A recent survey published in the United States¹ examined in depth the marketing concerns and opinions of 865 membership associations, covering a wide range of topics including uses of social media, successes in recruitment and engagement, tactics in renewals and reinstatement and primary challenges to membership growth.
This particular study’s aim – in contrast to previous surveys – was to …

A recent survey published in the United States¹ examined in depth the marketing concerns and opinions of 865 membership associations, covering a wide range of topics including uses of social media, successes in recruitment and engagement, tactics in renewals and reinstatement and primary challenges to membership growth.

This particular study’s aim – in contrast to previous surveys – was to identify not only the marketing methods and strategies associations are using, but those they find most effective in terms of recruitment, renewals and reinstatement of membership.

With respect to recruitment, 36% of trade associations found telephone sales calls to be the most effective method, second only to “word of mouth recommendation.” The figure was lower for individual associations – perhaps reflecting the fact that telephone marketing to individual professionals is somewhat more challenging than business-to-business.

For all associations, unsurprisingly the primary methods used for prompting membership renewal were email and direct mail, closely followed by various categories of telephone contact. The survey breaks the latter down into in-house calls and outsourced telemarketing, which is less commonly used.

Interestingly, with respect to telemarketing, the distinction between trade associations and individual membership associations was reversed, with the latter considerably more likely to opt for telemarketing as a strategy.

These results would suggest that the most effective approach to membership renewal is to deliver a membership renewal invitation by direct mail or email, and then use telephone contact to approach those who do not respond.

Most significantly, associations with renewal rates at or above 80% are more likely than those associations with lower renewal rates to report telephone contact as a top method for creating brand awareness.

Similar results have been found within the UK. In a survey conducted by the Trade Association Forum in 2010², association executives ranked the methods used for membership marketing in order of effectiveness, as follows:

1. Direct face-to-face contact (at exhibitions and other events)
2. Telephone / telemarketing
3. Direct e-mail
4. Direct mail
5. Word of mouth
6. PR activities

These studies give strong support for the inclusion of telemarketing as a vital element in your membership marketing strategy.

¹ 2014 Membership Marketing Benchmark Report, available at www.marketinggeneral.com
² Trade Association Forum 2010 Benchmarking Survey, available at www.taforum.org

How to attract customers with a company blog
Can a blog help your company grow? Yes, it can: According to Hubspot’s 2014 survey, marketers who blog are thirteen times more likely to achieve a positive return on investment. But if you don’t yet have a company blog – or if your blog isn’t generating the results you need – how …

How to attract customers with a company blog

Can a blog help your company grow? Yes, it can: According to Hubspot’s 2014 survey, marketers who blog are thirteen times more likely to achieve a positive return on investment. But if you don’t yet have a company blog – or if your blog isn’t generating the results you need – how do you get there? In this article, we suggest some strategies for overcoming these obstacles, so you can go ahead and blog for profit.

Why blogging works

Before talking about how to set up a company blog – and how to blog effectively, it may be useful to review the key reasons why company blogging is so effective in attracting new customers.   (In this article, I’ll use the word ‘customers’ to mean both existing customers and prospects).

It works like this. An effective business blog article typically talks about some topic which is of potential interest to your customers – and on which you have the specialist expertise to talk about and give good advice.   Blog articles which deliver value, for free, by providing useful information and sound advice to customers, have a number of key benefits:

• Appreciation: They are likely to be highly appreciated, enjoyed and liked by customers.
• Authority: They can help to build a reputation for you as an authority in your field.
• Trust: The can help to establish trust and confidence in your company or brand.
• Attention: They are likely to draw attention to your website and the products and services you have to offer.
• Sharing: Customers who appreciate and enjoy your blog are likely to share it with others via social media and increase your following.

All of these benefits depends, of course, on your article being found and read by customers in the first place.   There are two principal ways of drawing attention to your blog:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). By using keywords and phrases in the title and content of your article which customers are likely to be searching for, you can increase the chances of their finding it via Google and other search engines.
• Social media promotion.   You can promote your blog by posting messages on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social media sites, with links to your article.   With a good social media strategy, your blog will attract the attention of many more customers.

A further vital benefit of business blogging has to do with SEO for your website. Every blog post is an update to your website which adds new content – precisely the kind of content for which your customers are likely to be searching. Google and other search engines monitor the frequency of updating indexed websites – those which are regularly updated are likely to be ranked higher, as are those which attract more visitors.

Technical options for setting up a company blog

There are a variety of different technical approaches to setting up a company blog.

• If your website has been created using WordPress, you already have a blogging facility built into the website itself.   You can set this up via your WordPress control panel, or ask your web designer to do it for.
• The same is true for sites built using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla, or Drupal.
• If your website does not have a blogging facility built in, there are essentially two options:
  • You can ask your web-designer to embed a blog within the existing site. This may or may not be feasible – so you should ask your web-designer’s advice.
  • You can set up a separate blog site on a blogging platform such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com.

  Getting started with a company blog.

  Once your blog is set up and you’re ready to write your first post – then what?

  A number of key steps are vital:

  • Establish an editorial strategy – defining your blog’s goals, objectives, standards, policies and requirements. This is especially important if you are assigning the task of writing blog articles to an employee, a free-lance professional blogger or a third-party marketing company.
  • Identify knowledge resources.   In other words: what expertise do you have within your company which you can draw upon to use as blog content?
  • Identify potential topics. Draw up a list of topics your blog could cover – and periodically update this with new ideas.
  • Consider commonly used article types.   There are dozens of different commonly used types of blog article – many of which could be adapted to your particular requirements, such as:
    • Customer success stories and case-studies.
    • ‘How to’ articles – solving problems a customer may have.
    • FAQ – a Frequently Asked Questions article.
    • ‘How we do it’ articles – describing the processes that makes your business work.
    • Questionnaires, polls and surveys.
    • Comments on current news, relevant to your business.
    • Respond to a popular blog in your field.
    • Comment on industry trends – what’s up and coming, what’s yesterday’s news.
    • Pitfalls, hazards and blunders – how to avoid key mistakes.
  • Plan a blogging schedule.   A blog needs to be regularly updated with new articles to achieve the business benefits outlined above.   To achieve this, it’s important to:
    • Always ensure that you have a number of blog articles planned in advance.
    • Decide on a workable posting frequency – and stick to it!

Can taking part in a market research survey actually be fun? Can it offer some genuine value to the participant? Can a questionnaire or survey attract and engage with prospective customers and thus, serve as a powerful marketing tool? In this article, we explain why we believe the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “yes!”, — and …

Can taking part in a market research survey actually be fun? Can it offer some genuine value to the participant? Can a questionnaire or survey attract and engage with prospective customers and thus, serve as a powerful marketing tool? In this article, we explain why we believe the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “yes!”, — and we suggest a number of ways in which you can put these ideas into practice.

Market research surveys are usually dull
Have you ever participated in an online market research survey?
If so, you’ll be familiar with the way they look. Typically, something like this:

Scoring

OK, this example may be a little facetious – but you get the point. The survey is set out just like a printed survey form, which the survey software has reproduced in a digital format.
It’s an example of a common approach to application development, which bases its presentation on the familiar pen-and-paper process which it is designed to replace. It’s a simple strategy – but it fails to take full advantage of the digital medium in which the survey is now being presented.

How could online surveys be presented more effectively?
Here are a few simple ideas:
• In an online survey, there is no need to present questions in a list format, all on one page.
• You can present questions one at a time, each one taking up the user’s entire screen.
• Each question could be accompanied by an illustrative image – if this would help to clarify the question being asked (without biasing the participant towards a particular answer).
• Selecting an answer could take you straight to the next question.

How can online surveys engage with the participant?
The term ‘gamification’ may sound a little clumsy, but it’s a simple idea: it means turning something into a game, making it fun or enjoyable, in order to engage with, entertain and motivate participants. Gamification involves associating some participatory process with the kind of positive feelings one gets from enjoyable games – such as, a sense of goal achievement, mastery, self-expression or status. The approach is widely used in education and increasingly, in marketing – and recent studies of this strategy in a variety of contexts provide powerful evidence for its effectiveness.
We believe that online surveys are an obvious candidate for gamification – with the caveat that if your goal is to obtain objective information from participants, it is important to make sure that the game strategy does not bias your results in a particular way! Taking this cautionary note into account, we believe a well-thought out gamification strategy could serve to substantially increase participation in customer surveys.

How can online surveys attract new customers?
A widely accepted principle of inbound marketing is that valuable, useful content, which helps prospective customers fulfil a need or solve a problem, serves also to attract customers’ attention, building trust in a company as a source not only of useful information but also of products and services which may prove valuable as well. This, in a nutshell, is how content marketing works.

Questionnaires and surveys are not normally designed to deliver valuable information or insight to the participant. They tend to be viewed as information gathering processes, not means of communicating something useful. However, there is no reason why this must always be the case. A questionnaire can be designed, for example:
• As a self-assessment tool for the participant, which serves to identify the best solution to a particular problem.
• As a quiz – a test of the participant’s knowledge of options, ideas or strategies which might be helpful to them.
We call this approach quiz marketing. The idea, in short, is to create relatively short, interesting, enjoyable surveys which are a pleasure to participate in – and which provide the participant with genuinely useful information. Participants can then be encouraged to ‘share’ the quiz via social media, thereby greatly extending its reach.

How to design and publish a magazine online
A magazine website is usually taken to mean a site which hosts a digital edition of a printed publication. We believe this approach severely limits the power of digital publications to make the most of the online environment. In this article, we argue that …

How to design and publish a magazine online

A magazine website is usually taken to mean a site which hosts a digital edition of a printed publication. We believe this approach severely limits the power of digital publications to make the most of the online environment. In this article, we argue that magazine websites should be easy to navigate and read online, whilst taking full advantage of the many things a browser can do, which the printed page can’t.

Magazines online – the conventional approach

There is a standard, widely used approach to publishing a magazine online, in a digital format.

• First, you design your publication for print, using a page layout program such as Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign.
• When the design is complete – typically, when it has been printed and distributed to readers – you take a PDF copy of the document and convert it into an online flash application. There are two main approaches to doing this:
o Use a PDF to flash conversion application to create the flash version, and a plug-in application for your website to display the document online.
o Upload your PDF file to a digital magazine hosting website, such as Yudu or Issuu, which hosts the online edition of your magazine for you. On your website, you can add links taking readers to each edition of your magazine.
• If you wish to go a little further, each of these two approaches – depending on the software or the platform used – can also provide a means for creating dedicated magazine apps, for use on tablets and smartphones.

The online version of your magazine can also be enhanced in a variety of ways – depending, once again, on the software or digital publishing platform you decide to use. You can add links to the document, insert audio and video content and add special effects such as animations, etc., allow readers to like, pin, or share your content via social media.

The result of this process is a digital edition of a magazine which was originally designed with a physically printed edition in mind. Indeed, a considerable part of the appeal of the resulting ‘digital magazine’ lies in the extent to which it reproduces the experience of reading the printed version:

• A page at a time. You can see a whole page – or indeed, a two-page layout – at once. In a printed magazine, each layout is designed to be viewed and appreciated as a whole.
• Page-turning, not scrolling. You proceed through the document by flipping through the pages – not by scrolling up and down as you usually do on a conventional website.
• Easy navigation. It’s easy to move forward or backward through the document and find particular pages.

However, conventional ‘digital magazines’ often fail to deliver these benefits as well as they might.

Magazines online – limitations

Now of course, if you are a conventional, print-oriented publisher and your main business is to sell subscriptions to (and/or advertising in) your printed edition, the print-to-digital approach I’ve outlined above makes very good sense. However, it has some important limitations:

• Resolution. Print resolution is much higher than that of even high definition PC screens – and therefore, relatively small font-sizes are easily readable on the printed page. This is good for print publishers, as using larger fonts throughout the magazine would mean more pages and hence, higher printing and distribution costs. For the online reader, however, it often means we have to zoom in and out of the digital version in order to read it comfortably.
• Page format. Most printed magazines are produced in an A4 portrait format, whereas PC, notebook and laptop screens are landscape-oriented. A digital version of a print publication, therefore, will typically present either a single page (which you have to scroll up and down to read), or a double-page spread. In the case of a great many digital magazines, this makes the text difficult to read without zooming in close, scrolling up and down, and zooming out again.
• Static content. The content of a printed magazine is static and fixed – and the same therefore applies to that content when it is converted into a digital edition. It can be embellished with all kinds of add-ons – but the basic content remains a static reproduction of the printed text. This precludes the possibility of taking full advantage of the dynamic capabilities of the digital environment.

These limitations are all the more significant if you are not (or don’t wish to be) in the printed media business at all. For businesses, professional organisations, trade associations and many other bodies, digital publishing offers a means of communication which avoids the very considerable cost of printing and distribution physical copies.

Magazine websites – a manifesto

The term ‘magazine website’ is sometimes used to mean a website which has a magazine-like content structure – with news items, feature articles, regular updates etc. – or in other words, a blog.

That is not, however, what we have in mind. A magazine website, in our view, should have the following characteristics:

• It should reproduce the key ‘magazine benefits’ outlined above – a page at a time; page-turning, not scrolling; easy of navigation – while avoiding the limitations of print-to-digital conversion.
• The layout should be designed for digital publication first and foremost, using Responsive Web Design (RWD) methods do adapt the layout to whatever platform the reader may be using.
• It should make appropriate use of dynamic content presentation rather than the merely static reproduction of copy designed for print.
• It should make appropriate use of interaction and input from readers, for example, polls and surveys, comment and feedback.

It is of course quite possible for a magazine website to be developed alongside a printed version. The latter, in effect, is simply one of several alternative ways of presented and organising the same content (albeit, without the elements of dynamic presentation and interaction included in the digital version).

This strategy, we believe, has the potential to deliver significant improvements in the effectiveness, popularity and power of digital publishing. It will ensure that your online publications:

• Are easier and more enjoyable to read, on whatever platform the reader may use.
• Make full use of the dynamic, interactive capabilities advantages of the digital medium.
• Are more attractive to advertisers or sponsors.

Metaphor Media can be contacted 9.00 AM to 5.00 PM (UK time) on 020 8906 6715.