John : Thank you for joining us. This is 15 minutes to impact the podcast that gets right to the point on association marketing. I'm marketing general senior relationship director John Sample and this is my favorite episode each year. This is Pro Tips 2024, where I take a virtual walk around our virtual offices and talk to my very real colleagues about their top association marketing tips for 2024. Let's start in the corner office.

Rick: Hi, it's Rick Whalen, president of marketing general incorporated, and here are my 2024 pro tips for you. First of all, do something. It's surprising as I record this, we're already into 2024, and whether you're halfway through your fiscal year or at the start of your fiscal year, the calendar is not our friend. So it's very important that instead of what I call analysis paralysis, where you're sitting around thinking about and talking about and worrying about what to do, do something. And that something can be as simple as taking current labs members and trying to bring them back into the association. It could be taking your list of non member customers and trying to get them to renew. It could be upgrading existing members to higher dues levels. Do something, because the sooner you do something, the sooner you'll see results. Secondly, I mentioned lapse members. There's a tremendous amount of lapse members throughout the association world and we need to do a better job to bring them back. I think last year I worked in maybe about 37, 38 different lapse member telemarketing programs trying to bring lapse members back into the fold as full dues paying members. I can tell you there wasn't a single program that didn't make money. And more importantly, it brought much needed members. And those members are customers to the association, not only for membership dues, but to come to the conference to buy certification, to buy books and periodicals. So there are dollars. Sit there on the table with your lapse members. Don't let it sit there. Go back after them. And then finally, I would say test early and often again, sometimes we talk about testing and what should we test? And woe is me. Test something. Even the smallest thing can make a big difference. For instance, on offer, if you do a dues discount of 15 ones for the price of twelve, try and do instead 20% off, 25% off, 15% off. If you can't do money off, think about can you do a book? Can you do a discount on a future purchase a coupon? Can you let the person take money off the hotel for the annual conference? Again, test early. And offering testing is a very important piece of direct marketing, and it's something that we do here at marketing general with every effort that we undertake. So those are my pro tips for 2024. I hope you found some of them useful. Have a great year.

Caroline: My name is Caroline Monarch and I'm a senior account executive here at Marketing General. Today, I'm going to share a few tips for you to take your associations, events and conferences to the next level in 2024 through organic social media content. So while paid campaigns can inform your audience and grab their attention, organic content tends to help foster those long term relationships. We like to use organic posts, both pre and post conference to generate buz spark conversations and overall just amplify the impact of paid digital campaigns. One of the most effective ways to engage your audience is by featuring really authentic stories from your previous event attendees. So sharing their experiences, lessons learned, and the value they gained not only resonates with potential attendees, but it also creates an authentic connection. So think about dedicated posts and short videos where attendees share their unique perspectives about what we like to call what's in it for me? Or what people can gain from attending the event. This not only builds trust, but it also generates excitement and anticipation for your upcoming events. Another way to keep your content really authentic and engaging is to take your audience behind the scenes. So show them what really goes into organizing your events. Whether it's sneak peeks, behind the scenes moments, or just the journey of bringing everything together, platforms like Instagram Stories can help provide real time updates, making your audience feel involved in the process. And I'll just end with a bonus tip, which is consistency is key. So you want to post regularly, engage with your audience, and above all, just be genuine.

Jana: Hi, this is Jana Darling, I'm the VP of account services at MGI and I'm here to give my pro tip for 2024. I'm sure my other colleagues gave super valuable tips on different tactics that you could employ to make really big differences in your marketing programs. But I want to focus on something a little bit different, but equally as important. And that's for results analysis. As you roll out your new tests and campaigns this year, you want to know where you're finding success and where you may be wasting money, and probably more importantly, your precious time and energy resources. So I think the first step in this is really determining what your KPIs are for your campaign. Is it a revenue goal? Is it a membership count growth goal, conference registrations, proposal submissions, awareness, or something else? And then from there you take what you've determined as your KPIs and build out what tracking will look like. So for a paid digital campaign for membership acquisition, that could be setting up your digital ads using Google Tag manager where you can track the conversion and the associated revenue. It could be using UTM codes. So in the back end that you're able to determine where the traffic to your site is coming from and what campaigns. It could be using promo codes and seeing how many people are entering promo codes for various transactions. If we're looking really just awareness, it could be just measuring what the engagement is on your ads, what your cost per click is. Are you seeing increased website traffic? If you're doing mailings, it could be running a matchback so that you can determine what list was most successful, what package was most successful. At the end of the day, you just want to make sure that one of the key steps in setting up any campaign is determining what your KPIs are and how you're going to track them throughout the campaign. And then from there, it's not just kind of set it up and forget it. At the end of every campaign, or throughout every campaign, you want to be analyzing your results, trying to determine is this successful or is this not? And then optimizing from there. At the end of the day, you can roll out all of the tactics that you want and there are a ton of them. And I encourage that because I think multichannel, multi touch campaigns are going to give you the most success, but you also want to know which ones are performing best. So to oversimplify, my tip for this year, it's to track and measure what you're doing.

AJ: Hi, my name is AJ Jancourd. I'm a business development rep here at MGI and my tip for 2024 is to focus on data sourcing in your association. I think the easiest definition I can give you for it is getting the correct information into the right hands at your association. So this is getting the correct name, the correct email, the correct address, whatever it might be, into your marketing or membership team's hands. So that when they send out a campaign, they know that it's going to the correct person and that they're going to be able to receive that campaign and that information. I think there's three really big areas of data sourcing. The first I've already touched on just a little bit, and that's cleaning and updating data. I think this is a really obvious thing when you hear it, but sometimes it gets overlooked. In the grand scheme of setting up a campaign and running it, it's really about getting that email address right that mailing address, that phone number, so that you know when you're sending something out, you're not just aimlessly sending it to a group of people that are going to come back undeliverable. You're sending it out to the right people with the right address, the right email, whatever it might be. Another key aspect of data sourcing, I believe, is segmentation. I think it's a really key area because it allows you to segment a group of people together that they are going to be the most likely to respond to that form of communication. So it might be email, it might be direct mail. You know that you're getting the highest ROI with that segment of individuals. And I think that can be really important to creating and running a successful campaign. And then I think the final aspect of data sourcing is creating profiles. This is a really great thing to do with your member list. What it really is and what it can help do is uncover previously unknown information about those members. And this really helps you in that recruitment or renewal time, when you're providing them information about why they should renew, you're going to have this kind of key for them of what they want to get out of their membership. You're going to be able to provide those specific things back to them, and that's going to cause them to be much more likely to renew than if you didn't have that information in the first place.

Scott: This is Scott Serral, senior account director at Marketing General, and my pro tip for 2024 is despite what everyone has been saying, direct mail is alive and kicking. Hopefully by this point, we're seeing the end to the horrendous supply chain issues we've had the past couple of years, and we can actually get material to produce direct mail. People are back in their offices, and if not, hopefully everyone has contacted their members, their customers, their prospects and requested additional mailing information, a home address, alternate addresses, that sort of thing, so we can reach the people. According to a recent USPS survey, 2023 survey, 34% of the groups that responded have predicted that they will increase their direct market, their direct mail budgets for 2024, which is a great sign that actually follows along with what we saw in the 2023 membership marketing benchmarking report, where about 32 33% of the reporters said they were going to increase their budgets. Surprisingly, millennials and Gen Xers do like to receive mail. They all have informed delivery. They all are looking to see what they get and they'd like to study things. They take the time. If it interests them, then they'll go online to do more research. Response rates are still as impressive as ever. Return on investment is generally huge, and by integrating direct mail and digital, you're boosting the response rates of both. Direct mail is still a personal touch in the digital age. The digital world is a very crowded space. There are fewer distractions in your mailbox than on your screen, and technology is building the bridge between the physical and the digital. By the use of QR codes, a person can receive a mail piece and they're immediately connected to the Internet. Direct mail is also more formal than digital marketing. It's tangible. It's a unique opportunity to connect with a customer in ways that digital simply can't. It's data driven. You can tell or message the specific interests and needs of your target audience. And finally, it's trackable in ways that digital marketing digital advertising can never be.

John : Well, those are some great tips. I just like to add my own Pro tip for 2024. I've been fortunate enough to spend much of my career in the association space. In a time where we're bombarded with messages of division and nastiness in the world, this community seems to be getting more friendly, more welcoming, and even more energized by collaboration. My pro tip is to jump into this community. Don't resist. Network enthusiastically. Join a group. Participate in ASAE's collaborate or other forums. Lean into this amazing community. Don't skirt the edges. Jump in. You can start, if you would like, by connecting with me on LinkedIn. John sample at Marketing General well, that's it for Pro Tips 2024. We'll talk with you again soon. Thanks for joining us on 15 Minutes to impact the podcast that gets right to the point on association marketing channel.