Association Marketing

Most associations don't have a member journey problem. 

Over time, organizations add welcome emails, onboarding campaigns, event promotions, committee invitations, newsletters, renewal reminders, community notifications, surveys, and follow-up messages. Each communication is always created with good intentions. Each workflow solves a specific need. But it's rare when we step back to ask a simple question:

What does this experience feel like from the member's perspective?

The result is often a member journey that isn't intentionally designed, but that has just simply evolved. 

Segmentation has long been a foundational concept in marketing, but the landscape has dramatically evolved. Traditional segmentation has relied on static demographic or firmographic categories, such as age, membership type, or organization size - criteria that rarely change and are easy to manage.

While these basics were effective in a world dominated by single-channel communications (typically email), they fall short in today’s complex, multi-touch member journeys.

In a recent presentation at the Marketing Membership and Communications Convention (MMCC) hosted by the ASAE Center for Association Leadership, two of HighRoad's very own senior digital advisors, Nicole Crilley and Emily Nash, spoke on the topic of optimizing marketing campaigns for results. 

They presented to a captive audience of association marketers, program managers, and other professionals, looking to modernize the way they connect with their members and search for new ones. Here's a summary of their presentation. 

Marketing planning can be exciting. It's often the time where new ideas get thrown on the table, innovative and analytical thinking converge, and rough concepts get fully baked. 

What's not fun—seeing campaigns and approaches flop, particularly when so much thought, creativity, and goal intention went into them.

Most associations don’t have a traditional sales department, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a sales team. Throughout your organization, there are people who work hard on recruitment, engagement, and event attendance.

Association sales teams may be diverse and diffuse, but they still work like a team in a for-profit business. Unfortunately, this means associations will often run into one of the most common issues for all organizations: lack of alignment between sales and marketing.

Bringing marketing and sales teams together takes effort and communication, but it can be done. First, let’s talk about why it matters.