4 Paid Social Media Strategies to Drive New Membership for Your Chamber of Commerce

Creating awareness and driving interest is one of the most difficult stages of the marketing funnel. Reaching new people that have never heard of your chamber but are still a part of your target audience is tough. But it’s not impossible!

Strategic use of paid social media campaigns is one of the most effective ways to quickly reach new prospective members. Keep reading to learn 4 paid social media strategies to drive new membership for your chamber of commerce.

1) Find new members by creating attribution based audiences

Most social media platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, allow organizations to create targeted audiences based on specific attributes to use within paid campaigns. LinkedIn gives you the extra precision needed for B2B campaigns with attributes like company, demographics, education, job experience, location, and interests. You can combine these attributes to create your ideal target and serve ads about your organization to achieve your goal – in this case, awareness for prospective members.

2) Target the friends of your current members to use social proof

Facebook encourages organizations to use their ‘connections’ attribute called ‘friends of people who like your page’ to do just that – target friends of your Facebook followers. When a friend of one of your fans sees your ad, Facebook automatically shows them which of their friends likes your page. It is literally built-in social proof which decreases the burden to drive engagement significantly. Its effectiveness at driving interest and engagement with the ad makes it one of the best awareness based social strategies to start testing for your chamber.

3) Create a custom audience to increase awareness

You can use custom audience targeting on Facebook to reach people who have already engaged with your organization. Have a file of prospects that have called to inquire about your organization but never converted into members? You can create a custom audience with that information and re-engage them.

4) Use a lookalike audience to find prospects similar to your best members

Lookalike audiences are one of the best ways to increase awareness of your organization on Facebook because it allows you to target people that behave similarly to another targeted group. There are several ways this type of targeting can be used:

Most engaged members

Do you have a group of ideal members that are always engaging with your content, attending your events, and encouraging others to get involved? You can upload their information via a custom audience and Facebook will attempt to create an audience of people that look and act like those ideal members. Forget having to identify what makes your ideal members unique; Facebook does it for you with this strategy!

Best performing audiences

Which of your audiences are performing best?  Driving the most clicks at the lowest cost? Creating marketing qualified leads on your website? Create a lookalike audience based on that high-performing audience and you’ll drive more awareness for your organization in no time.

Having a tough time picking your ideal strategy? We encourage you to test each of them! Testing will help you determine which strategy is most effective for your chamber.