Using Social Media to Boost Your Conference Promotions

You shouldn’t have to put the rest of your life on hold to build a strong social media presence for your next conference.

Some social media tools take more time than others, and using them all would be a full-time job (for someone else, since you’ve already got one). But with a smart social media plan that is tailored to your audience, you can hone your approach and get the results you need.

Your first step is to develop an editorial calendar that lays out the messages you want to deliver, the content and media (social or conventional) that you plan to use at different points in your campaign, and the in-house or outsourced support that you’ll need to meet your deadlines. The calendar can be as simple or complicated as you need it to be—but consider starting small, meeting your goals, then expanding the campaign as time permits.

To make the plan achievable, use simple online resources to pre-schedule your content and keep campaign administration to 20 or 30 minutes per day.

·         Twitter tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck make it easy to pre-write a cluster of tweets and preschedule them through the day.

·         WordPress, a popular blog platform, has an editorial calendar plug-in to help you manage multiple posts.

·         A Twitter hashtag is one of the easiest ways to begin building a community around your conference message. Once people begin using the hashtag to post or retweet content, they end up bringing their followers to your conversation.

·         A YouTube channel takes a little more time—to prepare good content, and to manage the uploads. But a compelling video message can add a powerful new dimension to a campaign built mainly on online text.

Like almost any other marketing tool, social media will bring better results if you plan to gradually build profile and credibility, rather than pushing for quick results. The transition from push to pull marketing makes just as much sense online as it does in any other medium.

Six Tips for Marketing Your Conference on Social Media

It’s easy to spot the organizations that are missing the point with their social media campaigns. At a time when conventional marketers are abandoning hard-sell strategies that drive their members and customers away, others are trying to bring the same, tired techniques online.

Here are six tips to get the most out of a simple social media strategy:

1.    Find Them Where They Are: To bring your audience to your social media platform, you have to find them where they already congregate online. Don’t forget that you might end up with a different “right” answer for each audience.

2.    Build an Irresistible Community: Once you've located your audience, invite them to an online community where they can learn, share, and feel at home. As long as the site keeps giving them useful information and contacts, they’ll keep coming back.

3.    Develop Your Listening Skills: We’ve talked about the hazards of short-term “push” messaging and the need to give your audience the information that they need and want. A social media strategy takes you a giant step farther, creating an online community where you can listen to your members’ issues and concerns. You should also monitor all the channels where you located them in the first place, taking every opportunity to repost or reply to any interesting or relevant comments.

4.    Talk Back…In Their Language: When you start reflecting your members’ issues back to them, through the online community and in routine communications, you’ll prove yourself as an organization that has the pulse of its membership.

5.    Don’t Try to Do It All: Doing a consistent job with the right social media platform is more important—and more realistic—than sustaining a comprehensive campaign that uses every possible online tool.

6.    Take Control of the Strategy: In a recent article for the Canadian Society of Association Executives, public relations advisor Tim Shaw urged readers to connect their social media work back to organizational strategy and “measure, measure, measure” the results.

Social media is still a new frontier, where advisors are scrambling to keep up with the latest in technologies and platforms, tweets and likes. But the audience-centred strategies that work in other settings can also help you build a compelling online presence.

Why Conference Marketing Isn’t All About You

Is your conference marketing program designed as a hard-hitting call to action, with messaging that pushes and prods participants to that inevitable moment when they register?

Or do you take a more gradual approach, designed to pull the audience in by positioning the event as an irresistible opportunity for networking and professional development?

Your past registration campaigns may have emphasized one of these strategies or both. But the ultimate questions are:

·         Is the conference all about you or all about them?

·         And if it isn’t all about them, why do you expect them to attend?

The End of the Hard Sell

The big difference between the approaches is as simple and powerful as helping people find the information they think they need, rather than deluging them with the content you want them to like. According to Association Laboratory Inc., a U.S. association management consultancy, this is one of the characteristics that distinguish marketing from sales.

“Marketing is a member-driven approach to creating a package of products and services that solve member problems,” the company states. “Selling is an organization-driven approach designed to convince your audience to purchase what you have to sell.”

For the most part, “when most people say marketing, they usually mean promotion.”

A Gradual, Long-Term Goal

Earlier this year, I attended a workshop on creative marketing and sponsorships hosted by the Ottawa-Gatineau Chapter of the Canadian Association of Society Executives. One of my main takeaways was that marketing campaigns should build member engagement—inevitably a gradual, long-term goal, in contrast to short-term event registration targets.

Association Laboratory lists a series of possible catalysts for your next marketing campaign. Have you spotted a decline in membership or conference attendance? Are you losing volunteers or having trouble recruiting new ones? If your impulse is to launch your next mass mailing or e-blast, that may be the right step. But only if your messaging is about the unique value your members and participants can count on you to deliver, not the product or service you want them to buy in the next 48 hours.

No Silver Bullets

There are no silver bullets for engaging members, but I recently published a list of my favourite marketing tips for associations. If you’ve just clicked the link, or if you’re just about to, you know exactly how your members should feel (and exactly what they should want to do) after reading your next conference marketing piece.

How Many Memberships Do You Have?

There may have been a time when associations could keep their members engaged by crafting a single message, dropping it into a monthly or quarterly newsletter, and getting the word out by some combination of mail, fax, or e-blast.

It’s worth pondering whether that was ever the ideal strategy, even in the days when it was accepted practice. Today, with some pundits going so far as to declare the death of push marketing, you can and must do better.

It’s easy to find the right technology and the right advice to open a varied, creative conversation that will thrill your members and keep them passionately engaged with their association. The first step is to ask yourself how many “memberships” you actually have.

• Do veteran members, with many years in the organization and perhaps decades in your industry or sector, have the same needs and interests as new arrivals?
• Do all your members have the same educational needs?
• Are there specialist groups within the association who need careful attention to their own unique issues?
• Do all your members prefer the same mix of printed and electronic publications, of live and virtual events?

These and other differences are the hallmark of a healthy, diverse association. And they point to the need—and the opportunity—to delight, engage, and retain different membership segments by giving them:

• The information they want
• In the formats they prefer
• At the frequency they expect.

Your effectiveness in segmenting your market depends on the profile information you receive from your members and the insights you can gain by testing different messages with your various memberships. The most targeted approach, granular segmentation, is too expensive and sophisticated for most associations when it’s practiced at the level of an amazon.com.

But with the right stakeholder engagement program, you can create the same benefit for members who receive exactly what they need from their association. If you get this right, you won’t have to spend a lot of time telling your members how committed you are to engaging with them: They’ll be able to see and feel it, and the results will come back to you in their avid participation and continuing financial support.

Member Engagement: Keeping the Love Alive

With the economy just beginning to bounce back and everybody’s time at a premium, association members will only stay engaged and continue paying their dues if there’s something they love about their membership.

So finding that critical connection point and keeping the love alive has to be a top priority for your organization.

In the last edition of The Membership Engagement Blog, we listed the three questions you can ask to identify vulnerable members. The answers you receive will help you measure your success at two of the most important pursuits for any association:

• Keeping members engaged from the moment they join
• Pulling members back into the fold if their attention has begun to stray

Members might join the organization for any number of reasons—for professional development (whether it’s mandatory or self-directed), business networking, or career advancement. Their needs may also change as their relationship with the association evolves, or as they progress through your industry. That’s why it’s so important to segment your audience, to understand what information and resources each member needs and wants from the moment they join.

In Canada, the federal government has enacted a new set of privacy provisions that lay out a reasonably good roadmap for understanding your audience. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) establishes different levels of consent for sending information to members, prospects, or other contacts. The rules may look heavy-handed at first, but there’s a payoff:

• You can learn more about your members and why they joined by inviting them to choose the topics, formats, and frequency of communication they want to receive from you.
• You’ll have better touch points with more satisfied members if you periodically remind them that they get to choose the information they receive from you, and decide how often they want to hear from you.

How effectively do you segment your audience, to make sure each member receives the specific communication that s/he finds most useful and compelling? Drop us a line to tell us about it, and let us know if you’d like us to tell your story (anonymously) in a future blog post.

Understanding Member Needs - Before the Breakup

On any given day, some proportion of your members are probably a bit less engaged with your association than they were the day before.

Those ups and downs are natural. But when the relationship becomes weak enough, you run the risk that some members will leave the organization. Do you know how to read the signs of an impending breakup and rekindle the relationship before it’s too late?

Every member has their own excellent reason to connect with your association when they first join up. And it’s easy to spot the most engaged members, because you always see them—volunteering for committees, speaking at conferences, driving social media traffic, and playing other leadership roles in the life of the organization.

The majority of members are probably quieter, and that makes them harder to read. Many of them may be satisfied with the benefits they receive, but you won’t know for sure unless you listen carefully and reach out constantly.

In a 2010 white paper, Lebanon, Indiana-based Association Metrics suggested three questions to help you classify your members as loyal, neutral, or vulnerable, and are still very relevant today:

1.      If a friend or relative asked you about the association, how likely would you be to recommend they join?

2.      When your current membership is about to expire, how likely will you be to renew?

3.      How would you rate the overall value of your membership in this association against your dues?

A negative rating in response to any one of these questions is your signal that a member is vulnerable. And if you can spot a particular characteristic—age, income, educational level, years in your industry, or years in the association—that is more prevalent among vulnerable members, it may point to a cluster of members who are headed for a breakup.

Do you have an innovative strategy for keeping members loyal and engaged? Drop us a line to tell us about it, and let us know if you’d like us to tell your story (anonymously) in a future blog post.

A New Sheriff In Town: Part 3

We’ve been talking about Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), Bill C-28, and its impact on email marketing. We’ve seen that the difference between expressed and implied consent is going to be crucial for associations, and that it will take some time database management systems to catch up with the new legislation.

But while we’re looking at best practices for email marketing, here are a couple of other points to keep in mind:

·         Every bulk email you distribute should include an unsubscribe link. It should be conspicuous, in a clearly contrasting font colour, so anyone who’s looking for the link can find it right away.

·         Your unsubscribe system should get the job done in a single keystroke. You don’t have to confirm that they really, really meant to unsubscribe, and there’s probably no need to ask them why they’re leaving unless the information will support your future work. (There’s a difference here between unsubscribing from a distribution list and letting an association membership lapse.)

·         You can prevent a share of your future unsubscribes by clarifying peoples’ content preferences as soon as they join your organization or subscribe to a list. If you send each of your audiences the tailored information they need, at the frequency they prefer, and nothing more, you’ll be more likely to retain their confidence and their participation.

Consumer preference isn’t a new concept, and neither is privacy protection. Both re-emerged as business communications issues when email surged into the market. But if you want to comply with CASL and do the right thing for your members and subscribers, “do unto others…” is a surprisingly simple place to start.

Go back to earlier installments of this series: Part 1 and Part 2.