The Content Marketing Strategy for Associations

November 17, 2022
White papers, blogs, social media posts, and more, seem to be the simplest forms of content marketing, so it shouldn’t be hard, right? Turns out, we may be underestimating the true effects of this type of marketing, especially if your association doesn’t have a strategy, plan, and purpose for the content.
Let’s start with the basics. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as "a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action."
This is more than just churning out articles, though. Associations need to create demand for their events, advocacy, and news. Content marketing can be a way to provide numerous opportunities for your organization and be a key part of building relationships with members.
Within your association management system, you should already have key data points – information – on your members and prospects. In addition to that information, you should have relationships built with those current members, know what makes them tick, and what they’re interested in. Put the data and relationships together and you have the secret sauce to create content that has value to not only your membership, but to your industry.
You want to spend time planning out what you want your content marketing initiative to look like and you want it to achieve. Consider these guidelines during that planning process:
With everything discussed above, your association will be on its way to being the go-to place for information. That said, it can’t happen without a strategy and plan in place. In fact, a survey conducted by CMI showed "marketers with a documented content marketing strategy are more effective than those who don't have a written strategy."
Get together with your staff and figure out what resonates best with your members and prospects, so that you can be the leader within the industry.
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