The Essential Guide:
Step-by-Step Digital Marketing for Private Clubs

Introduction

If you’re reading this guide, chances are good that you’re either a Membership Director or General Manager or Board Member who understands the importance of digital marketing today.

You “get” that traditional club marketing methods are both ineffective and expensive, and member referrals are unreliable. By neglecting to elevate your clubs online presence, you’re missing out on the powerful results that an effective online marketing strategy can bring about.

Whether your club is just getting started with digital marketing, you want to expand your online efforts, or you want to learn how your social media posts can result in new members and not just “likes”, this guide provides step-by-step instructions to help you set up and implement a successful online marketing strategy.

From optimizing your website for search to developing engaging content to attracting prospective members through social media to analyzing and refining your strategies, this comprehensive guide will lead you through every essential step you should take to effectively market your club online

Optimize Your Website

More than an Online Brochure:
Generate Membership Leads on Your Website

Too often private clubs create websites that are essentially a digital version of their club brochure. By doing so, they fail to differentiate themselves from other clubs in their area and they miss a massive opportunity to share their unique culture and attract the right prospective members.

Most club websites are created by technology companies with platforms that support club operations, member experience, and internal communications. Most of these websites are not designed with the intent of attracting and converting new members. If you really want to attract visitors (and potential members) to your club’s website, you need to do more than simply build it: you need to optimize it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is how your website is discovered via search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. 

SEO typically involves two sets of tactics: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is strategically implementing keywords on your website, through the deliberate and strategic use of page titles, headers, meta descriptions, image data and more.

Off-page SEO is the process of improving your website’s overall search engine authority, which is determined by other websites that link to your website. The goal of off-page SEO is to attract “backlinks” from relevant, authoritative websites.

SEO for the Modern Age

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an older approach to keywords. In today’s online landscape, modern search engines are getting smarter every day. They can no longer be “gamed” through keyword manipulation. Instead, search engines reward websites (through higher search results) that provide relevant, high-quality content.

So modern SEO is about optimizing for the people searching for information, not the search engines. And the first step is making sure you have the SEO fundamentals in place.

SEO Fundamentals: 5 Elements to Optimize

Most modern websites are built on a platform that allows you to easily access and change your metadata, which is essential to SEO. If you are unable to make these changes yourself, you will need to contact your web developer to make the changes for you.

Optimizing for Mobile

The idea of mobile marketing is tossed around frequently in marketing circles, often with many different intended meanings. While mobile marketing can mean many things, there is one primary message for marketers looking to take advantage of SEO in mobile search: optimize websites for mobile viewing.

While you could create a separate mobile site or an app, the best option, from an optimization standpoint, is using what is known as "responsive design."

A responsive website uses the same URL and HTML across all devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The only thing that changes is the Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, which is a programming language that describes the style and formatting of a web page. CSS allows the content on your website to adapt to different screen sizes, which means visitors always get a great viewing and browsing experience. What’s more, Google prefers responsive design to other mobile technologies because it allows for more efficient crawling and indexing.

Create Great Content

Content is Key

Think of content, such as blogs, as the fuel that drives your digital marketing strategy. By creating valuable, high quality information that’s targeted at specific, well-defined audiences, you’ll do more than attract visitors to your website. You’ll attract the visitors who are the right fit for your club and more likely to convert into leads (and ultimately become members).

Besides attracting the right prospective members, written content will help considerably with your website’s SEO. Creating and distributing this information is the best way to earn those valuable inbound links that can boost your search rankings and help improve your website’s discoverability—it’s a powerful way to improve off-page SEO.

Blogging for Clubs

Search engines award higher rankings to websites that consistently add fresh blog content, and higher rankings mean new visitors and leads for your club. A blog also makes your website more dynamic by automatically injecting new written content every time an article is published. (Not to mention, blogs can also be used to help populate newsletters!) Without a blog, your website is simply a static online brochure that prevents your prospects from getting to know your club culture.

When blogging, take off your "hat" as a Membership Director or GM and try to think like a magazine publisher. The goal of your club’s blog should be to publish valuable, non-promotional posts, much in the way an article in a magazine would. Think in terms of the words your members use to describe your club and apply those phrases to your blogging language. To keep a steady stream of blog content flowing, engage your department heads to help.

What Do I Write About?

For your blog to be effective, you need to start with a purpose: What are you trying to educate your potential members and clients about? What makes your club unique? Where are the typical barriers in the sales process? Address those types of questions in your content strategy.

This type of education is not simply about features and services you offer. Rather, it’s about points of interest for prospective members—considerations when choosing how to spend recreational time and money, solutions your club may offer, and topics that convey the culture of your club.

Blogs are also an ideal place to house all of the memorable "stories" that occur during the course of the year at your club. Stories are memorable and shareable online, and they enable someone to feel "connected" to your club. Your members most likely aren't sharing your newsletters, but they will share interesting stories. For example, consider writing a member profile article featuring a new family and showcasing the reasons they decided to join.

A simple way to start blogging is to answer the ten most common questions you are asked by new prospective members. Do this once a week for ten weeks and you will have the foundation of a successful blog! Consistency is important.

Once those first ten weeks are over, check out your blogging analytics to see which articles are resonating the most with your audience. If two or three of the posts receive a significantly higher number of views and inbound links, try to expand on those topics. Remember to let your expertise and passion shine through in your blog content.

Key Components of a Blog Post:

Generating Leads With Blogging

Blogging presents a powerful platform for attracting organic traffic to your website and engaging with your audience. However, the primary goal of your club’s blog should be to drive conversions.

A conversion occurs when a website, or blog, visitor takes a desired action—like completing a form to download a piece of advanced content like a membership guide. Once they have completed the form, they are a known lead to whom you can begin to establish a relationship with and begin to deliver useful and interesting content, with the ultimate goal of converting the right prospects into members.

To achieve this goal, add calls-to-action to your posts and have them link to landing pages that provide downloadable access to more in-depth materials, such as member testimonial videos, online golf tips, etc. Make sure to include CTAs both in the sidebar of your blog as well as on every individual post you publish. In addition to image/button CTAs, you can also include text CTAs within the body of your blog content.

Blogs paired with CTAs allow you to engage with prospective members much earlier than the standard “contact us for more information” form found on most club’s websites. You can establish meaningful conversations, start gaining trust, and begin sharing your club’s culture to better influence your prospect’s decision making process.

Other Types of Content for Generating Leads

While it’s a perfect place to start, blog content isn’t the only type of content you can create to be successful with digital marketing. You need to produce longer-form content items, too, membership guides or other e-books that can be used for lead generation. Also, consider creating non-text based content like videos and slideshows.

These content “offers” will feed your conversions. A resource that takes some time and effort to put together will provide the type of value prospective members are looking for. The right content offers help to educate and enrich one's knowledge of your club and as a result, shortens the sales cycle. Such offers have the power to achieve an information exchange: an anonymous visitor fills out a lead capture form to access the resource and thus, becoming known to you as someone potentially interested in membership. An educated prospect doesn't waste a membership director's time!

Supercharge Your Social Media

Social media provides a platform for direct communication between your members, prospects, employees and admirers. Often clubs use likes and followers to measure social media success. But this narrow and outdated focus completely misses the business opportunity of social media: it’s a key driver of content distribution and brand visibility online.

When you use social media for marketing, you need to use the analytics the platforms provide, and other tools like HubSpot’s Social inbox, to measure the success of your social media efforts.

There is a wide array of social networks that you can use to your advantage, you may feel pressured to be on multiple channels but it’s important to have a social media strategy and an understanding of which platforms your prospects are most engaged with. So, here, we’ll focus on the four that can we see most relevant for clubs: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The Art of Social Listening

An important part of leveraging social media for your club is to understand what conversations are happening online and recognizing when you should respond. Here are some helpful tools you can use to monitor your club and industry mentions in social media:

• Google Alerts - Set up multiple Google Alerts for your club, brand, services, leaders, industry terms, etc. The alerts will get delivered directly to your email inbox at the frequency you indicate (e.g., daily or as they happen). It's an easy way to track mentions of your club and relevant keywords on the web.

• Social media management tools - Tools like HubSpot’s Social Monitoring, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social allow you to set up and monitor a live stream so you won’t miss out on what’s being said about your club, your industry, and your services.

• Social Inbox - In addition to providing the social monitoring functionality of a traditional social media management tool, HubSpot’s Social Inbox also connects to your contacts database, color-codes your members, clients and leads, and helps you prioritize your engagement so you can focus your time on the conversations that are most important to your club.

Convert Website Visitors into Leads

By this point, you have optimized your website, launched your blog, and started participating in and your promoting content on social media. After a few months of consistent effort, you should start seeing an increase in website traffic. (But remember, like all marketing strategies, it will take time to see significant results, hang in there consistency will pay off!)

An increase in website visitors is nice but you want to turn that traffic into new leads, and, ultimately, into new members! First, remember everything you’ve done to this point is intended to drive people to your website. The next step is to focus on conversion.

Focus on converting more of your website visitors into interested prospects. To do this, create a compelling content offer for your prospects, create a call-to-action to promote that offer, and launch a landing page with a form for visitors to provide their information in exchange for that offer. Finally, you’ll need to measure and iterate the whole process. In short, the conversion process is:

1. Create an offer
2. Build a call-to-action
3. Build a landing page
4. Measure, test, iterate

In this section, we will explore the conversion process in more detail. But first, take a look at how converting visitors into leads fits into what we call the “Inbound Methodology”—the best way to turn strangers into members and promoters of your club:

Nurture Leads into Members

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with your potential members by sending targeted, relevant, and valuable messages to them in a timely manner. The end goal is to get your leads to “raise their hand” and self-select into further engaging with your club.

As a Membership Director, you know that getting leads is fantastic—but not all leads are at the point where they can be considered membership-ready.

Take a look at your existing prospective member pipeline. How long does it typically take for a lead to become a member after his or her first inquiry? We know some prospects are eager to become members as soon as possible, but other prospects don’t follow a quick, linear life-cycle.

Unfortunately for most clubs, interested prospects that don’t follow the linear model—initial contact to information gathering to tour to trial to application—are moved out of the sales funnel and lost. When your prospects "go dark" for one reason or another, this is the time to make sure you stay top of mind in a meaningful way. 

Knowing that there are prospects with different decision-making life-cycles equips you to build some very effective lead nurturing campaigns and leverage this channel to qualify prospective members.

Lead nurturing allows you to engage those prospects that are nearly ready to join, as well as engage those who will take more time to make a decision. Through a lead nurturing system you can send an automated series of email messages to provide information they’re looking for. Furthermore, you can stay in contact with them in meaningful ways as they move from consideration to decision.

Measuring Email Performance

• Click-through rate (CTR) - Click-through rate measures response. Of the people you emailed, this shows how many clicked on your link(s)? The CTR can give you a sense of how compelling your email messages are. Experiment with different subject lines, calls-to-action, and timing to improve your email CTR.

• What about open rate? Open rate is an unreliable metric, as major email services do not load the images necessary for tracking who opened an email. Instead of worrying about open rate, focus on the number of clicks your emails receive.

• Unsubscribe Rate - Unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opted out of your email communications. As with open rates, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of your prospect member list’s health. Some leads won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process but will just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your messages.

• Conversion rate measures actions. Measure how many of those clicks turned into reconversions on your landing page. This is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. Remember that conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page. Test different landing pages to improve the conversion on your website.

Beyond Email

In today’s highly connected world, nurturing your contacts doesn’t have to be limited to email. Remember that you can and should communicate with your leads via social media or other platforms they use. Given this landscape, you should start thinking about behavior-driven communications that are triggered based on the full history of your lead's interactions, both on and off your site. This is something to tackle once all your other digital building blocks are in place.

Analyze and Refine

Your goal in this step is to identify your most and least effective online efforts to amplify what works and eliminate what doesn’t. You will need an analytics program, like Google Analytics or HubSpot Analytics features, to measure the data. Follow these steps to analyze and refine your strategies:

Conclusion

Doing more with your digital marketing might seem difficult and daunting. But by tackling each marketing tactic step-by-step can make it more manageable and start producing real results. 

And unlike traditional marketing tactics, every digital strategy you deploy can be measured and every lead can be analyzed when you have the right toolbox. Data is what enables the conversation in the boardroom to no longer view marketing as an "investment" but rather a "return on investment". 

We hope that by reading this guide, you’ve gained a practical understanding of how strategic digital marketing can improve your current online efforts to attract and add new members.