As a marketer, it’s hard to ignore the content marketing buzz. How do you know if you’re executing content marketing correctly? Do you need to have a budget for content marketing? How much time should you put into it? How can you measure the ROI? There are a lot of questions to think about when you implement a new marketing tactic, however, the great thing about content marketing (especially for associations) is that it isn’t really new, nor does it require a big change from your current marketing initiatives.
I say “especially for associations” because we all know that most associations don’t have a dedicated marketing team. And that’s okay. Anyone can contribute to marketing, and should, in order to grow the overall outreach of the association. The question is how do you get your staff, and yourself, to think like a content marketer?
Breaking down the definition of content marketing from the Content Marketing Institute will help:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Working backwards:
“to drive profitable customer action”
Profitable customer action sounds like a high level goal of just about any organization. What are the goals of your association? They may look like one or more of the below:
- Increase membership
- Increase membership value
- Increase sales (annual conference attendees, recorded webinars, online training/courses)
Can your goals be obtained by “attracting and retaining” members? Of course they can. And aren’t your current members a picture perfect definition of “a clearly-defined audience”? Yes, they are.
But how to attract and retain?
“creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content”
Your members come to you to grow personally and professionally. The content you are providing today is already valuable and relevant to them, otherwise you wouldn’t have a membership base. The trick here is distributing, and most importantly for associations, distributing consistently valuable and relevant content.
Let’s take a look at your current content landscape. Most associations provide one or more of the following:
- Annual meeting
- Webinars (live and/or recorded)
- Online Courses
- Journal
- In person training
All of the above are great sources of content, they just need to be repurposed. Use our framework below for an example of how to distribute consistently valuable and relevant information to your target audience.
But it doesn’t stop there! Stay tuned for the next Marketing to Members post to gain insights on what happens after you deliver the content and how to habituate the generation of valuable information. Subscribe below to get notified when we share on the Managing eLearning blog.