Gordon Dymowski
Social media marketing for any business is challenging, but for a business in the process of rebranding, maintaining its brand identity while integrating its diverse offerings can seem daunting.
Meeting that particular challenge is especially critical when that business is a professional association focused on the marketing field. Here is a case study in how rethinking social media marketing for a professional association can not only ensure brand consistency but drive greater engagement and involvement.
The client was a marketing-focused professional association with (then) approximately 45,000 members. Their social media specialist had gone on leave, and the association was moving forward on a rebranding initiative. As part of this six-month initiative, the client sought to integrate content about its various departments into its social media marketing efforts while rethinking the visual look of their brand. These departments included:
Although their general content was more heavily marketed via social media, the association’s other departments were rarely integrated into their outreach and showed extremely low engagement numbers. Primary social media channels for engagement were Facebook, Twitter (now X), and LinkedIn.
Two key questions that the client wanted to ask was what is preventing us from engaging more professionals? And can we integrate content from our various departments in a way that preserves brand consistency while strengthening our social media strategy?
Although this particular marketing association had prewritten social media content, much of it was generic and geared primarily toward promotion and search optimization. Creating engaging content would be critical for this revamp of existing social strategy not just to rebuild brand credibility but also generate leads for potential members. As part of outreach strategy, each department developed unique content ideas and guidelines
Although Hootsuite was used to automate the process, a dedicated analytics team tracked traffic using in-channel and web analytics. The overall goal was to determine extent of reach, amount of conversation, and website conversions (differentiating between membership acquisition and membership renewal).
As the association’s social marketing initiative began ending, the internal analytics team worked with appropriate stakeholders around interpretation of social media and web data analysis. Looking at all of the data, several interesting results were found
From an overarching standpoint, the professional association found that social media content which spoke to very specific business issues outperformed boilerplate content. Although this may seem self-evident, this insight informed the association’s rebranding efforts.
Professional associations focus on providing direct benefit for their members, and crafting social media content that speaks to the professional (and personal) development of its members is critical for social media marketing success. It provides a greater rationale for engagement and the establishment of longer-term member relationships.
B2B Social Media Marketing Consultant/Copywriter
Gordon Dymowski is a B2B social media consultant and copywriter working with small to medium-sized businesses around audience engagement, lead generation, and driving revenues. Gordon has assisted various organizations in social media strategy, engagement, and analytics with a specific focus on healthcare, technology, and mission-driven ventures. He is also a fiction writer who has written for various independent publishers.
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