How to Develop a Revenue-Boosting Marketing Strategy for Your Online Career Center

Your association’s career center is one of your most valuable resources for increasing nondues revenue and member engagement. With a written marketing plan for it, associations can boost its success and the revenue they earn from it.

To develop your marketing strategy, start with the basics: Set your goals, identify your target audience, take inventory of your resources (human and digital), create and manage your budget, and develop your metrics to measure success or failure. Developing a well-thought-out plan will leave little room for error and lots of opportunity for growth.

Set Goals and Target Your Audience

The first step is to define your goals. Once your goals are in place, you can develop your plan to support your goals. For example, if one of your goals is to increase job seeker engagement by 30 percent, your target audience would be your members as well as nonmembers.

You most likely have more than one audience, or persona, and it’s important to create resources that help them at their stage in their career journey. For instance, new graduates will have a different set of needs than midcareer professionals.

The messaging you use in your marketing determines the success of your campaign. Take your time to develop content that influences your target audience to take action and become more engaged with your career center.

If your association only sends out email blasts, you may want to add in a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter that is centered around open jobs in your career center. Also consider selling ad space in these newsletters to increase nondues revenue.

Resources

Take inventory of the resources you currently use—email platforms, social channels, newsletters, blogs—and evaluate which ones will be most effective in reaching your target audience. If your members are more responsive to emails, promote your career center in email newsletters.

To reach nonmembers, some options include social media marketing, digital advertising, and website content with SEO.

Under resources, think about who will be able to help plan and execute your strategy. Do you need to hire a third-party resource, or do you have staff well-versed in writing or social media strategy? Get your team together and decide who will own each part of the strategy.

If your association only sends out email blasts, you may want to add in a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter that is centered around open jobs in your career center. Also consider selling ad space in these newsletters to increase nondues revenue.

Budgets

After you’ve made a list of your resources, determine if you have the budget to execute your plan. Also decide if you need to invest in different resources to successfully execute your plan.

A few things to consider:

• Do you have a marketing automation platform, or do you need a basic email service?
• If you plan to do digital advertising, how will you secure that budget?
• Do you have to get approval to invest in new programs and campaigns, and how long does that take?

Success Metrics

Lastly, decide on your success metrics. Going back to our example of increasing job seeker engagement by 30 percent, choose metrics that will support this goal. Some metrics to consider are new job seeker registrations, new job alert email registrations, career center activity, and event or course registrations.

If you see increases in these numbers, you’ll know your marketing is reaching the correct people and is helping to meet your goal.

Remember that having a written marketing plan  (opens in a new tab) will help your association meet its goals; whether it’s improving engagement, driving memberships, or increasing nondues revenue. Once you have a plan in place, you’re able to update and modify it as your campaigns and goals change and evolve.