4 Ways Social Media Helps to Recruit Association Members

Whether your association has a small marketing budget or simply trying to be more cost-effective, social media can make the biggest impact. While we know that social media plays an important role in educating members about benefits, there are also ways to use social media to recruit association members too.

Because there are close to 3.4 billion people in the world with at least one social media account, it’s a great method to reach your target audience. We tout how social media allows you to engage with people online, but there are several other ways that social media assists in your association recruitment efforts.

1. Meet your target audience where they spend their time

When thinking about which method you want to use to reach your target audience, you should always consider the path of least resistance. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find out about your association and become members.

In order to make signing up as simple as possible you need to use social platforms that your target members are already on.

2. Increase brand awareness

Once you figure out where most of your target audience is spending the most time, you can easily create valuable content for them on that platform. Dividing your social media efforts across all social platforms likely won’t yield the greatest result. Being more active on a few is going to go farther than being semi-active on all of them.

Social media is a great place to recruit new association members because according to Facebook, 60% of people on Instagram say they discover new products on the platform. Therefore, even if in your opinion, you don’t have a large number of followers, social platforms allow you to grow your association’s reach to gain the interest of potential new members.

3. Increase website traffic

Along with engaging current and potential association members, social media allows you to promote your website content. Enticing someone to follow you on social media is easier than asking them to hand over their email address. So, consistently sharing your helpful content across your social channels, allows followers to easily click to your website.

Facebook Ad Retargeting

With this increase in traffic to your website, you can then run a retargeting campaign on Facebook to those who have already visited your site. In order to gather this information, you’ll need to install the Facebook pixel on your website. If you have access to your website’s code, you can easily add the pixel code. Otherwise, your developer will know how to add it!

This is a great strategy because it adds another touch-point to someone who has already shown interest in your association, making them a warmer lead to convert to a member.

4. Lead Generation

Lastly, social media allows you to generate leads for your association. You can do this in a variety of methods from the Facebook retargeting method discussed above, targeting people with interests similar to your association, or even simply to current followers.

Are you employing the best lead generation tactics to grow your association? Download our Lead Generation Best Practices Guide Now!

Using our experience in lead generation, we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 lead generation best practices you need to implement this year.

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4 Ways to Use Facebook to Educate Members on Association Benefits

Facebook is one of the best ways to educate members on association benefits because with over 2 billion people on Facebook, you’re easily able to meet your members where they’re already at. When you post on the platform that most (if not all) of your members are regularly on, you can increase your ROI and ultimately get your members more engaged.

Because we believe in the immense value that Facebook provides associations, we’re sharing 4 ways to use Facebook to educate members on association benefits to help you engage more members.

1. Facebook Groups

Facebook groups for any association are a great way to bring all of your members together, regardless of their location. This is a great space to cultivate a community and allow members to engage with each other, even outside of conferences.

The key to making a Facebook group work for your organization is to always understand that it’s about your members and less about the association. While you can (and should) share member benefits through articles, pictures, and video, you should also focus on sharing outside information that would still be beneficial for members.

2. Facebook Live

We are in an age where video and audio are key to any marketing strategy. People crave that extra connection with you and the association, so when you can create a piece of content that’s both educational and engaging, the entire association benefits. Members get to understand more about how they fit into the organization and you cultivate an engaged community.

Streaming live video on Facebook is a great method of interacting with your association members. First, there’s a low barrier of entry to reach your members since they are already using it for personal use. Second, all you need to create a live video is your phone or a simple webcam—no editing required!

Third, unlike simply posting a status or video on your business page, when you go live in your Facebook group or on your business page, group members or followers get a notification that you are live. This not only gets members to view your video but also entices them to watch and engage live. The increased engagement on your video increases engagement on Facebook and ultimately within your association.

Live video ideas that can be used to educate members on association benefits include how-to videos, webinars, interviews with members or businesses, behind the scenes, Q&A or FAQ videos.

3. Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger is a great way to build a connection 1:1 with your members. However, what do you do when you begin to get more messages than your team can manage? Enter chatbots.

With over 1 billion active users and a click-through-rate 4 to 10 times higher than email, chatbots are becoming increasingly popular to interact with people. Messenger marketing is great for quickly responding to Facebook messages without being spammy and overloading members.

Manychat, a chatbot provider, confirms that you can use chatbots for conversational growth and building relationships, which are key for any successful association. Along with welcoming new members, you can also send them information about upcoming events, latest blog posts from an RSS feed, keyworded auto-responses for FAQs, and even other beneficial timely content.

4. Deliver an Ad Campaign to a Custom Audience

Facebook ad campaigns, in our opinion, are the best way to reach members of your association. With custom audiences, you’re able to target your members specifically so they can see membership benefits whether they like your Facebook page or not.

Not only can you use Facebook ads to educate members on association benefits, you can also target that same audience to drive attendance to events. As we discussed in this case study, you can easily increase your event attendance with a custom audience as well as an attribution audience to reach potential new members.

If you haven’t started to use Facebook to educate members on association benefits, now is the perfect time to start implementing one (or all!) of these tips will ultimately help your membership engagement when you perform them consistently.

Let’s Talk

If you have any questions about how to better engage your association members, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to help you!

3 Simple Ways To Show the Value of Your Association's Membership

 Networking and professional development are the core purpose of any association. The drivers for each of those things relies upon a high level of membership engagement. We’re all competing for each other’s time and in today’s busy world it’s easy to take a backseat if you aren’t actively marketing and keeping yourself in front of your members. I’ve had the opportunity to partner with many associations throughout my career and here are a few things I’ve learned along the way about showing the value of your membership.

1. Secondary contacts are just as important as the primary contact

Especially with corporate accounts, it’s common practice to have an account manager communicating with only one contact within the organization. In this case you’re relying on that one person to transfer all your information and value to the rest of their team which is a bold assumption. Always interact with all roles who can benefit from the resources that are associated with their membership. It may require additional resources to combat data decay and keep everything up to date but the best way to do this is by adding all applicable parties to your email distribution as well as any promotional calling campaigns.

2. Ask for feedback, then implement it

In other words, listen to your members. A project I recently worked on was an end of the year wrap up for a client of ours. I reached out to each of their members to say thank you for being with us and inform them on some of the newer events on the horizon for the coming year. This provided the opportunity for back and forth open dialogue, so we could receive feedback on some of the different things they liked the best, and vice versa. In addition, you can’t go wrong by checking in occasionally just to gauge everyone’s temperature.

3. Spotlight your members

This is your opportunity to be matchmaker and help facilitate engagement among your members. A lot like dating, businesses join associations because they’re trying to “get out there” so to speak. As stated in the first sentence, “networking and professional development” are number one. I’m sure you have a blog or newsletter that you can feature a new member each week, month, etc. Highlight their date joined, company history, value propositions so they can be seen by the rest of the organization. If a business relationship can stem from one of these posts it’ll be a constant reminder of the value of your association.

Far too often do I see associations take a passive role when it comes to engagement. I’d argue that retaining your current member base is more important than new member recruitment when it comes to long-term growth potential. This goes for any business; it’s much easier and cost effective to keep a current customer than it is to acquire a new one so it’s important to continually show your members the value of your association.

How do you show the value of your association’s membership?

Case Study: Driving Members to Events Using Facebook

Driving members to events can be challenging for associations, especially when budgets are tight. But using Facebook to recruit new and existing members to events can be done successfully without spending a significant amount of time and money.

Today we’d like to share a short case study of a successful event recruitment example for The Professional Associations for Customer Engagement.

The Problem

Incept’s client needed more attendees for their upcoming event but didn’t know where to find them. Their main form of marketing, email, was not driving enough conversions.

The Solution

Incept suggested a Facebook campaign using custom audience targeting of their 4,000 past and present members as well as new prospects created from an attribution-based audience for their target market.

The Promotion

The campaign used several styles of ad copy and creative in order to optimize for the best performing combinations. Short videos and carousel style ads drew in the most engagement and website visits from the target audience.

The Results

During the 4 week campaign, we reached 1,196 people with 11,478 impressions. 974 of the prospects reached and 68% of the clicks were generated from the attribution audience, prospects likely not aware of our client’s organization before this campaign.  This created awareness of the event, their brand, and additional attendees for their event.

The Facebook pixel recorded 36 new registrations for the event during the time of the campaign, a potential ROI of 2,189%.

The Professional Association for Customer Engagement

“Our partnership with Incept has been a long and fruitful one. Being such a small staff for a non-profit doesn’t afford us the ability to have experts in every aspect of our business operations. Incept has guided us on different aspects of our organization. They have formulated, implemented and successfully executed plans for us on many different initiatives. Through all of those initiatives, Incept made sure that we were comfortable and knowledgeable with the process and the results. We value partnerships and there is no partnership that we value more than the one we have with Incept. They are our true trusted advisor.”

— Christine Haerich, SVP at Professional Association for Customer Engagement

How Quickly Should I Follow Up With Inbound Leads?

A few months ago I attended a session at Hubspot’s Inbound conference called 'The Art of The Five Minute Response Time.' Josh Harcus, author of A Closing Culture, spoke about the impact this strategy has had on his organization:

• 6x revenue growth in 12 months

• 9x shorter sales cycle

• 500% growth in team

Since learning of this art, we've challenged our team to decrease our response time significantly, and the results have been just as exciting. 

Current State Of Sales Follow-ups

The Harvard Business Review found that 26.1 % of leads are followed-up with within 5 minutes, while the average response time for all leads is 42 hours. It's no secret that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first, so if buyers are contacting you when they are ready to talk, why aren't we making every effort to speak with them immediately?  

Just look at the proof to the right. Dr. James Oldroyd published the Lead Response Management Study, which found that the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.

What's even worse than a delayed response? The average number of times a lead is followed up with is 1.3 times.  Not only are we not prioritizing these conversations, but we're giving up after just one call? 

Want to know different ways you can follow up with your inbound leads? Here are 3 ways to follow-up with inbound leads that can help turn your leads into customers.

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Download Our Step-By-Step Guide for Ideal Inbound Lead Follow-Up Strategy Now

We’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients and found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

Fill out the form to the right to download our step-by-step guide to effectively follow-up with inbound leads.