Association Insight International & European Association Insights Spring 2015 | Page 21
Article | Association Insights
Great content is all about engaging with your customers
or members, whether it’s at an event, through a lengthy
magazine article, a 500 word blog post, a five minute video
or 140 character tweet.
IMarEST knows that marketing and member engagement is
virtually impossible without good content. But IMarEST is
a 15,000 member international organisation with a totally
diverse membership base.
“The challenge is how do you communicate and pass on
content which is both value-adding and relevant to such
a broad spread of people in a range of diverse sectors,
geographies and demographics within the marine industry,”
says David Kelly - Head of Marketing at IMarEST . “But at
the same time our global membership base does give us
unprecedented access to information that we can tap into
and use to ‘crowdsource’ information from.”
Even problems can lead to great content opportunities.
Whilst a skills shortage in the UK’s marine engineering
industry has led to difficulty in recruiting ‘oven ready’
graduates and experienced personnel, it led to IMarEST
devising a survey and report: ‘Mitigating the skills gap in
the marine and offshore oil and gas marke’.
“As well as being a useful source of statistics on
professional development, the survey results provided new
and interesting content that could be used to generate
growth,” explains David. “It was this content that created a
talking point that helped us to engage with both new and
existing members and companies.”
David adds that great content can derive from lots of areas,
such as personal connections and listening to customers –
what are they saying and thinking?
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“Organisations should facilitate discussions and debate to
source good information and create content that enables
them to have something relevant to say,” adds David.
“Content should be engaging, interesting, honest, easily
accessible and relevant. Using testimonials has been an
additional way of delivering this, and having ‘the client’
talk about the organisation, carries far more weight and
of course generates interesting content as every story is
different.”
For associations, having good content is important, but just
as relevant is having the technology behind the messaging
to distribute it. Using technology such as online forums,
social media and e-newsletters can enable associations to
increase coverage.
“Using social media and building online communities has
been an important part of our communications programme”
says David. “We have recently taken this one step further,
and built an online collaborative working environment,
exclusively for our global member base, which provides
an area for special interest groups and other communities
to work, share information and communicate wherever
they are in the world. Not only is it important to share
great content, but it enables us to capture interesting and
relevant information and make it readily available for the
benefit of our members.”
To sum up: Making content as easy to access as possible is
a must:
• Make sure that you’re hitting the key areas that your
target audience will be in order to gain exposure
• Make it easy for your content to be passed on (viral)
increasing your coverage.
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