4 Ways to Use Marketing Analytics to Better Engage Your Members

In this post, we’d like to talk with marketing professionals and association professionals wearing marketing hats. Due to your work online and the analytics available through social platforms, email marketing software, website dashboards, etc., you have a wealth of data at your fingertips that can help you engage current members and attract new ones. When your creative team(or you) uses this data to assemble beautiful campaigns and web pages that capture members’ and prospective members’ attention, your data has a chance to shine as you share valuable stats with your team to empower them to create stronger content for the next email campaign, blog post, social media post, web page, whitepaper, or eBook.

Let’s look at four ways your association can use marketing analytics to better engage your members. Pick the one or two that your data shows are most likely to work for your association and share data with your creative directors, marketing managers, or content creators to empower them for success with their next campaigns.

Plan Workshops

Workshops are popular requests for associations. Members love to learn and they enjoy getting together to network. By looking at which topics your audience is interacting with most on social media, which pages they are visiting most on your website, and which articles they are reading most in email newsletters, you can share with your creative team a list of 3 – 7 topics that are HOT right now for your members.

Your events team or marketing manager can then take those topics and plan a workshop and networking event that will train members on the topic and then allow them time to engage with one another. Members who feel like they have connected with others are more likely to remain part of an organization at renewal time because they enjoy the camaraderie and engagement with colleagues outside of their workplace or schooling.

Create Short-Form Video and Audio Content

Whether you believe myths about the human attention span or are a believer in short content that allows people to consume it between tasks, you know the importance of short-form video content. People love to look through YouTube, scroll through and watch Reels and Tik-Toks, listen to podcasts, and attend Lives on Facebook and Instagram. When you look at your data and point out where members specifically are going to consume their content, and then point out how they are doing so, you empower your creative team to create videos and sound bites that your association’s members will watch and listen to, and then come back for repeatedly.

Your creative team can break the topics down into short Q&A Sessions with thought leaders from your staff or membership, podcast snippets that highlight your lowest listened to episodes, or segments of your longer YouTube videos. They can create highlight reels from webinars, podcasts, and meetings that give the viewer an easy-to-consume overview prior to committing to watch the full hour-long versions.

If your association caters to 18-24 year olds, your team can create Reels and Tik Tok videos with trendy content such as dances or voiceovers that highlight what you are teaching in your content. For example, a college association can create a viral video about applying to college, or a nursing association can create a fun video about ensuring nurses take their required continuing education courses for the year. With Instagram now allowing all users to link to external links in their stories, sharing the content can result in visits to your website, webinar, or downloadable content with just one click! This is well worth the time if your data shows that your members are on the platform.

Create Online Courses or Video Series

To complement your short-form video and audio content, your creative team will want to create one or two longer form content types to show your true thought leadership. The fact we can binge watch series over a weekend, forgetting to eat or sleep, shows that we love longer form content as well--when it falls into subject matter we enjoy. If your association caters to engineers who are spending time reading about a specific type of design, your association may want to create an online course or video series further diving into that type of design. Which type of content they create will depend upon what your data shows. Are you getting more hits on your YouTube videos or blogs about that topic? Go where the data leads.

Plan Thought Leadership Email Series

While email is overwhelming many of us, it is unavoidable in the work environment. The alternative is to spend all our time on instant message apps, in text messages, or on the phone. Most of us will take email over those any day. The key to members reading your email more often and for longer durations is to give them content they want and need. This is where your marketing analytics comes in. Empower your team with the data to know which topics your audience wants to see more thought leadership about so they can create a series of emails around that topic.

Bringing the Data Alive

If you are a one-person team at the moment, some of these ideas may seem big. Pick one platform to monitor and engage members based on the the analytics you collect from that platform. As you grow your engagement and association, and add team members to your creative team, you can then implement more of the ideas.

For those of you who have multiple people on your team, it’s vital that you share the information you get with your team, or else it’s just dead data. If you aren’t sharing the data with your team, you are missing the opportunity to share valuable information that will help grow your association and engage current and prospective members. The analytics living in spread sheets, databases, and reports can feel like they don’t make an impact on members if you don’t understand how that data can be used to empower your creative team and influence content creation. When you all work together, leveraging your strengths, your association is able to show your members that you care about them and their interests. You show members that you care about helping them grow in their careers, become thought leaders in their organizations, and become strong mentors in their field.