What is a consultant and how do you know if you need one?  A consultant is someone from outside your company or association who makes his or her skills, knowledge, and experience available to an enterprise in an advisory role, including implementation and education.  You may need one if the growth of your business has slowed, or worse, stalled out.  Continued growth is essential for success. Hiring a consultant can put you back on track to grow.  Below are 5 reasons why hiring a consultant may be exactly what your business needs.

Your association is sitting on a gold mine.  The mine is your Association Management System(AMS), and the gold is the member data within it.  All the information that you have already gathered about your members can be used to greatly increase engagement rates with them.  Using this data can also increase your overall membership numbers.  Angie Karpouzis, at Aptify, has written an article on how to best utilize your existing member data in order to better understand who your members are, and what they need.  

These days everyone is online.  As marketers, we need to incorporate multiple digital strategies in order to continue to find new leads. The Infographic below spells out 9 tried and true digital marketing tactics needed to increase lead generation.

As marketers, we spend time looking at many different types of metrics.  We look at website visits, conversion rates, generated leads per channel, email click-through rates, and many more.  When the time comes to present the results of our efforts to the boss, we can't present everything.  There are however, six critical marketing metrics that matter most.  If you missed this Toolkit, or would simply like to review it again, take a look at our Marketing Metrics Toolkit and discover which marketing metrics matter most to the boss, and how to calculate them. Our Toolkits are always available at HighRoadU.

Communities can be an excellent tool for increasing member retention and acquisition.  This is true only if your members find value in being a part of your community.  By being responsive to their concerns, you improve their experience and increase your value to them.  In order to be responsive to your members needs, you first need to discover what those needs are.  By watching their conversations and looking for common themes, you can learn what your members are thinking and anticipate what they need.  Heather McNair, at Higher Logic, has written an article that describes in detail how to predict your members needs and then address those needs with relevant content.

We are now living in a digital world.  So our marketing campaigns have to include effective digital strategies.  The infographic below provides 29 tips for constructing a successful digital marketing campaign.