The momentum you had early fell off, people started interacting with each other less, and you’re tasked with reenergizing your community. Launching content and marketing tactics to attract new members are one of the fastest ways to bring the energy back up and create new valuable connections between your members.
At Mighty Pro, we host hundreds of professional networking communities—from cyber security networks to the maritime shipping industry to academics to marketing executive communities. Here are five of the best ways we’ve found to attract new members and restart a new chapter of growth and momentum.
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1. Create a micro-course to help more professionals discover your community
Lots of professional networking communities will use research reports or free ebooks as lead magnets in new membership campaigns. While simple, it’s a tactic that works like a charm.
An even more powerful way to collect new leads for your professional membership is to create a micro-course and offer it free on your website.
For example, the Accountable Leaders Community offers a micro-course on the mindset of accountability.
This micro-course not only introduces them to their founder’s leadership philosophy but also gets them using the free tier of their membership app, creating an easy path for new people to follow to become paying members.
2. Find your “time-bound & timeless” content
The best-performing content to attract new members is often both time-bound & timeless. To explain what we mean, let’s look at a real example from one of our customers, HR Superstars.
If you’re one of the thousands of HR leaders who are a part of the professional network HR Superstars, you’ll know that there is one topic that HR people can’t get enough of—performance reviews.
The community hosts events, working sessions, and knowledge-sharing sessions on the topic. This topic is also used for an ebook to collect email addresses, social media posts, and podcast episodes.
For an HR community, performance reviews are an example of a topic that is both time-bound and timeless.
Performance review cycles happen every six months. This gives HR Superstars the chance to bundle together events, working sessions, and content for these critical moments in their members’ professional lives and do a big push of content during this professional crunch time. The time-bound nature of the topic—where HR professionals are rushing to improve their performance review strategy and knowledge—creates excellent opportunities to use the topic and content to fuel new member growth.
The topic is also timeless: the tactics and trends might change, but HR professionals will always be looking for ways to improve their skills in this core competency. This allows you to cover the same topic in different ways over the years, creating a solid foundation of knowledge, content formats, and data sources that can make your content dominant in your market.
Every professional network community has this type of timebound and timeless content hiding in your data somewhere!
A community for marketing executives, for example, could structure events and content around yearly strategic planning cycles, providing trends and data that help executives during those critical periods during the year (typically in August for larger organizations and Q2 for a mid-year checkpoint).
This gives you top-of-funnel content to distribute on LinkedIn, as well as lots of interesting data to bring to their existing members for mastermind sessions and livestreaming events.
3. Hit the ‘go live’ button every week
80% of audiences would rather watch a livestream than read a blog post. Adding a weekly livestream is an easy way to add energy and spontaneity to your community. You’ll reactivate dormant members and it’s a video format that doesn’t require a ton of preparation like hosting an in-person event or advanced workshop.
The video captured during the livestream also makes for excellent content you can repurpose and distribute on LinkedIn. Tag members that attended to help put your community in front of their network to attract new members.
In terms of running a fun and engaging livestream, it’s helpful to work backward and think at the end of this livestream are there certain things you want viewers to think, feel, know, or do?
This helps you structure your livestream such as whether you want to start with a few slides or a structured presentation and then open it up into a Q&A or catch-up session.
It’s key that you don’t forget about the group chat that’s buzzing alongside your livestream. Answering questions live from members, doing a collaborative problem-solving session on an industry issue, these two-way communications are what makes livestreaming so successful and valuable for members.
4. Give static courses new life with social learning
If you’re finding that your courses just aren’t driving the membership growth they used to shake things up by adding a dedicated community alongside your courses.
Our customer TED, for example, uses Mighty Pro to help groups of learners move through education together in cohorts. This is a much more energetic way to offer courses as people can both network, share what’s working in their industry, and get formal knowledge from your courses.
Let’s say your flagship course is designed for director-level professionals.
You can add a community that these course participants get access to alongside your course content.
That way, members can meet each other during weekly office hour sessions. They can share advice with their peers in group chats, watching lessons together or working through companion materials.
You can create different courses and mini-communities for each audience you serve such as a general community for more junior members, director-level, and executive level. Your course content will now be much more interactive and whether members are posting a question in the community feed or sharing tips in the group chat, you’re giving members way more reasons to come back to your community.
5. Hook new members with an advanced workshop
Most professional networks have high-ticket membership prices. To generate some immediate revenue and attract new members, try hosting a half-day workshop with a lower price point of $500 to $1000.
Host the workshop inside your community and have the participants log in and experience what it would feel like to be a member.
A successful example of this we’ve seen work well was a Business Analytics community that hosted a masterclass workshop with foundational data analysis errors to avoid, visualization techniques, and interactive problem-solving.
The workshop was priced at $1000. The workshop was broad enough to attract a wider audience among marketing professionals and worked well in creating new interest for the community, converting some of the attendees into regular members, and built their email list for future member acquisition campaigns.
You can also then offer this new workshop as a freebie to your existing members, adding more value to your paying subscribers.
Ready to grow your professional network?
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