Are you a business owner with a premium content product? If so, you may want to consider building a membership site where customers pay a monthly or yearly charge to access your premium content. This article will guide you through building a successful membership marketing and SEO strategy for your business to attract multiple new customers.
Before starting directly with the main marketing strategy, let's dive into some basic concepts.
Quick Reads
What is Membership Marketing?
When an organization begins a membership program to earn extra revenue, produce leads, and/or fulfill other organizational goals, it’s referred to as membership marketing. Membership marketing needs consistent growth in members, and it’s important to keep members engaged. And by keeping members engaged, you won’t just attract and have more members. You’ll have the strength in numbers to push through legislative wins, more volunteer members for your various programs, and an increase in event attendance and other revenue streams.
Before starting membership marketing, make sure you have a clear definition of your membership package for the customers. Providing the custom option to choose membership duration will positively impact your customer.
Membership marketing is a sales method used to acquire new customers or to retain existing ones. Memberships offer a predictable conversion rate making it an ideal marketing strategy to increase service sales. Memberships also enable you to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers, which is an advantage over one-off sales.
Moreover, it also provides a collection of multiple tested strategies that provide you with potential customers, lead generation, and customer retention at no cost.
Below are some of the top ways you can start using membership marketing for your business today.
1. Reaching A New Customer
No matter how amazing your service is or how perfect your membership package is, you’re going to lose some members over time, and that’s perfectly alright because everyone leaves at some point. So instead of just being dependent on current members, you should keep searching for new customers and try to convert them into members. SEO and content marketing will help you to maximize your brand visibility and do this.
You can use multiple ways to reach your targeted audience like social media marketing, email marketing, using best practice SEO for a business website, and many more.
2. Social Media
Social media marketing provides businesses with a way to engage with their existing customers and reach out to new customers as well while allowing them to promote their desired product. To grow your audience, you can use social media. Social media is a great platform to grow your target audience, and you can also reach out to your customers by sending personalized emails.
You can use your business profile to post photos or videos about the products or services you provide and communicate through comments or messages. You can also post testimonials of your existing customers. Social media provides an environment where customers can learn a lot about your business.
3. Deals and Coupons
Providing deals and coupons is an effective way of marketing to increase both sales of your business as well as membership for your service. You can use this strategy on social media to inform your loyal customers about this opportunity.
4. Referral Programs & Contests
Referral programs attract new members and reward the existing members who bring new members. Rewards can be gifts, discounts in regular membership packages, or even cashback offers.
While some business owners offer discounts to both referees and referral parties, few businesses run contests or competitions. It may be answering quiz questions and uploading results of the quiz or uploading photos with particular hashtags on social media, and the best contestant wins the prize.
5. Meet Customer Expectations
When you apply marketing to promote your membership and customers get converted into regular members, make sure that you provide all the services and support that you promised at the time of promotion. You can also provide some exclusive services. It makes members feel valued and gives them a reason to spread the word about your business and renew their memberships, and that's how you’ll get more loyal customers for your business.
6. Different Membership Offers
Sometimes, your membership plan may fail to convert a website visitor or even a customer into a member due to an undesirable membership price structure. So providing variety in membership price will help you acquire that potential members and increase membership sales. To provide variety, you can use any of the following approaches for your business. Moreover, by offering a variety of offers, you can appeal to a wider range of potential members. You could also offer different levels of membership, with each level offering different benefits. This way, you can offer something that is right for every budget and every need.
Additionally, different offers with varying membership pricing models can help you to increase your membership revenue. You can also use pricing to encourage members to sign up for longer-term plans, which will generate more revenue in the long run. Last but not the least, by offering discounts or other incentives to members who renew their subscriptions, you can make it more likely that they will stay with your organization. You can also use offers to reward loyal members with higher levels of access or benefits.
Free Trial
Some people like to try your service before making up their minds and subscribing to your membership. So, providing free access to your service for a limited time and limited functionality will help your customers understand your service and lead them to purchase it.
Flexible Membership Duration
Providing flexibility in membership duration will help your customer try paid functionality for a few days instead of a full month or your preferred duration (up to six months or one year). If they no longer want your service, they can cancel their membership subscription without any problem.
Installment Option
Instead of one-time payment billing, you can provide an installment option, an increment billing option. With both ways, clients will purchase your membership, and the only thing is they need to pay the subscription fees every month.
Tips For Effective Membership Marketing
There are many ways to get your target audience acquainted with your product. The trick is you want them to do something when they see your product or service. You can take a few basic actions to make the most of your marketing, reach more people, and convert those unconvinced members into complete members.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate free traffic to your website. The greatest strategy to ultimately improve your website's discoverability is to create relevant and quality content. Also, the content will help you to introduce your brand to your targeted audience.
To start with content marketing, you have to make a content plan based on keywords related to the services you provide. Writing “How-to” or “N Tips” blogs as well as creating useful videos can really help generate more organic traffic. If you can also solve clients' problems this way, you can increase your revenue.
Before creating content, you first need to conduct keyword research. You can use the SE Ranking keyword finder to find keywords related to your product or service with additional useful information to make a decision. All you have to do is enter your focus keyword, and select your country and search engine preferences.
2. Solid SEO Strategy
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best, low-cost, and effective marketing strategies most business owners use for their membership growth and to generate organic traffic. SEO will help you to rank higher on the search engine result page. You won't see the immediate results of this type of marketing, but after giving it some time and trying different defined SEO techniques, you’ll see great results.
The right SEO strategy will help you attract potential customers to your website and make them stay. Implementing SEO will help Google identify your website as trustworthy and improve your visibility. This means you can get your website on the first page when your prospects search with keywords related to your business.
3. Create A Call-to-Action (CTA)
Once you have planned your membership program and crafted a well-personalized email, it's time to create a call to action. A call-to-action is a marketing method or term that refers to a suggestion for your audience or reader to take the next step. It can be used to grab your visitors' attention through email, content, or any other marketing method you’re using and redirect them to your purchase page by a simple button at the bottom of the page.
Here, you can convince the audience by using exciting membership plans so that they’ll purchase your service or membership plan and become your valuable customer. The more effective your CTA is, the higher the chance to convert your website visitors into leads and eventually into customers.
4. Social Media Marketing
The social media platform is one of the first places people find an organization unfamiliar with but provides the service they’re looking for. So having a sound social media presence will lure your audience. People who often check various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter will investigate and interact with your social media profile.
Social media is at the heart of connecting with people and sharing thoughts and stories. Interactions may be both good and bad. When you put yourself out there, someone may come along and criticize your initiative. You must be ready for both positive and negative interactions.
You may reach a larger audience with sponsored advertisements, but you should never underestimate the power of social media. A well-crafted social media post might generate a significant amount of unanticipated cash. Remember that not everyone will see your social media postings, so schedule them at different times.
5. Email Marketing
You can use email lists you've collected from potential recruits and current members alike in email marketing. You may send information, updates, promotions, and more to this list of email addresses. You'll be able to convert customers from email subscribers to full-fledged members in no time with a well-crafted personalized message that informs them about membership.
Regardless of what you're discussing, creating and maintaining an email list is an excellent method to connect with potential and existing customers. Several email marketing statistics show the efficacy of email list development and marketing. Email marketing can help you build trust between you and your existing and new customers.
You can use email marketing techniques to send your existing clients an enticing offer, deal or discount, provide more information about your membership and its plan, and establish yourself as a trustworthy investment.
Conclusion
Membership marketing is based on the concept of providing the right customers with the right content so that they don’t feel deceived. Businesses are focused on offering content that will help their customers. By following the above steps, your membership marketing campaign will meet customer expectations, allowing you to attract new clients and build strong relationships with existing ones.
Membership marketing is a great way to build an audience of dedicated followers. It builds a strong relationship between you and your customers, especially when combined with customer service. Membership marketing will greatly improve customer retention and guard against competition trying to steal your customers away.
Membership marketing requires your customers to be engaged and actively participate, so they can contribute their knowledge. This form of marketing is centered around a community and conversation, rather than just about the product or service. Membership campaigns help the market to people that want to be marketed to.
Author Bio
Vibhu Dhariwal is Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified, a Digital Marketing & Web Development company. He likes sharing his experience in sales funnel building, outreach marketing, link building, content marketing, and SEO with readers. To know more about him, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.
