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Tag: storytelling

Anatomy of an Effective Member Story That Converts

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

  1. Tell me about how you got into the industry. What was it like in the early days of your career?
  2. How did our association help you learn the business and make connections? Can you point to a specific resource or event that was helpful?
  3. Thinking back to the middle years, how did our association help you advance in your career?
  4. Can you think of anything specific that helped you land a promotion or execute an important project?
  5. What is your role today? How does our association help you thrive in that role?
  6. In what ways does our association help you be a better leader? Develop your team? Strengthen your company for the long term?
  7. 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?
  8. 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.

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On the Chasm Between Data and Stories (Spoiler: It’s Not Real)

Test time! Which of these statements is true?

Marketing campaigns should be data-driven.
Marketing campaigns should be story-driven. 

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.

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