Content Marketing Tips for Your Association

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Content is everywhere. You’re consuming it right now. Content is the online language of businesses, including associations like yours. Content is how you communicate with your audience, how you make your message stand out, and how you persuade them to take the action you want them to take. The quality of your content is the difference between making a good connection, and not. So what can you do to make your content a strong tool for your association?

Stand Out in a Sea of Sameness

Your members and prospects are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day: news, advertisements, social media updates. That’s a lot of information to sift through. Not all of those messages will be good quality, both well written and interesting to your members. Badly-written content makes an organization look slapdash and sends the message “we don’t care enough about our business or customers to take time to write decent content.”

If you want to stand out, content is your ticket to doing that. Your aim? To craft content good enough that your members and prospects will want to read it and will enjoy communications from you. That way lies a good relationship and increased chances of upping your membership and keeping it active.

How to Create Content that Matters

  1. Use clear, correct language. Your spelling and grammar should be impeccable, and your language should be easily understood.
  2. Don’t forget your point. Good content starts with a premise and delivers on it. Your premise could be “read on to find out why your association is best for you” or “read this blog post for top tips on how to make the most of your career.” Whatever your premise, make sure your content delivers what you promised.
  3. Be original. There’s a lot of similar content out there. Make yours stand out by injecting some originality. Don’t forget an attention-grabbing headline too.
  4. Keep it relevant. Your content needs to matter to your readers or they won’t get past that snappy headline. What matters to them? Find out and give them that. Start off by imagining you were in their shoes – would your content appeal to you?
  5. Make it actionable. Whether your content calls for a one-time action (click here to join today), or a longer commitment (subscribe to read more like this), the next step should always be clear.

Creating content takes time and effort. Think of it as one of your best tools – it will work better with regular maintenance and polishing, so don’t let it rust. Keep it in good condition and it will do its job of connecting with your audience better.