10 Ways to Promote Your Membership Website Locally

By David Eedle |

Sometimes internet marketers forget there’s a whole world of often low cost promotional opportunities on their doorstep. It’s easy to become caught up in the excitement and wonder of promoting your membership website online. It’s a big world out there, with hundreds of millions of people teaming around the internet, some of whom would hopefully love to subscribe to your website and pay you money.

I reckon it’s easy to forget some of the marketing 101 truths. I was actually prompted by my post on Startup Brand Success, where I pointed out that a T Shirt seller shouldn’t forget the traditional offline avenues:

Twitter, Facebook and all the social networks offer opportunity. But don’t get blindsided by the hype. If you are selling T-Shirts then plenty of people have started out selling at their local markets, handing out samples in nightclubs, giving them to friends to wear, working to get stocked by a couple of super cool stores and so on. You need to capture the mavens, the people who lead the trends.

It reminded me that I need to keep reminding myself there’s a ready-made marketplace within cooee – our own home town, Melbourne. Not the biggest city in the world of course, but with four million people it’s not a bad starting place. It’s easy to fall prey to the glitzy world of Google AdWords and all the other online marketing systems, but all too often the tried and true methods work well, especially when launching a new business on a tight budget. I remember when we were scoping the launch of one of our membership websites in the USA. A sage and experienced friend reminded us that the USA is not a single market, it’s 52 countries all joined together. What works on East Coast won’t necessarily work on the West Coast. What people respond to in the north won’t cut the mustard in the south. Their suggestion was simply to set out to conquer California – and perhaps San Francisco to start with.

Local marketing is often over-looked by online businesses

I’ve held that advice close to heart ever since. There is no point setting out to conquer the world on Day 1 of the marketing plan. Try your own home town to start with.

Here’s 10 ways we’ve successfully promoted our membership websites in our own home town of Melbourne. And not an internet web browser to be seen.

1. Posters and flyers – the fancy schmancy internet marketers will be aghast. But the old stuff works fine. We print big bundles of handbills and pay students to distribute throughout the cafes and coffee shops.

2. Trade shows – trade shows can be an expensive exercise, so we used to try and find other companies to partner with and share the cost as a way of reaching directly to a commercial audience.

3. Lectures to university students – I’ve guest lectured at a number of universities around Australia, all with the underlying intent of promoting our membership websites. Good sign ups always eventuated, and I’m usually even paid as a sessional lecturer!

4. Community radio and TV ads – there’s loads of attention given when some multinational (or internet wanna be) spends a few million buying a 30 second spot at the Super Bowl. But airtime on community radio and television is cheap and can be very effective. It’s often listened to by non-consumers of commercial media, and with ads costing peanuts you can afford lots of repetition.

5. Run a competition for a new logo / name – when one of our membership websites needed a new logo the managers ran a competition with a decent prize – $5,000 I recall, plus several smaller prizes for 2nd, 3rd etc. Total prize pool was around $10,000. It gained loads of attention, and even a little controversy.

6. Business media love little businesses made good – the most expensive newspaper in Australia is the Financial Review – the dedicated business newspaper. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they’d only be interested in big businesses. We’ve had several stories in the Fin. I once went to renegotiate our over draft with our business banker, and she had a clipping of a Fin article on Fiona and me on file – she was mightily impressed and approved the overdraft on the spot. Apparently being in the Fin Review was good for our credit rating.

7. Local press love a local success story – that’s why local media is called local media. And they’ll write about anyone local who seems vaguely interesting. The small paper people tend to be under-resourced, make sure you do all the leg work, with a good written press release they can copy/paste and set up a photo op.

8. Cultivate the mavens – it’s been shown you only need a few dozen mavens on your side and you can start a world wide trend. Make a super human effort to reach out to the dozen people who matter in your niche in your town.

9. Publish a directory – be philanthropic. At Arts Hub we once took over the running of the government’s directory of arts funding grants and operated the web site for a while. They were happy to have a nuisance task off their hands, and we had an excuse to reach out to every arts organization in the country. Which was handy given that this coincidentally was a key part of our marketplace.

10. Approach local organizations and associations – if you can find an offline cross-over, search out local associations and groups, and offer a membership discount to your web site they can sell on to their members. It’s a sort of affiliate scheme, you can even pay the association a commission.

What are your experiences? How have you promoted your internet business in your local marketplace?

Image: Flickr nataliemaynor

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