Membership recruitment and retention is nothing more than building and retaining successful relationships.  So, how do you successfully create these long-lasting relationships and continue to make more of them - and grow the number of your contractor association members? 

Listen, I get it.  You have a life, and you would prefer if it wasn’t spent totally in front of your computer screen.  At the same time, you want to make sure that you are making the right choices when it comes to your marketing efforts, and you also want to be able to show the value of your marketing and how it impacts the bottom line of your business.

I hope you all had a fabulous Thanksgiving! From us here at Trending Up, we’d just like to take a moment to share what makes us most thankful this year, from friends, to family, to our clients! Here are some from some of our team:

Marketers used to see case studies as just an added bonus – the “whipped cream” on top of everything that their company does.  If they had the time to get around to them, they were great to use to brag with.  But, I am telling you that a well-executed case study, if used correctly, is far more important than that.  It isn’t a mere brag – it is PROOF of the industry-relevant, problem solving, superhero skills that your business is wielding.

Marketing brochures: general, colorful, printed pages containing basic information about your business, products, and services, usually including a phone number or website address, but overall not targeted, not measurable, and by most accounts, not that useful for gaining customers. If this is how you can describe most of your marketing materials - including your website, email blasts, social media, advertisements, and downloadable content - stop what you’re producing. Marketing should be building sales enablement tools, not brochures.

Many home builder marketing strategies include traditional advertising techniques, cold calling, and other outdated methods that make measuring success very difficult. As a result, home builder marketing can be a costly endeavor.

This advice for reducing costs for home builder marketing spend are based on the inbound methodology. Here at Trending Up, we’re focused on the return on your investment, and the data that support that - so, these ways of reducing marketing costs for home builders include better ways to market that will increase your quality leads, as well.

If you work for a bank, how would offering a nominal short-term interest rate bump – or maybe a free toaster – increase website traffic?

The fact is that they wouldn't. These ideas stop way short of being smart, productive strategy. So what should you do? 

Professional bloggers and content marketing pros have learned that quality content geared toward a defined target audience is the single best way to generate more traffic on your website.

The fact is, though, just because you build it doesn’t mean anyone will come.

Content marketing is not an easy definition to pin down. When you Google this term, over 49 million search results come back. And this trending term has grown 500% in the past five years.

Interactivity is crucial to inbound marketing. In a sense, every design choice in an inbound marketing campaign should be built around a desire to interact with your prospective customer. However, that’s still only one part of the story. Sometimes, it’s necessary to directly solicit data from your prospects. How?

The cliché phrase, “No pain, no gain” probably originated in one of the ubiquitous exercise videos from the early ‘80s. Jane Fonda, anyone? Still, the basic concept continues to apply across lots of different activities.