Change is coming, but that’s nothing new, we’ve known that since, well, forever. However, within the current tide of change, associations must decide if that change will be the long hoped for type of change that Sam Cooke sung about or if it will be the change that steamrolls its way through our organizations. That’s what this year’s Aptify conference was all about. Specifically, embracing technology to lead and harness the power of change. One key theme that stuck out, was that not only do members expect things at their fingertips, so do employees. This fact was highlighted in Jamie Notter’s (Author of “When Millennials Take Over”) keynote speech about millennials in the workplace – “The Power of Millennial Alignment”. It isn’t enough anymore to know what members expect and to kindly say “we’re working on it”, we must be able to deliver what they want when they want it (and when do they want it? NOW, of course). That’s where technology partners like HighRoad come in. Partners in the association space are working alongside associations to harness the power of technology to deliver member services and respond to member needs.

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant, valuable content to attract a specific audience in order to drive engagement.  The main objective of content marketing is to generate leads, and as a marketing strategy it can be quite effective.  Demand Metric Chief Analyst Jerry Rackley and our own CMO Suzanne Carawan discuss how organizations are successfully using content marketing as a lead gen tool.  In addition, they discuss:

We have been hearing a lot about marketing automation these days.  But there are quite a few misconceptions still floating around.  One of the most common is the mistaken belief that marketing automation is too complex a tool for smaller marketing teams to be able to set up and maintain effectively.  Actually nothing could be further from the truth.  Marketing automation is an ideal solution for smaller teams who have limited time and resources.  This is because a major benefit of marketing automation is to allow marketers to do more in less time.  We have found an article, written by Molly Hoffmeister over at Salesforce, that dispels four common myths and shows us instead how marketing automation can help grow organizations both large and small.

If you're looking for greater success with your content marketing strategies, include visuals.  It has been found that people respond better to text with images than to text only content.  The infographic below lists eight statistics that show the benefits of incorporating visuals into your content strategy.

Welcome emails can be used for more than just a friendly greeting.  Organizations can use this type of email as an opportunity to guide subscribers into their world.  They can be used to set expectations, provide education, highlight services and product features, or point out discounts and offers.  Welcome emails set the stage for what a customer can expect from an organization.  They also outperform promotional mailings. Welcome emails have 4 times higher open rates and 5 times higher click-through rates than promotional emails.  Yet close to 70% of marketers are still not incorporating them into their customer aquistition program.  Our partner Bluehornet, has created a guide of best practices for building a welcome email campaign.  Download "A Digital Marketers Guide-Welcome Email Campaign" and learn about the benefits of using welcome emails to help increase your digital marketing success and grow your organization.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content in order to attract and retain an audience.  Implementing content marketing into your existing marketing strategy can help to increase your number of leads and ultimately your revenue.  The infographic below shows five good reasons why content marketing should be an important piece of your overall marketing strategy and some best practices to get you started.