Association marketing in today’s world isn’t always easy. People get advertising and marketing thrown at them from every direction. And as an association marketer, you have a lot of competition for prospective members’ and members’ attention.
So, how do you break through all of the marketing “noise” to reach your audiences?
Your online career center is a powerful marketing tool that can help you attract your audiences and get the word out about your association’s brand and value. You just have to put it to work.
Let’s look at how you can use your online career center to market your association.
What makes an online career center a good tool for association marketing?
An online career center works as a powerful association marketing tool in a few different ways.
First, it offers tremendous member value. Association industry research by Momentive Software shows that job and career advancement opportunities are continually top benefits that attract and retain members. A robust online career center helps to attract and engage members by giving them the career development resources they seek.
Second, it helps you to market your association to companies in your industry. Employers in your industry want access to highly skilled and experienced workers. By offering them opportunities to market their job openings to relevant job seekers through your online career center, you can drive revenue while developing relationships with companies that might become ongoing sponsors of your association.
Third, your online career center can integrate with your association management software (AMS) and your learning management system (LMS) to give you greater insights into your members and prospective members. These insights can help you cross-market your association’s benefits, products, and services.
3 ways to use your online career center for association marketing
Now that you know what makes your online career center such an effective association marketing tool, how do you put it to use? Here are three proven ways:
1. Use your digital marketing channels.
You probably already have digital marketing channels in place. So, put them to work in promoting the value of your online career center.
To recruit and engage members, promote the value of your online career center in your member emails, newsletters, and social media posts. A few ideas:
- Send a monthly email to your members and prospective members that includes links to career tips in your online career center.
- Place a jobs feed on the home page of your association’s website. This will attract more traffic than just a generic ad for your online career center.
- Send a job alert email to your members. This will keep them actively engaged with your online career center and, therefore, your association.
- Include articles about the benefits of your career center in your email newsletter.
- Set up a feed that automatically lists some of the job openings from your online career center through your Twitter streams.
To attract and engage employers:
- Create a media kit to send to companies in your industry. This approach can help you to market your association as a whole, and also improve awareness of your recruitment channels, such as job postings, job emails, recruitment guides, and promotions on your association’s social media feeds.
- Email coupons and special offers to employers. This approach helps to increase awareness of your association while encouraging more job postings on your online career center.
2. Use your career center at events and meetings.
Your association’s events and meetings are great activities for attracting new members and sponsors as well as deepening engagement with current members and sponsors. You can use your career center as a highly effective tool within your events and meetings when you highlight it as a valuable benefit for members and sponsors. For example, you can:
- Add a page to your meeting or event microsite that promotes your online career center to your industry, thereby demonstrating your association’s value to the industry.
- Set up a booth at your annual conference to promote the benefits of your online career center and register job seekers and employers.
- Display signs at your annual meeting and other events to promote your career center.
- Include job postings in your event sponsorship packages to add value for sponsors and promote the value of your association’s online career center.
3. Integrate your career center with your other systems.
You online career center is a powerful tool on its own. But as mentioned previously, integrating your online career center with your AMS and LMS gives you ways to cross-market your association’s products and services.
For example, by integrating your online career center with your AMS, you can capture member activity from your online career center in member records in your AMS for a more complete view of member interactions with your association. Using this information, you can create more personalized content and marketing campaigns to promote products and services to your members based on their interests.
Another example: When you integrate your online career center with your LMS, you can present members and non-members who are browsing your LMS course menu with actual and relevant job opportunities they would be qualified for if they took suggested courses or learning paths through your organization.
Take the next step with your association’s online career center.
Your association’s online career center can be a powerful tool for marketing your association. Using YM Careers as your career center solution, you can implement many of the techniques in this article (and more!) to attract and engage members and sponsors.
YM Careers offers leading job board software and career center solutions for associations as well as an entire team that’s ready to help you build a robust online career center that helps your association grow.
