The majority of chambers are looking to get the most out of their marketing budget, maximizing their exposure and reach to potential new members, using limited resources in terms of staff and budget.
Whether you are limited to a single individual handling the daily operations as well as the marketing or have a fairly decent amount of internal resources, it’s important to get the best return for your combined effort and expense. It’s possible to create an effective chamber marketing strategy without breaking the bank or hiring a team of internal employees.
The most important aspect is setting up the basics in the beginning properly. Doing so gives you a great starting point and allows you to build upon your results, scaling your chamber marketing effort, and your ROI increases.
It’s possible to see measurable results even with limited time and a small starting budget. Let’s outline a five-step chamber marketing strategy that will help you succeed online, attracting new members, and leading to scalable growth for your organization.
1. Identify Member Characteristics
One of the most attractive aspects of online marketing is the ability to target a very specific persona, using a combination of targeting options and marketing platforms, both organic and paid. To do this effectively and at a member acquisition cost that meets your needs, we must know as much about your target member as possible.
Creating a detailed persona, complete with all of the typical characteristics of your chamber members will allow you to craft all of your campaigns around that ideal target. From Facebook ads that allow you to target based on interests, status, employment, etc., to knowing what social media platforms your members are active – this is all relevant to market to them organically. The more information you have available, the better your results will be.
Many chambers have an extensive onboarding process, which collects a lot of information. If you have that available it can help you best target your ideal prospects. Each platform is different, as some will allow you to target based on age demographics, employment information, income levels, etc. Others, like Facebook, for example, will allow you to target based on interests. This requires a little creative thinking, but the more data you have available at your disposal, the better.
2. Define Membership Goals
The biggest mistake many chambers make when marketing is approaching it blindly, without a concrete plan in terms of membership goals. You cannot kick off a marketing campaign with the hopes of attracting new members.
You need a plan so you can create a marketing strategy that aligns with it and gives you the best possible chance of meeting or exceeding those goals.
- Is there a certain number of new members that your chamber must enroll monthly or quarterly to hit certain internal goals?
- What is the ideal member acquisition cost that you need to be at or under to grow at a profitable rate?
- Are your chamber membership fees structured in a way that allows you to acquire members at a higher cost because most renew their dues for a specific number of years on average?
- What is a rate of growth in terms of new members that your chamber can comfortably handle on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis?
Once you have the answers to these questions you can jump to the next step, and determine what internal resources you have at your disposal to execute your chamber marketing effort.
3. Determine Availability of Resources
Do you personally handle your chamber’s daily operational duties as well as all marketing and advertising efforts? If so, you might want to consider partnering with a chamber marketing agency such as ours. A full-time dedicated marketing partner ensures that your campaign is constantly worked on and goals are met or exceeded.
There is also an additional benefit of hiring an agency partner, and that is the years of experience driving marketing results specifically for chambers throughout the country. Paid marketing platforms like Facebook and Google are constantly changing their policies and it can be a very steep learning curve for those who haven’t run large-scale campaigns before.
From an organic traffic standpoint, Google’s search algorithm is always being updated. Even with an individual or individuals available to work on your campaign, unless they have experience, the time and money wasted on trial and error could be avoided by partnering with an agency to handle it all.
There isn’t a right or wrong option – some chambers are fine with the learning curve and willing to spend a lot of time and money to understand and learn in real-time. Others would rather outsource their marketing and drive results much faster without wasting campaign budget on testing and learning.
4. Create a Marketing Plan to Hit Target Goals
Once you know what your goals are you will want to map out the best options to help you reach them. Some of the best ways to market your chamber are going to include the following:
Chamber Local SEO: Creating resources pages and blog posts on your chamber’s website targeting your name and the location of your chamber is a great starting point. From there you can perform keyword research aligned with your target persona to create content that helps attract additional visitors to your website.
Chamber Pay-Per-Click Ads: Google PPC ads can help you attract new members and pay-per-click ads are a great marketing tool for scalability. You know exactly how much each click, lead and converted membership costs. The data collected from your PPC campaign can then be applied to your chamber SEO campaign, helping you to identify keywords worth ranking for organically.
Chamber Facebook and LinkedIn Ads: Both Facebook and LinkedIn are also great paid advertising options with very detailed targeting options. There are a lot of specific components that require extensive knowledge to obtain results without depleting the entire campaign budget. Working with a chamber marketing agency to handle paid media buys will generally yield better results than attempting to learn these platforms by way of trial and error.
While there are several different ways to market a local chamber online, these are the basics your campaign should include at the very least. It’s a great starting point to build upon as your ROI increases and allows you to explore additional marketing options.
5. Measure and Review Your Chamber Marketing Effort
The only way you will improve your marketing results is to constantly review and analyze as much data as possible. With tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, along with the data analytics on the paid advertising platforms, you have access to valuable information that can be used to make vast improvements.
When you can optimize your strategy it leads to better targeting, more valuable engagement, and lower member acquisition costs. When the chamber marketing campaign is delivering new members at a cost that makes scalability possible that is how you experience the kind of growth required for a thriving community.
It can be quite overwhelming to have all of this data at your fingertips and not know exactly what to do with it, but that is something we can help you understand as well as monitor for you. When you dedicate a full-time effort to both campaign management and optimization it results in your growth targets being met or exceeded.
Final Thoughts
Marketing your chamber effectively requires that you first identify who your target audience is, which allows you to determine what marketing strategies and platforms can best be used to introduce your offer to those individuals.
Next, you need to identify your goals and the resources you have available to put together a marketing effort. Whether it’s paid ads or an organic SEO strategy, it’s going to require a team with not only the time to manage the campaign but also the experience needed to meet all of the chamber marketing goals.
If the above information is beyond what your current staff can handle, consider teaming up with our agency to be your marketing partner, handling everything from campaign design to execution, measurement, and optimization. We focus on attracting new members while you focus on the day-to-day operations of running your chamber.
For more information, and to speak with a chamber marketing specialist, please contact us at your earliest convenience. We can explain the process of launching a chamber marketing campaign, as well as answer any questions you may have along the way.
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