Your organization is in the thick of working to win back former members and program participants right now. A huge piece of that effort is happening in your marketing strategy.
Senior Director of Marketing for Daxko’s Digital Marketing Agency, Kinnick McDonald, shared several tactical tips for building effective win-back strategies. Check them out below to see where your organization is meeting or missing the mark.
Know Your Audience and Your Goal
The first step to outlining a marketing strategy is understanding who you are talking to, or who your audience is. Typically, your organization is addressing one of three audiences:
- New members
- Past members
- Current members
In a win-back campaign, you’re addressing past members. As we approach the summer months and programs are bringing more people into your facility than you’ve seen in more than a year, it’s important to stay ahead of your strategy so your seasonal camp families take on full-time memberships even after those camps and summer programs come to an end.
Follow the Buyer’s Journey
Once you have an audience and a goal defined, you still have legwork to do before launching a campaign. You need a framework to ground you in marketing best practices, and what we find works best is to filter your campaign through the buyer’s journey. This will help you map your message, determine distribution tactics, and define key performance indicators or KPIs.
Awareness
At this stage, buyers are able to name symptoms of a problem they are experiencing, but they’re not yet able to state the problem in one succinct sentence. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but generally, the following distribution tactics are most effective for capturing the buyer’s attention at the Awareness stage:
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media
- Directory Listings (Local SEO)
- Word of Mouth
Consideration
In this stage, the buyer has defined a problem and is actively researching options for solving their problem. They want more information, but they are not necessarily ready to make a purchase. By the time the buyer makes it to this stage, it is a marketer’s job to provide materials that will accelerate their transition from Consideration to Decision. The following distribution tactics can be effective at this stage:
- Content Marketing
- Reputation Management
- Email Marketing
- Downloadable Resources
- Mailers
- Remarketing (Behavioral Retargeting)
Decision
In the final stage of the buyer’s journey, a buyer is prepared to make a purchase but is weighing all their options and comparing you against your competitors. To encourage the buyer over the line at this stage, you can leverage the following distribution channels:
- Website
- Sales and Marketing Automation
- Live chat
- Calling
Establish a Data-Driven Approach
Again, before diving straight into your campaign, you must gather information on your audience, their environment, and their other programming options for the summer. This will set you up for success when you do start reaching out to them.
Understand Your Members and Prospects
Ask them questions! One effective way to gather intel is to send a survey to members and past members. Find out what’s going on in their worlds and what’s new in their lives. This could inform what features and values you emphasize in your messaging to them.
Become Familiar with the Data
Apply quantitative and qualitative data to your approach. Ask questions like: What percent of members who went on hold have returned to the organization? Use your core operating system to look at historical data on members, how they’ve interacted with messaging in the past, and how their memberships have changed. Use what you learn to drive your messaging approach.
Dive into Regional Updates and Restrictions
You are the subject-matter expert on the members and prospects in your area. Stay abreast of regional updates that affect membership at your organization.
Investigate Search Trends and Terminology
Particularly at the Consideration and Decision stages of the buyer’s journey, your audience is leveraging Google. Use Google Trends to understand what people are searching for, when they’re searching for it, and what related terms they’re keying in. Tools like this can help you position your program more specifically than just as a “summer camp.”
You can also use Google Keyword Planner to find information on competition, bids for competitive keywords, and historical or seasonal keyword data.
Conduct Competitive Research
You know who your competitors are. You know what other camps are offered in your area. If you’re not frequently checking in on your competitor’s content, you should be. Read their materials and determine how they are messaging to a similar audience.
Nail Your Messaging
You are an expert at your brand, your mission, your members, and your target audience. You know how to talk to them about your value and your services.
Ensure you have clear, consistent, and effective messaging throughout your entire campaign by:
- Creating a messaging overview document that drives all asset creation
- Recording who your target audience is and your goal for the campaign
- Producing both a long and short description of the messaging strategy
- Strategizing a hard and soft CTA for different deliverables within the campaign
All of these should be clearly articulated so that your team is empowered to create a clear experience that funnels your audience through to a single goal: program registration.
Partner with a Team of Experts
Have further questions about any of the strategy outlined here? Daxko’s Digital Marketing Agency can support in all of these areas. Get in touch with our team.