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.
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.
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 2025. 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 2025, event attendance will start slow but finish strong, and accruals will take more time and more effort. 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.
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 2025, 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.
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.”
