Category: marketing

The Truth about Bad WOM

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

There’s a dark side to Word of Mouth, too. Negative reviews are inevitable. So what should you do in response?

Develop serenity to accept the things you can’t change: You WILL get negative reviews. Expect them. You can make some of the people happy some of the time, but there’s always that one guy who just wants to complain.

Realize what’s actually going on: People who are taking the time to complain share another trait – they actually CARE enough to share their feedback. That doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly follow every single suggestion that comes in (which would be impossible anyway, since at least some of them will be directly contradictory), but it does mean you should think about whether there is a nugget of truth and, if so, how you might be able to incorporate that into improving your program or service.

Remember: “most companies don’t have a negative word of mouth problem – they have a lack of positive word of mouth problem.”

Getting Good WOM

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Want to increase your sales, market impact, and online search? According to MarketShare/Keller Fay, word of mouth has a significant, measurable impact on your marketing. A 10% lift in WOM leads directly to a 1.5% increase in sales and up to a 54% increase in marketing impact. That’s big.

But what makes a great Word of Mouth topic?

  1. It’s emotional – it connects with people
  2. It’s portable – they can share it easily
  3. It’s repeatable – the message is not too complicated

Want to find out more about WOM? Check out Andy Sernovitz’s blog or sign up for his GasPedal e-newsletter (at the blog). A lot of the examples he uses are corporate/consumer, so may not suit the association industry directly, but they’re always inspiring.

 

Seven Keys to Marketing Success

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Recently, on ASAE’s Collaborate Community, someone asked for examples of other associations’ marketing plans. The things is, marketing plans are less about taking some other organization’s plan and swapping your acronym for theirs and more about answering some key questions:

  1. What do you know about your audiences? Who are they, who are the key decision makers, what and how and when do they buy, etc.? (Capture EVERYTHING you know and always look to be adding.)
  2. What are you trying to market to them? Make sure you’re clear about your program, product, or service and can describe it in benefits to your audience, not in features you offer.
  3. What are your goals? Remember, they should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely).
  4. Do you have any competition? If so, what do you know about them?
  5. What assets do you have at your disposal (website, email, direct mail, social media, in person events, etc.), and how do you plan to use them? This is the place where you set your strategies and match tactics to them.
  6. What’s your budget? Don’t forget to think about staff time as well as money.
  7. How will you know you’ve been successful? What will you be tracking and monitoring, and how will you do it and report on it, and to whom, and on what interval?

 

Explaining Marketing to a Kid

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

A few years ago, the association that I was working for had probably the best “bring your
kid to work” day I’ve ever seen.

One of our activities was a “career scavenger hunt,” where the kids had to find the people who were participating, and then each of us had prepared some sort of activity to help the kids understand what we do.

Mine was a marketing activity, and got me thinking: what’s the simplest way to explain marketing? After all, I only had about 5 minutes to explain this to kids ranging in age from 5 to 17. Here’s what I came up with:

Marketing is about telling people what your company makes and helping them understand why they would want or need it.

For the little kids, that’s where we stopped. And that’s relatively easy for things that are tangible and desirable, like Hot Wheels cars or My Little Pony.

But what about things like buying (and eating) vegetables or buying (and wearing) sunscreen – things that are important, helpful and valuable, but not as fun as, say, an iPad?

That was the question I posed to the older kids, and I think it’s a critical question for association marketers, as we think about how to market what we do to our members and other audiences.

Membership Marketing on a Shoestring Budget, NAHB-Style

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I had the opportunity to present Membership Marketing on a Shoestring Budget for the National Association of Home Builders’ Association Leadership Institute earlier this week. As usual, when I deliver this session, I solicit great inexpensive marketing ideas from the participants as well. Here’s what the chapter leader smarties at NAHB came up with:

Barter!

  • Swap a trade show booth for an association need (like decorating or landscaping for your new office)
  • Trade a membership for ad space, or a service (like with your local Better Business Bureau to handle conflict mediation for your members)
  • Give a firm a sponsorship in exchange for reduced rent, or for providing incentive prizes for a membership contes

Email!

  • Automate your blog content posting into an e-newsletter – for bonus points, let your members set their preferences for topics they’d like to hear about, and send PERSONALIZED e-newsletters
  • Run email contests to inculcate a culture of paying attention (like old radio contests – everyone who responds by a certain time will get a certain prize) – this one led to a 45% open rate on all association blast emails, which is damn impressive
  • Pay attention to your open rates, and send emails when your members are receptive to them

WOM!

  • If you have a great member program that saves them a significant amount of money (maybe even more than their dues?), ask members to share their stories
  • Create member discount reminder cards like you get for becoming a member of your local public radio or TV station
  • Create your association’s TV channel on YouTube, and interview members (short, sweet, interesting) for it – they’ll tell their friends
  • Generate some excitement around your Member Get a Member campaign with outstanding prizes and public recognition (nothing like a little competition/peer pressure)

Customer Service!

  • Educate and train your staff
  • No passing the buck – if you don’t know the answer, find out
  • Remind people that the best thing to do if the problem is your fault is admit it, and move to solutions
  • Educate your members to share information
  • Show appreciation for them

Your Tips!

  • Use YouTube creatively – do member on-site visits, get them to provide short how-to videos
  • Engage students in your field – they might have a service they can provide in exchange for a free membership
  • Engage students NOT in your field – could you work with a marketing student on new collateral, save money by paying her at a lower rate, and help her get experience in the process?
  • Visit your members, ask for their feedback ALL THE TIME (and do something with it) – create a REAL relationship
  • Educate yourself about your members’ operating environments

 

You Have to Woo Them

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 3 Comments on You Have to Woo Them

During my weekly project call with a client earlier this week, we were talking about the fact that it’s time to move to “phase two” of our engagement. We’ve already done a lot of good work addressing things that were negatively affecting their ability to retain members, and we’re ready to move on to their recruitment efforts.

I broke out a metaphor I use a lot: you can’t ask prospects to marry you before you’ve even taken them on a date.

We were laughing about using that as an example as Valentine’s Day approaches, and she remarked: “I get it – you have to woo them.”

I loved that way of expressing it!

What I’m really talking about is the ladder of engagement. Fundraisers use this concept a lot (Beth Kanter, in particular, writes and speaks about this frequently), and I think it’s equally important for membership organizations.

We talk a lot about membership being a relationship, not a transaction. If that’s the case, we need to genuinely treat it that way. Just like you wouldn’t – I hope – ask someone to marry you the first time you meet him (or her) for coffee because it’s rude and weird and not likely to work, so the first time a prospect hears from you shouldn’t be a membership pitch. But all too often, that’s what happens: “You signed up for our free enewsletter and maybe even got your first issue? Wouldn’t you like to pay us big bucks to commit to us for a year?!?!”

Um, how should I know (yet)?

You have to give that prospect time to get to know you a little more, so she can assess whether or not she wants to commit, and whether a commitment is right for her and for you. The way you do that is to construct a ladder of engagement. It might look something like:

  • A new person signs up for your free enewsletter.
  • After she’s received a few issues, you send her an email inviting her to do something else with your association that’s also free – maybe download a whitepaper, or get a trial subscription to your magazine, or download a free article from your journal, or attend a free educational webinar, or go to a chapter event where newbies can attend for free.
  • Assuming she does that, you offer her one of those other free options.
  • Assuming she does that, you should be starting to get some sort of a sense of what she’s interested in, so you offer her something that will cost her some money, but not much, and that you’re reasonably sure she’ll like. If she’s downloaded a bunch of stuff to read, maybe offer her a book to purchase. If everything  she’s participate in has to do with the topic of leadership, offer her a webinar on leadership that costs to register.
  • Assuming she takes you up on that offer, you can work through offering her additional things that cost some money (but maybe not as much as membership) and take some time (but don’t require a year’s commitment), learning as you go what types of things she likes to do and what topics she’s interested in.
  • Then, once you’ve both had a chance to get to know each other better and put time and energy into developing and deepening your relationship, and only then, you can ask her to commit, to join. And when you make that membership pitch, rather than just being some generic, “Join us! We’re gr-r-r-r-eat!” bit of fluff, you can actually tailor your explanation of how membership would help her based on what you know about her.

Result? You make fewer membership pitches, but with a much higher success rate, and you see less early-membership churn, because you both were reasonably certain this match was right before you made it. In other words, you’ve built the foundation for a successful long-term relationship.

Don’t Forget the Debrief!

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

Sometimes I think the most useful service I perform as a consultant has nothing to do with conducting stakeholder interviews or running focus groups or digging through background materials or doing secondary research or creating kick-ass strategies or even more kick-ass campaigns or teaching staff what’s involved in conducting a campaign so they can go forth and fish themselves, rather than just eating the fish sandwich I handed them.

Not that all that stuff isn’t great, of course, but I think maybe the most helpful thing I do for clients is get them to sit down for an hour or two after we finish whatever the main focus of the engagement was, discuss what we learned, talk about what we’d do differently the next time, and document the whole thing. In order to do this, we also have to actually figure out what happened. We go through questions like:

  • In concrete and specific terms, how did we do against what we wanted to do? Did we achieve the revenue (or number of attendees or number of new members or renewal percentage etc….) we were aiming at? Why or why not?
  • What went well? How can we tweak it to make it go even better next time?
  • What didn’t go well? Why? Should we try to fix it next time, and if so, how, or should we just write it off as an experiment that didn’t work?
  • Is there anything we wanted to do we didn’t get to or couldn’t make happen, and what did we learn that would get us there next time?

It’s hard, I know. When there’s a lot going on and not quite as many people as you wish you had to get it all done, it’s tempting to finish a project and just move on the next thing on the “To Do” list.

The problem with that is that we want our associations to be learning organisms. But if you never take the time to assess what happened and capture and share what you learned, your association will never get smarter as an organization – you’ll never get to the point where you’re increasing organizational capacity.

 

 

10 Tips for Creating an Effective Marketing Piece

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I’m headed to Providence to speak at CESSE this week, and one of the sessions I’ll be participating in will be an idea swap where we’ll be sharing marketing materials. I’ll be facilitating the discussion, and the nice folks at CESSE asked me to prepare some general tips to help people as they reviewed each others’ materials.

So I figured: why not share them with you, too, blog reader?

  1. Short is better than long. Don’t stuff too much crap in there. This is not your only chance to talk to your audience ever in the history of human beings. They are not going to read pages and pages of text. Trust me on this one.
  2. Speaking of text, pictures are better than words. And make sure you keep your visual look consistent. It’s OK for an event to have its own logo, but it should work with your normal logo and fonts and colors. Your audience should know at a glance that this piece is from you.
  3. Use color! Innovations in print technology have really brought the cost down. There’s no excuse for visually dull pieces these days. And pay attention to what the colors you choose say about you.
  4. Use image heatmapping. We normally think of this related to websites, but you can test any image. (Crazy Egg is one of my favorite sites for this.)
  5. Speak in their voice, not yours. We’re all familiar with the “benefits, not features” thing (or at least we should be), but you also need to use their language. You talk with engineers differently than you do with nurses or accountants or beer wholesalers or construction contractors.
  6. YOU MUST HAVE A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION. This probably should have been the first tip, and yes, I am shouting. If you’re not clear about what you want people to do, you are not ready to invest in a marketing piece. End of story.
  7. Proofread. Triple check your details. Is the date right? Is the time right? Is the location right? Is the website URL right? Are the prices right? Also, make sure you actually included all the relevant details. I got a marketing email the other day for an event that didn’t tell me what day it was, what time it was, or where it was. When I clicked on the link, I at least got the date and time from the website, but still no location. How am I supposed to go to that event?
  8. Generally speaking, serif fonts are more readable in print, san serif fonts are more readable online. It’s OK to break this rule, but do it consciously, and in either case, make sure your font is not too small! Your 25 year old marketing assistant may be doing the layout, but you need to make your your 55 year old CEO member can actually read it.
  9. Run an integrated campaign. Print is great. Email is great. Social is great. The web is great. You know what’s really great? When you use them all together in a coordinated way to create a campaign where the pieces compliment and build on each other.
  10. Have a little fun. Of course, you have to know your audience, and a mostly student audience is very different from a mostly PhD in chemistry audience which is very different than a most surgeon audience, but be engaging and hip and energetic, not dull, dry, overly formal, and too serious. You’re trying to get people interested in and excited about your product or service, right?

Do You SAVE?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 2 Comments on Do You SAVE?

First, marketing had the 4 Ps:

  • Product, aka what you’re selling
  • Price, aka what it costs
  • Placement, aka how do you get your product to your customers
  • Promotion, aka how are you selling your product

Then, marketing moved to the 4 Cs:

  • Consumer, aka who is your audience and what do they want
  • Cost, aka what it costs (that one didn’t change)
  • Convenience, aka where do your segments buy your stuff (because they may not all buy in the same place/way)
  • Communication, aka two-way interaction with your audiences

But, Harvard Business Review argues, really forward-thinking marketers are now into SAVE-ing:

  • S-olutions, which forces you away from thinking about your products and into thinking about the problems your audiences have and how you can help them address those problems, which is a step beyond “what do they want?”
  • A-ccess, is still about the where, but incorporates the Google idea of the Zero Moment of Truth, the concept of the “purchase journey,” and your organization’s skill in and availability for customer service and interaction
  • V-alue, which is intimately familiar to associations, as we talk constantly about the “value of membership” – turns out, people are far less price-sensitive than we tend to think they are as long as the value is apparent
  • E-ducation, aka content marketing, or non-sales communication

What are you doing to SAVE for your members?

AMS, CRM, and “So Now What?”

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on AMS, CRM, and “So Now What?”

This is the final post of launch week for the new Spark whitepaper, Member Relations: An Association-Centric Approach to Customer Relationship Management:

We’ve looked at CRM as an approach, CRM as software, how AMS and CRM are alike and different, and now we’re on to: “What does it all mean?”

CRM is not a one-to-one replacement for AMS. But it can still be highly valuable to associations that don’t do many of the traditional things associations do, or that outsource some of those traditional association functions. Its greatest application may, in fact, be as a supplement to AMS, supporting associations with robust sales functions. And in an era of flat or declining memberships, associations must become more comfortable with an active sales culture.

Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/10s8UUb.

The full PDF includes case studies of three associations that are each taking a unique approach to this interplay.