen (the objectives), a discussion of what we know about their members (the leverage), an analysis of what we’ll use to craft the message (the raw materials, including the voice and archetype), and careful thought about how we’ll tell the story (the messaging and copy points). The deliverables are last—because the deliverables don’t even matter if the strategy isn’t based on how to move members.
It’s the heart and head working together. The brand and the marketing. The soul and the logic. As for what to actually say in your message? For that, we head to the belly.
Your content is the BELLY. It’s the day-to-day fuel. It’s where inspiration is nourished.
If you know anything about nutrition, you know that filling your belly with high-calorie, low-quality foods usually makes you feel lethargic, bloated, and generally rotten. By contrast, high-quality calories and good food makes you feel more energetic, more motivated, and generally better. Content is no different: it’s quality over quantity. Want inspired members? Don’t just dish out content for contents’ sake. Take a true content marketing approach. In other words, feed them good calories.
A Storytelling Diet
The way to truly nourish inspiration is through standout storytelling, both visually and verbally.
Stories come in all forms: the story of your association, the story of what happens at the conference, the story of lives changed.
This is what we did for the National Investment Center (NIC) to market their spring regional conference this year. We spent time interviewing members they selected—each of whom had a different story to tell about the conference. (Hint: get your members comfortable talking, and they will always say things 100 times better than you could ever say them yourself.) Using a content marketing approach, we turned those stories into inspiring articles and well-designed downloadable PDFs, with call-to-action web buttons.
A Growing Appetite
When your content is solid and engaging and starts with quality—and you have the right plan in place—you can turn the stories into anything: magazine articles, emails, direct mail pieces, social media posts, print posters, apps, infographics, and, of course, motion graphics.
In fact, we’re moving toward the belief that VIDEO is becoming the most important way to present content (we’ll be writing more about that soon). We’re going to start embedding motion graphic clips (some as short as 15 seconds) into every email. It goes back to strategy—and the idea that you need to communicate to members the way they want to be communicated to.
Over and over again, people consistently rank video as one of the top ways they like to view content.
When we talk about quality content, we’re not just talking about words. Words are huge. Words move people, no doubt. But in today’s highly visual marketplace, you absolutely cannot inspire in a sustainable way without the final piece.
Design represents the LIMBS of inspiration, because it’s what carries your message into the world. It’s what members touch and interact with. In other words, it’s what gives your brand, your marketing, and your content legs and arms.
Associations consistently tell us: “Yes, we know this. We do design our marketing materials.” To which we almost always reply: “No, you don’t.” Design isn’t just creating a vector graphic in Adobe Illustrator, changing a few fonts, and slapping on the brand colors. Good design—design that truly inspires—must be purpose-driven.
Design That Elevates
By purpose-driven, we mean that it’s heart, strategy, and story—woven together into a captivating visual package.
It’s smart, savvy, and it makes a strong emotional connection by bringing the story to life through visual elements that are consistent in every single piece of content, from print to digital to social media.
Our favorite recent example is the work we’ve been doing with the American Specialty Toy Retailers Association (ASTRA). Their design is very clearly the limbs of the campaign. It’s what elevates the event in the hearts and minds of their members.
The graphics are bold and bright. The images of children are whimsical and light and forge those emotional connections with members.
Every single piece takes design into account, from the play of space to the vibrancy of the colors to the personality of the event.
No postcard is slapped together. No email is sent as text only. Each piece has legs. We also put together a short motion graphics piece for them, which has gotten a huge response from members. Video is no longer optional: it’s a must do in today’s dynamic, busy, and visual-driven world!
Designing an Experience
The final thing we must point out is that while print is still very much alive and brings a tactile element that absolutely has a place in moving and inspiring members to register, your overall design strategy has to work for the digital world.
It has to pop on the screen. Most associations realize that text emails do nothing to inspire. But they don’t push the design nearly far enough. And they hardly ever carry it into social media, which has become an increasingly visual format. (We’ll be writing more about that soon as well!) No matter the medium, design is what will make the experience of your brand come to life.
We’ll repeat it again: Inspiration is the place where brand, marketing, content, and design intersect. Neglect one, and the whole suffers. Cheat one, and you cheat them all. But take the time to weave them all together, and watch inspiration bring your base to life.
So, what do you have to offer members? Literally, what is the stuff you’ve got? Remember, the first stepping stone is that your job is to change lives. You can’t do that if people don’t register. But they’re not going to register until they see a piece of what you have. Stop looking at this as a catch-22, and just start sharing what you have.
Be generous, and be strategic.
What events/promotions/discounts can you tie to registration? We’re not just talking about hotel discounts and room blocks. But giveaways. Information sharing. Community-building activities. What thought leaders in your industry can you tap to provide value-added things for your members?
However, your offers won’t be effective if you don’t understand (and account for) registration timing.
We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue # 11!
People don’t know that you’re talking to them if you don’t actually talk to them.
And the way your people recognize that you’re talking to them is through voice.
If your logo or conference brandmark is your visual signature, your voice is your verbal signature—and without it, there is no compelling reason to listen to your message, to take action, or to share it with others.
We see far too many voiceless marketing campaigns: generic information, lacking context, personality, or specificity.
A strong brand voice demands attention. It creates instant recognition, and—most importantly—inspires your people by talking authentically and directly to them about the stuff they care about. The visual and the voice—your graphics and your copy—have to work together. They have to both come from the same place of inspiration, and archetype-driven messaging.
Nothing about how you communicate to your members should be haphazard. That included what you offer them.
We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #10!
It’s the month for taking stock. For raising your glass, and taking your turn sharing what you’re thankful for. Around the Rottman table, we’re thankful for many things: good health, good business, a new grandchild even. But we’re also thankful for something else. We are thankful for you, because you are working toward something we admire: making people’s lives better. As you know, we believe associations host events to bring people together so that lives can be changed. We can’t imagine any other reason as compelling. So, thank you.
But that’s not the end of the Thanksgiving story. Not even close. In fact, we just need to take a quick detour back to the very beginning of human history. We know you’re tempted to beg off, what with the turkey coma and all. But you don’t want to do that, trust us. Because if you are really committed to the business of changing lives (and we believe you are), you’ll want to see what we have to show you. So grab another helping of sweet potatoes and come with us.
At the Beginning, There Were Stories
We may have overreached when we said the very beginning of human history. Let’s advance forward just a little bit, to the time when people started forming societies. When they had developed language and belief systems and had figured out that no matter who is in charge or how you get your food, some people like to be the hero, some people like to tell the jokes, some people are the poets, some people are the peacemakers, some people are prone to adventure, and so on.
Where we are, then, is the beginning of human emotion, and the realization that there is a set of stories that drives humanity. We’re standing front and center, watching the birth of the archetype, or the idea that there are universal human stories that get lived over and over again, regardless of time or circumstance.
That people are intrinsically wired to live them, be called by them, and instantaneously recognize them.
Why are we taking you back to this moment? Because there is a direct line between here and what you are trying to do with your event. And if you truly understand how to follow that line, you can see a 15 percent increase in attendance at your event.
What do a bunch of old stories have to do with making people show up?
That’s a great question. The short answer is: everything.
We firmly believe that we are entering the Age of the Purposeful brand: where instead of squandering their attention, people save it for better stuff. Stuff they care about. Stuff that speaks to them, in colors, forms, sparks, emotions—and ultimately, the stories that call to them, bubbling up from some place in the collective unconscious.
It all sounds a bit mythical. So here is a dose of reality to ground it: in the Age of the Purposeful Brand, content for content’s sake won’t be good enough. Throwing darts wildly to see what sticks: that luxury is gone. There just isn’t enough attention anymore. You have to talk to people with much more purpose. For you, that means marketing all the tracks and precons and keynote speakers in the world won’t be good enough if you are not connecting to something fundamental. To the deep-rooted stories of who we are. This is what archetype-based branding is all about: connecting your brand to the archetypes it already evokes, teasing that out, and using it to create a distinct brand voice and brand look.
We laid this out back in March when we talked about the steps to creating a marketing plan: you need to understand brand archetypes so that you know how to talk to your people and what kind of images to show them. Because when an association puts forth the effort to discern their archetypes and uses those archetypes to develop a thoughtful, branded voice, they connect to their members in a new way. They connect because they have a much clearer picture of: (1) what visual and verbal stories will resonate with their members, and (2) how to tell those stories so that members recognize that the story is meant for them, in that precise moment, and that they should take action.
Let’s look at a few examples.
The Caregiver: Talk to us About Nurturing
The American Specialty Toy Retailers Association (ASTRA) has a bright, cheerful brand, matched by a bright, cheerful summer conference. They are in the toy business, and the toy business is about loving to see kids smile and nurturing play and learning. In fact, it’s a brand with a deep story about nurturing.
After our discovery session with ASTRA, we realized that their retail members fit the Caregiver archetype.
They are in business because they want to nurture. They nurture their love for what they do, and in turn, they nurture their own businesses—which is related to helping parents nurture their children. Using this Caregiver archetype, we were able to create a branded voice that spoke directly to ASTRA’s retail segment. We knew what kinds of stories to tell, what kind of tone to take, what kind of subject lines to write, what kind of graphics to create, and what kind of words to use. In telling the story of caregiver, we were telling the story of the conference in a way that resonated with members at a deeper level than merely logic. By doing this, we were able to help ASTRA get a 15 percent increase in enrollment for their event.
The Advocate: Stories about Effecting Change
For the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR), it was the classic story of difference-making, because we uncovered that their provider organization leaders fit the Advocate archetype. They are here because they want to make a piece of the world better. Their sense of purpose is linked to championing the rights of others and making life better for people. They want to effect change and help people use their voices for causes they believe matter.
Hence, the voice we created for ANCOR appealed to their members’ sense of justice and compassion.
It was big and inspirational: together, we’ll make life better. We’ll shape policy that makes a difference. We’ll give voice to people who need it. Again, understanding the archetype and the voice that needed to flow from it helped us shape their campaign and develop the right kinds of case studies to use in email communications and direct mail. And it helped ANCOR meet their numbers, even amidst funding slashes and members’ shrinking budgets for things like attending conferences.
The Patriarch: The Language of Protection and Duty
One last example is from work we are currently in the middle of, so we can’t give as many details. It’s an association from the world of commercial building and architecture, and the members are mostly owners of or management level within small companies that handle very specialized product distribution. In our many discovery conversations and research, we came to understand that their distributor base fits the Patriarch archetype. They are leaders who feel an inherited responsibility to protect others. They make others feel safe and inspire respect, and they understand that this is what makes them good at their job.
Wrapping the voice in the Patriarch archetype will help this association validate to their members that the day-to-day of decision-making to preserve the order matters.
That being better at their job makes the whole industry better. It helps us strike the right balance in the voice, and understand what kind of emotions and ideas we need to tap into when we design and write the emails. From pictures to pull-quotes, archetypes help inform the look, feel, and tone of every piece of communication.
It’s There: Use It!
Obviously, teasing out the archetypes and creating the accompanying voice helps us—as the marketing firm charged with drumming up inspiration and increasing attendance. As we said in the beginning, we’ve seen a 15 percent increase in attendance for the associations who have worked with us to create marketing campaigns steeped in brand archetypes.
Ultimately though, it helps you and your association. A lot. Because you are working every day in the business of changing lives. We know that your job is getting harder. That’s why we offer this to you. Don’t you want to be able to better reach your people? To communicate with them in more meaningful ways? To convert more of them from mildly interested onlookers to fully engaged registrants? Don’t you want the secret access code to their collective unconscious?
The beautiful thing about this approach is that everything you need is already there: you just need to recognize it and know how to use it.
Enjoy the holiday, and after you recover from your turkey hangover, give us a call. We’d love to help you figure out your archetype. It’s not doing any good just hanging around back there in the beginning of human history. It’s time to put it to work for you.
Your registration brochure isn’t just a marketing piece. It’s the face of your conference. A face can launch a thousand ships. Or it can make everyone pack up and go home. To make it a face that inspires action, your brochure has to engage your people. It’s got to do the old W&W: woo and wow. The most effective way to do that isn’t to promote the venue. Rather, the most effective W&W strategy is to create a story around the number one reason people attend your conference: person-to-person interaction.
Our research has confirmed that in-person networking is the number one reason people step out of the virtual world and the LinkedIn discussion groups. Hence, your registration brochure needs to upsell the networking opportunities with both copy and visuals, and really tell the story.
If you’re not telling that story, don’t even bother putting a brochure out there.
Because if you thought the recession was bad for conference attendance, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The world of information is downloadable—and it will continue to be even more downloadable. Social networking facilitates connections almost instantaneously.
However, you do have something in your corner. The virtual world isn’t the same as the real one. Slap a camera on your computer, but it doesn’t matter. Virtual experiences can’t match the human experience of standing in a circle of your colleagues, chatting and laughing as you generate ideas and sparks and connections. The experience of all of your neurons firing because you are breathing the same air, in the same moment, at the same place, at the same time as a bunch of other interesting people.
The fact that virtual can’t match human is the meat of your story, and you better tell it in a compelling way.
We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #3!
We propose a Golden Triangle of Conference Marketing: WHY is in the center. And your Brand is at the top, with your Strategic Plan and Conference on either side. Your brand, your strategic plan, and the essence of the conference are all elements of HOW you do what you do. Outside the triangle lies the WHAT stuff: the deliverables, like social media, apps, the registration brochures, e-newsletters, save-the-date, report to members, and other tangibles.
But all of it must start with WHY your association exists. And it all must be aligned. However, we find that it hardly ever is. For example, if a key driver of your strategic plan is to elicit member feedback, but you only look at the composite scores on surveys and don’t take the time to read the comments, WHAT you’re doing isn’t aligned with HOW you say you are doing it (and the WHY is usually lost altogether).
We can break this down one step further for your conference: WHY is still the foundation and the WHAT things are still the deliverables, but HOW becomes the conference theme. A conference theme that starts with WHY is inspired by the very belief that holds the association together—not by the location or the venue or the time of year. Instead of a clever pun that could work for any association in any given year, your conference theme should spring from something deeper and more fundamental. Your conference theme can become like a rallying cry… or it can be yet one more empty promise. The conference theme holds tremendous potential. But so often, it’s wasted.
We hope you find these tips inspiring for your next conference, and until next time keep a look out for clue #2!
Take a moment and picture your favorite group of members in your head. You know, the “go-to” group. The ones who are are involved and highly engaged. The ones who always give you feedback and come to your annual conference without even being asked. You love this group—as well you should. Be grateful for them. But here’s the un-pretty reality: they represent a huge hurdle for your association. Their eagerness and tendency to show up no matter what is keeping you too comfortable in your marketing.
Because in the new frontier of association event marketing, there is no norm. It’s not about assuming like-mindedness. It’s about embracing and understanding the dis-similarity of your membership. It’s about understanding the fact that your members are disparate people, with lives and problems and jobs and Saturday morning sporting events and bills to pay and arguments with significant others and dreams they’re trying to chase. It’s about getting that what holds them together is they are looking for a life-changing moment. An event that will be a game changer. Your association has that power. It’s why you exist.
But you aren’t reaching them because you’re focused on the eager 30 percent who always show up. It’s time to start talking to the other 70 percent who desperately need you, and design visually-based marketing campaigns that inspire them to want to come to your event.
Because the ability to inspire people is what will transform your association from same-old, same-old with a fast approaching expiration date to a sustainable organization with the ability to change lives.
Do You Sense a Theme Here?
Marketing a conference is almost exactly like launching a product. So, the first thing you need to enlist for a product launch is empathy, or being intimately connected to what your customers need (in the case of associations, your members). And then it’s a matter of focusing on what they need. Most associations do a good job with these first two things. It’s the part where you show people what you’ve come up with for them where it’s falling short. Early Apple investor and former CEO Mike Markkula said:
“People DO judge a book by its cover… We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod.”
Mike Markkula
Just as with a product launch, marketing your event is all about “packaging”—which is the story you’re wrapping your promotions in. Associations have this tendency to believe that their audience is so “niche,” that they forget to care about story. It’s easy to start thinking it just has to be “professional” and inform the unaware. But that’s where the empathy falters a bit. Because your members DO need to be inspired. They’re not just a niche. They are people with imaginations. People whose lives are waiting to be changed. And your conference can do that. But you have to present in that way.
You have to start by being clear on the difference the event makes for people. And then, you need a way to communicate it and visually portray that belief. You need a clear “HOW.” For a conference, that HOW is the conference theme.
But hold on, because this is where the disconnect happens. A theme isn’t just a nice-sounding phrase, recycled and repurposed year after year. Rather, it’s a verbal and visual statement about possibility, about what can happen at the event, and about the ways in which lives can be changed.
A conference theme is a living thing: the idea and the visuals should sprout and grow together.
Your theme and the brandmark you design around it MUST inspire wonder and excitement and anticipation. Sounds lofty, right? Well, it better be. It better be absolutely fantastic! And it better look fantastic on the page and screen. Because if your theme isn’t right, the whole thing falls apart. From what we’ve seen, a majority of the themes out there aren’t right.
Products aren’t just thrown out there, with the assumption that the right people will buy it. They are given careful thought, unveiled in a strategic way, around a central theme that’s been carefully chosen. You have to do the same for your event.
For example, for their 2013 event, we created the theme for the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association (ASTRA), “From Ordinary to Extraordinary.” We built a strong photographic and graphic treatment around it, used it to craft a targeted direct mail campaign, dripped an email campaign around it, and let it inform every single visual we used (including the short video we created for the event). We incorporated it in the campaign messaging and content strategy. Their attendance wound up with a 15 percent bump when all was said and done. Of course, the campaign was more than just a great theme. But the theme is what the campaign was built around. It was the glue that held it together. The thing that continually inspired their base. The clear HOW.
Good Design is Good Business
Our roots are in design, so we’re biased on this. But we’re also right. Good design is good business. It’s a promise of quality. It builds trust, amplifies your brand, impacts members’ experiences (and the way they remember the experiences), and changes members’ behavior (by inspiring them to act). You can create the best programming in the world and bring in a roster of top-notch speakers. But if your visuals don’t support content, don’t resonate with people, and aren’t powerful, nobody is going to think the event is powerful. In other words, bad design is bad business.
Too often we see associations forsaking design for the method of communication. They choose the way they are going to communicate and engage (email, social media, etc.) without taking time to create a design strategy that supports their message. Platforms alone don’t create emotional connection. Even Pinterest—one of the most visual platforms—doesn’t create connection on its own. The visions of life, via the Pinboards people pull together to inspire themselves and others, are what make emotional connections happen: you could do this; you could travel here; you can learn this; you can have this in your life.
Visuals you connect with don’t just create little moments: they create movements. And that’s what your event needs to be: a movement on a larger scale. Not just an event made up of some good moments.
So, how do you tap into this visual world to promote your event?
As we said above,
Step one is to have a killer theme that you can build a visual world around.
Step two, you need to think about how to balance your content with your visuals.
We believe in visual email campaigns. Of course the substance matters: you have important things to say. But if it’s too text heavy and the visuals are just an afterthought, we guarantee that for the majority of people (the 70 percent who don’t just automatically show up), your conference will also be an afterthought.
Third, harness the power of video.
But edited video.
Five-minute videos about why your association is great are just self-indulgent. And hardly anyone is going to watch them. Why do you think TV commercials are 30 to 60 seconds? The first thing people do with a You Tube video is look to see the time: they are looking for videos three minutes and under (under two minutes is even better). For that same ASTRA event, we created a promotional video that was under two minutes short and graphic. It was the campaign’s biggest hit, and they got an increased number of registrations from it. There are plenty of examples of great video, based around a central theme. Two of our favorites are Back to the Start and The Scarecrow videos by Chipotle.
Fourth, think more critically about the content of your magazine.
We know from reading surveys that an association’s magazine is often one of main reasons a person joins. But to reiterate: that doesn’t mean you’re dealing with a like-minded bunch. Your members/readers are not just a herd of sheep that will follow blindly to your event. You have to woo them with powerful visuals. Your magazine absolutely has to have inspiring and visually-driven content that promotes the conference. We recommend a six- to eight-page spread that also has case studies wrapped in it. It should run at least one month before Early Bird.
Finally, think about ways you can “unveil” your conference.
What can you borrow from successful product launches? Find ways to highlight pieces of the event, by visually representing them. Use your theme in creative ways. And always, always, always wrap everything you do in strong visuals. If you’re not sure if your visuals are strong, we’ll be glad to take a look for you. We have no problem telling the truth.
That favorite group of yours? They’ll be there. They’ll keep coming. But they can’t sustain you, and you know it. It’s really the other battle that will make your numbers. And that fight is only going to get more difficult. The only way to win it is to design yourself to victory.
Let’s face it; design matters. Marty Neumeier, the Director of Transformation for Liquid Agency states that “the most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box” which is what Michaela O’Connor Abrams emphasizes in her speech at the 2013 Exhibition and Convention Executives Forum. In years past, events typically followed the standard norm; a big show room filled with vendors that had attendees walking up and down the rows. How is this appealing to your audience? How does your event stand out from others? To put it simply, it doesn’t. In the article, “Why Event Design Matters” the author sums up why design is a critical aspect in making your attendee’s overall experience worthwhile.
Imagine walking down the street and stopping into a restaurant or store you’ve never been to before. The atmosphere is your first impression; despite the products you have or the food you serve, people aren’t going to embrace it if they aren’t impressed by the overall character of your place. Take this into consideration when planning an event for your association. Every little detail matters!
The first steps of event planning begin with marketing (i.e. social media and direct mail) then bringing your event to life which includes the atmosphere, the entertainment, the food, the venue; the impression you make on your attendee is valuable.
Where do you think your first impression is made? Your marketing. You need to design a strategies that will help engage members and prospects so that they will be inspired to act. Your customized strategy will need to include comprehensive plans for email marketing, direct mail marketing, and social media marketing. Your marketing pieces should contain innovative design and strong story-based copywriting.
So, when you sit down to plan your next event, remember to think about your attendees and the design that is going to make your event noteworthy.
We tried very hard to find a stealthier way into this statement. But it’s such a point of contention and confusion that we just have to come out and say it, in no uncertain terms, as unequivocally as possible: Direct mail is a necessity of conference marketing.
We know this because across every industry and meeting size, the associations that meet their numbers are the ones who are doing direct mail. Yes, there was a mass exodus from printed marketing pieces a few years ago, fed by a perfect storm of recession, mobile app proliferation, and social media. But the associations who have kept direct mail in the mix are the ones having the most success with their events.
If these few paragraphs were all it took to convince you, we’d be thrilled! But we see you shaking your head in disagreement. Direct mail in 2013? Really?
Yes, really. But let’s get it all out on the table. All of the reasons you disagree and don’t want to invest in direct mail in 2013.
1. Because no one cares about print anymore.
This is one of those statements that people like to utter with a hint of nostalgia in their voice and pair with a sad headshake. Oh, the doom and gloom of a modern world that no longer values print! It’s a really compelling story. The only problem is that it isn’t true.
In fact, as a culture, we value print more than ever: precisely because when there are so many other options (less expensive options at that), creating a tangible piece of printed material is a much more conscious decision.
However, the scarcity of print doesn’t automatically mean that everything being printed is actually good. Lots of printed pieces are still crap. But, if your piece is well-designed, inspiring, and interesting, that combination of good + tangible automatically builds esteem and credibility in your members’ eyes—as in, “Wow, they must really care about this: they put it on paper!”
It’s not something terribly logical. It’s like trying to describe why you would ever want to go to the zoo to hear the lions roar versus just watching them on TV. It’s about realness.
And when you print something, it becomes real.
It comes out from behind the screen and jumps into your hands, connecting with the part of the brain that processes emotion and gut decisions. Like the decision to register for a conference.
We would never deny that in the modern world, people care about different things than they used to. But don’t tell us they don’t care about print. We’ve seen with our own eyes that the opposite is true.
2. Because it’s too expensive.
Yes, print is more expensive than email. We can’t argue our way out of that one. We know your budgets have been slashed. But here is an important fact to weigh when you’re designing your conference marketing budget: Direct mail gets a greater response than email.
We’ll repeat that one more time, because it’s not a typo. Direct mail gets a greater response than email. Now, email has a stronger return-on-investment, precisely because it is relatively inexpensive. But time and time again, when associations need to bring in the numbers, they send out print. A great example: one of our clients, National Staff Development Council was having trouble meeting their attendance goals, despite using all of the other tactics we recommend. Once we designed a compelling direct mail campaign for them, they easily met their numbers. This is a rinse-and-repeat story: it happens over and over again. When associations are struggling to meet their numbers and they hit their audience with strategic direct mail, they wind up meeting their goal.
Yes, direct mail is an investment. We can’t pretend it’s not. But it’s an investment that works.
3. Because it doesn’t work anyway
Did you read what we just said?
But we will concede that on its own, it may not work. And if it’s not done well, it definitely won’t work. But when you use direct mail strategically—that is, as part of a comprehensive campaign that also includes email marketing and social media—and you create graphic- and story-driven pieces that engage and inspire, and you segment and time the pieces properly, it works beautifully.
Basically, direct mail is the opportunity right in front of you that you’re missing.
Are you ready to do something about it?
Two Ways to Make Direct Mail Work
We recommend choosing one of two approaches—both of which work extremely well.
Plan A: Highlights Mailer + Registration Brochure
The first approach is to pair event highlights with a well-designed registration brochure. We’ve written quite a lot about the kind of registration brochure you need to be doing. So let’s focus on what this highlights mailer needs to be about.
Timing: Drop the event highlights mailer when registration is open, and the registration brochure in the weeks before the Early Bird deadline.
Content: A highlights piece should be exactly that: the most captivating highlights of the event, based on what your members tell you they care about most. Networking is almost always the number one reason people cite for coming to events, followed by learning. Your printed piece needs to have those things jump off the page, with bold design and high quality photography (not grainy images of people sitting around a table in a poorly lit ballroom). The session highlights you feature should make an emotional connection with your members. You need to both show them why they should care, and also tell them.
Design: This is not simply a save-the-date postcard—or a postcard at all. This is a folded, smartly-designed piece, with graphic elements that tie not just to the event brandmark, but also to the overarching “WHY” behind what your association is about. For example, we did a highlights piece for our client, The American Specialty Toy Retailing Association (ASTRA) —whose “WHY” is around the idea of leading through play. We used fun images of kids playing and learning and wove in graphic elements like bubbles. We laid it out in such a way that all of the messages—even the “Schedule-at-a-Glance”—tied back to the kids and the overarching reason.
Segmentation: It’s possible that you need to create two (or more) different pieces, especially if you have two (or more) distinct audiences you’re reaching. You’re not re-inventing the design each time—just tweaking. For example, if your session events are grouped by track, you might create a mailer to highlight each track. The more directly you are talking to your members in this piece, the better. Forcing the highlights into a one-size-fits-all piece sometimes has the effect of not saying anything at all. Take the time to be strategic and segment.
Plan B: Case Studies Mailers
The alternate approach (and one we love) is to craft three direct mail pieces around three personal stories from members. We call these “case study” mailers. You’re basically building a case study—based around member testimonials—for why the event matters.
Timing: Start dropping the pieces one a month, about three months before the event. Tie the pieces to your specific offers, such as Early Bird, hotel deadlines, giveaways, webinars, or other special offers.
Content: The only way to build a successful case study is to mine your members (survey feedback is the logical place to start) and do a series of in-depth interviews with a handful of them to really get at WHY they come to the event and the difference it makes. Choose three stories that build on each other: they’re not saying exactly the same thing, but they all tie into why the event matters. Include good quality headshots of each member. There are various stylistic choices you can make (first person versus third person), but the key is to make sure the pieces are written in the voice of the event. And definitely use your email campaign to reiterate and retell the stories.
Design: As with the highlights mailer, this should be a top-notch piece. The design should match the voice, whether it’s playful, urgent, bold, or charming. Your design must get at the heart of why your event matters to people. When we design case study mailers, we take time to really brand them. For example, we did a series of case study mailers for the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR) where we focused on interviewing people at one member organization and telling their stories of why the event mattered. We branded the case study mailers all around this idea of why the event matters, and used the design to reinforce it. (And yes, they got their numbers.)
Segmentation: Different stories will resonate with different people. It’s not just about tracks. For example, stories from first-time attendees might be the exact thing that members who have never attended need to hear. On the other hand, members who are deciding whether to return to the event might make a stronger emotional connection with stories of members who have attended multiple conferences. Think carefully about the stories various segments of your audience will identify with.
Yes, many of your peers may have run away from direct mail. That only makes your opportunity that much stronger. Go back and take a look, and then ruminate on this: tangibility will set you apart. Tangibility will build connection. And tangibility will help you bring in the numbers.
In the winter of 1971, a guy by the name of Ray Tomlinson did something really ordinary that would, in time, revolutionize the way we communicate: he sent the very first email message. Ray was a computer engineer at a contractor for the U.S. Defense Department. One of those brainy guys working on some of the very early Internet stuff, he did some fancy playing around with the existing technology, and figured out a way to send messages between two machines. In various interviews, Ray talks about how his first messages were just nonsense strings of letters, totally forgettable. He was only testing the technology, he says; he didn’t know he should have had a Neil Armstrong “one small step” comment at the ready.
It’s been 42 years since that first message, and email has changed our lives. But what hasn’t changed is the forgettable factor: emails are all too often forgettable, opened and discarded (or unopened and discarded) in a matter of seconds. Most of us get an average of 100 emails a day: that adds up to more than 36,000 emails a year. In all of this noise and traffic, what is going to make someone stop, read, and—most importantly—ACT?
Inevitably, stories about email have a section where they bemoan the pace of modern life. That’s a total waste of time, so we’re not doing it. Because our culture isn’t the problem. Your forgettable emails are the problem. And the truth is that in today’s world, the disease of forgettability will cost your association more money than all of your other woes combined.
Making Email Marketing Work for Your Event
The really great news is that email is actually a terrific way for associations to market events. Unlike spam or unsolicited emails, you are abiding by the first rule of email marketing: get permission first. You have the permission of your members to communicate with them.
Permission is a powerful thing to have on your side. But it’s not enough. You also have to do it right—because email marketing only works when you do it right. We make it work for our clients by following the Think-Say-Show process: strategy that starts by answering why this whole thing matters, archetype-based messaging that talks to members about the things they care about, and inspiring graphics that paint a picture they have to be part of.
But that’s the view from above. We’re going to walk you through some specifics: things you need to start doing TODAY to see better results from your email marketing for your conference. First, we’ll talk about what has to be true ALL of the time. Then, we’ll offer six ideas around how to create email content that inspires members to ACT. And finally, we’ll address what six things you need to do to get members to OPEN your emails.
First, let’s talk about what has to be true all of the time.
Email Marketing for Events Golden Rule: Every single email message you send out to promote your conference must have a consistent, branded look. Every. Single. One.
There are three reasons for this:
Consistency builds trust and credibility: your members will take seriously what you say if they keep seeing it presented in the same way.
Of those thousands of emails we get every year, we are much more likely to open and engage with the ones we recognize.
The third reason is really the key: A branded look is what allows you to build the story of your event, week by week. Your email campaign needs a graphic and verbal life of its own—separate from the other regular communication that you send out to members (like monthly updates).
We’ll talk more specifics about how to brand your emails in the next two sections.
SIX IDEAS FOR IMPROVING YOUR EMAIL CONTENT
1. Use a customized, well-designed email template that incorporates your brandmark.
Text-based emails inform: they do not inspire.
Your email template is your chance to paint a captivating visual of what the event is about. It MUST incorporate the brandmark and theme (that’s part of that stand-alone branded look we outlined in The Golden Rule). You also need a smartly-designed sidebar, with calls-to-action designed as graphic icons. Choosing (and then customizing) the right template is perhaps the single-most important design decision your association will make regarding the conference email marketing.
2. Segment your storytelling.
The same stories don’t appeal to everyone, because not everyone cares about the same thing.
For example, in a campaign we built for The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS), we realized that the headmasters of boarding schools came to the event for different reasons than the faculty and staff—so, we created a segmented email campaign. We also segmented based on members who had never attended and members who had attended. This allowed us to help TABS tweak the messages in very specific ways.
3. Speak in a voice that will make members listen.
One of the things we specialize in is helping associations hone in on the voice they need to use to inspire their members to register. As we said in last month’s article, discerning your archetype is a key stepping stone in your marketing plan—and it’s what you’ll use to create the branded voice. For example, we determined The American Specialty Toy Retailer’s Association (ASTRA) member archetype is that of a caregiver. Their members believe that nurturing a child’s love of play can change kids’ lives. It’s what drives them at their core. So, we created a voice that is nurturing, caring, cheerful, optimistic, and playful. We used the conference theme, “From Ordinary to Extraordinary” to develop the stories. And we worked with ASTRA to keep the voice consistent across all event email communication. When you talk to your members in a voice designed specifically for them, it forges an emotional connection.
4. Build unique offers into the campaign.
Offers include things like Early Bird specials, webinars, hotel discounts, giveaways (from iPads to free hotel stays), ebooks, and other special promotional things.
And definitely use videos to entice people to click on your offers. Videos should be short (one or two minutes, tops). You can take two approaches: motion-graphic based videos (highly graphic and fun), or testimonial videos (where members or speakers talk about the benefits of the event). Videos not only break up text-heavy emails, people also love to watch and share them. As for how to present your offers: craft at least one specific email for each offer, and then keep them in front of your members for the duration of the offer using graphic icons in the sidebar.
5. Always remember to answer: “What’s in it for me?”
The most successful email campaigns are the ones that consistently make emotional connections with members.
For example, it’s not just about telling your members about who the keynote speaker is: it’s about showing them why they should care, and telling them the story of how it might change their life. A great strategy is to build your campaign around member testimonials. For example, for The American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR) email campaign, we interviewed three senior staffers of a long-time member organization, and told their stories of why the conference mattered to them through a series of three emails. We’ve said it many times before: your event is about people. So, channel people. Not facts.
6. Include calls to action
In each email you send, you want to have a specific call to action.
Tell members exactly what you want them to do: “Register by April 15th to claim the special rate!”; “Don’t miss the chance to win a free iPad: Register in the next two days!”; “Claim your spot in this valuable webinar and register today!” Make sure to include a call-to-action in the body of your email, and in your sidebar.
SIX WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR EMAIL OPEN RATES
1. Get the frequency right.
You can structure your email marketing campaign one of two ways. Either start marketing via email six months out, and send emails three times a month. Or, start the emails three months out and send them twice a week. Pick your strategy, and stay with it—throughout the entire campaign.
2. Don’t be afraid to send more emails (if they are good emails).
Associations are sometimes leery of sending too many emails, feeling like they are “bothering” members. We have two challenges to this notion. First, the data doesn’t support it. It shows that the rate of unsubscriptions is the same whether or not you only send one monthly email or two to three emails a week. That’s why we recommend two branded event emails a week. And then, bundle all of your other association updates into one weekly digest.
The second reason we challenge this idea of “bothering” is that you are in the business of changing lives (as we talked about in last month’s article). You can’t change people’s lives if you don’t communicate with them. But you also won’t change their lives with bad emails. Send smart, well-designed, inspiring emails about your event on a regular basis, and lives will be changed.
3. Craft better subject lines.
We often suggest doing A/B testing (send out one subject line to one group and a different to another group—all things being equal—and then see which one gets a better response). But before you go to the trouble, try simply writing better subject lines. Preferably ones with a “what’s in it for me?” statement. Ones that inspire, intrigue, and tell stories—versus simply informing. The exception: the “registration is now open” email: this email usually gets the highest click-through rate and drives the most registrations. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel on this one.
4. Be deliberate in your timing.
People read more emails in the morning than the afternoon, and the earlier, the better. The best open rate is actually between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Monday and Friday are terrible days to send emails (Monday is the highest “unsubscribe” day). Tuesday is slightly better; Wednesday and Thursday have shown to be best. Do you have to be a slave to what the stats say? Of course not—especially if you know your members very well. But it’s definitely good to understand the trends.
5. Keep emails mobile friendly.
People tend to read about half of their emails. And of the ones they do read, about 88 percent of them are read on mobile device (smart phone or tablet). Your email template MUST be mobile-friendly.
6. Inspire confidence in your members that they can anticipate something better than the ordinary.
People will open your emails if they know they are good. No matter what the data says about which day of the week or what time to send, if you craft really, really great emails, people will open them. If they know they can expect exciting offers and creative storytelling, they will open them.
Email marketing is one of your best tools for telling the story of your event.
But you have to use it the right way. Otherwise, it will get eaten alive by the forgettability bug. But don’t panic yet—the antidote is readily available: Send better emails. Starting now.
From the time I started school, I knew something wasn’t right with the blackboard. Or books. Or spelling words. What my eyes were seeing and what I knew they were supposed to see weren’t the same thing. And it was a big problem. In middle school, I actually had a teacher who wouldn’t let me go out to recess until I finished correctly copying word-for-word what was on the board.
But I never got it right, and I often missed recess altogether. Because the a’s and the e’s were always backwards, and the words constantly jumped around. There was a name for it, even back then: dyslexia. To cope, I just discovered ways to see differently.
That’s why I got into typography. Typography is basically the way “type” is arranged so that you can read language. We think about fonts and size, but the key to typography is space. Specifically, the space between the letters themselves (called “kerning”) and the space between lines (called “leading”).
My eye could immediately pick out those spaces in between, and I intuitively got it. In this way, my “inability” to see what everyone else was seeing became one of the great blessings of my life. Because it allowed me to see that the space in between is the space of possibility. This is the key message we at Rottman Creative need to share with you in 2013, because all of the other space has been swallowed up by tight budgets and competition from the virtual world. The space in between is all that’s left for your conference. And it’s in that space where we see something that you probably don’t. We see that you are in the business of changing people’s lives.
You’re Not Just a Marketer; You’re a Life-Changer
Joining an association is a very conscious decision. People join to connect, and to better themselves in some way: to be better leaders, better employees, better business owners, better advocates, better service providers, better parents, better friends. Better humans. This is one of the coolest messages in the world. But not all organizations are actively thinking it, saying it, or showing it.
It’s not that you’re not marketing. According to the 2012 Meetings Marketing Benchmarking Report, 97 percent of you say you come up with your own marketing plan and have your own marketing people. What the survey didn’t reveal—but what we know—is that those marketing plans are rinsed and repeated every year, with updated dates, locations, and themes.
We also know that for most organizations, email is the primary way you communicate with your base. But instead of gems of inspiration, these emails are usually just more noise in the world, stocked with facts: this keynote, that session, this workshop… All of this adds up to only 20 percent of members attending your events. That’s one-fifth. A small bite. Much less than it could be. Too many lives not getting changed. So, what’s stopping you from getting 50 percent or more? In relying on facts rather than emotional connection, you are missing the opportunity to inspire the base.
What’s really stopping you from greatness is that you’re not telling the story of how your conference changes lives. And there is a pretty good chance that you’re not even seeing this. Not yet, that is.
We are going to tackle inspiring organizations this year in a way we never have before. Because we literally can’t take it anymore: What your association is doing is too important. The lives you are changing matter too much. Twenty percent isn’t good enough.
The Stepping Stones to Inspiration
Let’s start with the idea that you are in charge of changing the bulk of your members’ lives. Not 20 percent. But the bulk. Instead of an idea lost in the cracks, let’s make it the only thing you see. Your members need your conference more than anything.They want it. They must have it.
In fact, let’s make that idea the first stepping stone.
Stepping Stone #1 BELIEVE THAT YOUR JOB IS TO CHANGE LIVES
How do you get from where you are now (20 percent) to changing the bulk of your members’ lives?
The first answer is a marketing plan. A real one. (As in, not the one from last year.)
You need to develop an integrated marketing plan that will close the gap between the excitement of what really goes on at the conference, and the way you market it.
Your emails are excellent at informing people of WHAT the conference is. But what’s lacking is WHY (“because this will change your life!”). As we’ve said, ultimately, it’s about inspiring your base, and telling them the verbal and visual stories they will connect with.
But first, you need to know who your members are and how they behave. Which leads us to the second step:
Stepping Stone #2 RUN YOUR DIAGNOSTICS
Think of this as looking under the hood. Gather the most up-to-date facts about your membership base (keeping in mind that it’s probably changed in the past few years). That means looking at surveys, demographics, member feedback, and open rates for emails (including which ones get the highest and lowest).
Get a clear picture of who your typical member is and how they behave. Once you know that, you can start to plot their story along the continuum of stories that have been with humanity since the beginning of time.
Stepping Stone #3 IDENTIFY YOUR ARCHETYPES
Archetypes are personality types or stories that show up over and over again, across all cultures. Think about the stories of humanity: the hero who triumphs, the rebel who challenges, the lover who casts a spell, the trickster who teaches a lesson. We connect to and intuitively get these and other stories, because we live them over and over again. Your association actually evokes an archetype: your brand is linked to one or more of the archetypes—and so are your members.
To really inspire your base—and to know how to market specifically to the different segments of members—you need to know your brand archetype, as well as the archetypes of your people. We’ve done a lot of work in this area (one great resource is Archetypes in Branding), and we’ve seen how when an association takes time to discern their archetypes, they connect to their members in a new way. They connect because they have a much clearer picture of what they’re about, and what their people are about. Figuring out your archetype map helps take the mystery out of this storytelling you need to do that we keep talking about— because (maybe for the first time) you know what stories will resonate.
In short, archetypes help you know how to talk to your people. That’s where the next step comes in.
Stepping Stone #4 DEVELOP YOUR VOICE
People don’t know that you’re talking to them if you don’t actually talk to them. And the way your people recognize that you’re talking to them is through voice. If your logo or conference brandmark is your visual signature, your voice is your verbal signature—and without it, there is no compelling reason to listen to your message, to take action, or to share it with others. We see far too many voiceless marketing campaigns: generic information, lacking context, personality, or specificity.
A strong brand voice demands attention. It creates instant recognition, and—most importantly—inspires your people by talking authentically and directly to them about the stuff they care about. The visual and the voice—your graphics and your copy—have to work together. They have to both come from the same place of inspiration, and archetype-driven messaging.
Nothing about how you communicate to your members should be haphazard. That includes what you offer them. Which leads us to the fifth stepping stone.
Stepping Stone #5 LEVERAGE YOUR OFFERS
So, what do you have to offer members? Literally, what is the stuff you’ve got? Remember, the first stepping stone is that your job is to change lives. You can’t do that if people don’t register. But they’re not going to register until they see a piece of what you have. Stop looking at this as a catch-22, and just start sharing what you have.
Be generous, and be strategic. What events/promotions/discounts can you tie to registration? We’re not just talking about hotel discounts and room blocks. But giveaways. Information sharing. Community-building activities. What thought leaders in your industry can you tap to provide value-added things for your members?
However, your offers won’t be effective if you don’t understand (and account for) registration timing. And that’s the final building step.
Stepping Stone #6: WORK WITH THE TIMING
Knowing when and how to make your offers is an art to itself. Registration occurs along a bell curve, peaking around the early bird deadline. Increasingly, we’re seeing higher rates of late registration, and we believe that early bird registration numbers will begin to drop off. The next generation moves faster, and often decides last minute. You have to know their patterns, and what will move them at any given time.
You also need to understand how to integrate all of your marketing, so that one is reinforcing the other: social media posts highlighting the key points of emails, emails reinforcing the direct mail pieces, and direct mail pieces dropping at strategic times.
In fact, your marketing plan should be a comprehensive picture of how Email Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing, and Social Media Marketing will work together to tell the same story. Fear not, those are the topics for our next three newsletters. But it’s no use moving forward until you’ve walked the path along your stepping stones: belief that you change lives, diagnostics, archetypes, voice, offers, and timing.
You can think of this focus on stepping stones as stepping back. Or stepping up.We think of it as stepping in-between, to see what you do and how you do it in a totally new way.
Because the space in between is rich. You just have to start looking.
You’re an athlete in the arena of event marketing. What skills will you see?
We admit it: we are raving sports fans.
Yeah, the rehashing of scores and bad plays and personalities on the field, court, and course is fun. But if you’re like us, that’s not the stuff that drives you to keep watching, week after week.
Sure, you might be jealous of athletes’ 7-figure contracts and endorsements, but what you truly admire is their talent and ability to flat out move—against the odds, and against Newton’s laws. Athletic movement captivates us with its raw flow of balance and timing. The way it comes together is symphonic: the guy who runs 90+ yards at full speed, dodging madmen with the instinct to kill all the way; the triple play that squashes the other team’s 9th inning rally; the series of flips and twists perfectly landed on a tiny strip of nothing.
We’re drawn to these physical expressions of balance and timing because we covet these two qualities in our lives—in all ways imaginable, from not falling on our rear ends in the snow, to knowing how to deliver a punch line, to juggling a career and a family. We’re all students of balance and timing. And we watch athletes because they show us what happens when it all comes together.
So, when we launch a marketing campaign that lacks both balance and timing, why are we so surprised when the fumble, fall, or foul derails our efforts? Why are we so in love with expressions of careful balance and good timing, yet we forget to translate them into the work we do that matters?
Eggs, a Basket, and a Bad Ending
What we’ve been noticing lately is that many associations have terrible balance. Specifically, when they have an over-reliance on one particular marketing mode—such as email marketing, social media, direct mail, or on-site apps—their attendance numbers become volatile. When all efforts are clustered around one thing, the event turnout is much more likely to fluctuate when something goes awry (because the state of everything is to go awry at some point).
On the other hand, when associations position the core of what they’re about solidly in the center, and then spread their marketing efforts across a balance of activities—each one built on the other—they are much more likely to get the attendance numbers they want (even through hitches, glitches, and twitches).
The kind of balance we’re talking about is born of abundance and proactivity. The running back with explosive legs and a single-minded determination who’s got five different strategies for plowing through. It’s about knowing exactly why your association exists and the difference you are making—and then skillfully guiding your people through the three stages of the buying cycle: (1) informing the unaware, (2) inspiring the interested, and (3) reassuring the intent.
We wish one basket were enough. But it’s so not. Not today.
Why Email Alone Isn’t Enough
How many emails do you get every day? We send you this one, in hopes that you’ll click through. But we’d never invest everything in that, because we’ve seen the industry numbers. Most professionals get more than 200 emails a day. Sure, it raises the odds of the email being opened when it comes from a trusted source (like your association), but it doesn’t buy you that much in the end. Maybe an extra second.
As for the open rate: this is only a measure of who has viewed your email. It doesn’t mean they’ve engaged with it. And it certainly doesn’t mean they’ve clicked-through. For most marketers, the click-through rate is a fraction of the open rate (think of the difference between “hits” and “unique viewers” on your web site). If only a small fraction of your people click through, your marketing breaks down around the very first stage of the buying cycle: informing the unaware. Unaware people aren’t inspired. Unaware and uninspired people don’t register for your event.
The first step is to create stronger emails. We have a few suggestions:
Create a story around networking, and lead with it in your content, since the majority of attendees come there for networking.
Spam-proof your subject lines, while still keeping them engaging and interesting.
If you do top 10 or top 5 lists, keeping NEC in mind: that’s networking, education, and certification. Any list of reasons to attend has to touch all three areas.
Remember that branding matters. Your event will be judged by its marketing, including the emails. That means creating branded, well-thought out emails with a recognizable look and feel. To be clear: a bunch of words on the page is a bunch of words on the page; it’s not a look and feel.
Include calls to action, but not too many (a confused brain shuts down). Include no more than three action steps in your email.
Consider the time of day your email gets delivered. Stay away from Mondays and Fridays, and choose either 10 a.m., noon, or 4 p.m., based on what you know of your membership base.
Consider using testimonials. Someone else touting the benefits of attending is more powerful than you touting them.
Remember that venue alone does not inspire. Ditch the cityscape photos and think a little more strategically about images and your brand.
The second step is to stop relying on email alone. In fact, to stop relying on any one thing to do everything you need.
Nothing Alone is Enough
We can look at social media and direct mail in much the same way: if a person isn’t engaged with that medium, you haven’t reached them. It’s not that you’ve failed to inspire them (yet). They haven’t even looked at you.
Oh, but wait, you say: we have an app! Hey, we love apps. We just wrote about them. We’ve got a killer one that drives registration in development. But that’s not the kind of app we’re talking about, and we know it’s not what you’re talking about. You’re thinking your onsite app is the ticket, right? Surely, that will inform the unaware?
Sadly, no. Because no one downloads the conference app until the plane ride or the morning of the event. It’s great for helping people steer their way through their day at the event. But not so much for getting them there.
In all of this business, hardly anyone is getting informed. Even fewer people are getting inspired. So your job becomes harder and harder, and making your numbers become harder and harder.
Striking a balance with your marketing is the smart way to navigate through the three stages of the buying cycle. So, here is what we want you to do: step back, and take a holistic view of what you’re doing in your event marketing. Put your WHY (the compelling reason to believe) in the center, and spin an interconnecting web, comprised of a strong email campaign backed up with some eye-catching direct mail, reinforced with a memorable and interesting social media presence, and paid off in a well-thought-out event app.
That’s your stuck dismount.
You’re in the Right League, Just the Wrong Year
Indulge us in one more sports metaphor. Did you know that no matter how good a quarterback is in college, there is virtually no correlation with how good a quarterback he’ll be in the NFL? There’s a long history of top draft picks winding up . . . well, nowhere. It’s because—from the quarterback’s prospective—college and professional football are two very different games. Professional is faster, vastly more complicated, and uses a totally different sense of timing. To be good in the NFL, a college quarterback has to throw out what he thought he knew about timing, and absorb a very different sense of it. If he doesn’t, he’ll fall to the bottom of the pack.
At least with football, there is only one big transition from NCAA to NFL. In marketing, we have to transition year after year, and our ideas about timing are always changing. But the one thing we can take from the quarterback conundrum is this: you will fall to the bottom of the pack if you insist on sticking to the old ideas about timing. For example, if you’re not capitalizing on the trend of late registration, you are missing a huge opportunity. In fact, whatever your idea from five years ago (even two years ago) about how to time your marketing was, it’s out of date now.
Let it go.
Drip, Drip, Drip
If balance is about mastering the first stage of the buying cycle (informing the unaware), timing is about navigating the second: inspiring the interested.
We believe that you create inspiration through nuggets and drips. It’s about the build. It’s about momentum and coyness and not giving away the milk for free. We never get tired of the way Apple introduces new products. They manage to build excitement for the same product, such as the iPhone, over and over again. What they actually change about the product is not the point (because it’s usually not much). It’s how they meter out the marketing, managing to build excitement and hoopla around release dates.
You can do the same thing, without Apple’s mega-million dollar marketing budget. It’s about building your WHY—your source of inspiration—through slices and teases. To be clear, your association better full-on know your WHY (every part of it, not just a nugget).
But stack it like Legos. Stagger it like bricks. Create a rallying cry around a date when something is announced: build it, offer it, and make it limited (going, going . . . gone!). Create both interest and urgency. Give people a reason to keep reading, to click through, to retweet, and ultimately, to register. Generate excitement over time—using a balance of marketing modes.
A great way to make use of timing in your marketing plan is to create interest around four key areas:
Money-driven stuff: early bird rates, hotel prices that go up after a certain day, and travel rates that increase the longer you wait.
Education stuff: paid workshops with cut-off dates, and sessions with limited seating.
Networking stuff: dinners, lunches, parties, outings, and other special events, paid or unpaid, with cut-off dates.
Certification: sessions with limited seating and/or limited time to react.
Half-time is over. You’ve got a game to win. Find your balance, maximize your timing, and we’ll see you in the end zone.
The mandate to inspire isn’t going away. How will you conquer it? We have an answer.
To drive event registrations and build a sustainable organization, you have to inspire the base. Wake them up. Shake them around. And get them to act. Now.
But it’s hard to do. We feel your pain. That’s why we write about it so much.
Now, we’ve given you various advice. We’ve told you to market your event by telling a story around the person-to-person interaction. We’ve told you to create excitement and inertia with your registration brochure. We’ve told you to start with why.
We stand behind all of this. Earlier this year, we wrote: “The fact that virtual can’t match human is the meat of your story, and you better tell it in a compelling way.”
And we’ve got a pretty good idea about what the most compelling way is, as of this minute. It’s not a web site. It’s not a printed piece. It’s an app.
“Oh, good. I already have an app,” you say. No, you don’t. Not the kind we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about a event app that your attendees download on the way to the event (or on-site). We’re talking about an app that drives registration, a next generation, interactive, voice and video-enabled digital publication. We’re talking about an app that generates pre-conference connections and excitement. An app that teases, entices, engages, and flirts with your potential attendees, creating a vibrant experience that leads them to click on “register now.”
We’re talking about an app that helps you do the thing you desperately need to do: inspire people.
Immersion Inspires
A digital publication that comes alive on your iPad can engage in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. In fact, we have to go back to the mid-1990s and the CD-ROM for a comparison. It sounds like old technology now. But let’s look at what it did: CD-ROMs created a sensory experience that engaged viewers and took them on a journey. It was an immersive world, not a flat world. Although the web ultimately replaced CD-ROMs, it never quite filled the niche.
In fact, a bunch of the things that were popular on CD-ROM (especially games) reappeared on iPads once app technology came onto the scene. It’s because there is nothing better out there for engaging users—not even on the web. And PDFs don’t even come close.
Your registration brochure, reimagined as a vibrant, colorful digital publication app can hold video, animations, audio, and slideshows. It can incorporate live twitter feed and be customized with HTML. It can also showcase 3D pictures (vs. flat). Through these mediums, this kind of digital publication app can tell a variety of stories.
Imagine it:
Animations and videos that come alive.
Interactive articles about what attendees will experience.
Snippets of keynote speakers giving their presentations.
Sessions and workshops with one-click download of slides, worksheets, and handouts.
Tools for users to quickly and easily set up networking opportunities beforehand.
The ability to entice sponsors and take advertising to the next level
A hub for discussions, tweets, posts, and images of your event—six months before it even starts!
3D images that showcase the venue.
A quick, easy registration process, right there in the app.
A registration app transforms the user experience from the flat world of “telling,” to the immersive world of “showing.” Instead of just telling people to be there, an app shows them in a very human way why they need to be there.
Why tablet apps?
In case you’re wondering: we’re focusing on apps for the tablet market vs. the smart phone market because the research shows that the smart phone is more for on-the-go use, to quickly check and respond to email, or to glance at headlines or web sites—mostly for quick information. On the other hand, tablets like the iPad are more strategic thinking devices. They engage people for longer periods of time, encouraging them to sit down and enjoy the experience (more like reading a book or a magazine).
The Pre-Conference Party
With an app for your registration brochure, here is a snapshot of how it could work: you promote through social networking, email marketing, text messages, and direct mail effort (an inspirational, well-designed piece), all of which lead people to a cool animation or video on your home page, which links to your app in the app store.
Within two or three years, this will be the main way you promote your event. Everything will be wrapped around your registration app. And by the way, apps aren’t limited to the registration brochure. Create a digital publication for your sponsors brochure and exhibitors brochure, too (imagine the selling opportunity that could create).
Marketing your app drives registration by building excitement; it sets up a pre-conference feeling for the event. It’s almost like your event has already started. In fact, it IS how it starts. You’re not just promoting it six months out: it actually begins six months out. (Perhaps this means you can even start charging more for early registration!) Your web site won’t go away. It will simply become a kind of information hub. But the mobile, immersive experience of the app—that will become the cornerstone of how you inspire.
Get There Before Everyone Else
We’re not jumping on the app soapbox because we like the view. We’re advocating for registration brochure apps because the numbers make sense.
Tablets will overtake desktop computers. They will. Already, we’re seeing about 20 percent of users choose iPad over the computer. In a recent South by Southwest panel discussion (click here to listen), a panelist presented research that showed that when given the choice, people opted to use an iPad app versus the web at a 5:1 rate. Five to one.
With more than 55 million iPads out there (that number is 100 million once you factor in the other tablets), that percentage is only going to grow. By the end of 2012, we expect 35 percent of users to prefer the iPad/tablet to the computer. And by the end of 2013, 50 percent—yes, half of your base—will be on the iPad/tablet.
If apps are where your people are going, it makes sense to meet them where they are—and then to lead them. Remember the adoption of social media? You may have pushed it aside as a fad—but now, you can’t run or promote a event without it. But think about what it felt like to be late to the game. Think about the rush to catch up.
This time, you can be prepared. It’s your chance to be out front, using the technology in the right way.
Be Relevant, or Don’t Bother
In two years from now, this is how the majority of events will be marketed. By making the switch now, you are addressing the current trends and making your members feel very relevant. When members feel relevant, they have a reason to believe that your event is worth their time and money—and they also have a reason to spread the word.
Inspiration, relevancy, and innovation: this is what apps bring to the table.
But more than anything, they help people actually come to your table. Because if no one shows up, your event won’t survive.
Drop us a line and tell us what you think about app marketing. Challenge us with a question we don’t know the answer to, or tell us your vision for what you’d like to see an app do. We’d love to chat with you about it.
Do you know why people hoard? It’s not because they are terrible people. It’s because every little thing represents possibility. “I could do something with this someday,” the hoarder thinks.
But they wind up with so much stuff, they become paralyzed with the idea of possibility—and they don’t do anything with any of it.
Traditional event marketing has something in common with hoarding: it’s all about believing that inspiration lives solely in the stuff. Events are marketed as mountains of possibility (Learn! Grow! Network! Innovate! Advance! Mingle! Sightsee!)
But it mostly comes off as . . . white noise. As more stuff. A bit like the home of a hoarder.
Now, your event has to have stuff. We get that. The stuff is what people do when they get there. But the stuff actually doesn’t build loyalty. The stuff doesn’t drive registrations. The stuff is just WHAT your association does. It might close the deal, but it doesn’t forge the connection. And by itself, it doesn’t inspire.
So, what does?
The Why that Comes Before the Stuff
There is a brilliant book by Simon Sinek called Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action. Sinek’s thesis is that people don’t buy WHAT you do or even HOW you do it; rather, they buy WHY you do it.
People don’t buy Apple just because they think the products are cool. They buy Apple because they identify with Apple’s prevailing WHY: to challenge the status quo. In every way that Apple communicates, they lead with that WHY. It’s always the message.
It’s the WHY behind the stuff that inspires people to act.
And with technology making virtual networking easier, this is only going to become more and more true. Having a clear WHY—behind not just your event, but also your brand and your strategic plan—is like having a laser that cuts through all of the WHAT.
WHY drives registrations.
But only if you communicate it in an effective, intriguing, and clear way
Yet in the association arena, hardly anyone is doing this. That’s because it’s hard to do. We can all come up with the WHAT. Go to any association’s event site and you’ll see plenty of WHAT they do: keynote speeches, networking, and training.
But the WHY, as Sinek says, can feel fuzzy if you’re not used to thinking about it. The WHY is not keynote speeches, networking, and training. The WHY isn’t the stuff you get.
The WHY is related to the reason the association was founded. A person or group of people founded it, right? It didn’t simply spring to life by itself. There was something that moved someone. That reason, that thing that the association is about at its core: that is what moves people to act. That is what people own. It’s the same emotional logic that governs why people spend double the money to buy an Apple product, or why they buy music and phones from a computer company at all. They own a part of the WHY: “Yes,” they say. “I want to challenge the status quo, too. When I buy this, I feel like I AM challenging the status quo.” WHAT they are buying matters, of course—but it’s not the hook.
Your WHY is probably not the same as Apple’s (although it could be, and we’re dying to work with you if it is). So what is it? Providing service to your members is probably a key part. But we’re willing to bet that there is something deeper that drives your organization—something so basic and so fundamental that the organization absolutely could not exist if it weren’t true. For us, it’s to inspire and elevate. We can think of at least one association where it’s as simple as to teach people how to be leaders.
Nowhere is it more important to communicate your WHY than in your event planning and marketing.
Do us a favor: use a critical eye to take a look at your event marketing. Is it more crowded with WHAT stuff than WHY stuff? Are you communicating WHY you do what you do in a clear, uncluttered, and uncomplicated way?
When we do event marketing audits, we rarely see associations being guided by WHY they do what they do. They almost always let white noise take over. That’s why, on average, associations get less than 30 percent of members to attend the annual conference. That means you have to work that much harder to recruit new members, so less than one-third of them might come to your event.
And the truth is, you’ll never break out of that cycle unless you think differently.
Turning your event to gold.
We propose a Golden Triangle of Event Marketing: WHY is in the center. And your Brand is at the top, with your Strategic Plan and Event on either side. Your brand, your strategic plan, and the essence of the event are all elements of HOW you do what you do. Outside the triangle lies the WHAT stuff: the deliverables, like social media, apps, the registration brochures, e-newsletters, save-the-date, report to members, and other tangibles.
But all of it must start with WHY your association exists. And it all must be aligned. However, we find that it hardly ever is. For example, if a key driver of your strategic plan is to elicit member feedback, but you only look at the composite scores on surveys and don’t take the time to read the comments, WHAT you’re doing isn’t aligned with HOW you say you are doing it (and the WHY is usually lost altogether).
We can break this down one step further for your event: WHY is still the foundation and the WHAT things are still the deliverables, but HOW becomes the event theme. A event theme that starts with WHY is inspired by the very belief that holds the association together—not by the location or the venue or the time of year. Instead of a clever pun that could work for any association in any given year, your event theme should spring from something deeper and more fundamental.
Your event theme can become like a rallying cry… or it can be yet one more empty promise.
The event theme holds tremendous potential. But so often, it’s wasted.
When you can clear away the clutter and get to the driving force (we want to teach people to be leaders), there is so much less noise. As designers, we specialize in creating purpose-driven design that does that, whether it’s through infographics or video or visual storytelling. We figure out the strategy based on your WHY.
It’s a far more sustainable and clear way to communicate.
So, you can keep doing what you’re doing—hoarding stuff and trying to sell possibility around WHAT—and work twice as hard for the same results as last year.
Or, you can do something different, something that requires a moment of fuzz-clearing, something that will get you beyond just possibility and all the way to results.
Join us in the Golden Triangle, won’t you?
(Or we’ll just call Hoarders for you: maybe they can help.)
Have you read The Hunger Games yet? If you want to know how to market your event, you should. Yes, we’re serious. So . . . what do a mega bestselling youth culture book set in a futuristic dystopia and your lovely event have to do with each other? We’ll tell you. But first, play along with us as we lead you through a quick futuristic visualization exercise.
The year is 2017. It’s the first day of your association’s annual event. As always, it’s been a furious few months of preparation. But since you’ve been following the same marketing plan for eight years, it runs like clockwork. You’ve got the same web site (all you had to do was swap out a logo), the same web site (you just had to make some slight tweaks to the event page) the same series of postcard drops (just with different iStock photos swapped in), the same lineup of industry topics (just with different speaker names attached), and the same event happy hour (although wine went up to $17/glass). What could go wrong with such a well-oiled machine?
You breathe in the smell of Starbucks and blueberry muffins, glance at the neatly strung lanyards, the banner ready to greet attendees, and the tote bags tucked under the table. Finally it’s time: you open the doors, ready to greet the masses and welcome them to the 2017 event.
Except no one is there.
You check your watch. Eight-thirty sharp. Where is everyone? You bound down the steps to the expo center. But instead of sponsors decked out in brightly colored booths, there are only a bunch of union guys waiting to unload trucks that never showed up.
You grab your laser-powered, 10 terabyte, ultimate high-def, waterproof foldable titanium tablet to check online. You stumble upon a webinar covering the same topics as your event, and there you see the list of attendees. It’s a familiar list since it’s the same names in your membership database. Panicked, you head to one of the virtual networking rooms made possible by some new Apple technology, just in time to catch the tail end of a business breakfast, and you see the real time stats posted: $90,000 in business just exchanged, 150 strong connections, and two people engaged. Surely, there is Twitter activity. So you head to your association’s Twitter page, where you spot the hashtag #worthittorenewmembership? being Tweeted about. The Tweet-sensus? Probably not.
As you sit sadly with your muffin, the truth hits you: your event has become irrelevant, and your association isn’t far behind. You had the chance five years ago to change course, to heed the predictions, and to shake up the game. You heard some buzz about inspiration and story, but putting on the same event year after year felt much more comfortable. Besides, inspiration costs money. And your well-refined marketing plan seemed to be producing modest increases each year. It seemed good enough. But it wasn’t.
Will You Make it Out of the Arena?
Listen, we’re all ate up with the future. We love technological innovation (and have been known to camp out in line for the next Apple product). But we’re worried about you, because physical (as opposed to virtual) events are about to enter a point of no return. A dystopia as frightening as The Hunger Games. You can come out on the other side, strong and relevant. Or you can get swallowed whole, and never make it out of the arena.
We’ve been saying it for years: to keep your event relevant (and attended), you need to inspire the base. But we’ve got a new idea for you: you also need to inspire the future base. Because what people like to call “youth culture” is about to just become “culture.” The next generation is your guide for what to do now, because not only are they your future (literally), the trends bubbling out of youth culture are infiltrating middle-aged board rooms everywhere.
Why You Need to Pay Attention to The Hunger Games
The next generation may have a nine second attention span (you do too, by the way), but they’re not stupid. They are discerning. And they’re not interested in dumbed-down content. In fact, the only thing that breaks through that nine-second attention span is good content—specifically, a good story. That’s exactly why The Hunger Games trilogy made it big: aimed at teens, but read widely by just about every demographic, it spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list (and Suzanne Collins is the most downloaded author on Kindle to date).
What’s the secret to the book’s success? It’s intense. It’s big. The action moves fast. Lots of short sentences. Pure plot. Characters you get. The bold change that you need to root for is laid out very clearly. It’s basically a story that you can’t stop reading—so you buy the next book, and the next one. And then you see the movie. And then you tell everyone you know to do all of these things, too. Not because anyone tells you to, but because it captured you and you can’t not share.
In order to compete against all of the online resources for education and networking, your event marketing has to become The Hunger Games (no, of course not literally). It has to be about big ideas, communicated quickly, and in a way that makes people desperately need to know more, read more, tell their peers, and above all, actually be there.
You have to figure out how to communicate the big ideas behind your event—like education and networking—in a remarkable way that is both easy to digest and inspiring.
Nuances were last generation. This generation is about boldness and clarity.
Make It Unexpectedly Good, or Go Home
Your brandmark, your brochure, your direct mail pieces, your web site, your social media: every piece of your marketing has to be clear, inspiring, and remarkable if it’s to cut through the nine-second attention span and compete with today’s (and tomorrow’s) virtual world. It has to be unexpectedly good. It has to be text-message worthy. Kindle highlight worthy. Hashtag worthy. And—in case we haven’t said it enough—relevant.
If your marketing is that good and that in touch with the people you want to attend, then why wouldn’t they show up in person to see what’s next? On the flip side, if your marketing is that outdated and unremarkable, why would they bother showing up?
We’ll talk more about the anatomy of inspiration in next month’s newsletter, but if you don’t want to wait that long to start brainstorming your mega blockbuster event marketing plan, drop us a line. We’ll figure out how to get you out of the arena triumphant.
Isn’t it lovely that we live in a society where no one judges anything by appearance? Where things like book covers and brand name labels don’t even matter anymore? Isn’t it fantastic that we’ve evolved beyond how things look?
Isn’t it so refreshing that . . . Hold on, what’s that you’re saying? You don’t live in that society?
No kidding. Neither do we. And neither does your conference. Its appearance gets judged just as harshly as the sad-looking books in 90 percent off bin. Don’t get us wrong. We’d love for you to stop and smell the roses and enjoy the intrinsic beauty of life. But wouldn’t you rather gather ye rosebuds after you achieve record attendance at your conference this year?
If you’ve thrown out the registration brochure along with your Y2K survival kits and banana-sized mobile phones, you are missing a real opportunity to light up your people. You’re missing the chance to create the excitement and inertia your people need to make their way to that “register now” button on your website. So right now, get out a Sharpie and last year’s budget, and in bold, black letters, add the line item: “registration brochure that rocks.”
But The Web Can Handle It, Right?
Before the web, the registration brochure had a pretty clear-cut mission: get people to register. It was one glossy booklet. The preliminary program that tried to do it all.
With the web, associations saw the chance to save precious marketing dollars. Why print and send out something when all of the info is on the Internet? With the paperless movement, it made good sense. Just let people go online. Upload a few pictures of a casino, a beach sunset, or some identifiable urban landmark, and you were golden. That worked great.
Until it didn’t work anymore.
The reality is that a conference without a smartly designed registration brochure is missing something. Poetically, we’d say it’s missing a soul. But practically, we’d say it’s missing inspiration.
However, let’s get something straight: in 2012, the registration brochure doesn’t need to do it all. In fact, it can’t. You’ll dilute its value if you try to make it be both a marketing piece and an information piece. Information (like logistics, registration, and FAQs) is what the web is for. Let your site do the heavy lifting of informing. It’s where your people are going to go for that stuff anyway. But a brochure that glides across their desk, full of headlines, images, and story vignettes that create a real longing to be there in person? Well, that’s the kind of piece that will make a real difference.
The Story is What Sells
Your registration brochure isn’t just a marketing piece. It’s the face of your conference. A face can launch a thousand ships. Or it can make everyone pack up and go home. To make it a face that inspires action, your brochure has to engage your people. It’s got to do the old W&W: woo and wow. The most effective way to do that isn’t to promote the venue.
Rather, the most effective W&W strategy is to create a story around the number one reason people attend your conference: person-to-person interaction.
Our research has confirmed that in-person networking is the number one reason people step out of the virtual world and the LinkedIn discussion groups. Hence, your registration brochure needs to upsell the networking opportunities with both copy and visuals, and really tell the story.
If you’re not telling that story, don’t even bother putting a brochure out there. Because if you thought the recession was bad for conference attendance, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The world of information is downloadable—and it will continue to be even more downloadable. Social networking facilitates connections almost instantaneously.
However, you do have something in your corner. The virtual world isn’t the same as the real one. Slap a camera on your computer, but it doesn’t matter. Virtual experiences can’t match the human experience of standing in a circle of your colleagues, chatting and laughing as you generate ideas and sparks and connections. The experience of all of your neurons firing because you are breathing the same air, in the same moment, at the same place, at the same time as a bunch of other interesting people. The fact that virtual can’t match human is the meat of your story, and you better tell it in a compelling way.
A Solution to the Retention Issue
So, you’re ready to craft a killer story with this registration brochure. Next question: What form should it take? You’re probably not going to like this answer. First, yes, you should design an electronic version in PDF. But you also need to do a print piece (yes, with actual ink on actual paper). You have to do both. A PDF can be easily shared, but a printed page has more impact because you touch it.
We already know the number one argument against doing both: it costs too much. We counter it with a very simple ROI equation: the more attendees you have at your conference, the more money your association makes. The less attendees you have, the less you make.
Let’s think of it another way. What are your association’s biggest challenges? Recruitment and retention, right? The minute someone joins, there’s a whole army of people and marketing dedicated to making sure they renew next year. Here’s a thought: ditch the army, and instead pour the money into making your conference great—and the marketing for your conference great. What percentage of your members attend your annual event? Fifteen to 20 percent? (You can fib if you want, but we’ve seen the numbers.) A rock star conference can double that—and there is where your retention can come from. If more came, wouldn’t they re-up for next year? And wouldn’t they re-tell the story of how amazing the conference was over and over again?
Great conference marketing IS recruitment and retention.
If you want our opinion: fire anyone who doesn’t get that immediately—they’re just wasting your association’s time and money. And the ones who do get it? Put them in charge of the registration brochure. And create a piece that changes the game.
East to West, Big and Small – we’ve been watching what’s going on and it’s time to report the facts. Over the past year we’ve been analyzing conferences and annual meetings across the country. Organizations are still struggling to meet attendance goals. We’ve identified four major trends that attribute to low attendance.
1. Informing and assuring, but not inspiring.
Organizations are doing a good job of informing their members about the conference, and their websites and direct mail pieces are great for reassuring the intent. However, the images and wording in the marketing messages lack inspiration. Content and imagery used in marketing materials, including direct mail and websites, must inspire the member to want to register for the conference.
Opportunity for 2011:
Answer the question “Why should I attend?” with every message and image.
Build excitement through imagery and words.
2. Over reliance on email communications.
If we only had a penny for every time we heard an association executive say, “I’ll just email that info to our members.” Email marketing has become a central part of communications for many organizations. However, with an open rate of under 20% and a click thru of 3% – email marketing is not the most effective tool for reaching the membership.
Opportunity for 2011:
Compare email marketing strategies to current best practices (segmentation, personalization, engaging subject lines, interactive content).
3. Lack of segmentation for marketing.
Most associations have their membership broken down into segments, however unique marketing messages are not created for each segment. Instead, one-size-fits all messaging is created for everyone – but in reality, it doesn’t fit all. It’s more likely not going to fit anyone.
Opportunity for 2011:
Collaborate with the membership team to identify segments.
Play up the differences in each segment to create personalized marketing messages.
4. Poor analysis of conference survey results.
Many associations are missing out on great information, testimonials, marketing messages and ideas for the event because of poor strategies for reviewing attendee surveys.
Opportunity for 2011:
Surveys need to be analyzed by someone in marketing.
There is greater potential for an honest look by having someone outside the organization analyze the results.
Additional trends
Marketing team dropping the ball.
Attendee survey results show that annual meetings provide members with tools and information that assists them with their daily activities and larger challenges. It is the responsibility of the marketing team to create messaging about the conference that informs members of how the content at the event will affect potential attendees.
Missing word of mouth.
Marketing has changed dramatically. Word of mouth and conversations are very important for consumers when making a purchasing decision. Associations are missing out on this opportunity by not using testimonials and social media to the fullest extent.
Late registration.
Attendees do not need to register early for various reasons. Marketing teams need to combat this by having a marketing push towards the end of registration time. Two areas of control for you to leverage: money and availability.
Attempting social media.
Associations of various sizes are tip toeing into social media and attempting to use it to supplement conference marketing. However, few are seeing conference attendance numbers to be affected by social media because the content being shared over social media platforms tends to be very informational. Also, there is a disconnect between the social media strategy, overall marketing messages and the members actual needs and wants.
The Big Picture
Low attendance is a symptom – not the problem. The problem is that organizations have a weak foundation because their three most important elements do not connect:
Brand Guidelines
Strategic Plan
Conference
It’s a constant battle for organizations to ensure they align strategy, identity, and capacity with vision, mission and values. And, members can sense when they fail to do so. Low attendance is simply a symptom of a larger problem – the disconnect between the strategic plan, brand and conference.
The 2011 Solution
Dust off the organization’s strategic plan, create branding guidelines that define what the association stands for, and remember to incorporate the conference into the strategic plan and brand.
A recent study found that about 80% of consumers rely on multiple marketing channels when making a purchasing decision. Yet, many associations have come to rely solely on a single-channel approach. Just like a monotone speaker loses the attention of his audience, mono-channel marketing prevents your members from connecting with your message.The more you diversify your communication channel with your consumer, the better the impact.
Cross media marketing hits people from all sensory perspectives, and is more successful because it connects with members of varying learning styles. Some may be more likely to remember the information in a video, others from a letter, and still others from an online conversation.
We’re going to take a quick lesson in using social networking as a marketing tool and then discuss how to integrate it with other marketing channels.
How to use social networking
Listen
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make about social networking is jumping in with both feet before taking a look at what they are really jumping into. Just like we wouldn’t ask you to read our newsletters without first doing research to determine interesting topics, you will be wasting your members’ time if you don’t first listen to their needs.
Ask your members how they use social networking and what they enjoy about it. Also, use search features on Twitter, Facebook, Google’s Blog Search, Whos Talkin (www.whostalkin.com) and Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) to gather information on what people are saying about your organization and industry.
Goals
Set goals on what you hope to achieve through social networking. Some may be more vague, like increase brand awareness, but be sure to set some goals that you can measure (e.g. increases in web traffic).
Community
Target your community based on demographics, but also based on their interests and passions.
Strategy
Develop a social media strategy. You’re strategy should include all of the background information in the above steps, plus information on who is executing the plan, what support other staff members should provide, brand values and messages to be conveyed, and a schedule for evaluating success.
Content
Share valuable content. And please remember, we mean content that your audience finds valuable – not strictly what you think is important.
Be Real
People are not flocking to Facebook and Twitter to have conversations with robots. These sites are popular because we get to connect with human beings, so be real and use a human voice. Show empathy, humor, surprise….you know, emotions.
Oh, and measure!
How will you know if its working? You’ve got to measure and check in on ROI.
Three stages of social networking
When looking around at successful, struggling and failing social media efforts, we’ve discovered there are three stages of a social networking campaign: Inform, Drive, and Engage.
Stage 1: Inform
The inform stage is as clear as it sounds. You are simply informing your audience that you have various social networking accounts. This can be done by placing the links and icons on other pieces of communications like direct mail, the website, and email signatures. You are not yet asking members to follow, just letting them know you are there.
This is not a long-term strategy for success because you are likely still doing a lot of listening and not having any conversations in these channels, but it is a great place to start. To start to see value, you will need to move to the next stage, Drive.
3 ways to move from Inform to Drive:
Join in on conversations you stumbled upon while conducting searches.
Implement tactics developed after asking members how they use social networking and what they like about it.
Develop a list of reasons for why members should follow you. Replace the links and icons you’ve been using on email signatures and the website with these “calls to action”.
Here are some examples:
“Follow us on Twitter for latest info & contests”
“Join our discussions on LinkedIn for great (free!) advice from industry leaders”
“Share our mission with your friends by following us on Facebook”
Stage 2: Drive
At this stage you’ve identified why your social media efforts are valuable to your members and you’re ready to get more followers. Your tweets, Facebook postings and LinkedIn updates continue to be very informative – who you are, what you are about and why you are in this social space. There may be an occasional conversation with followers.
To transform your social media efforts into an effective part of your marketing strategy, you must move on to the next stage, Engage.
3 ways to move from Drive to Engage:
Promote information your followers share through RTs and link sharing.
Join in on conversations your members are having in these channels.
Adopt trends you see other successful social media users implementing (i.e. hash-tags, videos, news aggregators, trendy topics, etc).
Stage 3: Engage.
At this stage the organization is having open conversations with members through social media channels. The dialog is active and interesting to members. Not only are they responding to your Tweets and updates, but they are sharing them with their friends. Members who love social media will begin to use these channels as their primary source of communicating with you and getting information about events.
In this final stage, you will constantly be researching, connecting, embracing your brand, developing contests/promotions, building excitement and hopefully sharing content that will become viral.
Whatever stage you are at, you must integrate!
Social media is a hot topic these days. Partly because it is the new thing, and partly because companies are hoping a combination of social media and email marketing will eliminate the costs of printing.
People have been saying that direct mail is going to die because of social media. But, the same thing was said when we started using the telephone for mass communication, and the television, and email. While it has morphed, direct mail it is not yet dead.
Food for thought: The average consumer receives 14-15 emails from brands each day (which few people open up). The same consumers receive 16 pieces of advertising per week received via mail. This gives direct mail one advantage over email marketing.
However, to be truly successful at social networking and get worthwhile results, you must integrate it into your entire marketing and communications plan.
Integrating can be as simple as driving members to your social media channels with “calls to action” placed on email signatures and direct mail pieces. You can also integrate by tweeting or posting a LinkedIn Update about a direct mail piece or email newsletter that members are about to receive. (Many companies do something similar by emailing customers to keep an eye out for coupons in their mailbox.)
However, true integration (and marketing success) will occur when you leverage the best of all your marketing channels. By being in conversation with members through social networking you can receive real time feedback. Even the most avid social media user still prefers to have certain kinds of information collected in an email document, printed piece or an easy-to-access website.
2 ways to try cross media marketing:
Before, during and after your annual event, use social networking to ask members how they want to receive certain kinds of information. Is it helpful to be mailed a program guide, or would you rather be able to access that from the website?
Increase your effectiveness by giving members a multi-sensory experience when sending them marketing messages.
Use a Quick Response Code (QR Code) or Personalized URL (pURL) to lead a potential attendee to a website with a video, inspiring text and images, links to social media channels and a form to sign up for the email newsletter.
Direct mail is not dead and social media is not the king. Instead, they are both respectable components of a complete cross media marketing plan.
The 3 most important elements of any organization.
It’s a constant battle for organizations to ensure they align strategy, identity, and capacity with vision, mission and values. More tension is added to that conflict as an organization grows during the good days, or shrinks during challenging times. There are three living elements that must reside in unity within an association or non-profit.
Strategic Plan Branding Conference (Annual Meeting)
If these foundations don’t reside and work well together, there will be a disconnect in the eyes of the members. For example, if your strategic plan mentions being open and transparent to cultivate community, but you fail to express that at the conference, your members will see that and lose trust in you. All too often we see organizations stress the importance of “supporting” their members, yet they fail to apply (or, even read) the feedback gathered after the annual event. We also see strategic plans focus on reaching out to younger professionals, yet the association executives only listen to the highly engaged members.
The disconnect from goal to execution can easily be identified by members and it will turn them away faster than bad service or a nasty meal.
From the inside looking out
Over the past year, we’ve been conducting Conference Marketing Audits. This has given us great insight into how associations of various sizes operate, why they experience success and why they experience failure.
We’ve been promoting ways to increase conference attendance, but these audits have shown us that everyone (including us) needs to take a step back from day-to-day operations and look at the bigger picture.
Low attendance is simply a symptom of a larger problem – the disconnect between the strategic plan, brand and conference.
We’ve yet to come across an organization that is effectively connecting the values, mission and vision of the strategic plan to the brand, and then to the conference. What we’re proposing is that an organization must view these three elements as one. Although each is distinctly valuable all three are related and must work together to shape the organization as a whole. The strategic plan, brand guidelines and positioning statement for the conference should be bound together in the same notebook and placed at every desk in the office.
Strategic Plan
First off, the Strategic Plan (Go To Manual) is not just for the board members. It should be shared with every staff member – especially the marketing department. Seriously, how can any one develop a successful marketing plan, if they don’t know which way to drive the organization (or how fast)?
Tips for dusting off your strategic plan:
Hold monthly or quarterly reviews of the strategic plan and how the organization is achieving the goals.
Creatively display the mission, vision and values throughout the office. You could even make fun, engaging pieces that staff members would want to display at their desk.
Explain to staff members what the strategic plan means, why it is important to their department and how their job is affected by it.
As the strategic plan grows to include everyone in the organization, it should also grow to include the brand and conference. Why are these important in relation to the values and mission? What goals need to be set for the conference? How will those goals be measured and reached?
It baffles us to no end that the largest live gathering, the heartbeat of the organization, is not mentioned in the strategic plan or embraced in your branding.
Branding
Your brand is a promise delivered.
A brand represents a set of values to the world through actions and words. It states what you stand for and lets members know they can count on you to meet those defined expectations.
The branding guidelines are what brings the brand to the office.
If you want to be successful at fulfilling your mission, your brand guidelines can’t be a list of marching orders and dos and don’ts on how to use the logo. Instead, it must be what the association stands for and the brand pillars that capture the gut feeling of your members. This is where it is important to have conversations with members and conduct surveys.
We understand how hard it can be to dig through feedback and be subjective after you’ve been in the association for several years. Eventually, you will have engaged with members long enough that you will develop a sense of what they need and want, which means you may think it would be a waste of time to read survey results. However, this step is so vital to understanding the members’ gut feeling that it warrants careful review and analysis of the feedback.
As you can see, the brand guidelines are connected to the conference, not just in how logos and fonts are used for the marketing, but also through measuring how members feel about the association. And, its not hard to see how that should play into the strategic plan as well.
Conference
The conference is the largest touchpoint of your brand.
Essentially, your conference should be the essence of your brand. A member’s experience at the conference will determine their gut feeling about the organization. Which is why you must gather feedback at the event, read it and apply it. Let it refine the strategic plan and the brand guidelines.
Also, the conference goals should be part of the strategic plan and shared with everyone in the organization. When a goal has been set, share it with everyone. Then provide feedback as they reach toward the goal.
How are you doing?
Dust off your organization’s strategic plan, create branding guidelines that define what you stand for, and remember to incorporate the conference into the strategic plan and brand.
How does your organization’s marketing fulfill the essence of the plan?
How are core values expressed in emails to members?
How is the organization’s mission fulfilled through pre-conference marketing?
Remember the golden days when organizations had unrestricted budgets for sending employees away to conferences. All you had to do was quietly mention your conference and boom! Sold out. It hasn’t been since the 90’s that associations have had to re-think event marketing. But, the world has changed drastically and if you don’t adapt, your organization is going to become irrelevant.
But, how do you keep up with the times and still hold on to the values of your organization?
At a recent conference we saw some marketing directors from various associations fail at this challenge during a conversation that paralleled the kind of peer pressure occurring at middle schools. A marketing director from an association was guilted into signing up for Twitter by marketing experts from other associations. Ignoring her knowledge that her members do not use social media and without considering the nature of that industry these marketing “experts” rallied together to pressure her into starting a Twitter account for the association.
We’re going to bet that her instincts were correct and that Twitter is not popular among professionals in that industry. Imagine the time and money she is going waste on launching a Twitter account that will have little to no engagement.
What could have saved her in this moment of peer pressure?
A set of marketing principles….like the ones we’ve laid out for you in the newsletter!
These guiding principles can keep you focused on fulfilling an organization’s mission and goals, while remaining relevant. These essential truths will keep your organization on target for fulfilling your mission and goals – while navigating trends, social media, economic changes and cultural shifts.
Principle 1.
We should use social networking to reach out to attendees.We will learn new ways of communicating through social networking to engage in meaningful, effective conversations with individuals before, during and after the conference.
Everyone is jumping on the social media bandwagon. That’s fine – it’s popular, it’s fun and it’s a great way to communicate with attendees….well, at least that is what we believed until we looked at how associations are using social media.
Page after page of uninspiring content and no engagement from followers. It comes as no surprise that these associations are not getting anyone to register for their events from Facebook or Twitter.
So, what can you do?
Look at the demographics of your target audience. Then do a little research to discover which social media platforms they are using and how they are engaging on social media. It may be that members in your association love using Facebook – but only for keeping up with friends and family. If that’s true, then investing in Facebook will be a waste of time.
Tips:
Ask the highly engaged members and regular attendees how they use social media, personally and professionally.
Brainstorm with members to get an idea of the content they’d like to receive from the organization via social media and which discussions they would help kick-start online.
We accept that late registration is a fact, not a trend.We will not ignore cultural shifts. Instead we will work with them to make our marketing plan even stronger and more effective. Adding new means of communication and changing the schedule of communication are musts.
You have to embrace it. Don’t freak out.
Late registration is a side effect of making it easy for people to register. And, with the economic challenges we face today – they are more likely to wait until the last minute to register.
This isn’t true for everyone. Your hardcore attendees and the very involved members will sign up every year. But, will they alone support the growth necessary to increase attendance and membership retention? Likely not. You need to get the other members more engaged. These are the ones you are after to make the conference a greater success.
So, what can you do?
You have two sources of power to influence potential attendees to register early. Money and availability. The traditional early bird discount is how you can use money to influence. As for influencing through your power of availability. You can limit certain sessions to people who register early. This will add urgency to the process and communicated how much you value the content of the event.
A more radical option is to replace the early bird kick-off with a late registration push. Yes, that will make your job a little tougher. But, what’s more important to you – an easy work day or giving potential attendees what they need in order to boost attendance?
Tip:
Reach out to the needs of all segments of your target audience.
Principle 3.
We should promote value over venue when developing a conference marketing plan.We will position ourselves as experts with valuable resources and information to share with like-minded professionals, instead of positioning ourselves as tour guides. Through multi-media and strategic communication we will educate potential attendees on why they should attend.
Promoting the venue over the value of the conference is a cop-out. It’s not in the best interest of the association or members, and its definitely failing at your job because you are not talking about the value of the event. There has to be something more members can gain from attending your event other than visiting a great city.
So, what do you do?
For anyone who may disagree, we are not suggesting that you omit the conference location from all marketing pieces. Yes, please tell them where the conference is occurring and a few area attractions that may make their trip enjoyable.
We’re simply saying that the venue should not be promoted as the primary benefit for attending your event. Value first.
Tip:
A picture is worth a thousand words. Use imagery that captures the value of the event, not just the venue’s most popular sites.
Principle 4.
We perceive that conference marketing is one arm of an organization’s holistic messaging for fulfilling their mission.We embrace conference marketing efforts that will enhance an organization’s strategic messaging and fit within the organization’s overall goals.
Most organizations have some sort of strategic plan that guides them towards specific goals and fulfilling their mission. However, conference marketing must give association executives amnesia because they completely forget about the organization’s strategic plan when promoting their largest event of the year.
The huge disconnect between the powerful strategic plan and an association’s branding guidelines.
Just like the strategic plan, branding guidelines should be a living document that ties back to the organization’s goals and purpose.
It is a complete failure if the plan for marketing the annual event is list of rules on font and logo usage. Let’s get this straight, branding guidelines are not a list of rules about fonts, pictures and colors, no more than parenting is a list of house rules about curfews and putting away toys. Branding guidelines must capture the essence of the association, which in turn affects the event. They are pillars of how the largest in-person meeting of the year fulfills the organization’s mission.
We see poorly defined branding guidelines all the time…and the failures that come from it. If brand guidelines are really just a list of rules, then of course the only thing to rely on is the venue. Thus begins the transformation from association guru to travel agent, and the abundance of marketing materials with pretty pictures of D.C., Nashville or whatever city has been picked for the venue.
So, what do you do?
Grab a copy of your organization’s strategic plan and get ready to examine your navel….your branding guidelines. How does the conference help fulfill the mission? Why is the event important when you look at the big picture?
Immediately you’ll realize the value of the conference. A story will form that will give potential attendees a “gut feeling” about what you’re all about.
Tips:
Promote the new sections/sessions as being up-to-date and relevant content for your members.
Use testimonials from previous years to help tell the story.
Create brand guidelines that connect the organization’s strategic plan to conference marketing efforts. (i.e. our goal to be the place professionals come for the latest in industry trends means our email marketing campaign must promote breakout sessions that are lead by industry leaders)
Principle 5.
We believe that a marketing plan is a schedule of strategic activities that will guide behavior.We will achieve conference marketing success by following a roadmap that leads to a desired destination. We affirm that a marketing plan is a well-researched strategic map that addresses the role, appearance and tracking of all marketing efforts.
You have reached a fork in the road as the path you are on divides into two roads. The road on the left forgoes the use of data and surveys. It leads you to brochures and emails with pretty pictures of the conference location. It is easier and familiar. It involves some Googling and chatting with the nice lady at the tourism office.
The road on the left worked in attracting some people – not as many as last year, but what do you expect with the economy. The road to the right takes you the way of using survey results and data to create a marketing plan designed to guide behavior.
It is a more challenging and a longer journey, but along the way you meet new members, hear stories of how attendees implement what they learned at previous conferences, and find out why some members did not attend last year’s event.
The road to the right results in the birth of new ideas for promoting the event, more member engagement during the marketing campaign and an increase in conference attendance.
As an added bonus, membership retention numbers are also on the climb!
You must adhere to this principle or you’ll be marketing venue over value with pretty pictures instead of real, valuable content. Ultimately whatever crowd that does draw, is not one that will stick around – they will just as easily leave your nice venues for another. CRASH! There goes your retention rates, too.
So, what do you do?
Survey previous attendees about past conferences. Then use this data to help formulate a plan that will help the unaware, inspire the interested and reassure the intent.
Tips:
Learn something new by surveying members other than the ones you see at every event.
Talk to members who received marketing materials, but did not attend.
Principle 6.
We should recognize that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is foolish. We will not engage thinking that supports ineffective habits. We will transform our habits and works based on research, the audience’s needs, and our vision. We will test our efforts to ensure that we are putting energy into projects that produce quantitative results.
Look around, do you see companies using the same marketing tactics with the launch of every product? No, its different. Apple is a great example. Their marketing evolves with cultural shifts, but also with the product they are promoting. The marketing for an iPod, iPhone and Apple computers are completely different from each other, yet, each one captures the essence of what the product has to offer the target audience.
Your marketing must evolve.
If you are doing it the same way every year, that is why you are seeing the drastic drops in attendance and retention rates. Yes, the economy has affected things, but your inability to adapt is the real reason why attendance and retention rates are dropping.
So, what can you do?
Tell a story through testimonials. A simple testimonial about how the content of the event affected an attendee’s work can add freshness to the marketing campaign. An interview with an attendee about what they took from the conference and how they implemented it in their work will go a long ways in promoting the value of your event and organization.
Tip:
Follow an individual (through a blog, Facebook page, Twitter, etc) while at the conference. And, then go “home” with them to show how they implemented the new information, tools and resources they picked up at the event.
Congrats! You’ve made it to the end of newsletter!
In addition to the great stuff we just shared with you, enjoy an RCG exclusive deal.
Conference brand mark special!
RCG will develop a conference brand mark unique to your organization and event. The brand mark will be based on the principles shared with you in this newsletter. Instead of a cookie-cutter logo, you’ll have a brand mark that expresses who you are and the value of your event. Includes an animated video file that can be used for online marketing. Available for $1200 to first THREE* people who respond to this email.
*Three winners will be awarded a brand mark during October 2010. Void where prohibited. Limited time offer. Employees, vendors, current clients are not eligible.
In the absence of a clear vision, association marketing staff members start second-guessing each other. The result is a cluttered mess of details about speakers, sessions, hotel accommodations, schedules and directions. It’s a hodgepodge of information that will go in one ear and out the other. So, in the “conference community” do you think your conference is purpose-driven? Then why do you still experience stress, lack of focus, complex decision-making processes and less-than-desired marketing results? You may already be focused in the language you use to describe and plan the event, but what really make a difference is being focused on what the conference has to offer.
A purpose-driven conference with a well-executed marketing plan will stand out among other events. Creating a purpose-driven conference will fill empty seats. It’s a journey—one that will allow you to see the big picture of what the conference means to attendees, then give you the ability to see how each detail fits together.
Keep reading for an example of one purpose-driven conference which sold out in 8 days, netting approximately $7 million.
Positioning.
The event community is overflowing with organizations competing in the same space with very similar messages. Potential attendees can’t determine (or even remember) the difference between the various events.
Differentiate or die.
Without proper positioning, your event will get lost in the crowd and simply disappear. Attendance will drop, money will be lost, sponsors will forget about you, the organization’s reputation will be damaged (maybe yours too) – in short, it will just fail as it becomes known as the conference not to attend.
Each year Apple holds a Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). They beautifully translate their purpose-driven operations to the world of conferencing, creating an experience that is known by web developers and geeks as the must-attend conference.
“So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many … rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try to make something better.”
Jon Ives, Senior, VP of Apple
By accepting that there is competition in the event community and positioning themselves to stand out from the crowd based on the purpose of their event, Apple’s WWDC event grows to be more successful each year. The most recent WWDC event sold out in just 8 days. With 5,000 attendees at $1,600 per seat, this event brought in an estimated $7 million in just about a week.
Still think your conference is purpose-driven?
Or, are you ready to explore making it better and truly experience success? Discovering the intent will allow you to see the conference through the eyes of a potential attendee, positioning you in a better place to make decisions that will result in filling empty seats.
Focus Conference Positioning
Take a few moments to complete the following reassuring statement and you’ll be on the right track for conference marketing success.
“We help _______ [target audience] to _______ [benefit] and_______ [benefit].”
For example, an association hosting a conference for teachers could say: “We help educators to learn effective classroom management strategies and get access to current curriculum.”
A statement such as the one above can keep an entire marketing team on the same page while preparing for and promoting the event. It’s the first step in differentiating your event from the other conferences your potential attendees may attend.
Nitty Gritty of Conference Positioning
Now that you have a solid conference positioning statement, use that message to reign in some of the event details and vital decisions.
What unique attributes of your products or services distinguish your conference from those of your competitors?
How does your conference fit into the overall brand strategy of the association?
How does your conference solve a problem or meet a need for your target audience?
Why is your conference the best solution for them?
What is non-negotiable about your conference and must happen at all costs?
Solve a problem.
Besides competing with other conferences in the event community, your event also competes against various books, training programs and other “problem solving” avenues. How do you know what problems your potential attendees are facing?
How do you find out what other solutions are they considering? How do you find out what they think about what your conference has to offer? Simple – you ask them. Ah, but not so simple is how to ask them in a way that gets you the answers you need (even if they are not what you want to hear).
To help us get to the bottom of effective research techniques for member-based organizations, we reached out to Melissa Marcello, President of the well-respected independent opinion and marketing research firm Pursuant Research.
The Big No-No
RCG: What is the biggest mistake you see associations make when conducting research among their members?
Melissa: “Creating closed-ended questions based on knowledge gained only from highly engaged members is a mistake I see member organizations make often and unknowingly. Member organizations feel like they are in touch with their members’ needs because they have regular contact with some members who are board members and leaders within the organization. However, these are all highly engaged members, not the garden variety. They assume that what they know about this group of highly engaged members is true for everyone, and wrongly attempt to use research to quantify those thoughts.”
It’s easy to ask questions, the challenge lies in asking the right questions.
RCG: Obviously, it is important to ask the right questions when gathering feedback. What makes a good question?
Melissa: “It’s important to find balance. If a question is too narrow, it will not provide helpful information. However, if it is too broad it will be difficult to answer and the respondent will become frustrated. It’s important to remember that the members are people first, and second a professional. It’s natural for them to want to feel like they are giving you the ‘right’ answer.
I like questions that get inside their world and connect with them. For example, picking up the phone and asking members questions about their work week:
‘What happened at work this week that was a challenge? What was most satisfying? What was your greatest frustration?’
It may not seem direct, but you’ll discover some gems in their responses. Also, it builds an emotional connection between you and the member.”
Use what you’ve got.
RCG: What is one tip organizations can implement today to make their research efforts more successful?
Melissa: “Use data you already have to capture new, more detailed information. For example, segment surveys by member engagement. Each group will have unique needs and values.”
During our talk Melissa shared more tips that will help you discover why members would want to attend your conference:
Don’t assume you know what the member needs or wants.
Start with the easy questions so the respondent does not get frustrated, and to build trust that will result in more honest and helpful answers.
Gathering research through phone calls and focus groups should feel like a conversation. Members should feel comfortable enough to bring up a topic that is not necessarily on the script.
Memories drive behavior.
Now that you have identified a problem your conference can solve for potential attendees, put that information to use and guide individuals to registration.
Learning creates an impression. Impressions empower the ability to remember. Remembering compels behavior.
Great marketers understand this and intentionally market with strategic stimuli or prompts to remind their target audience of a particular event, time or piece of information stored in their memory. In the event community, you can use this theory to drive members into the actions you desire – event registration, membership renewal and purchasing publications.
First, take the positioning statement, answers to the positioning questions and some member feedback, then use that information to create content for a purpose-driven conference. That is the right kind of information you want to teach to potential attendees about the conference. Next, you can begin the use of strategic prompts to trigger memories that will drive behavior.
Let’s start with some memory basics:
What will potential attendees remember?
After reading an email about the upcoming conference or skimming the event’s website, what will potential attendees remember? Will the content and value of the conference stick with them?
How will they remember you?
Identify how potential attendees will feel when they remember you, and what you want them to think about when they encounter a triggering event. What should they think about your organization and offerings?
When will they remember you?
What real-life experiences serve as good triggers for potential attendees to remember you? These triggers can include activities at work, conversations with colleagues or experiences in their community and home.
Once you’ve determined when you want attendees to remember your organization or event, and you know what you want them to think and feel — get out of the way and do not distract them!
If you want attendees to think of you when faced with a problem at work and you want them to remember your event as being something that helped them come up with solutions, then do not distract them from this memory by promoting your event as being at a “fabulous and fun destination!” You completely ruin the memory cycle and confuse the potential attendees when you promote the venue over the value.
Does it sound too good to be true – a conference marketing experience that reduces stress, focuses energy, simplifies the decision making process, gives meaning to your event, and prepares for successful competition in the conference community.
It does happen, as seen by Apple’s WWDC annual event. And, it can happen for your organization, as well, when following a successful strategy for positioning, research and marketing.
For those of you attending ASAE’s 2010 Marketing & Membership Conference next week in DC, be sure to check out Gary’s session – Rethinking Conference Marketing: From Web 2.0 and Beyond. He’ll be talking about how to develop a conference marketing plan based on positioning and how to differentiate yourself from the pack, including ways to implement social networking strategies into your conference marketing.
Have you ever had a chance to watch kids during story time? A good storyteller can captivate young audience members all the way till Happily Ever After, which is not an easy task because these young listeners are often found running around, incapable of sitting still and definitely not able to stay quiet.Yet, they can be hypnotized by a good story.
Seated in one place, eyes glued to the storyteller and pictures on the pages, they are quiet except for the occasional “WOW.”
They are a tough audience to reach, but once the storyteller has their attention the reward is great. However, these young lovers of a good story are not the hardest audience to captivate. No, that would their parents.
Possibly the people you are trying to engage through conference marketing efforts. Just like their children, your potential attendees can generally be found running from place to place, hardly ever finding a moment to be still, and are so overwhelmed with responsibilities and distractions, their time is rarely quiet. Yet, you are challenged with the task of getting their attention and holding it while you give them all the information they need about your upcoming event.
I’m here to tell you that it just simply won’t happen. Save the date cards that kick off the same marketing campaign you’ve been using for the last five years will not capture the attention of nor engage your audience.
Stop marketing, and start telling a story, a story that gets your audience to the edge of their seats, eyes glued on your organization and when at the peak of the story all they can do is say “WOW.”
Specifically, we are going to talk about telling a story through your event Website, Offer and Webinars. Seriously, throw away your marketing to-do list, we are going to replace it with a vision and a story.
Website
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
A great story demands a strong opening line.
Just like a great event demands a strong first impression. But, when does the first impression occur? At what point does the potential attendee read that opening line? At registration? At check-in?
No, the first impression occurs once potential registrants visit the event website. That experience is when they start to put together the story of who you are, what your brand means to them and what the event will be like. What story are you telling and how are you telling it through the event website? How are site visitors experiencing your brand while on the site?
Does confusing navigation make it difficult for them to find the information they want?
Do they feel overwhelmed because there is too much content on the site?
Do they view your lack of social media integration as a sign that you are not keeping up with the times?
Does the list of facts about the location, date and speakers seem impersonal?
You may have a great SEO strategy or marketing plan that drives thousands of potential attendees to the website – but if you don’t tell an engaging story you’ll never get the users through the front door and to the registration page.
So, stop marketing, and start telling the story of your event. Create an experience with engaging graphics, inspiring text and a story that tells the site visitor why they should attend your event.
How to WOW them:
The event website is the perfect opportunity to wow potential attendees. Interacting with a website that tells a passionate story will IMPACT attendees, CHANGE them and CONNECT them. It will “WOW” them all the way to the registration page.
Here are some tips to get you started:
Gain perspective. Let this statement guide your digital communications:
As a result of going to our event website, people will do/think/feel _. (fill in the blank)
Use examples to illustrate your points. In the weeks leading up to the event have a registered attendee (maybe a member you know well) write a weekly blog post or create a video blog as they prepare for the conference.
Blog topics can include:
what they find out when researching the speakers
how they identify who they want to meet while at the conference
what vendors they are excited to see (and the potential swag!)
places of interest they discover while researching the location
plans they make for socializing with other attendees
Switch up the homepage for the day of the event.
How well does your web presence serve the needs of attendees during the meeting? Once the event approaches, transform the homepage of the event website to become a real time guide to what’s happening. Synchronizing Twitter, Flickr and other social media platforms can keep everyone in the loop. It’s important that if the site is enhanced for the day of the conference, then it should have a quality mobile version.
Offer
What is the goal of the offer you create to let potential attendees know about the event? Is your goal to educate them on the event details? Or, to persuade them to register? Listen up: People do not want to be inundated with facts or sold on something. They want to be inspired.
The goal of the offer should be to a create a change in the person – a change of behavior, thinking or feeling.
The change you should strive to create is one that helps the audience believe that your event will solve a problem for them. This is a change that will lead to event registration.
And because stories have the power to simultaneously engage the listener both cognitively AND emotionally, they are highly effective in getting your point across.
If the goal of the offer is to create a change in the reader’s belief system so that they trust your event will benefit them – then you must begin with that in mind and work backwards from there to design the story you tell through the offer.
How to WOW them:
Getting started. Similar fill-in-the-blank question to get your team started down the right path.
“As a result of reading our offer, people will do/think/feel_________ “(fill in the blank).
Video. Video. Video. Testimonials are a great addition to any offer you post about the event. But, a stagnant paragraph next to a picture doesn’t do anything. You’re not fooling the reader, they know that the paragraph of italicized text next to the picture of the nice lady is a testimonial geared to persuade them to attend your event. Again, people don’t want to be sold. They want to be inspired.
That’s why video is vital to every offer you create. Thanks to television, movies and YouTube, we still believe that Video = Good Story. Make your story come alive through video. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a video of a person talking. There are many affordable ways to create video using motion graphics, text and music that will engage an audience more that plain text on a site.
Webinars
Quick – grab a pencil and post-it note. You should jot down this conference marketing secret…Good webinars will increase attendance more than any Save the Date card could dream possible.
Webinars are a fantastic way to continue telling the story of your event through your website. A great webinar doesn’t have to be a 60-minute long presentation, it could be just 15-30 minutes in length. But, it does have to be engaging and inspiring.
Webinars featuring speakers, presenters and vendors giving sneak peaks into their specialty can be quite engaging. Also, webinars about the experience and location from staff members and previous attendees can inspire people on the fence to take the leap and register.
Check out these handy-dandy webinar facts:
FACT: Webinars save money.
Many organizations are using webinars to reduce the number of in-person events. Studies say that some organizations who launched webinar programs saved 75% on event expenses and that webinars can cost less than 25 cents per minute.
FACT: Webinars require less time.
Webinars require less time to all involved. It is easier to get attendees to commit to attending your webinar when it is only about an hour long. This is way more appealing than sitting through a daunting conference that can last for hours.
FACT: Webinars are good for consumers (potential attendees).
A recent survey found that 86% of all viewers will watch as many or more webinars in the next year than they did in the past year. Another survey performed showed 83% found webinars convenient; and 66% time effective and only 7% found webinars a waste of time. These surveys clearly show that webinars are highly effective and convenient for consumers.
FACT: Webinars increase sales.
Webinars create an efficient and quick way to educate, inspire and convince those interested in registering for your event.
How to WOW them:
Again, it’s all about telling the story. If your goal is to get listeners to do something (i.e. register), your story needs to inspire them by appealing to their values, self-interest, or some combination of both. Recently I read Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers and this quote from the book is the ideal direction for these stories. You must appeal, “not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.”
Little, three word statements can get you in trouble. Take “I love you”, for instance. Said too soon, too often, not enough, or not at all can sink a relationship. How about every kid’s favorite: “Clean your room!” An allowance might be withheld, a cell phone might be held hostage, or, in an extreme case, piles of stuff might be shoveled in the trash can if mom’s forceful request is ignored.
Then there are the three word statements that cause you to do the exact opposite of their intention. “Walk, don’t run!” is a command that is pretty much impossible for little kids to obey when they’re excited. “Nothing new here” and “Pay no attention,” on the other hand, immediately piques curiosity. Obviously, you are hiding something and I’d like to know what. Telling Dorothy and her friends to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain didn’t work for the Wizard of Oz after Toto unveiled him, and it won’t work for you either.
Finally we come to “Save the date,” a favorite of event planners. Use that often? If you do, cease, desist, stop immediately! Those are probably the three most overused words in event planning, and using them is the best way to make a bad first impression.
Think about it: you have 3 seconds to make a good first impression. Three! A quick glance is all a person needs to form an opinion. Once that impression has been made, it’s nearly impossible to undo. Show up for a first date in a favorite outfit that makes you feel like a million bucks with your hair and makeup just so and a huge smile plastered to your face, and you are already one step towards a second date. Enter the shabby, dreary lobby of what was billed as a boutique hotel, and you might walk right out and seek accommodations elsewhere—and then tell the readers of Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Zagat about it.
Save the date notices that simply list the date and venue are tired, overused, and totally ineffective. They immediately send the message that there’s no need to rush, no need to do anything right now, no need to take action because more information is coming…eventually. Your save the date notice is glanced at, tossed, and forgotten. What kind of first impression is your “save the date” notice making for your organization’s big event?
Whether you are attempting to make a good first impression in your career or social life, it’s very important to know how to create one every time. This article will provide a few useful tips on how to do just that when planning an event. As they like to say, a picture is worth a thousand words. With extra thought and preparation, your picture—or event marketing materials, in this case—could be worth a thousand and one words.
The First Impression
In this day and age, everything is interactive. To grab someone’s attention and leave a really great first impression, you need to wow them, engage them, get them talking. Social media is everywhere these days, and for good reason. With it, you can start a conversation with your audience, whoever and wherever they are. People are not numbers anymore; they’re not a boring set of statistics and demographic information laid out in a chart. They’re individuals with personalities, and you want to offer them substance, value, excitement and a positive impression of your brand.
Making a good first impression relies on three little rules rather than three little words. When you are planning an event, your marketing materials must:
Promote the event’s value
Inspire the unaware
Enhance the brand
Promote the event’s value
Use common sense when making that first impression. You need to answer these important questions: Why should I attend your event? What new things will I learn, see, do? What is available to me at this event that I cannot find or get elsewhere? Basically, what’s in it for me?
Inspire the unaware to attend
Be thought-provoking and inspirational in your messaging, especially during these days when everyone is doing more with less: less time, less people, less money. Make a strong argument for why someone should leave the busy day-to-day of their jobs to go to your event. What will be new, fun, interactive, a once-in-a-blue-moon experience? How was last year’s event such a smashing success, and what will make this year’s better?
Enhance the brand
Put on your strategy hat and remember that you’re not selling an event, you’re selling an entire brand experience.
You’re event adds value to your brand, and you’re putting on this event so members will think more highly of your brand.
After all, your ultimate goal is to ensure attendees become members, renew their membership, or increase their donation, not because you like to throw a big party.
This is a great quote that I read somewhere, and I am sorry I don’t remember where, but it’s very apropos to this discussion: “Your event should be a memorable experience that adds value to your brand, but if your first impression is of the same old-same old, then what is that really doing?”
You need to do something new, so break out of your box, ditch the playbook, and approach your event with fresh eyes. Armen Gharabegian, CEO of Design Ethos in LA, contributed some relevant advice in a column that appeared in Corporate Events Magazine. He really stressed the impact your event has on your brand. We couldn’t agree more. If the marketing materials you use before, during, and after the event look the same every year, your organization looks irrelevant, out of touch, stodgy, and boring. But don’t just focus on the design and how your brand looks; the content matters even more. Your marketing materials must resonate with people and tell your brand’s story.
Gharabegian also urges you to think about the key takeaways of your event: How will you get your attendees to remember the information you are sharing with them? Encircle your attendees in messaging that drives home those points. What emotions do you want to trigger? Go beyond a new look and message in your signage and staging; take it to the flooring, seating, walls, ceiling. Incorporate everything into your branding efforts.
Making a great first impression while planning your event starts with thought, preparation, and relevance. In those three, very fast seconds someone spends glancing at your event marketing materials, pull out all the stops to grab their attention. By adding inspiration, excitement, and value, and your brand will grow and flourish.
Last year, associations saw a 25-50% to drop in conference attendance.
Surveys show the outlook for this year isn’t much better. Yet we’re seeing associations use the same approach to marketing their conference year after year.
That’s like writing your own one-way ticket to failure!
If you’re reusing the same tired strategies and hoping that people will attend, then we have news for you: Hope alone doesn’t sell seats at a conference. People who have attended in the past and see the same marketing approach will assume that you’re spitting out the same info as the year before. And for those who haven’t attended, well, if your marketing pieces didn’t win them over last year, then why would this year be any different?
Here’s another dose of tough love: associations like yours are feeling the pinch both from the economy and from social media, which is breaking down geographic barriers and allowing like-minded people to connect without shelling out for a conference.
Don’t believe us? Just look at SuperComm, which was one of the biggest technology trade shows in the early 2000s with over 50,000 attendees in 2001. Attendance dropped to 6,400 last year and the two associations that sponsor the trade show decided to cancel the 2010 event altogether. When members don’t attend your conference, it’s reflects poorly on your association’s brand, which can translate to poor member retention.
The fact is that associations planning conferences need to do more with fewer resources and fewer staff people in order to survive in this dog-eat-dog climate. And the secret to getting more bang for that hard-earned buck can be summed up in two simple words: BRAND EXPERIENCE.
So, what is this elusive brand experience?
A positive brand experience reinforces your association’s reputation and strengthens relationships with your members.
When they log onto the conference website or get a postcard and see something memorable that conveys passion for your organization, that’s a positive brand experience. It’s a gut feeling, like love at first sight. (OK, let’s not get too carried away.)
The experience reignites members’ interest and inspires them to attend the conference. It might also inspire them to become your brand ambassador and share the info with an unaware colleague. Score!
OK, smart guys. So, how can we create a good brand experience?
First, don’t think about how that postcard or website or banner should look. Think about the feelings it should create and the actions it should motivate. Do you want members to think, “wow, this is exactly what I need to take our fundraising to the next level! I’m going to register right now!”? Or maybe, “this medical conference could connect me with important researchers – why haven’t I gone before?”
Notice that in both of these instances the branding experience is effective, because it speaks to the members’ needs and plays up the value of attendance. Being different is all well and good, but it’s more important to be relevant to members.
In the first case, our friendly fundraising professional needs to learn some new strategies. He gets a postcard in the mail, checks out the website, and BAM he’s sold! It helps wth a need for him, because the association understands its members and created an easy-to-navigate site that content that’s useful to them. The other hypothetical attendee gets her needs met, because the association emphasizes the connections that members can make to boost their research. They chose a story that resonates with her, and it worked!
Wait! How do we figure out what our members really want?
If only it were as easy as Mel Gibson made it look in What Women Want. It takes some time to get inside your members’ heads, but that time is an investment that will pay off down the road. Remember, building a successful and sustainable brand isn’t a sprint to the finish line. It’s a marathon that never quite ends, because your brand needs to evolve over time as needs change and the marketplace changes.
Here’s how to examine your members’ needs:
Look at your current members – Why did they join? What do they get out of membership? What social media platforms do they use? What will motive them to renew?
Look at the kind of new members you want to reach – What keeps them from joining your association or attending your conference? What needs are not being met?
Look inward to your organization – Are you already doing great things that nobody knows about? That could be part of your brand’s promise!
Look at competitors to see how they position themselves – What resonates with their members? What doesn’t?
You can’t possibly talk to every single member, so you’ll need to extrapolate information from those you do reach. Then you can create personas that speak to their needs and help you hone in on a branding strategy.
I’m passionate and I think I understand members’ needs. How do I communicate that?
Hiring a skywriter to fly over a major sporting event usually does the trick for us. Just kidding! Use this checklist to ensure that your conference materials reflect the right message and fulfill the appropriate needs.
What story are you telling?
What problems are you solving?
What needs are you meeting?
Are you including a clear call to action?
Do you encourage open communications with your members?
Are you promoting value over venue?
What unique attributes of your product or service distinguishes your conference?
All of these areas are related, but they point back to numero uno: storytelling.
Find the right story to tell and the appropriate actions, problems, and needs will become crystal clear.
And if you do a really good job solving the right problem and telling the right story, then members will be so jazzed they’ll tell your story, too, perhaps using tools like email, blogs, and Twitter. All the more reason for your association to embrace these tools, too.
But remember that the story should focus on the value attendees will get out of your conference, not all the cool amenities of your conference venue. Over the years, we’ve seen a few too many associations get caught up in promoting the venue to the exclusion of their conference, which creates brand conflict and confusion. Conference venues have their own marketing staff; it’s your job to find the unique selling point of your conference and share that story.
But isn’t good branding expensive?
Conferences and other events offer you an opportunity to engage members, reaching out to unaware prospects and strengthening the bond with existing members so they’ll renew membership. In fact, a 2009 survey of senior marketing and sales executives found that respondents believe event marketing is the channel that provides the greatest return on investment. Of course, that’s assuming that you create a strong, memorable brand for the event.
But you don’t need fireworks or skywriting to lure attendees. Focus your conference design and marketing on the purpose of the event and the brand experience you want to convey. When marketing choices are strategic, everything supports the brand, ensuring that nothing is wasted. It also gives your association the best return on investment possible.
Besides, the alternative (laziness or just plain bad branding) will cost your association even more. Low attendance translates to lost revenue, lost members, and, in some cases, lost jobs.
You may remember a few months ago in an edition of WhiteSpace we shared with you the Top 5 Reasons You Should Twitter Your Annual Meeting:
Keep non-attendees informed on conference happenings.
Keep attendees better informed about the day’s schedule.
See the conference from a different perspective.
Inspire non-attendees to attend next year.
Stay connected to members.
(If you don’t remember, or you’re a new reader check out our newsletter.)
Now we’ve found a very cool, and easy-to-use tool for sharing all of those tweets. TwitterFountain is a Twitter application that pulls together tweets that contain a chosen keyword or hashtag. It also pulls in images from Flickr with a chosen tag.
If we ditch the geek-speak, this means you can have a constantly updating application on your website or blog that shows all tweets and Flickr images related to a certain topic….such as your annual conference.
Here is a TwitterFountain we quickly set up to show tweets containing the phrase “charitytuesday”, and Flickr images tagged “conference attendees”:
In just a few minutes we’ve created a communication tool with real-time updates. Imagine how useful (and fun) this could be for your annual conference.
And, no, we’re not talking about losing weight, writing that novel, or learning how to “deal” with your mother-in-law.
Turning to the internet to find information and answer questions has become quite natural for many of us. Why waste valuable energy, brain cells and time when you can just turn to Google for all your questions.
Directions, recipes, dog training tips, how to manage teenagers, what books to read, what clothes to wear, how to fix my hair, ways to save money, ways to spend money. It’s all on the internet.
Periodically, we take a few moments to scour the internet and see what other people are saying about conference marketing.
Regardless of our Google inquiry, we always come back with the same result: “there’s a whole lotta stuff out there!”
Articles, blog posts, surveys, webinars, podcasts, tweets. Very little good, some bad, and mostly ugly.
Whenever I overhear one my kids trying to sweet talk their dear grandmother into spoiling them with something more than usual, I’m remind of a phrase I heard from her many times in my youth, but have yet heard her say to her sweet grandkids.
“You need that like you need another hole in your head.”
That phrase comes to mind when reading all the junk in cyberspace on conference marketing.
You guys need another boring newsletter like you need another hole in your head.
Here are four, just four, and only four areas you need to focus on with conference marketing. Forget all the bad, trivial stuff you’ve read, and follow these four crucial rules for marketing success in 2010.
1. Develop and use personas.
If you’re looking for one big, new thing to shake up your marketing plan and make it more effective, this is it. (You can thank us later for laying this golden nugget at your feet….or, in your inbox.)
Developing and using personas is based on a well-known, and widely-practiced philosophy that some of us may be known to have shouted at retail clerks and customer service reps:
“The customer is always right.” For you, we’ll tweak it to: “The conference attendee is always right.”
Hopefully, you understand that if you don’t give conference attendees what they need, they’ll find some other way to get it. That’s very much what you do when a company isn’t providing the service/product you need, right?
Creating a persona allows you (and your communications team) to get into the mind of your members.
Developing a persona will transform you into an expert on your members. Not only will you know who they are, what they like, but you’ll also learn how to communicate in a way that resonates with them. You’ll unlock the secret to inspiring them.
All of that information can then be used to create a member-centered communications plan.
The primary persona is a fictional character that mirrors real conference attendees. It includes creating a name, photo, bio, business objectives and other attributes. You can use the persona to navigate through scenarios conference attendees may encounter before deciding to register for the annual meeting. And the fun doesn’t stop here, you then move on to developing a secondary persona.
Why do it?
Developing a persona and using it can have the following causes and effects:
CAUSE
EFFECT
Understand their communication style.
Potential attendees receive and digest your message.
Understanding their decision making process.
Overcome (or prevent) objections for attending.
Pinpoint communications.
Messages stick to targeted members.
Discover their pressure points.
Potential attendees emotionally connect with messaging, making it more compelling.
How to get started:
Realize that conference attendance depends on inspiring members. Duh.
Recognize that you are not your members. In other words, your members might be different than you. (Again, duh.)
Research your members. Learn about your members. I mean, really learn about them – favorite websites, tv shows, what their home life is like, etc. Don’t be scared to interact with them, I doubt they bite. Find out what they like, what inspires them, who they are, etc.
Develop. Make the findings of this research understandable and actionable. Develop personas using descriptions, picture and scenarios.
Segment marketing communications. Make member-focused marketing decisions. Plan conference marketing based on primary and secondary personas of potential attendees.
Measure the results. Be ready to capture the results from this new, more effective way of communicating with your members.
2. Use social media, the correct way.
Do you know what’s worse than not using social media? Using social media incorrectly.
It’s way worse, because it’s public! People are going to see that you don’t know what your are doing. They will either laugh at you, quickly become annoyed with you….or if you are lucky, they’ll never notice you.
But, if used correctly social media can make you seem hip, informed, accessible and trustworthy as an expert in your industry.
Also, according to Mashable, during December 2009, global users spent an average of five hours on social networking sites, up from three hours in December 2008. That’s an 82% increase.
Why do it?
CAUSE
EFFECT
Learn how to use social media.
Members think you are hip, informed and know they can easily reach out to you.
Increase web presence.
Reach more potential attendees.
Create easy-to-share content.
Followers and fans spread your content with their friends and colleagues.
Two-way communications with potential attendees.
Strengthen relationships and get valuable feedback.
How to get started:
Based on primary persona, decide what content and information conference attendees may want to share with their networks. Pictures, videos, presentations, handouts, speaker bios, podcasts, etc – are all content that attendees will want to use when sharing their reflections on the event over blogs, Twitter and Facebook.
Integrate social media into the live event. Something as simple as creating a TwitterFountain would be a great tool.
Integrate with other communication efforts. Pull it all together so you don’t seem like a schizophrenic marketer. Check out a previous newsletter we wrote about purposefully integrating communication.
Show some personality! Nobody likes a boring tweeter.
3. Video, video, and more video.
From the big screen to the small screen and now to the smart screen, video and motion graphics have become what the people like.
We’re not just talking about video’s made with your flip camera or with a production studio, we’re also talking about motion graphics. Clips with audio, movement and text can dramatically help define the story being told. It brings life to inanimate words and images.
Consumers are overwhelmed with information, news. After a while it becomes too noisy and they can’t receive the information.
But, motion graphics can change that because video appeals to more senses than just text.
The Nielsen Company reported increases in online video usage during 2009, and the prediction is that 2010 will see greater use of online video.
Would you announce the annual conference without using email marketing? No way!
Email marketing has become a staple in communications, and video and motion graphics are becoming necessities, as well. Your members are on board with online video, it’s time for you to jump on board, too – or, you’ll be left at the station. And you know what happens to people left at the station? They are forgotten.
Every message sent to potential attendees should have a video, this includes (but does not exclude) save-the-date emails, registration offers, speaker bios and more.
WHY DO IT?
CAUSE
EFFECT
Videos showing images and/or testimonies of last year’s attendees.
Potential attendees see event as fun and exciting, as well as informative.
Include video and motion graphics in communications.
Members will absorb your message.
Inspirational Videos.
Potential attendees remember it, and/or share with others.
How to get started:
Learn to walk before you run. Start with something small, like an animation of the conference brand mark.
Enhance valuable information with animation. Animate key findings that highlight the most important part of your message.
Testimonials. Create videos with previous attendees giving testimonials about their experience. Videos should open with animated brand mark (created in step 1), and they should be less than three minutes long.
Simply do a screen grab of the video you are using and place it in email with a link back to the site to watch the video. Ask your web guy to explain.
If content is king, then video is his queen. We’ve got lots more to come about video and motion graphics. Stay tuned to our blog.
4. Let’s get virtual.
Incorporating virtual events with the real event can make you seem like the coolest cat ever, oh, and it can make your conference more valuable.
Don’t freak out, the technology for virtual events has gotten better, easier to use and more affordable. In fact, it’s so easy to use and widespread, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t taken an online class or webinar. Again, don’t get left at station – the virtual train is loaded up with your members and about to pull out any second. You best get virtual, and quick!
CAUSE
EFFECT
Regional conferences have virtual events with other regions.
Increase interest in national events.
Pre-event virtual meetings.
Attendees get more value out of break-out sessions and overall content.
Post-event virtual meetings.
Attendees receive more information and have a higher perceived value of event.
How to get started:
Again, start with baby steps. Host a webinar or play a podcast at the live event.
Do an interactive, virtual breakout session. Members will love another option for receiving content.
Learn the technology and options for virtual events. We’ll be sharing more info about virtual events on our blog. Or, as we said at the beginning of this newsletter, just Google it.
If you think our recommendation are wrong, then you can try this (http://www.gorilla-robot.com/) at your next event.
One thing that most of your members, conference attendees and website visitors have in common is that they want to have their say. They want to give their opinion and know they’ve been heard. And, if you don’t respond, the world is full of organizations or businesses who will.
Here are three tools that can help you gather info that will be helpful in making future decisions about event planning, marketing, and publications.
1. YackTrack.com
YackTrack is a free-to-use search engine. Focused on online conversations, YackTrack searches Twitter, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Flickr, Mixx, delicious, Identica and more. After completing a search, you can subscribe to an RSS feed to read new chatter about your search topic as it is posted.
2. GetSatisfaction.com
GetSatisfaction is more tailored for businesses, but it can still be useful to organizations. The website allows individuals to report problems or complaints with a product or service. Setting up a free account could provide a great space for conference attendees to be honest about their experience at your most recent conference. Association staff members can then respond over the site.
3. SurveyMonkey.com
SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool, that allows you to plug in your own set of questions, pick your industry, set your parameters and then get instant results. The service is free for up to 100 survey responses.
Let’s leave behind the nightmares of low conference attendance in 2009, and embrace the hopefulness of 2010. I think we can all say that we are glad 2009 is gone. The economy has affected our jobs, lifestyles, retirement funds, and our level of stress.
Articles are popping up all over the place about how various industries survived 2009. From real estate to retail, industry leaders are reflecting on last year and making hopeful projections for 2010.
Yet, there is a different tone in the world of events and conferences.
We’re gonna guess that you saw a drop in attendance for your annual conference, because we recently read a survey which reported that 71% of associations saw a decrease in conference attendance in 2009. And, some associations saw a decrease of close to 50%!
Very gloomy news. But, the most disturbing part of this survey, completed by various association executives, was that 41% do not expect anything to change in 2010, and 20% expect attendance to decrease again!
At a time when most industries have professionals who are willing to make changes to be successful, association executives seem satisfied to sit back and just let another year of poor conference attendance come and go.
We think that is a lousy way to head into a new year. Instead, we are going to reveal more about what happened in 2009 and identify some conference marketing failures that can be corrected to help make 2010 a successful year for conference attendance.
And the survey says…
(Pull out your stats from 2009 to see how you compare with the association that participated in this survey.)
Here’s the review of 2009 Annual Conferences: Attendance was down, sponsorships and exhibitor attendance dropped, some organizations faced attrition penalties, and a few had to cancel their largest, annual meeting.
72% of respondents said overall attendance was down
36% said attendance was down 20-50 percent
75% said exhibitor and sponsor attendance was down
42% paid or owned attrition penalties
72% had to renegotiate with suppliers because of decreased attendance
It’s not fun stuff, and we don’t get why anyone would want to have a repeat of that in 2010. Yet, the projections for 2010 based on this survey say just that.
62% of respondents expect to have the same or smaller attendance in 2010
Yes, 2009 was a bummer, but it is time to get over it, fix the problems and have a successful year.
Examining how you promoted the event is a great place to identify some solutions that could increase attendance. Check out our newsletter Positioning Your Annual Conference for Greater Attendance to get started. www.rottmancreative.com/positioning
Developing new strategies for member retention and conference attendance are a must during a recession.
65% expect exhibitor and sponsor attendance to stay the same or decrease
Weak attendance and suffering sponsorships and exhibit halls hurt the overall value of the conference because attendees have few networking opportunities. Its the start of a nasty cycle that keeps feeding into the death of your annual conference.
The quality of an exhibit hall can greatly impact the conference value and attendance. Crowdsourcing is a great way to ensure that you are pulling in the right vendors. www.rottmancreative.com/crowdsourcing
86% plan to renegotiate with suppliers to makeup for attendance shortfalls
It worked in 2009, so why not try it again? Over 60 percent of respondents renegotiated with hotels and venues by promising to bring future business. Yet, what kind of business are you bringing them if with each event you have to renegotiate because of declining attendance? We think your time would be better spent developing a new marketing plan to help increase attendance, instead of letting this defeatist mentality take over as you plan for failure.
Your new marketing plan should account for more and more conference attendees registering late. It is not just a trend, and conference marketing has to evolve around it. www.rottmancreative.com/late-conference-registration
Nearly 40% will work with Convention & Visitors Bureau to market destinations
Before you make the switch in careers to a travel agent, let’s look at how the travel industry is doing.
A survey from Allstate showed that 50% of Americans cut back on their vacation budgets for 2009. But, not everyone did so because of lack of funds. Many did so because it seemed to not be a necessity. When it came down to it, vacations lost their value. Also, just like your office, there have been cutbacks, people are more stressed and tired. Who has time and energy to even plan a vacation, let alone actually take one?
So, maybe the idea of picking a great event location and marketing it, isn’t such a great idea after all.
Instead of marketing the destination, associations need to promote the value of the event.
82% plan to increase e-mail promotion
Um, we can’t believe we actually have to say this, but sending 20 poorly-planned and poorly-executed e-mails, instead the 10 poorly-planned e-mails sent last year will not increase conference attendance.
Instead of communicating more, how about communicating better? Integrating e-mail marketing and direct mail is a great place to start. Check out our newsletter with tips on how to get started. www.rottmancreative.com/content458
71% will use social media to promote meetings
Well, just like increasing e-mail marketing, social media will not increase attendance or sponsorship if there is not a solid strategy backing it up. Tweeting “We’re going to have a conference in beautiful Austin, TX” will not benefit you at all.
There are two essential tools you need before implementing social media into your marketing plan: a social media strategy and a social media policy.
46% will create campaigns specific to each attendee segment the organization services
Brilliant! This is exactly what we love to see associations doing, and we would love to work with any group that is thinking this way. We expect them to have great success next year and have an increase in their conference attendance. Congrats!
One group that deserves to have their own messaging is the younger members in your association.
It’s time for a new game plan.
You knew it was going to be a tough year. But, you picked a great venue, decent speakers, got the best deal for the hotel that you could and followed your standard marketing plan to the tee.
Yet, no one showed up. Well, it’s no surprise to us – and it shouldn’t be for you either. And, the same thing will happen in 2010 if you don’t take action to change.
When the world is against you, you have to step up your game. There is a lot that you can’t control – like budgets, cutbacks and increasing travel costs. But, there is a lot you can control – like, effective marketing that promotes your event as a unique offering.
It’s time to step up and fix the problems in your marketing plan, and let the nightmares of ’09 stay where they belong….in the past.
Harness the power of a crowd to reach your attendance goals.
We know it has happened to you. You can deny it if you want, but we know the truth. We know you pour hours of work and thousands of dollars into your annual conference, and you are let down when you don’t meet attendance goals.
So you look for the silver lining – the post-event surveys! Reading comments from attendees on why they LOVED the event will definitely cheer you up, and make all your hard work seem worthwhile. But, then it happens. Surveys pour in, bringing complaints and comments of disappointment.
“What a shame that the exhibit hall lacked a vendor to help me with…”
“It was a good event, but really didn’t help me.”
“I wish the main speaker had spent more time talking about…”
“Why wasn’t there a break-out session about…”
“Maybe next year you can do this differently.”
We know you’ve received feedback like this, and with declining membership numbers and attendance goals you simply can’t ignore it.
Stop hiding in shame. Do something different!
The association and members can’t take you shrugging off these comments any longer. It’s time to retire the saying, “hindsight is 20/20,” and find a solution. Lucky for you – we’ve got the solution!! Making it’s first appearance in WhiteSpace…..(Drumroll please)
Crowdsourcing!
Crowdsourcing is the act of sending out a challenge or request to an unknown, undefined group. The goal is to gather as many solutions as possible in hopes that one will be the perfect solution.
Even though you don’t realize it, crowdsourcing is part of your every day life.
When you get home tonight you may either ask, or be asked this question, “What would you like for dinner?”
Kids and spouses give various responses and you sift through the bad answers, like the ever-standing request for pizza, hoping for a clue on what you could fix for dinner that could work for the whole family.
That is crowdsourcing on a very small scale, but it can also work when addressing a very large, unknown community – especially when using the Internet. Crowdsourcing embodies what we truly desire from technology – to make us better at what we do.
And, we’ve got great news for you – crowdsourcing can help associations. Through crowdsourcing you can prevent those depressing post-event surveys, and in a way that will increase membership and conference attendance.
Alright, we know that right now you might be thinking, “Geez, I’m too busy to add one more thing to my to-do list!” Just like you, our days move at a rapid pace and there is never enough time to get everything done. Heck, most days it seems like a miracle that the kids get to the bus stop on time – even though the bus stop is just at the end of the driveway.
We want new ways to make our job easier and help us save time – not more tasks to add to our day.
And, that is one reason why we became such big fans of crowdsourcing. Ever catch yourself thinking that if you had a bigger staff, an assistant, a clone, or a third arm, you might actually be able to get everything done? Well, crowdsourcing can’t give you any of those, but it can give you a large group of (free!) volunteers to help out.
4 Irresistible Reasons Why You Need to Learn About Crowdsourcing
1. Provides targeted solutions in less time.
Think of crowdsourcing as a great way to get a large group of skilled, intelligent people to brainstorm for you. Throw out a question to your members about conference topics, and while you are moving on with your day-to-day tasks, ideas will start pouring in. One of these ideas may work, but if not, then at least your team has a place to start when you have your internal brainstorming session.
2. Lowers costs and adds value.
Many organizations and companies who use crowdsourcing for event planning save money on market research, while also getting more bang for their buck. In addition to tapping into a broader network, crowdsourcing builds strong relationships with potential attendees because they helped set the agenda. This also results in attracting more passionate members who really want to make their mark.
3. Gives attendees a better experience.
Attendees will be happier and more fulfilled if given the input power to set the agenda and determine the content. Through crowdsourcing, participants get to collaborate before the annual conference, which will add more value to the content shared at the event.
4. Results in higher attendance.
Crowdsourcing is a simple and effective way to engage knowledgeable members, and make the event more valuable to them. Very few people would skip an event that they helped plan!
How to Get Started
Now that you’re interested in crowdsourcing, you might need some direction on where to get started. The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it is limitless.
All you need is imagination, and a little bit of technology. To get your headed in the right direction, ask yourself these questions:
What kind of relationship do we have with our attendees?
Do you provide any opportunities for them to feel the excitement of being a partner for any of your events, programs or services?
What kind of relationship do we want with our attendees?
Think about the skills and knowledge your members have – how could your organization benefit from them? It might also be helpful to ask yourself what type of relationship you think your attendees want with you.
What do we want to learn from the attendees?
In addition to learning from their expertise, crowdsourcing is great for market research.
What kind of opportunity do we want to give attendees?
Look at your upcoming annual conference and identify at least one opportunity for opening up the conversation with attendees through crowdsourcing.
Four Easy-to-implement Ideas for Crowdsourcing & Conferencing
Bringing together a large, unknown group of volunteers and using their talents and imagination to come with new ideas, isn’t as hard as you think.
1. Q&A During Event
One easy-to-implement idea is to pose questions during the event and allow attendees to respond via text message. Those results can automatically be published on a screen in the main session to guide conversation, or saved as research for future use.
2. Pre-event Voting
Allow participants to submit ideas for any aspect of the conference ranging from session topics to social activities, then allow them to vote for the ideas they like the best. This is most effective if a deadline is set for submitting ideas, then another deadline set for ending the voting. Also, it’s easy to set up a RSS feed so that participants can get updates on new submissions.
3. Use Social Media
Social media and crowdsourcing are the perfect couple! Whether you want to share a video over YouTube, a short question over Twitter, or get expert advice in a LinkedIn forum – social media sites are designed to help you engage the audience and get valuable feedback.
4. Start a Contest
A huge motivating force behind the success of crowdsourcing is our competitive spirit. Even if there isn’t a monetary prize, participants will jump on the chance to be the one with the solution. Contest ideas can range from submitting the best solution for integrating technology at the event to best theme-party idea for the big social.
Crowdsourcing is an effective, and cost-efficient way to collect a dynamic cross-section of ideas. And, even if you get several submissions, but only a few usable ideas, it is still a worthwhile venture, because it makes sense.
Just like asking the family what is for dinner each night, not every response is a winner. But, you still ask because you know they at least have the right to make a suggestion. The same is true for your members, and if you don’t give them the opportunity they will go somewhere else to find it.
There are many ways to communicate with your potential conference attendees that it’s very easy for the information being communicated to be lost or forgotten because of the use of traditional communication methods. To separate your communications from the traditional ways, personalize the information. Incorporating personalized information into your communication efforts will help with increasing attendance at your conference. Encourage potential attendees to engage with the information they are receiving by using pURL’s, twitter, and facebook.
PURL’s
Personal URLs are perfect for potential attendees to interact with the marketing materials. For example, as you send out your save the date postcard, you can send along with it a PURL for the recipient to log on to. On their personal page, you can have them register early, fill out a questionnaire, or have them choose or suggest topics that they would like to have covered during the conference. By allowing the attendee to participate during the pre-conference stage, the conference value and attendance will increase.
Twitter
During the pre-conference stage, you can begin to setup #hashtags for your conference on Twitter. Invite possible attendees to follow your conference twitter account to receive instant updates about the conference and to begin conversations about what they would like to see at the conference and to start networking with other attendees.
Twitter can be used during the conference as well to let attendees provide their own personal views on subjects and to strike up hot topics throughout the conference. Have the speakers setup their own accounts so they can get involved with conversations through twitter.
Setting up a group on Facebook for your conference is a great tool. As you add friends to the group, you can gauge the potential for attendees at your conference. Utilizing the upcoming events tool, the group will be notified about key dates for the conference.
Registration Offers
Who does not like a discount or special offer? Why not offer a discount for early registration using PURL’s? Provide special offers to your Facebook Fans who participate in discussions. Conduct contests through Twitter during the conference where you provide information or clues only seen through your Twitter updates. Providing more options for early registration and participation in pre and post conference sessions will encourage members to take advantage of the situation and in turn it will help with conference attendance and late registration because we know “it’s not just a trend, it’s a fact.”
By incorporating these personalization tools, you will help with the overall value of the conference, but more importantly it will help increase your attendance.
We’ve been giving you guys tons of tips and how-tos about conference marketing, and now its time to help you put it all together and fill those empty seats at your next conference.
“We cannot adjust the wind… but we can adjust the sails.“
Unknown
This marketing plan package equips association and non-profit executives with the tools and knowledge to fill the empty seats. This package is especially designed for:
Associations and non-profits with a limited staff
Organizations not meeting their attendance goals
Organizations with an In-house marketing team that needs a fresh set of eyes to review currents strategie
We are only offering this special package in the first quarter of 2010. If you want to reach your conference attendance goals for next year, then check out the details and special price for the workday sessions and remote guidance provided in our exclusive Marketing Planning Package.
Under attended. Under funded. Under staffed. Does that describe your last conference?
It’s time to adapt, or your conference will be 6 feet under…..along with your job. History has taught us that the inability to adapt to change, will result in extinction. “Survival of the fittest” is not just a theory for the animal kingdom, it also applies to businesses, organizations and even annual conferences.
The first conference I helped promote was way back in 1988 for the United Way of American. Amazingly, we see associations using the same approach to conference marketing today. The same preliminary offers and save-the-date postcards that were being used 21 years ago, are staples in many organization marketing efforts today. But, there have been drastic changes in communication and lifestyle. Therefore, can this still be the best way to market a conference?!
Adapting for survival, and success.
In previous editions of White Space, we have given you plenty of tips on effective conference marketing.
We’ve covered the importance of positioning your conference as a unique offering.
We’ve climbed onto our soapbox many times to stress value over venue.
Like a newsboy standing on the corner yelling the day’s headlines, we’ve harped about changes in communication and social networking.
We’ve written do’s and don’ts about marketing to younger members and integrating offline and online communications.
And, we’ve warned you of deadly myths, like the misconception that late conference registration is just a trend of 2009.
You are now equipped with some of the best ideas in the industry about conference marketing. These ingredients can be combined to help you adapt and achieve attendance success. But, are you still missing one thing?
The recipe.
Even with all the ingredients, you can’t make a delicious cake without the directions. You can try winging it, but without the recipe you won’t know how much of each ingredient to include, the order, the purpose or the timing.
The same is true for conference marketing. You can read our newsletters and blog posts to learn about the strategies and activities that are resulting in sold-out conferences, but without a conference marketing plan, you won’t get it right, especially with the constant changes in communication and the economy.
Do you develop a new plan each year based on last year’s event?
What method or role does research have on your planning?
Does your marketing strategy stress value over venue?
Does your marketing plan take into account the ever-changing way your members want to receive and access information?
If you’ve answered no to any of these questions, then you need to call us.
Filling empty seats.
There is one thing that will fill those empty seats, and that is a marketing plan that is a schedule of strategic activities designed to guide behavior.
Let me reiterate, the only way to fill the empty seats is to follow a strategic marketing plan based on research, the audience’s needs and the organization’s mission.
We’ve told you about the ingredients, and now we’re going to give you the recipe. For the first time, we are going to offer a special package for organizations who want to adapt for survival and success.
A one-day, on site hands-on marketing planning session, followed by 4 weeks of remote support that will provide your team with a plan on how to fill empty seats at your next conference.
This special offer is only available for the first quarter of 2010, call or email for details and to reserve your spot.
Our most recent edition of White Space covered positioning annual conferences for greater attendance. One of the topics we touched on was the importance of identifying your niche market, what they desire and then showing them how you can meet their needs. Association executives have tried various creative ways to promote benefits, some have worked, and others didn’t produce a satisfying ROI.
Here’s a list of pricing tactics that have been working for associations so far this year:
Offering quarterly dues payment
Promoting a “dues relief” program
Discounting registration rates to their annual meeting
“Two for one” dues payments
Local resident discounts to the annual meeting
Increasing travel grants for members to attend conferences
Providing free conference registration when attendees pay travel expenses and stay at HQ hotels
Offering conference attendees a payment plan
Each of these benefits will appeal to a specific group of potential attendees, and of course, when it comes to pricing you are appealing to something that they care about.
Let’s pretend that you are promoting a conference in Washington DC for middle-school teachers about using online curriculum. After going through your typical strategy and marketing plans, you end up with some great collateral pieces. The campaign begins and your first direct mail piece lands in the hands of a busy, first-year, middle-school science teacher. She glances at your shiny postcard for only a few seconds before going back to class. What will she walk away thinking about your event?
A) This is a conference for teachers. B) This is a conference in DC. C) This is a conference about teaching using technology.
The answer to that question is key.
Even if the economy was great. Even if all school teachers received a raise this year, and airfare was the lowest it’s been in years, and your conference was in the perfect location. The answer to that question will determine your conference’s attendance.
The answer you want in our little scenario is C, and the way you get it is by positioning your conference as a unique offering. If you fail to do so, then you are simply selling a conference. The young teacher in our example receives direct mail, emails and invitations from other professional organizations each week. You have joined the rest of them in reinforcing her thoughts of joining a professional group, or maybe attending a conference some day. But, without correct positioning you failed to tell her about your conference. Without correct positioning you are wasting a lot of time and money on marketing.
Beating out the competition.
You are correct in saying that the recession has affected your conference attendance numbers, but solely chalking it up to small budgets is a shortsighted conclusion. Other factors have created a tougher, more competitive environment. Consolidation has happened in many industries, plus other organizations and for-profit shows are looking to survive by expanding their audiences to include your niche markets. A lack of positioning, will result in a continued drop in attendance. And as your share of the market slips away it will be your fault, not the economy’s.
We’re changing the way organizations market their conference – one conference at a time.
We perceive that conference marketing is one arm of an organization’s holistic messaging for fulfilling their mission. We embrace conference marketing efforts that will enhance an organization’s strategic messaging and fit within the organization’s overall goals.
Let’s step away from the marketing talk, speak human, and get down to do some practical tips.
Tips on successfully positioning a conference.
1. Be unique.
You must differentiate or take the chance of becoming irrelevant. An effective brand has separated itself from its competitors by finding a unique selling position in the marketplace. If you position yourself without differentiation, you’re selling a category; you are simply selling another conference, and you will not be remembered or recognized. One of the biggest mistakes we see associations make is promoting their conference based on the venue location, which says nothing unique about the organization or the conference.
Questions to ask:
Who are your competitors?
What unique attributes of your products or services distinguish your conference from those of your competitors?
How do you view your association–if your conference was a car brand what would it be? Why?
2. Stay focused on the association’s brand strategy.
Before you tell the world about your brand, you should have buy-in within your organization. You should have champions of the brand in your organization. (If you don’t, well…Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. And, use your one phone call to call us.)
Questions to ask:
How do you see your brand (conference) in 5 years?
How does your conference fit into the over all brand strategy of the association?
How do you want your members to feel, think and act?
3. Talk about the benefits.
In our niche-oriented society, brands are successful when they are created for the consumer. Identify what your niche market desires and show them how your conference meets their needs.
Questions to ask:
How does your conference solve a problem or meet a need for your target audience?
Why is your conference the best solution for them?
4. Identify the purpose of the conference.
Before any work can be done in marketing your event, you have to discover the true purpose of the conference. Think about what it brings to your attendees and to the association.
Questions to ask:
Is the purpose to increase attendance or revenue?
Is your main goal to recruit new members, new sponsors and new exhibitors?
Are you launching a new product?
Are you motivating, collaborating, educating or training?
5. Push the right information.
Your conference’s positioning will inform potential members about the most important and valuable information. You can not tell potential attendees everything about your association conference in one direct mail piece, instead pick out the most important information for them. Sometimes this may mean leaving out details that you think they need to have, but the goal is to position the conference so that they will be enticed to discover those details.
Questions to ask:
What is non-negotiable about your conference, and must happen at all costs?
If you had to change one thing from your conference what would it be?
If you had to trash one thing from your conference what would it be?
Think about all the sales pitches, emails, and phone calls you receive each day. Which ones stick with you? The ones that were unique and made an impression on you – whether good or bad. A lack of positioning for your conference means that for the potential attendees reviewing your postcards, brochures and websites, your association will not make an impression on them.
This is not the time to practice The Three Musketeers style of conference marketing that promotes the category of professional conferences instead of your conference. We are not all for one, or one for all. Your association has a distinct identity. Your annual conference is a unique experience. Tell that story, instead of the story about how DC is a lovely city.
If a school teacher had 40% of his class fail, he would find himself in the principal’s office trying to save his job.
If an accountant couldn’t report for 40% of the budget, she’d quickly be asked to pack her things and leave.
If we lost 40% of our clients, we’d be out of business.
Recently we had a talk with an association executive who saw a 40% decline in attendance from their 2008 to 2009 conference. Yet, this association’s marketing team is using the EXACT SAME “marketing plan” for next year.
Einstein’s infamous quote defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result comes to mind. By that definition, we could start filling up therapy offices across the country with association executives who are marketing their conferences the same way year after year, hoping for a greater attendance.
In the course of interviewing association execs about conference attendance we heard stories like this one that baffled us to the point of tears. Let’s just get this out there. You guys are great. You’re organizations do great work. We love ya. But, seriously, some of you don’t have a clue about conference marketing! You’re using the same marketing plan from 1998 (with the addition of email marketing), despite conference attendance rates falling faster than newspaper subscriptions.
If you choose to stay with the same system you have been using for years and reject change you are choosing tradition over success and greater ROI. However, if you have a vision for growth, the energy for new beginnings and want to see a growth in conference attendance, please stay with us and keep reading.
Late Registration
Many of you have told us that late conference registration has become a problem when planning your annual conference, and that you’ll be happy when this trend is over. Well, we’ve got some bad news for you. Unlike fanny packs and mullets, late conference registration is here to stay. So, throw a tantrum, have a little cry, reach for the office liquor cabinet…whatever you need to do to shake the fear so we can move on.
We’ve been talking to association execs about this, doing some research, analyzing human behavior and compiled all our findings here into one easy-to-read, easy-to-share, and easy-to-love edition of White Space. Just like when you’re kids told you they wouldn’t be seen with you in public if you wore that oh-so-handy fanny pack, we’re going to have a tough-love conversation about you’re outdated, unfashionable conference marketing efforts.
Top 4 Reasons Why Late Registration is Here to Stay
We’ve come to the conclusion that late registration is a result of shifts within our culture, it’s not a fad that people are doing to appear cool to their peers, or to prove that they are too important to register on someone else’s timeline. It’s just the way life is these days.
First: Online Registration! It’s the way of the future!
Thanks to online registration, gone are the days of having to walk up-hill both ways with no shoes to get to the post office and mail in a form. Without the worries of finding a stamp, or getting a paper cut, attendees can quickly and easily register for your conference with just a few clicks. Your attendees’ reaction to the addition of online registration has evolved from, “Wow, you guys are so hip and cool to put this on your website! I can’t wait to sign up using that fancy online form!” into, “Ah, I need to register for that conference, but I can do it online…later.” (Please don’t be foolish and think that we are recommending dumping online registration. Keep reading to find our tips, how-tos and what-nots.)
Second: Travel
A strong motivating factor in previous years for early registration was the necessity to make proper travel arrangements. However, if you’ve done any traveling in the last, um, decade, you know how quick and easy it has become to arrange all your travel plans online. It only takes a few moments for potential attendees to book their flights, hotel and car rental. Plus, with all the various discount travel websites available, it’s possible to still get a great deal on airfare just a couple weeks away from the event.
Third: The Economy
Here’s the hard truth, people just aren’t sure what’s going to be happening over the next few months, and many of your potential attendees may question their job security. Of course this affects future planning of larger expenses such as trips. Families are opting for camping trips and staycations instead of the grand trip to Disney World. And, for you it means that potential attendees are hesitant to commit early. They want to wait until the last possible minute to ensure the conference still fits in their budget.
Fourth: Oh, those young whippersnappers!
Young people these days, sheesh, who understands them and their lightening fast texting, addiction to Facebook, and complete ignorance on how to use the Yellow Pages! You may not completely understand why they do the things they do, but you know they are full of energy and you want them to be more involved with your organization. And, you really want them to come to your annual conference. But, here’s the thing, young people these days don’t give two cents about early registration. Your early-bird specials might draw in the older, more established bunch, but the movers and the shakers would gladly pay a higher registration fee to maintain the flexible schedule they dearly love. Also, your younger attendees are not going to register until they are convinced that their investment of money and time is worth it. It’s going to take a lot more than a postcard and an email to woo them.
Are any of these fads?
No, they are shifts in culture. (Well, hopefully the economy will strengthen, soon, but consumers will be leery for a while.) Anyway, take a lesson from these cultural shifts as they show that just because things have been done a certain way for a long time doesn’t mean it is the right way to do things now.
WE NEED TO REPEAT THIS: Just because things have been done a certain way for a really long time, and worked in the past, does not mean they are the right things to do now.
Take what you know about conference marketing, or at least what you think you know, and forget it. Those ideas are more outdates than big hair and tie-dye, especially when faced with the reality of late registration and declining attendance rates.
Deal with it.
You don’t really have any control over the reasons why conference attendees are growing more and more comfortable with late registration, but you do have the power to expand your marketing vision to see this as an opportunity. Which means you must adapt your conference marketing plan.
1. Take your “marketing plan”, shred it and start all over.
Honestly, you’re falling down on the job if you’re not adapting your conference marketing plan each and every year based on shifts in attendee behavior (like late registration), changes in communication and last year’s results. Some of you are light-years behind because you are still using a marketing plan that worked back in ’95, with the addition of some poorly planned email marketing.
2. Forget the Vendor-Do list.
A marketing plan is not a vendor-do list of brochures, direct mail and emails to be created, it is a schedule of strategic actions each designed with a specific purpose in mind, and supported by research or logic. For example, the Vendor-Do list might include a pretty direct mail piece that will be sent to all potential attendees. However, an effective marketing plan will include research to support how the direct mail piece should be segmented to various groups of the potential attendees to increase response and ROI.
3. Use multi-media late in the game.
The closer you get to the date of your conference, the more personal, interactive and content-heavy your communication should get with potential attendees. Multi-media such as podcasts and videos are great ways to easily share this valuable information. Stop you’re groaning that you don’t know how to do this, or that you’re not tech-savvy enough to do it – worst case scenario is that you’ll have to ask your teenager to help you upload your videos on YouTube.
Let exhibitors create podcasts and videos.
Have one of the presenters or break-out session leaders create a webinar on the topic they will be discussing.
Ask a few of last year’s attendees to do short video testimonials.
Share each of these on your website, through social media sites and over email in the last few weeks leading up to the event.
4. Get over your fear or apathy towards social media.
Can you think of any successful person or organization who achieved their goals by submitting to fear, procrastination or ignorance? Those are not qualities that tend to lead to success, yet, they are the reasons why many associations avoid social media.
Word of mouth is strong, powerful advertising, and social media is the most effective tool available to encourage people to start talking about your event. So, what’s the problem here? If you’re afraid, just jump. If you don’t understand social media, read our blog for information and tips. If you’re just overwhelmed then hire someone to manager social media for you. You are shooting yourself in the foot by not engaging with potential attendees online through social media and networking. Plus, the longer you wait to join the conversation, the farther behind you will be.
Using social networking/media is key to adapting your conference marketing plan for late registration because it may take a few weeks for the conversations to get going, plus potential attendees will be more likely to engage in online conversations with you as the event approaches. Not sure how you could use social media in conference marketing? Well, we’ve got tons of ideas, here are just a few:
Create Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter profiles so attendees can easily share their conference experience with you and others.
Create a Facebook fan page and update it daily to build excitement about the event, and answer any questions potential attendees may have.
Give all presenters, speakers, breakout session leaders and exhibitors the chance to interact with potential attendees via video, audio, Twitter, blog, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Use Twitter and your Facebook fan page to encourage attendees to communicate with each other before the event. The more they publically share their excitement about the event, the more enticing it will sound to those on the fence about attending.
Upload videos on YouTube of key association staff members sharing their excitement about the planning process, i.e. how they are deciding on speakers, topics and the schedule.
Late registration is not a trend, and you have to adapt your conference marketing plan for it. For most of you, this is going to mean a major overhaul as your conference marketing plans were already lacking strategy and logic.
Tips for correctly integrating direct mail and online marketing to increase conference attendance.
As social networking has become more popular, the science of social media marketing has evolved. In fact, if you Google “social media marketing”, you will be overwhelmed with tips, how-to videos, case studies and sales pitches. But, like many professionals you may wonder, with all of that information, how do you decide what is valuable and will really work?
The big secret to effective social media marketing is to view it as a new strategy to integrate into your existing marketing plan.
Much like how advertising and marketing changed when homes across the nation started arranging their living rooms around a TV, you must consider how to adapt to consumers spending hours each day at their computers. It is a new avenue for communicating with your audience. And, it is more dynamic than other marketing tools because it allows consumers to talk back and share info with their friends, family and colleagues.
To demonstrate how to effectively and tastefully integrate social media marketing into existing marketing plans, we are going to break down the specifics of combining direct mail and social networking for association conference marketing. This can be tricky since direct mail tends to be a push oriented message, and most social media marketing takes the pull approach. We are going to focus on increasing visibility and awareness by integrating social media/networking, such as:
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Blog
Specifically, we are going to discuss integrating those channels of communication with the standard save-the-date notification and the conference overview piece.
Plan, plan and then plan some more.
Before we fill your head with lots of wonderful ideas, we must stress the importance of scheduling each marketing effort for integration into the overall plan. Poor planning can take a perfectly fine message and make it seem fragmented and confusing.
Tips for planning an integrated direct mail and social media marketing schedule:
Create a calendar that you can easily reference. It should include a date for every single marketing effort from direct mail to tweets.
Plan corresponding messages for each direct mail piece and social networking effort/announcement, such as including a blurb about Twitter on the save-the-date card.
Start with what you know best. If you are more familiar with direct mail pieces should be scheduled to go out, start there and then fill in social networking.
Content strategy for social networking and print pieces should be planned before anything is published to your audience.
Time to execute: Save-the-Date postcards.
The easiest place to start with integrating direct mail and social media are the save-the-date notifications, whether they are a postcard or email.
Before:
A couple of days before the save-the-date notifications are sent, make postings on Facebook and LinkedIn that will be visible to association members and others who may be interested in the conference. The post can be short and sweet with a link to a video featuring highlights and testimonials from the previous year’s event.
Here’s an example:
“It’s conference time again. Check out highlights from last year and what you can expect from us this year.”
Be sure to also put the highlight video on your YouTube stream.
Day of Mailing:
Start using Twitter for the campaign. We recommend putting up an interactive PDF file on the association website, and directing tweets to that page. (To see the advantages of using an interactive PDF, check out our newsletter on the “Five Advantages of the Interactive PDF.”)
Some tweets can include:
“What are you doing on November 10th?
“VIP save-the-date postcard coming your way.”
“Where will you be on November 10th? Hopefully with us! More info coming to your mailbox this week.”
During the planning phase keywords should be established that will be used during the campaign and actual event as Twitter hash tags. Include them in these tweets, and make mention of Twitter on the save-the-date postcard/email.
After:
One week after postcards have been mailed out, post on the association blog some background information about the save-the-date postcard. Specifically, this is a great opportunity to discuss how and why the conference theme was chosen. Besides informing members about the importance of this topic, you can build excitement by passionately explaining the reasoning behind the visual elements such as the conference brandmark.
This blog post is pivotal in the overall plan because it starts the transition from announcing the date and theme, to building value in the event. Here are a few tips to remember while creating the post:
Create an outline for this blog post while the visual elements for the conference are being created and tweaked. Or, at least refer to your notes from those discussions while writing the post.
Don’t shy away from displaying excitement and emotion about the theme and why the association finds it important.
Don’t distract or confuse readers by listing all the options you were considering but ruled out.
Next up: Conference overview piece.
Before:
A few days before sending out the conference overview piece start dropping hints to followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These can include short posts that tease the readers into guessing or wondering about what to expect at the conference. The goal is to put them on alert and peak their curiosity before receiving a direct mail piece that is longer and more intensive than previous pieces in the campaign.
These teasers can be fun riddles – include prizes for anyone who guesses correctly.
Day of Mailing:
Hit up Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn again to announce to potential attendees that you’ve just placed all the answers to the previous days’ questions in the mail, and they will be receiving it soon.
After:
Post a couple of polls on the association blog and social networking channels asking potential attendees what interests them the most about the event. This can include polls about breakout group discussions, planned social activities or event speakers.
These polls do two things:
They encourage potential attendees to start thinking about the value of the conference;
They give you a wealth of information about what attendees are expecting.
Thinking on your feet.
Since this integrated plan includes communicating with your audience through dynamic, social media/networking tools, you need to prepare for receiving instant feedback from the people you contact. They may respond with questions, excitement about the conference or offer their opinion on how to improve the event. We recommend deciding how this feedback will be handled; and if it can be used to build value in the event, then share it through other mediums.
Let’s say a member who attended last year’s conference leaves a comment on the association blog post about how and why this year’s theme was chosen, saying that they greatly enjoyed last year’s event because they left with a wealth of information and new friends. This is a great testimonial that should be shared with potential attendees on the website and printed pieces.
These tips can provide rewarding ROI for associations who take them seriously and use them correctly. But, they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to integrating direct mail and social media. Basically, we’ve covered the importance of planning, given some examples of scheduling, and thrown some fun, different ideas out there. But, there is a lot more to cover. Like how do you keep a consistent message throughout these mediums, but still get the best use of them, because you can’t use the same message on a direct mail piece and on Twitter and expect the same success. Why? Well for those answers, and many more, you will simply have to stay posted.
They first heard your name briefly mentioned in one of their college classes as a professor listed off some professional resources. Or, maybe their introduction to you was after they landed their first “real” job and received a free membership to your esteemed association from their new employer.
They often confuse their older colleagues with their obsession with technology and desire to text message instead of making a phone call; and at the same time amaze their superiors with their idealistic ways, optimism, high standards and energy.
They are….drum roll please….the Millennials.
Most associations would love to get these young professionals more involved in their organization.
A key to getting them involved and transforming them into life-long members starts with getting them to the annual conference.
But, conference marketing strategies that have been effective on previous generations won’t work on this bunch. This generation has seen more marketing and advertising messages, starting at a younger age and in a more universal way than any previous generation. Because they have been flooded with hyped sales pitches, they are numb to traditional marketing and advertising techniques. They surf the web, rarely noticing ads. Direct mail postcards are barely glanced at before hitting the recycling bin. Mass emails are marked as spam. They use DVR to skip over commercials on TV.
Marketers have learned that this may be the toughest crowd to please. Not only are they opposed to mass advertising and marketing, they are difficult to reach because of the increasing number of communication options and media channels.
So, is all hope lost in marketing to them? Does it seem impossible to get younger members to even take notice of the upcoming conference, let alone to get them to register? Don’t fret – the basics we reviewed in last month’s White Space on the “Dos and Don’ts of Conference Marketing” still apply. We are simply expounding on the idea of personalizing and segmenting your marketing pieces for the groups of recipients.
Follow Their Lead
Millennials are the early adapters of most social networking sites, meaning not only are they using them, but they have become masters at integrating their online and offline lives through these sites. Actually, Millennials have become so reliant on communicating through technology; they have weak skills at what other generations would consider traditional means of communication.
Need a real life example?
Let’s take a look at a common real-life event that has been happening for centuries: a wedding. The way Millennials tell their friends and family members about this major life event is a perfect lesson in marketing.
As recent as five years ago, young couples would mail a Save-the-Date postcard, followed by an invitation and RSVP card to friends and family about this major life event. They would also put an announcement in the local paper. But, Millennials are not necessarily following these traditions. They know that the chances of someone in this age group keeping up with a “Save the Date” postcard are slim to none, and even less likely is the possibility that their best friend from college will actually fill out the RSVP card and mail it back. Instead they create websites for their weddings complete with e-invitations, a quick way to RSVP, links to online registries, directions, hotel information and a blog from the young couple about the planning which gives attendees an idea of what to expect. And after the wedding is over they post pictures of the reception, honeymoon and even moving into their new house. Friends share YouTube videos and Flickr pictures, and the wedding conversation carries on for months.
Now let’s take the lessons we learned from this example and put them to use!
Go To Where They Are
To communicate with Millennials, the best place to start is the social networking sites they are already using every day. Set up accounts, learn the language and start conversations. The good news is that it is free to set up accounts on these sites. It only takes the investment of your time to integrate the message of your conference marketing and remind members of important dates.
Facebook: Any Millennial is more likely to read details of an event they are invited to over Facebook than they are to read a piece of direct mail before losing it in their apartment.
Twitter and Text Messaging: Forget about phone calls and long-winded email, Millennials like it short and sweet.
LinkedIn: This is a gold mine. LinkedIn is a great way to introduce association members to conference speakers. Start by having key staff members develop profiles.
Build Value with User-generated Content
Growing up in a world of e-bay, Wikipedia and blogging has taught Millennials how to develop relationships and build trust without any face-to-face interaction. Take advantage of this to show them that your organization provides quality content and addresses important issues that they need to be aware of. User-generated content can transform you into a respected authority in their eyes.
Aggregate blogs, articles and Twitter posts from event speakers onto your website in the months leading up to the event.
Have a Millennial in your organization give weekly video updates about mainstream news related to topics that will be addressed at the conference.
Use a blog or Twitter to let key staff update members on conference planning – be sure to include any decisions that were made to make the event more environmentally friendly, i.e. paperless registration.
Personalization
Even though Millennials are trained experts at filtering out traditional marketing messages, they are not completely immune. The trick is to approach them creatively. Creating a completely different conference logo and message just for Millennials is not necessary. More important is tailoring the delivery.
Personalize direct mailing. Instead of sending Millennials the traditional Save-the-Date postcard, send them an invitation to join in on your online conversation. Point them to your blog, Facebook page and Twitter profile.
Offer younger members a chance to participate in the planning by hosting online polls giving them a chance to vote on social events to be held during the conference.
Show some effort in personalizing the conference for a younger generation by including speakers closer to their age.
To really wow them, set up your own social network that will allow them to create profiles and communicate with you and each other all in one spot.
Show that You Care about their Values
Millennials are cause-driven, idealistic and have high community standards. Years from now our history books will talk of the difference they made in our most recent presidential election. Harnessing this energy is a great opportunity to turn Millennials on to your association and annual conference. Find out what is important to them, and incorporate that into the planning, marketing and hosting of the conference.
Create an opportunity for members to discuss traveling or lodging together to save money and gas.
Allow younger members to get more involved through event volunteer opportunities.
Make an effort to go green with everything from paperless registration to reusable dinnerware.
It doesn’t matter how you do it, but make an effort to show that your association cares about something greater. Collect canned food for a local homeless shelter, raise money for cleaner water in an under-developed country, or connect with a local nonprofit that can organize an optional volunteer activity for attendees during the conference.
Of course, you have to tell members about these efforts as part of your marketing, preferably over Facebook or Twitter.
Marketers in the entertainment and media industries have already figured out the power of the Millennials and have adapted to their communication preferences. Now, fresh to the workplace, Millennials are already changing the dynamics of office politics, communication and culture – and their impact will continue to grow exponentially over the next few years as they will outnumber both Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Any association that services them as professionals must learn how to communicate with them and get them involved in their organization.
You know the value of your annual conference, you know how it can benefit your members – now the challenge is to figure out how to tell them. As conference marketing becomes more dynamic, it becomes increasingly vital for associations to develop a solid conference brand mark, theme and message.
The bigger picture of these tips for marketing to Millennials is that without bridging the gap between strategy and creative, any marketing effort will fall short of its potential.
For associations of various sizes and missions, conference attendance has been down and many association executives are feverishly looking for new ways to increase attendance. We believe the key to this may lie in conference marketing that effectively emphasizes conference value, instead of, let’s say, conference venue.
We recently participated in a webinar about membership retention that opened our eyes to a possible weakness, or a possible opportunity, for growth. In this webinar we learned that members who attend the annual meeting are 20% more likely to renew their membership compared to members who did not attend. In the same webinar, we learned that members who make a purchase (publication or product) from a website are 30% more likely to renew their membership than members who do not make a purchase.
Is it just us, or should these statistics be reversed? Annual conferences are huge events packed with informational key speakers, dynamic learning experiences and great networking opportunities for members. Why are members not making the connection of conference value to membership renewal as strongly as they do with purchasing a publication/product?
It all starts with developing a conference marketing plan that showcases the value of the event. Communicating the value will result in higher attendance, and also increase an attendee’s perceived value of their membership. But, how do you do that? (Hint: keep reading.)
Conference Theme
One of the first, and most important, steps in marketing your next conference is deciding on a conference theme. Wise planners can see that this is more than coming up with a catchy slogan and a logo; instead, it’s a challenge to pack the value of your conference into one statement, image and strategy.
Don’ts:
All too often we see associations create a conference brandmark based on the event venue. If the most compelling aspect of the conference is the location, then maybe you should just encourage your members to take a vacation there. But, if there is value to your conference other than the city in which you’re gathering, then you must convey that to your members at every chance possible – especially with the conference brandmark.
Relying on what’s worked in the past is not the way to inspire newer, younger members. Challenge yourself to learn more about them and how your conference theme and brandmark can inspire the younger members.
Dos:
Create a short, powerful, inspiring statement that captures the conference value for members. Use 6-12 words to bridge the gap between strategy and creative as you develop the conference brandmark. Revisit this value statement in every single step of marketing your conference.
Create a conference brandmark that is versatile enough to be used over various mediums.
Pre-Conference Materials
After creating a dynamic brandmark that communicates the true value of your conference, put it to use with pre-conference materials. Each eye-catching piece that falls in this category has great potential for effectively inspiring potential attendees to register for the conference; but without proper strategy, each piece also has the potential to quickly hit the trashcan.
Don’ts:
Bombarding potential attendees with multiple, ineffective direct mail pieces guarantees that you will become junk mail that goes straight from the mailbox to the recycling bin. This can easily be avoided by segmenting the recipients and targeting them with tailored messages, following a strategic schedule.
Email marketing is a great way to inform potential attendees about conference events; however, misguided attempts that flood inboxes with generic, one-size-fits-all messages will turn away potential attendees instead of catching their attention.
Trying to utilize all of your favorite images, fonts, colors, quotes into each pre-conference piece will turn into a huge mess that confuses your target audience.
Dos:
Several months before the event, send out a Save the Date postcard or email with a strong message about the conference value that inspires the recipient to want to know more about the event.
Segment the recipients of all pre-conference marketing pieces into groups based upon their interests; create and send personalized, targeted messages to each group. This is much more effective than sending a generic message to everyone.
Follow these basic rules for email marketing: > Use a template that reflects your conference brandmark > Create a subject line that entices readers > Make the most of the preview pane > Design each email to be easy on the eyes – looks good and is easy to read > Ensure that the message shows up, even if images don’t > Give it a personal touch with testimonials from last year’s attendees > For the best success, send it out on a Tuesday morning
Make PDFs of your exhibitor prospective, ad spec, and exhibitors’ hall sign-up that can be downloaded from your website, or sent via email.
Connect strategy and creative for a smooth message by giving the conference registration website the same look and feel as all marketing materials.
Explore ways to use social media during your conference and get it set up before hand. For example, encourage attendees to Twitter their conference experience, or share photos on Flickr. Set up the searchable tags or groups so that all the content can be easily found.
Post-Conference
Post-conference communication is a great way to gather information that may help with planning next year’s conference. It’s also an opportunity to help members recap their experience and see the value of attending…it will also build excitement for next year’s event.
Don’t:
There are two extremes of post-conference communication; saying nothing, and overwhelming attendees with a parade of post-conference emails. Falling into either extreme can decrease the attendee’s perceived value of the experience.
Dos:
Keep attendees engaged after the conference by posting podcasts of the keynote speakers or converting the best of breakout groups into webinars.
Continue the conversations by giving attendees a place to ask questions, share their experiences and compare notes. This can easily be done through Twitter, a forum, or your blog.
Ask for feedback by emailing attendees a short, easy-to-use questionnaire that carries the same brandmark as all other conference materials.
Making a mission-based strategy come alive in creative marketing is a stumbling block for many associations, which is supported by the fact that every week we see conference brandmarks with the image of Seattle, Chicago or New York. If you still think your conference brandmark should be an image of your venue’s city skyline, be sure to include a list of nearby attractions and info on the tourist center – maybe that will entice your members to register for your conference, or at least take a vacation there.
