When building your marketing plan for the year, understanding your audience is imperative. By analyzing your messaging and capturing the right information, you will gain the knowledge needed for success. You should strive to get to know your audience and to understand them better. As you progress, you can better define your audience type and what products or services they want or need to successfully engage their organization.
Your audience should be made up of people who want to engage with your association, rather than the people your organization wants to engage with. There should be a genuine benefit that they will gain through engaging with your messaging or offering.
Why is it important to know your audience to communicate your message?
Any successful campaign beats the competition by making sure that your content breaks through the clutter by understanding your audience. Therefore, associations must establish a relationship with their learners, so they see them as their go-to source for education. Members want to receive communication about learning opportunities that are relevant to them.
Personalization
Your communication with members should be personalized content that shows you are listening, paying attention, and you value them. If you can target your audience in their moment of need with relevant, personalized messaging, then you have an opportunity to drive them to your courses. Furthermore, you should consider personalizing with information that you have in your LMS or AMS. This can be data like demographics, previous courses taken, topics of interest, preferred mediums, career stage, and activity during events.
Data Driven
Data is your friend. You can use data to locate your webinar lovers and make sure that they are aware of all your upcoming webinars. You can filter for learners that attended five or more webinars last year and give them a special discount on an unlimited webinar passport. Your LMS should not only be able to deliver a variety of mediums to meet the diverse needs of your members. You need to have reporting insights that help you target your messaging based on specific learner preferences.
Repurpose
Scaling is so important for small organizations with limited marketing resources. When you repurpose material, you are able to quickly and efficiently communicate with your members in different mediums they like. In an ideal world, you should not be reinventing the wheel every time you go to do a new campaign. Leveraging your marketing automation tools will help infuse dynamic content and create templates and you can then reuse.
Examine
Whether it is an operational message or selling something, make sure that you are sending them exciting, targeted, and relevant messages. The same message can be written a plethora of ways. You have the power to make your audience believe you and act, based on how you write it.
Timing
You can schedule messaging accordingly so that communication is spaced out at a manageable cadence, and you are not overwhelming the member. In some cases, you can combine messages to be more succinct in your communication piece. Perhaps, if there is a regular newsletter that goes out, you can include your upcoming learning offerings. This opens up the opportunity to regularly communicate with them with controlled messaging.
There will be groups of people who will be unlikely, unwilling or unable to engage with your association. As best practices show, including them in your target audience could be more detrimental than beneficial. Informed guesses can be a good starting point to build your communication cadence. Inclusions and exclusions must be backed by unbiased data gathered from accurate market research.
You need to make sure you have a good understanding of your audience to send the right communication out at the right time.
Freestone integrates seamlessly into multiple AMS and CRM platforms to streamline member management, track learning engagement, and generate revenue.
To learn more about how Freestone can help your learners earn credit to meet their continuing education course requirements, talk to one of our LMS experts today to set up a free demo.