Buyer personas are a useful tool for intimately understanding the needs of your members and prospective members. Personas help you laser-focus your marketing efforts.
Marketers have been using buyer personas for years, but the concept can easily apply to your member-based association or non-profit in what we’re calling member personas.
A member persona can enhance your marketing and communications efforts:
- Targets your membership efforts to prospects that are most likely to become lifelong members of your organization
- Focus event communications and content around specific topics hyper-relevant to membership needs
- Gives you a specific person to keep in mind when you’re creating marketing content
- Uncovers prospect’s unique interests and needs, useful for building or enhancing products or services
Step 1: Conduct market research
Take a look at your existing membership. As members of a cause-based or trade association, chances are, they have a lot in common. Try to find demographic and psychographic characteristics that are commonalities and pinpoint unique differences. Think you don’t have enough information? Look at your membership database, past event surveys, website analytics, membership surveys, or host a focus group.
You might find you have more than one type of member - undoubtedly! Focus on building your first persona that is representative of the majority in some way. Then tackle the others.
Step 2: Put yourself in their shoes
Write your member persona’s “I Want Statement” outlining her wants and needs from your association. Give your persona a name and possibly a photo - this makes her more real. Define her title and qualifications and write a short backstory of what brought her to your association.
During this process, make sure the persona is based on what you know. To fill in gaps, interview your organization’s current members. Monitor discussions on LinkedIn to determine what their key needs are. The persona can be very brief - a simple list of bullets will suffice.
Step 3: Use your new member persona
Once you have a member persona developed, you’re ready to put it to use. Use your persona as a guide for auditing your existing and planned marketing efforts. Try writing future marketing messages with your member persona in mind. You’ll be surprised how this technique helps the brainstorming process.
Step 4: Refine and repeat
As you learn more about your membership and your prospects through your newly laser-focused membership marketing, make your new persona even better. Consider revisiting your persona before and after a campaign and after a major event (which is a great time to get further insights). If you learn more about various sub-segments, write personas for them as well.
The process of building and implementing membership personas can be very valuable in the non-profit and association context. Consider writing a non-profit member persona today.
