7 tips to drive traffic to your membership association website

If your membership association website is part of your organisation’s digital marketing and lead generation strategy, then it’s important that your membership site content reaches as many prospects as possible.

With so many prospects using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to find useful content and like-minded peers, building a community around your membership association website has become one of the most important tactics to drive traffic and keep visitors coming back to your website, time and time again.

By engaging with prospects through social media, comments, online forums and multimedia content, you can increase your membership association’s website exposure and build a loyal following from your visitors.

To reach this stage you will need to drive traffic to your membership site, and in this article, we will look at 7 simple tips you can use to do just that.

1. Write content for similar membership association websites and forums

Writing for your own membership site will help to draw traffic directly to your membership organisation. However, writing for similar websites and online forums provides a sure way opportunity to spread your message and reach a much larger audience.

Research into other membership association websites, blogs and forums that target a similar niche or audience to your own and offer to write some content for them. Remember, your audience will look for helpful articles on plenty of other websites, so try to reach out to those prospects by submitting content to the websites they visit.

When writing for other websites, remember to include an author biography with a backlink to your own membership association site. This will allow your readers to easily click back to your site and will help to boost your own web traffic.

2. Deliver mobile-friendly content

It is no secret that mobile-browsing is now the norm. Here are some figures to prove it:

• 80% of internet users own a smartphone. (Smart Insights)
• Users spend on average 69% of their media time on smartphones. (comScore)
• 80% of social media time is spent on a mobile device. (comScore)

Looking at these figures, it is definitely safe to say that membership organisations need to concentrate on delivering content that is mobile-friendly.

By delivering mobile-friendly content, you help to capture prospects that prefer to browse on their mobile phones.

Furthermore, prospects tend to have their mobile phones with them at all times. By delivering mobile-friendly content, you can take advantage of this, and prospects can access your membership associate website any time, any place – which is a certain way to drive more traffic to your membership site.

3. Broadcast your content on Twitter

Twitter provides an exciting platform to reach and interact with a large audience in real-time.

These days, many organisations use Twitter as a tool to broadcast their membership site content to their followers and prospects.

However, using Twitter to just simply broadcast your content really misses out its real power. If your membership organisation uses Twitter (which it really should be doing), the key to driving more traffic towards your membership association website is engaging with your following.

Engaging comes in many forms, from simply maintaining a dialogue with your followers through comments, to live Q&A sessions.

Twitter is a very powerful tool for your membership organisation’s marketing strategy, and if used well you will benefit from increased engagement and higher levels of traffic towards your membership association website.

4. Engage your followers using Facebook

As well as Twitter, another option for driving traffic to your membership association website is Facebook.

Here are a couple of pointers for reaching your audience using Facebook:

Create your own group: Facebook groups are ideal for engaging with people who are already interested in your product or service. Once you have set up your group, you can invite people to join in and start a discussion. In turn, those that have joined your group can also invite other like-minded individuals to join and contribute.

Create a business profile: Facebook business profiles are essentially public profiles for organisations and businesses – not dissimilar to an individual’s Facebook page. Unlike groups, business pages can be seen by non-Facebook users and are indexed by search engines. Business pages are great for building long-term awareness of your membership organisation and offer a place where you can share your content: driving traffic back to your membership association website.

5. Include video content on your membership site

These days, membership association website content has gone much further than just the written word. With the rise of smartphones with good quality cameras and the ease of viewing and sharing content on social media, video content has found a staple place in many membership organisation’s digital marketing campaigns – as the following stats show:

• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
• Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
• Views on branded video content have increased 258% on Facebook and 99% on YouTube as of June 2017 (via tubularinsights).

Video content has the power to be very engaging, and great content means more traffic to your membership association website.

However, creating great video content isn’t an easy task. With so many thousands of videos uploaded to the web every day, standing out from the crowd is essential.

When creating video content for your membership site, make sure it is of a professional quality. Also, make sure that you do your research and discuss a subject that others will find informative and helpful.

If you are thinking of creating video content for your membership association website, then a good place to start is by looking at some of the popular videos in your niche and using them as inspiration for your own ideas.

6. Live stream content to your membership

Live streaming has the benefit of letting your members engage with you in real-time, via chat and comments.

This is a considerably more powerful medium than pre-recorded video and is one of the best methods of reaching your audience and driving more traffic to your membership association website.

Live streaming is a great medium for providing your membership with online training, product demonstrations and membership workshops.

With live streaming, you can engage much better with your audience as they can see and hear you live, and take part in Q&A sessions with you in real-time.

7. Regularly email content to your membership

Email is still an effective tool for sending your content to your membership, and shouldn’t be overlooked as a method of driving traffic to your membership association website.

Email offers a great way of getting your content directly in front of your members; via their inbox.

By using a service such as MailChimp, users can subscribe to your email newsletters in seconds. You can then use your newsletter to send out all kinds of content: new articles, videos, invitations to live-streaming events, surveys – pretty much everything that your membership organisation offers to your members.

By using all of these tips, you should be able to build a strategy that builds member engagement and drives more traffic to your membership association website.

At Artonezero, we help membership organisations build greater user-engagement and grow their membership with membership website design and development, mobile app development, strategic software integration, digital marketing strategy, all with ongoing technical support and guidance.

If you are ready to chat about your membership association website and marketing strategy with a recognised Memberwise supplier, book a callback today.