Whether your association has a small marketing budget or simply trying to be more cost-effective, social media can make the biggest impact. While we know that social media plays an important role in educating members about benefits, there are also ways to use social media to recruit association members too.
Social media is a great method to reach your target audience. We tout how social media allows you to engage with people online, but there are several other ways that social media assists in your association recruitment efforts.
- Meet your target audience where they spend their time
When thinking about which method you want to use to reach your target audience, you should always consider the path of least resistance. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find out about your association and become members.
In order to make signing up as simple as possible you need to use social platforms that your target members are already on.
- Increase brand awareness
Once you figure out where most of your target audience is spending the most time, you can easily create valuable content for them on that platform. Dividing your social media efforts across all social platforms likely won’t yield the greatest result. Being more active on a few is going to go farther than being semi-active on all of them.
Social media is a great place to recruit new association members because 60% of people on Instagram say they discover new products on the platform. Therefore, even if in your opinion, you don’t have a large number of followers, social platforms allow you to grow your association’s reach to gain the interest of potential new members.
- Increase website traffic
Along with engaging current and potential association members, social media allows you to promote your website content. Enticing someone to follow you on social media is easier than asking them to hand over their email address. So, consistently sharing your helpful content across your social channels, allows followers to easily click to your website.- Facebook Ad Retargeting
With this increase in traffic to your website, you can then run a retargeting campaign on Facebook to those who have already visited your site. In order to gather this information, you’ll need to install the Facebook pixel on your website. If you have access to your website’s code, you can easily add the pixel code. Otherwise, your developer will know how to add it!
This is a great strategy because it adds another touch-point to someone who has already shown interest in your association, making them a warmer lead to convert to a member.
- Facebook Ad Retargeting
- Lead Generation
Lastly, social media allows you to generate leads for your association. You can do this in a variety of methods from the Facebook retargeting method discussed above, targeting people with interests similar to your association, or even simply to current followers.
