How to use inbound marketing for membership acquisition – part 3

In part 2 of our 3-part series on how to use inbound marketing to boost member acquisition, we explored the first four inbound marketing channels we recommend, with some practical examples of how you could implement them within your existing marketing strategy. If you haven’t read this article yet, take a look here.

In part 3, we will explore the final five inbound marketing channels we recommend to support your member acquisition, with ideas on how you could implement them within your organisation.

Don’t forget, we have also merged the information from all three articles into a helpful guide with all of our tips on inbound marketing to increase member acquisition, which you can download here.

Inbound marketing channels

In our previous article (part 2), we already covered the following inbound marketing channels: content marketing, SEO, events, and email marketing. To complete the list, below we have explored the final five commonly used inbound methods for member acquisition where we have seen impressive results first-hand with our membership clients.

Social media

Love it or hate it, social media is a marketing channel that cannot be ignored. With 4.2 billion global users, and 91% of those users will visit an organisations website after engaging with them on social media (Sprout Social), it can play a significant role in your member acquisition strategy.

As with any good marketing channel, choosing the one or ones that are most relevant to your audience is crucial. If you are a B2B legal membership organisation, then TikTok would not be the right channel for you.

Social media can be used to boost your member acquisition through reaching new perspective members with relevant and engaging content, and help position your organisation and its working groups, committees, members, advisors, and trustees as thought leaders within your industry by commenting on the most topical subjects, helping to make policy, define standards, and push the organisations charter.

Social can also be used to engage and retain existing members through polls, groups, and conversations. In our recent guide – Social media guide for membership organisations, we go into detail about social media and provide tips on how to get the most out of this for your organisation.

Advertising

The traditional way of outbound advertising to push messages in a scatter gun approach and hope is very much over, thankfully! With modern systems and approaches advertising can play an integral effective role in your inbound strategy with both online and offline advertising mediums delivering immediate results.

Inbound advertising works most effectively when integrated with earned and owned media channels such as SEO and social in an integrated campaign. For example, you could utilise Google pay per click (PPC) and Microsoft ads to target specific keywords while targeting them with organic content on your website, social media and followed up with an automated email campaign.

One of the biggest benefits of working in this way is it allows you to reach people who are at different points of your member acquisition funnel, and to accommodate for your members multi-channel user journey.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate marketing activities saving the organisation time, money and generating additional revenue. But amazingly, MemberWise found in their recent study that only 22% of organisations are using automation for their online activity / member journey, and only 28% to automate non-payment of annual subscription fee renewals. This shows that most organisations have not adopted automations beyond transactional and subscription related rules, which is a missed opportunity.

There are limitless opportunities to utilise marketing automation within a membership organisation from automating the joining process to reengaging existing members. Marketing automation also allows your organisation to provide a more personalised experience through personalising emails, content and channels used to provide a better member experience. This is certainly needed as we know 81% of members expect a personalised experience when utilising online member content. So, personalisation is now expected from your members, and not just a nice to have.

We delve into marketing automation in further detail in our article retention through automation for membership organisations.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the method of increasing the percentage of users who ‘convert’ on your website. This conversion depends on your website and business goals, but for membership organisations it is typically new member sign ups.

By employing CRO as part of your inbound strategy you are maximising a channel you already have in your website and making it work harder for you increasing your ROI (return on investment). CRO also provides you with data driven insights about your potential members, so you can adapt your site to better serve them and make their customer journey frictionless, leading to increased member acquisition.

CRO tactics could include activities such as changing content on your membership pages to better serve and appeal to your target members, to changing your navigation. But the key to any great CRO strategy is to be data driven and test and learn. Base your decisions and actions on real user data, implement, and learn.

Analytics

Although this is not seen as a traditional inbound marketing tool, analytics provide you with valuable insight into your market, new member habits and drivers, member acquisition path, marketing activity performance, allowing you to optimise your marketing to be more effective to driver greater results.

Alongside traditional analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which 96% of membership organisations use to record their digital analytics, tools such as HubSpot, enable you to track performance data from all inbound channels and tactics allowing you to attribute any resulting prospective members, new members, and membership revenue to the correct source in one tool. This provides you with greater visibility over which tactics your budget is best spent on and giving you proof of expected ROI to challenge for more budget. Every marketers dream!

Summary

We hope you can now see how inbound marketing can become an integral part of supporting new member acquisition, and how it can be implemented within your existing marketing strategy. If you are already harnessing the power of inbound marketing, that’s great. And if this has helped shine a light on some alternate tactics that can support your organisation to grow then we have achieved our goal.

Inbound marketing support

Finally, we know creating and implementing an effective inbound marketing growth strategy can be a challenge, which is why we are here to help. We have supported many membership organisations with our inbound marketing continuous improvement services helping to increase member acquisition, retention, and drive growth. Get in touch today to see how we can support your organisation.

To read the full guide on how to use inbound marketing for member acquisition, visit our website where you can download your copy.