CAREER CENTERS EMAIL MARKETING EVENT MANAGEMENT
Is your association’s career center leveraging digital and traditional marketing to increase member engagement and non-dues revenue?
Your career center holds great potential as a member benefit and a source of non-dues revenue. When it comes to benefits from their professional membership associations, members want help finding jobs. In fact, according to the 2018 Member Education and Career Development Report, 66 percent of members look to their professional associations to help them find new job opportunities.
But your online job board or career center provides more than just great member value (as if that weren’t enough!). It’s also a powerful tool for generating non-dues revenue for your organization.
So, isn’t it time to take your career center to the next level with a comprehensive member engagement model?
Why You Need to Improve Your Membership Marketing
Your existing members are the lifeblood of your association, so it’s vital to your continued success to keep them coming back. They are also ambassadors for your brand, so utilize membership marketing to protect your good reputation, give them a reason to brag about you, and encourage their referrals.
Interacting with members through marketing touchpoints also provides you with actionable insights to strengthen your service offerings. Prevent declines in affiliation and membership by understanding and responding to your members’ needs.
By developing a strategic member engagement plan, you benefit from a growing base, higher revenues, and ongoing loyalty that nurtures lifelong relationships.
How to Market to Your Members Effectively
Consider leveraging these three-member engagement services to build more excitement, interaction, and revenue from your career center:
1. Events and meetings
Your members look to your organization for learning and networking opportunities. So you likely already spend significant time creating events and meetings with informative content, quality speakers, and valuable networking opportunities to meet those needs. Why not leverage those events and meetings to grow your career center and show that your association is THE industry career development destination? Try these approaches:
Include a page highlighting the career center and its benefits on your meeting or event microsite.
- Set up a booth at your event to promote your career center.
- Display signage at your in-person annual meeting or other events, promoting your career center.
- Provide free resume reviews by experts (in-person or online).
- Connect mentors and mentees – by specialty, region, or subject matter.
- Offer contests for free classes, workshops, or one-on-one coaching sessions with a subject matter expert.
- Spotlight a particular industry or employer (for a fee) with an in-depth presentation.
- Provide a FAQ handout for new attendees to set up expectations for future events.
Prepare calendars or save-the-date cards highlighting future events, center hours, and contact or registration information.
If it’s in the budget, offer swag and make it both useful and memorable. For example, you could give away seed packets and encourage your members to “plant the seeds” for a more successful professional future.
2. Email
Email is a powerful way to get more people more involved with your career center. Be sure to reach out to both job seekers and employers. Here are a few ideas:
Distribute a monthly marketing email. Email your registered employers and job seekers each month with tips and best practices.
- Introduce a job alert email to your members. Employers are often willing to pay extra for this distribution of their job to additional potential candidates.
- Email coupons and special offers to employers. This is a great way to encourage more job postings, particularly during slower posting periods.
- Email reminders for upcoming events or speakers. Ensure members know what you have to offer so you can boost attendance.
- Use email to highlight new services and promotions. Consider offering an early bird discount to employers or members-first reservations to create more demand.
- Develop a referral email that members can forward to non-members to earn a reward for new member conversions. This process is especially useful for growing your existing member base.
- Consider offering existing members an early renewal discount via email. You’ll get trackable data about which members respond to these offers for further targeting.
3. Other online channels
Move beyond email to reach people through other digital channels. For example:
Place a jobs feed or widget on the home page of your site. This will pull in more traffic to the career center than a link alone. It will also give employers access to passive job seekers.
- Use a Facebook integration. This can promote recently posted jobs through a Careers tab on your Facebook page.
- Share a relevant feed of jobs with affiliate organizations that do not have their own career centers. This can provide them with content and drive users back to your career center.
- Leverage the power of user-generated content by encouraging members to share their photos, videos, and experiences on your social media accounts.
- Create hashtags so your members can easily share trackable information about your center, events, and services.
- Post videos on your website and popular platforms that engage your members and showcase your services.
- Ask employers to help promote your association by including links to events and your website on theirs as a form of sponsorship.
- Use electronic surveys to get even more feedback from your members and employers to refine your services.
These are just a few of the many ways to grow your career center through marketing and, in turn, generate more revenue and provide an even greater benefit for your members.
Member Engagement Trends
As your organization continues to deliver on its mission to nurture, educate, and connect your members, several shifts in society contribute to how your association drives engagement. In our recent study on member engagement trends, we discovered the following:
- Many members consider networking opportunities to be highly important to their continued career success. Capitalize on that need by sponsoring plenty of events where members can connect with industry professionals, employers, and each other.
- Virtual interaction is here to stay. Engagement rates increased as the world adapted quickly to digital connections and interactions. Invest in technological resources that provide chances for connecting online.
- Members value educational opportunities. Engagement increases with virtual class offerings and industry training resources. Position yourself as a leader in both.
- Demographics influence engagement. Use your knowledge of your membership to understand their priorities and preferred interaction methods to better meet their needs and boost interaction.
Maximize Your Marketing Strategy With Our Comprehensive Guide
Download our guide to learn more about growing your career center through both traditional and digital marketing!
