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Nine Ways to Shine on the Internet
Using your association’s web site to maximize your marketing efforts

By John Gunn, CEO, John Gunn Marketing Partners

If you still view web marketing as the electronic equivalent of your print promotional collateral, chances are you’re missing untold opportunities to capitalize on the Internet’s value as a vital communication channel. Here are several ways you can begin using this dynamic tool to implement a variety of marketing activities and strengthen your association’s market position.

Understand Your Audience

Providing high-quality and relevant content is the cornerstone to attracting viewers and encouraging repeat visitation. Use results from your association’s member research, product evaluations, application forms, membership demographics, industry trends analysis, and even anecdotal conversations to help ensure the content you offer is valuable to current and prospective members and customers.

Shape Visitors’ Experiences

Make it easy for members and other visitors to find what they want, as well as what you want them to see or purchase. Be strategic in how you direct visitors through your site and consider conducting usability studies with a sample of your members to ensure your site navigation is intuitive and clear.

As a general rule, visitors click three to four times before becoming frustrated and abandoning a search on your site. By asking your members to complete several search tasks for critical information on your site, you can gauge the ease with which visitors find desired information.

Communicate Your Brand

Beginning with your home page and continuing throughout your site, make sure your association’s core brand message is clear and apparent to all visitors. Ensure the messages, graphics, content, navigation, special features, and products offered work together to reinforce the desired brand image and communicate the unique value proposition you offer.

Keep It Simple

Fast speed and easy-to-read content helps visitors mentally download information quickly and encourages longer user sessions on your site. Write for the web, keeping verbiage concise, action-oriented and packed with useful information. Keep type sizes large enough for an aging population to see and read quickly, and avoid background colors, shading and graphic designs that compete with text and decrease readability.
With the exception of articles and substantive content, attempt to keep pages to lengths requiring minimal amounts of scrolling. Avoid unnecessary graphics and features that slow downloads and click-throughs, helping members quickly surf your site to find must-have information and the services you sell.

Optimize Your Visibility

Your web site provides an effective 24/7 storefront for the services you wish the world to see, but only if they can find you. Approximately 90 percent of web users begin surfing by using search engines, resulting in hundreds of millions of searches each day on Yahoo!, Google, Ask Jeeves, MSN, America Online, Alta Vista, and others. Because visitors seldom read past the second page of search results, take steps to ensure your association’s site lands near the top of the list for search results with keywords your members and prospects are most likely to use.

Keywords drive search engines and you must understand the top-of-mind words people associate with your organization. Once known, these keywords should hold prominent positions in your content, page titles, descriptive META tags, headers, ALT-attributes and other opportunities to embed keywords into your site. Design with keywords in mind, as search engines use automated programs called “spiders” to scan sites and read HTML coding to complete search requests and rank results.

With a design strategy in place, register your site with top search engines like Open Directory (which feeds Netscape and Lycos), Yahoo!, Google and others. Reciprocal links and your association’s presence in online directory listings further elevates your ranking in search results. Also be sure to purchase all domain names relating to your organization as a safeguard against misdirecting potential visitors away from your site.

Give Members Good Reasons to Visit and Return Often

Encourage members and customers to visit often by improving the utility of your site. For members, the ability to make changes to membership records online, download newsletters, register for events, search and post jobs, network on listservs, purchase books and access member-only services and information can become the draw that encourages repeat visitation. For nonmembers, online clearinghouses of industry-specific statistics, news, and links can become added-value features to keep them coming back for more.

Explore Your E-Commerce Options

According to the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) 2001 research report on e-business among nearly 800 association respondents, more than two-thirds (69%) offer secure servers for e-business transactions and 54 percent offer “members-only” sections on their sites.

These associations also find value in using their web sites to promote products and services (69%), process membership applications (67%), offer online education (67%), help members network (67%), and process event registrations (15%). They also provide online membership directories (63%), product catalogs (49%), career centers (34%), and webcasts (15%).

Most of these organizations process e-commerce orders in-house (83%), fulfill orders in-house (80%) and collect payments online through their web sites (56%). They view the Internet as an important (33%) or very important (57%) way to communicate with members and on average devote 6 percent of their overall expense budget to technology and 1 percent to e-commerce.

Learn from Your Competition

Keep an eye on competition by visiting their sites often. Your competitors’ sites will reveal to you the brand they aspire to communicate, the brand they currently communicate, and a variety of marketing information about strategic directions, budgets, staffing, members, customers and other market intelligence that can guide future decisions about your association’s site, positioning and business strategies.

Gather Market Intelligence

According to the ASAE report, 44 percent of association respondents say they conduct member research through their web sites, and more are likely to do so as the cost of online surveying and polling technologies continue to decrease. Begin capturing contact information on site visitors by creating numerous opportunities for visitors to send e-mail requests to you, and subsequently provide you their e-mail addresses. By offering free subscriptions to e-newsletters or access to other free information, you can begin identifying new prospects for product sales and membership.

Often overlooked and undervalued, your association’s web tracking reports reveal a wealth of information about how visitors arrive at your site, where they enter, what they see, the amount of time they spend, and where they exit. Studying your web traffic and trends can help you enhance navigation and content while supplying potential banner advertisers with statistical proof of the visibility opportunities offered through your site.

John Gunn is the CEO of John Gunn Marketing Partners, LLC,
specialists in marketing assessments, research, strategy and plans for associations. For more information, please contact the author at (703) 299-0774, jg@GunnMarketingPartners.com

For information about reprinting this article, please contact cr@gunnmarketingpartners.com.

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