{"id":365,"date":"2012-11-05T09:33:49","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T09:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.naylor.com\/associationadviser\/index.php\/2012\/11\/05\/newsletter25006_365\/"},"modified":"2012-11-05T09:33:49","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T09:33:49","slug":"newsletter25006_365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.naylor.com\/associationadviser\/newsletter25006_365\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing Your Association\u2019s Online Marketing Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">By<\/span> Association Adviser <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">staff<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/www.naylornetwork.com\/NAY-ADVISER\/assets\/danseligson.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 10px;\" \/>As we head into that time of year when vacations, stifling<br \/>\nheat and a relentless stream of &#8220;Out of Office&#8221; replies give us a few moments<br \/>\nto pause and catch our breath, we thought we&rsquo;d tackle some of the most<br \/>\nfrequently asked questions sent in by you, our readers. <\/p>\n<p>We&rsquo;re often asked about ways associations can improve and<br \/>\nexpand their online presence. With the help of Dan Seligson, president of the<br \/>\nMarketing Committee for the Kellogg Graduate School Alumni Association in New<br \/>\nYork and past president of the Association of Internet Professionals, we&rsquo;ll<br \/>\nshed some light on how you can improve your presence strategically, rather than<br \/>\njust blasting out as many tweets, posts and &#8220;Likes&#8221; as you can muster.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.naylornetwork.com\/NAY-ADVISER\/assets\/takeaways.png\" \/><\/p>\n<table width=\"\" cellspacing=\"3\" cellpadding=\"3\" align=\"center\" style=\"border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; margin: 5px; border: 1px solid black; background-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border: 1px solid black;\">\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Free tools help you increase your online market<br \/>\npotential by hundreds of percentage points.<\/span><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">You can easily see exactly what your competitors<br \/>\nare doing and learn from them.<\/span><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\">Don&rsquo;t guess about what makes a website good or<br \/>\nbad. You can survey users for as little as a penny per test.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>\n<span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">ASSOCIATION<br \/>\nADVISER:<\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"> Dan, you&rsquo;re an<br \/>\ne-commerce specialist who&rsquo;s worked with History Channel, Walt Disney&rsquo;s Internet<br \/>\nGroup, Best Buy and the non-profit aid organization, Americares. What&rsquo;s the<br \/>\ntoughest thing for online marketers and web developers to understand about<br \/>\ndrawing the right kind of traffic to their sites?<\/p>\n<p><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">DAN<br \/>\nSELIGSON:<\/span> Everyone with a website knows that online marketing isn&rsquo;t so<br \/>\neasy. We all want to improve our online<br \/>\noperations, and we have all been sold the same false bill of goods. Intuit, the<br \/>\nmakers of QuickBooks, have a new website creator that they proudly advertise on<br \/>\nnational TV and on their homepage. Intuit&rsquo;s claims that it&rsquo;s easy: 1) Choose a<br \/>\ndesign; 2) Customize it; 3) Show the world. Intuit isn&rsquo;t the only company<br \/>\noffering those services; enter &#8220;Website Builder&#8221; into Google and you will get<br \/>\n28 <span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">million<\/span><br \/>\nresults. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">AA: <\/span>Yet, with 28 million<br \/>\npages of solutions, how can you really develop your online marketing plan?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">DS:<\/span> There is no magic to it. It just takes some elbow<br \/>\ngrease. Follow the same principles that catalogers and direct marketers have<br \/>\nbeen using for more than a century. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">AA:<\/span> Can you give us some basic guidance<br \/>\nto that process and share some tools that might help?<\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">DS:<\/span> Here&rsquo;s a 10-step guide that I like to use for both for-profit and<br \/>\nnot-for-profit organizations:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 1: Define Your<br \/>\nIndustry (Industry Framing)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>What game is your organization actually in? Who are you<br \/>\nplaying against? Seems obvious, but just ask your exec team and see if they<br \/>\nagree. The best place to define your industry is in a war room. Brew the<br \/>\ncoffee, get lots of carbo snacks and lock in your top decision makers. At the<br \/>\nAssociation of Internet Professionals, we entered our war room thinking that we<br \/>\nwere in the &#8220;Trade Association&#8221; industry and came out realizing that we were in<br \/>\nthe &#8220;Executive Education&#8221; industry. Our<br \/>\nmembers wanted certification and to learn the latest thinking. That&rsquo;s what we<br \/>\nprovided, much more than any other member benefit. From that, everything<br \/>\nchanged. Our competitors weren&rsquo;t the online networking organizations, they were<br \/>\ncolleges, technical schools and groups like the American Management<br \/>\nAssociation.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 2: Google Your<br \/>\nCompetitors (Competitor Analysis)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Google can tell you amazing things about your business and<br \/>\nyour competitors. Let us take a look at our competitor, the American Management<br \/>\nAssociation. Who is sending them visitors? By adding &#8220;link:&#8221; in front of their<br \/>\nweb address, I get a list of every site that has links to the American<br \/>\nManagement Association&rsquo;s site. <\/p>\n<p>Literally, type &#8220;link:amanet.org&#8221; into Google, you will get<br \/>\n512 results of links that lead to the AMA&rsquo;s site. They include a lot of<br \/>\nuniversity career sites, the MBA Alliance, some consulting firms and the<br \/>\nNational Career Development Association, an interesting list of relationships!<br \/>\nDo this for your competitors to see what shows up.<\/p>\n<p>You can also pay a nominal fee to sites such as <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.spyfu.com\">Spyfu.com<\/a> or <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.compete.com\">Compete.com<\/a> to see exactly how much traffic and what keywords your competitors<br \/>\nare using.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 3: Google<br \/>\nYourself (Online Media Distribution)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Now compare your list of inbound links to your competitors&rsquo;<br \/>\nby Googling &#8220;link:&#8221; and your web address. (Don&rsquo;t use any spaces.) Document the<br \/>\ndifferences between you and your competitors.<br \/>\nDecide if you want to develop some of those relationships for yourself.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 4: Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to Determine Your Market Size<span style=\"color: rgb(255, 0, 0);\"><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Now you want to enter the following phrase into Google:<br \/>\n&#8220;Google AdWords keyword tool.&#8221; This will take you to a Google tool that will<br \/>\ntell you how many people are typing in a given keyword. It will even look at<br \/>\nyour site and suggest keywords for you. How many people are searching for your<br \/>\nassociation and your competitors? Which search terms are more popular?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 5. Define Your<br \/>\nKeyword List<\/span><\/p>\n<p>When you look at the keyword tool for the American<br \/>\nManagement Association site, AMAnet.org, you can see that the phrase &#8220;Training<br \/>\nIT&#8221; (as in Information Technology) gets 20 million searches a month and &#8220;Seminars<br \/>\nIT&#8221; gets 660,000. In this case, using the word &#8220;training&#8221; in your online<br \/>\nmarketing plan will increase your market size by 3,000 percent over the word<br \/>\n&#8220;seminar.&#8221; Use Google&rsquo;s keyword tool to create and prioritize your list of<br \/>\nimportant keywords.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 6: Change Your<br \/>\nSite Copy<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(255, 0, 0);\"><\/span>Having seen which words are more popular than others, it&rsquo;s time to review your website copy to match it with these popular keywords, and fit those keywords where it makes sense. Show your<br \/>\nkeyword list to your web team, and ask how they can incorporate those phrases<br \/>\ninto the page titles, addresses, tags and content.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 7: Do Some Math<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Now that you have chosen your keywords, count how many<br \/>\nsearches you could get. The total number of searches for IT training and<br \/>\nsimilar keywords is about 100 million per month. Divide that number by 10,000 and you get a<br \/>\ngood estimate of your potential business from Google. In this case, there is a<br \/>\npotential for 10,000 new orders a month for IT training products. How much is<br \/>\nthat worth to you? Now you can start to budget against that potential.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 8: Ask Grandma<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Everyone who creates presentations or written documents<br \/>\nknows that you can&rsquo;t edit your own work. It&rsquo;s the same with the web&ndash;you can&rsquo;t<br \/>\nsee your own site. Consider resources such as Creative Good (<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.creativegood.com\/\">www.creativegood.com<\/a>) or Amazon&rsquo;s<br \/>\nMechanical Turk site (<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mturk.com\">www.mturk.com<\/a>) and create an account. There, you can get<br \/>\npeople to perform tasks on your site and tell you about their experience for as<br \/>\nlittle as a penny! Use their feedback to improve the design of your site.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 9: Start Bidding<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Set up an AdWords account and start bidding on those<br \/>\nkeywords. See how many sales you can actually get.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Step 10: Rinse and Repeat<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Now you start the optimization process&ndash;change your landing<br \/>\npages. These are the first pages that customers see when they land on your<br \/>\nsite. Are you making them an offer, providing an incentive to take action?<br \/>\nChange the incentive, adjust the layout and run the ads again. Test quick,<br \/>\nadjust and test again. Cycle through steps 8-10 over and over. Click on your<br \/>\ncompetitors&rsquo; ads and let yourself learn from what they are doing.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">AA<\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">: Any final thoughts<br \/>\nfor our readers?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">DS<\/span>: In short, there is no need to be inventive. Use the sites mentioned to<br \/>\nleverage your competitors&rsquo; work and to test your own.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Helpful sites\/searches:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\">Google Search:<\/a> &#8220;Link:domain.com&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.adwords.google.com\">Google AdWords<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.spyfu.com\">Spyfu.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.compete.com\">Compete.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mturk.com\">Mturk.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Association Adviser <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">readers can also email Dan at<\/span> <a href=\"mailto:Dan@CVRmarketing.com\"><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Dan@CVRmarketing.com<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"> to request a free test.<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><\/p>\n<table width=\"\" cellspacing=\"3\" cellpadding=\"3\" align=\"center\" style=\"border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; margin: 5px; border: 1px solid black; background-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"border: 1px solid black;\">\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 10pt;\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-size: 10pt;\">Rate this article 5<br \/>\n(Excellent) to 1 (Poor). Send ratings and comments <\/span><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"mailto:associationadviser@naylor.com?subject=Online%20Marketing%20Strategy_July%20eNews\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-size: 10pt;\">here.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As we head into that time of year when vacations, stifling heat and a relentless stream of &#8220;Out of Office Replies&#8221; give us a few moments to pause and catch our breath, we present a 10-step guide to marketing professional organizations on the Web.<br \/>\n<em>By <\/em>Association Adviser<em> staff<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Developing Your Association\u2019s Online Marketing Strategy - Association Adviser<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.naylor.com\/associationadviser\/newsletter25006_365\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Developing Your Association\u2019s Online Marketing Strategy - Association Adviser\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As we head into that time of year when vacations, stifling heat and a relentless stream of &quot;Out of Office Replies&quot; give us a few moments to pause and catch our breath, we present a 10-step guide to marketing professional organizations on the Web. 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