Ultimate mar comm cheatsheet -mmcc 2015

Editor's Notes

• #3: We know that every day you’re inundated with “the best” marketing and communication tips for association management. We ourselves were overwhelmed every time we’d check our email, see blogs, follow twitter feeds, and come to these conferences – it’s hard to see through the noise and help filter through it. As we said in our session blurb, our goal is to “separate the junk from the gold”. We’ve looked at literally hundreds of “top tip” sites and found our favorites, which we’ll present in a rapid-fire way today while bringing you into the conversation. We’ll talk about tips in a few areas – content marketing, membership including recruitment, retention, and engagement; social media, and the web. The best part is that at the end we’ll get your contact info and send you all the websites we went through, and today you’ll walk away with a physical cheat sheet to post on your bulletin board when you need some inspiration in a pinch.
• #4: Too many organizations focus all of their prospecting efforts on external activities such as tradeshows, but often non-members attend your events, read your publications, and know your other members.
• #5: Don’t forget to do A/B testing of prospecting messages, and to segment your communications. This group has not decided that they want to join – so don’t just plow them with the same messages your members are receiving. See if you can find a unique or new way to share various aspects of your organization.
• #6: Even if your prospecting messages are amazing, if your website or join process are less than impressive, you may lose people.
• #7: This seems obvious but use trackable links and forms to see what messaging is working for what audiences. People may go to your website but if you can track who is actually joining, that’s more relevant.
• #8: Find ways for those with similar roles as prospects or in the same organization to reach out to prospects for communication follow-up. This can be portrayed as a volunteer role.
• #9: a folder with basic FAQs and membership materials that any member can easily get from your website to take with them to events that might be relevant to prospects. Similarly, have generic business cards for your organization that anyone can distribute.
• #10: Create a preview page with sample benefits. Consider www.yourassociation.org/preview as a short link you send out that allows people to view a sample conference recording, report, newsletter, and/or publication, as well as a short video of testimonials. This will allow prospects to see (in a hidden back end page) a bit of the “good stuff” you have to offer.
• #11: Develop a special offer to answer your prospect’s question: “Why join now?” After many tests, one of the best offers continues to be a limited-time, introductory dues discount. Ideally, this discount will bring the dues down to a psychological price point – a dues amount that ends with a dollar amount of a “7” or “9”. For example, an acquisition price of $139 will typically generate more revenue and members than a price of $150. But be sure to offer something. Direct response marketing is offer driven.
• #12: 8. Once you have found the best prospects, carefully develop a strong Unique Selling Proposition (USP) to drive the positioning and copy of your promotion. The USP answers the prospect’s question of, “Why this association?” The USP is the big benefit that your association can deliver compared to any other group. Tip: Ask someone who is not familiar with your organization to read your copy and define the USP in one sentence. If they can’t, go back to the drawing board.
• #14: In order to know if your strategy is working, you need to begin with clearly developed and easily measurable goals. Ask yourself: How would you like your relationship with your members to change through this plan? What will you measure to know if you’ve achieved your goal?
• #15: Next, you need to decide what format you will distribute your value to your community members. You have several options: online, at a live event, in a publication, or through other various tools. Ask yourself: What method of delivery would be most convenient for your members? Fewer barriers to consuming the value that you are proving means that more people will receive that value and come back for seconds..and thirds, etc.
• #16: A member engagement strategy is an ongoing initiative. A successful engagement strategy includes ongoing opportunities for members to engage. This takes consistent effort on the part of your organization to deliver ongoing value to your members while making adjustments to your plan. Ask yourself: How will this strategy result in members staying engaged and continuing to get value from our organization in the long term? How is that going to be maintained and who will be responsible for maintaining it?
• #17: It’s important to have a clear outline of who among your staff is responsible for each aspect of your member engagement strategy so everyone knows for what they’ll be held accountable.  Ask yourself: Who will do the work? Who will monitor progress? Who is ultimately responsible for the goals being met?
• #18: Create and publicize volunteer opportunities for members at all stages of their careers. Most organizations have the same opportunities year-over-year, which draws in the same members. Create publicized volunteer opportunities for ad-hoc and virtual task forces.
• #19: 6. Offer scholarship opportunities for membership for current members in employment transition or new mentees of key volunteer leaders. This will allow them to promote the value of membership to potential members, will attract new members, and will engage the leaders into feeling highly relevant and valued in the organization.  
• #20: Partner up with an organization that is similar enough to have value for your members but different enough that you have unique value propositions; offer extra opportunities for engagement to those who are members of both organizations.
• #22: Spend a day or week promoting your long-term members. Give them love – send them a small gift or note, include a shout out on your web/social media/newsletter. This will allow “old timers” to feel appreciated and will show new members why they want to stick around for a while.
• #23: This goes without saying, but for most organizations, rental car discounts are neither mission-based nor sexy to promote.
• #24: This might seem like a recruitment tactic, but Retention begins the day the Member joins. The best way to keep Members after the initial year is to make certain that they feel that in addition to the programs of the organization there is a place for them for input and participation. Send a welcome letter to each Member or better yet have your Membership Chair or the full committee make personal phone calls to these Members letting them know you are thrilled they have joined or renewed their Membership in the organization.
• #25: The key to an effective recognition program is to remember that recognition can’t be reserved for only those in the organization who do the big jobs. Regardless of the level of a Member’s involvement, he/she deserves some form of recognition. After all, the recognition volunteers receive for their efforts is their “paycheck.” The recognition needs to be meaningful and sincere, but should also be reasonable and reflective of the service given.  Ideas like lists of Members who have either joined or renewed that are visible at monthly meetings, included in Member newsletters.  Small honors or notices for Members who have hit Membership milestones such as 5, 10, 15 years.
• #26: Conversion – Almost always, first year members are the least likely to renew. That’s why the first year of membership is called the conversion year. Focus time, effort, and budget on these first year members. This has a budget implication too – as long as you’re not spending more to renew members than to acquire a new member, you’re doing fine.
• #27: Offering payment options, especially some form of automatic credit card or EFT renewal, turns renewals from an opt-in decision to an opt-out action. Before doing this, however, make sure that you know the limitations of your AMS, your staffing, and your auditors.
• #28: This is highly debated, but some organizations have great success with giving incentives for early renewals. It may be worth a try using a postcard and a website only promotion code to track effectiveness.
• #29: Adding personalized messages to renewal notices can be effective. For example, “because of your membership, you saved $50.00 on your product purchases this year.” Or, “we had some success on the legislative issue you were most concerned about.” 
• #31: One key to success in content marketing is to get the entire organization, from the top down, to buy into a "culture of content." This means that everyone in the organization will not only get excited about your marketing team's efforts, but will also actually get involved in the production and promotion of content. This is probably one of the biggest challenges marketing teams in larger organizations face, however it is critical. My advice is to start at the top and get all your C-level execs to back creating a culture of content. From there, you can follow this advice to promote the content culture throughout the organization.
• #32: If finding a topic and doing the research for it is too time-consuming, create a bundle of content you have already created around a certain topic. Gather content with an underlying theme, like "Website Design Tips," and package it with a supplemental blog post. This creates a valuable package of materials for readers to digest. Another way of repurposing content is to revisit an older piece of content and providing updates. New information is constantly being studied and evaluated, which can be easily reported as an update to an earlier post.
• #33: Having a calendar that documents a content strategy is a great way to ensure timely content creation, but this strategy is too often overlooked. Sixty-one percent of marketers say that their biggest difficulty with content creation is that it takes too much time, but only 44 percent are reported to have a documented content marketing strategy. Putting together a calendar of content scheduled for the month is a great first step that provides a set amount of time to strategize, brainstorm, create, and publish.
• #34: offer teaser content for the purpose of drawing people in and making them want more. (Example: Share older but still relevant content on your site on pages accessible to non-members.. this shows them what you’re about and also allows you to collect their info for download..)
• #35: Allow your ‘content elite’ – those in your organization who are spectacular at creating and sharing content, and those known as thought leaders amongst your membership – to be contributors to your content. What people contribute to, they are more likely to promote themselves.   Also Offer your most influential members the chance to preview your content in advance; allow them to share it amongst their audiences. This ‘leaked’ information can lead to stronger uptick and the feeling that it isn’t just more marketing fluff and is instead relevant.
• #36: People want to know your take on the article. If you just regurgitate what someone else has written, you miss the point of content curation. In a webinar we held a few months ago on thought leadership, Devin Knighton of Instructure noted how companies typically fall into a “pattern of thought followership.” He noted that companies interested in content marketing first just replicate what’s out there, further stating: They fail to add anything noteworthy and don’t take a true leadership position.Devin Knighton of Instructure Inc. In the end, these companies are thought followers not thought leaders. The best practice is to identify the implications for the content and make recommendations on where things should go in the future.
• #37: The whole point of content marketing – at least, in my opinion – is to drive people to your site. Most brands have great content that lives on social media sites. Your content, including your curated content, needs to live on your site and be promoted in social media. It will increase your SEO value, drive customer engagement, and hopefully push people down your sales funnel.
• #38: We are strong believers in providing empathetic content geared toward your sales funnel. Below you’ll find the Right Intel sales funnel, which tracks the size of our different funnel stages over time. As you look at the funnel, you see that our “Qualifying” stage grew significantly in Q3. This chart highlights that we now need content that can help move sales prospects to the “Demo” stage. Create and curate content that is specifically targeted to moving people from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. Content that could do that might be first-party content like a short video, which we email to get prospects excited about what we do. Or it could be a note from the CEO saying thanks for their interest. It could also include a few curated posts that help the prospect know that we get them and their business.
• #40: when you set a goal, regardless of whether it’s personal, professional or specific to a post, it should always be a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based) goal. As an example this Facebook post had a goal: “To attract 5 new leads from Facebook by the end of August 2014″. The post was well defined, in terms of a SMART goal, and using Facebook’s Analytics tool Insights it was easy to measure its success.
• #41: Managing 4-5 channels is going to be very time consuming, something associations have in short supply. Now that you’ve done your competitor research and created buyer personas, choose the social media channels where your customers spend their time. If the majority of their time is spent on Twitter (40%), Facebook (30%) and the rest of the time on other networks. Then Twitter becomes your primary channel and Facebook secondary.
• #42: Managing your social media channels is an integral part of your marketing strategy. Decide who’s responsible and make sure that person has the relevant skills and expertise. This is not something to be handed to an admin assistant who’s only  qualification is that they spend their life posting to Facebook or Pinterest. This person needs to understand your business goals and how to use social media platforms to attain those goals. Work together to create a posting calendar. Having a weekly planning session works well, keep it to 30 minutes and use a spreadsheet or tool like Trello to capture, manage and assign post creation tasks. Then each morning have a quick standup meeting, taken from agile marketing, to check you’re on track. Something may also come up during the week that you want to take advantage of in your posts – some breaking news or product information.
• #43: Most businesses analyze the effectiveness of their social media after they publish. Now, there are tools available to analyze data for content curation before you post.
• #44: Over the past two years, I’ve moved to adapt written content for multiple platforms, like YouTube, to increase my reach and visibility.   For example, by turning one of my List25 articles into video every week, I’ve grown the YouTube channel to 1.3 million subscribers and amassed over 200 million video views. A similar tactic with WPBeginner articles has grown subscribers to over 8,000, and the channel has increased sales for my WordPress plugins.   Changing content formats doesn’t have to involve just videos. You can also convert snippets from your existing articles into images—which tend to have better reach on Facebook. These images allow you to leverage the power of social networks such as Pinterest and Instagram.
• #45: If you run a small business, creating or curating content can be relegated to the back burner. The problem is that an erratic publishing schedule can alienate your audience and break trust. There’s a way around this.   Schedule a baseline of curated content. While there are a number of tools out there that can help, lately I’ve been choosing to use Hootsuite’s new Suggested Topics under its Publisher tab.
• #46: Organizations make the mistake of using hashtags for one brief campaign or event without any longevity to them. Consider a hashtag for an entire year of engagement and build your event themes and energy around them. (Our org is currently looking at launching #HBAImpact for the entire next year.)
• #47: If it’s your association’s 20th anniversary, encourage members to flash the number on a sign or with their fingers and tag you in it. It’s an easy way to create a viral campaign (and prizes don’t hurt).
• #48: While you want to drive members to your social media, remember that most associations are professional in nature and people may not mix their personal social media with your organization’s social media. Plus not everyone uses SM. Make sure that any content you have is on your website first and foremost – nothing should only exist on SM that doesn’t exist somewhere in your basic website.
• #49: Your clients, customers and users are incredible people, and when you identify like-minded folk, encourage them to interact with one another, over and over again. You will birth relationships that will always reference you as a common interest, reinforcing their love for your company's brand.
• #50: One thing that holds many businesses back from actively posting on social media is having to come up with ideas for what to post. When you batch content and social media update creation, it’s much easier to come up with interesting ideas for status updates relating to that content. Whenever you create a piece of content (article, podcast orvideo) for your blog or website, come up with a list of 10 to 20 social media posts at the same time that can be used to promote that piece of content. This same concept will work for your product pages, sales pages or any other piece of content you want to promote.
• #51: Once you have a list of social media updates, add the updates to a spreadsheet to keep track of them all in one location. This can be a simple spreadsheet that includes just the update and a link to the content, or it can be a more elaborate one that tracks all of your content and social media updates for multiple networks.   This will save you a lot of time over the long run. Also, you build a library of tweets and status updates that you can use for years to come. Whenever you need to schedule some updates, just come back to the spreadsheet, create a .csv file, import it into a program like Hootsuite and you’re good to go. Leslie Samuel, creator of Become A Blogger.
• #52: Rather than joining angry mobs, say something positive and uplifting about important issues that your audience cares about. Social-media users are more likely to follow you if you share happier updates. Emotions are contagious and people enjoy optimism.
• #53: Check, double check, and have someone else check each and every things you put on social media. An embarrassing typo can cause a world of hurt and is easily avoidable. Have you ever left the “L” out of “public service?” Some guffaws are just too easy.
• #55: Use responsive design--that automatically adapts to how the site is being viewed. "Rather than developing a site for each device, a responsive site is designed to adapt to the browser size," making for a better user experience, says Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director, Wixon Jewelers. And a better user experience typically translates into more time spent on your site and higher conversion rates.
• #56: Primary navigation options are typically deployed in a horizontal [menu] bar along the top of the site," says Brian Gatti, a partner with Inspire Business Concepts, a digital marketing company. Provide "secondary navigation options underneath the primary navigation bar, or in the [left-hand] margin of the site, known as the sidebar." Why is intuitive navigation so important? "Confusing navigation layouts will result in people quitting a page rather than trying to figure it out," Gatti says. So instead of putting links to less important pages--that detract from your call to action or primary information--at the top of your home or landing pages, put "less important links or pieces of information at the bottom of a page in the footer.“ Also keep navigation simple. If your organization has been around for a long time, chances are you have a million links and subpages. Have a site map, but keep top-level navigation easy for anyone to get to the most important 50% of your site content.
• #57: If your organization posts hundreds of articles, blogs, and resources a year, go through and archive or sub-categorize material at least once a year. More than likely, the vast majority of the content can fit into a few buckets which will also help people find what they want. (Additionally, old forms may give outdated pricing or value information – it’s OK to take these down!)  
• #58: "Create enough space between your paragraphs and images so the viewer has space to breathe and is more able to absorb all of the features your site and business have to offer," says Hannah Spencer, graphic designer, Coalition Technologies, a Web design and online marketing agency. "Controlling white space through layout will keep users focused on the content and control user flow," adds Paul Novoa, founder and CEO at Novoa Media. "With a lot of visual competition taking place on the Web and on mobile, less is more. Controlling white space will improve user experience, increasing returns from the website."
• #59: Every page on your website should be making your visitor act on something. Maybe it’s to get them to purchase your ebook, view your credentials, or watch a demo video. Whatever it is, make it known to the user. Remember, they don’t want to think when they’re browsing your site. Whether it’s a button or a hyperlink, but something on every page that leads them to the action you ultimately want them to take.
• #60: The key is to make the links they click direct them back to a page driving them to info about membership, not just a plain kick-back screen.  
• #61: Your current customers are a huge asset to your company because they can provide real-world case studies – and testimonials – as to how your company has helped them save time, save money, etc. Reach out to your best customers and ask for a testimonial. Here’s a tip: have it pre-written, so all your customer has to do is approve it.