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4 Best Practices for Association Web Design

man explaining association web design

Your association needs a strong digital presence to stand out from the crowd. In fact, it’s estimated that you only have seven seconds to grab someone’s attention before they click away to the next website. With such a short time period to keep your users engaged, you’ll need a solid web design.

A well-designed website can help your association convert prospective members into applicants and retain existing members’ interest in your organization. As a result, you’ll have a thriving member base, allowing you to reach your objectives and grow at scale.

However, if you’re new to web development, creating your association’s website can feel overwhelming. With the right tools and strategies, you can jumpstart your web design and confidently build the association website of your dreams. Use these essential practices to boost existing members’ support and bring new people to your organization:

  1. Use consistent branding.
  2. Adhere to accessibility guidelines.
  3. Add an intranet network and private pages.
  4. Ensure your website is mobile friendly.

Before diving into these tips, keep in mind that a content management system designed specifically for associations will arm you with the tools and features needed for your industry. Let’s begin.

1. Use consistent branding.

Your association’s brand is made up of your mission, values, tone, and visual elements like logos, fonts, and color schemes. These elements work together to show the world what your association is all about. That’s why your website’s branding should be consistent with other public-facing materials from your association, like your marketing collateral and social media pages.

Branding can help your association web design look more professional. 

According to Morweb’s guide to web design best practices, branding is crucial to your website’s success for two reasons:

  • It builds online visibility in your community and beyond. Good branding helps with publicity, so if you’re looking to recruit more members or get people to register for your upcoming conference, having a consistent brand will help them find you on the web.
  • It helps your association appear professional and organized. A generic website looks less put together and reduces credibility. Instead, use branding to show that you’re a reputable organization providing an excellent member experience.

If you’re struggling to identify what your association’s brand actually is or feel like it’s outdated, it might be time for a thorough brand refresh. Revisiting and re-evaluating your brand in these cases can help your team streamline your public messaging and increase your association’s brand recognition among your target audience.

2. Adhere to accessibility guidelines.

One critical component of good web design is accessibility. Having an accessible website means that people of all abilities are able to easily navigate and engage with your website’s content.

Here are some easy ways to put inclusivity at the forefront of your digital strategy:

  • Use text and graphics that have a high contrast ratio. A high contrast ratio makes it easier for people with visual impairments to read your web content. For example, black text on a white background stands out and ensures it’s easier to read the featured content.
  • Choose easy-to-read fonts. No one likes to waste time deciphering a complicated font. Keep things simple by choosing a sans-serif font, as these are typically better for web content.
  • Add alt-text to images and graphics. Alt-text, or alternative text, is added to the HTML of images or graphics on a website, providing a description of the image. This ensures that visitors using a screen reader won’t have any gaps in their browsing experience.
  • Offer closed captioning and transcripts for multimedia elements. If you’re including videos or podcasts on your websites, create a complete transcript so people with hearing disabilities can still interact with your content. You can also use free online tools to provide closed captioning on videos.
  • Include an accessibility widget. The right CMS for associations will allow you to add an accessibility widget to your website. This puts power in the hands of your website visitors, giving them the ability to change the coloring of the website to greyscale, increase the font size, and highlight links for easy access.

Web accessibility can open your organization up to diverse audiences. 

An accessible website will allow you to connect with people of all abilities who might be interested in working with or joining your association. Plus, your reputation will likely get a healthy boost when people see you’re making a concerted effort to welcome every visitor to your site.

To stay up to date with current accessibility standards, make sure to actively review the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Created by the World Wide Web Consortium, these guidelines can help your association evolve its digital strategy to meet growing web accessibility initiatives. Use an association-specific CMS to easily implement these changes without having to code.

3. Add an intranet network and private pages.

One of the greatest benefits of association membership is the opportunity to network with other professionals. To promote professional development and connect members with each other, add members-only resources, like member directories, forums, job boards, private event pages, or a members-only blog, to your website.

With a CMS built for associations, you can easily keep these sensitive and exclusive parts of your website secure by creating a password-protected intranet network. This will help you establish a strong community within your association and prove to your members that being part of your organization is worthwhile.

A secure website will help members feel more confident interacting with your website. 

Here are some tips to ensure that your members-only web resources stay secure:

  • Monitor account registration and deny any suspicious-looking registration attempts.
  • Encourage your members to regularly update their passwords.
  • Consider requiring a two-factor authentication sign-in process to preserve the security of your site.

On top of providing valuable information and resources to your members, emphasizing a secure intranet network also shows your current and prospective members that you’re a trustworthy organization. People will be more willing to give you their contact information or payment information when they feel confident in your web security measures.

4. Ensure your website is mobile friendly.

With people spending more time on their phones than ever, it’s a good idea to optimize your website for mobile users. This can help your organization expand its reach to a mobile audience and create a smooth experience for supporters interacting with your content on any device.

Make your association website mobile-friendly to increase your reach. 

Here are a few things you can do to optimize your site for mobile devices:

  • Use a CMS that takes care of mobile responsiveness automatically.
  • Make your donation or dues pages “thumb friendly” by including drop-down menus and single input areas.
  • Ensure pop-up windows scale to mobile devices so that website visitors can easily exit out of them.
  • Compress images to increase your website’s load speed.

When your website is mobile friendly, it is much easier for your association’s members to use it on a regular basis. Plus, a mobile-friendly website can encourage users to share your content straight from their phones, whether they’re emailing a webinar registration form to a colleague or sharing a blog post on social media.

The Gist

Your website serves as an invaluable marketing tool and resource for members. Even if you don’t have any web development experience, these essential tips can help you create an engaging and comprehensive website. Conduct research to find and invest in a CMS with association-specific features so you can easily create a strong digital presence tailored to your audience.

This is a guest post from Murad Bushnaq

Murad Bushnaq is the Founder and CEO of Morweb. Since its inception in 2014, Murad has acted as Creative Director and Chief Technologist to help nonprofits spread their vision online through engaging design, intuitive software and strategic communication.

The post 4 Best Practices for Association Web Design appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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The Content-Driven Guide to Disruptive Marketing [With Examples]

disruptive marketing

If you’re a marketer, you know it’s hard to stand out from the crowd today! Technology, the internet, and constant access to smartphones have made it difficult to get noticed by consumers who are inundated with brand advertising and content. Pair that with the fact that humans’ attention span has become shorter than that of a goldfish and you’re met with a substantial challenge.

Disruptive marketing — or the process of transforming and even replacing industry status quos — is often necessary for new or smaller brands to get ahead.

But what does disruptive marketing really mean? How can you learn to do it? Is the risk really worth the reward?

In the sections that follow, we’ll answer these questions and more. Let’s get started!

Quick Takeaways

  • Disruptive marketing has its roots in the business concept of disruptive innovation.
  • Like disruptive innovation, disruptive marketing makes products more accessible, is always customer-focused, and requires risk at the beginning.
  • Disruption requires challenging assumptions and committing to continual improvement.
  • Social media advertising and influencer marketing are examples of two significant disruptions in the marketing industry.
  • Brands like Dollar Shave Club, La Croix, AirBnB, and Wendy’s have leveraged content to execute disruptive marketing strategies.

What is disruptive marketing (really)?

Disruptive marketing’s innovative roots

Disruptive marketing has its roots in the idea of disruptive innovation, a concept coined by Harvard business professor Clay Christensen. Clay defined disruptive innovation as:

“a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market . . . eventually displacing established competitors.”

In other words: it starts small, gains momentum, upends industry norms, and eventually creates totally new ones.

The video below gives a quick and really helpful overview of disruptive innovation that I recommend watching before we keep going.

A few important takeaways from the video:

Disruptive innovation makes something more affordable or accessible.

The most obvious examples of this are technology innovations and smartphones, which have democratized data to the masses.

Disruptive innovation often seems like it’s doing everything wrong in the beginning.

When Uber was founded, people scoffed at the idea of getting into a stranger’s car. The idea of AirBnB made people nervous in the same way. Today? They’re both ubiquitous parts of everyday life and travel.

Disruptive innovations are often low quality at first.

They require many iterations and improvements over time. Think about our iPhones — every new model is better than the last, but Apple doesn’t wait until they perfect every feature to release them.

Disruptive innovations focus on the customer.

Business innovation and marketing crowds agree: you can only find success by fulfilling customer needs. Disruptive innovation looks at customer needs of the future, often filling them before customers even recognize they exist!

How does it all relate?

All of the above are true for disruptive marketing, too. When you think about these points from a marketing perspective, it’s something like this:

Disruptive marketing takes an innovative, novel approach to marketing products and services to new and existing audiences. It uses new channels, mediums, messages, and more to accomplish something not done before by other companies.

Because of this, disruptive marketing is also inherently risky. There are no past examples to work from. Marketers have to look at what they do know and make informed predictions about what’s likely to resonate with audiences.

If all of this sounds kind of difficult — well, that’s because it is. If disruptive marketing were easy, brands would do it all the time to get ahead of the competition.

The good news is that you can easily learn tools and techniques (we’ll cover them in this article) to help you recognize opportunities for disruptive marketing and innovation. You can practice them all the time — constantly trying out disruptive strategies and operating in a way that gets your content noticed.

And the payoff? It can be huge! Disruptive marketing helps new market entrants shoot ahead of established competitors, boosts company growth, and increases brand awareness manifold.

How do you use disruptive marketing?

Challenge assumptions

The first way to uncover disruptive marketing ideas is to challenge the assumptions that exist about current marketing practices and consumer preferences in your industry. Challenging assumptions is another idea founded in the world of business innovation, and it basically means to question what is assumed to be true.

When you do, you get one of two answers: a confirmation that an assumption is indeed true, or a realization that it isn’t. When you get that second answer — that the assumption is not true — you know you’ve got an opportunity for disruptive marketing.

Truly challenging assumptions requires questioning the very core of what we think must be true for a given industry or market. Consider these business innovation examples:

Examples of companies who used disruptive innovation to transform their industries

Image Source: weploy

Imagine what people’s responses would have been 20 years ago if they heard about banks with no cash, or accommodations providers with no property, or taxi companies that don’t own cars.

The point: what seems impossible may not be so. It may, in fact, be an assumption. True disruptive innovators — and disruptive marketers — challenge assumptions constantly to find new opportunities for growth.

Two true marketing disruptions that might help you visualize how this concept plays out in practice are:

Social media advertising

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the idea of businesses using social media was unheard of. As many a millennial will tell you, it was once a haven mostly exclusive to high school and college students. Fast forward to today, and social media ads have totally changed the way social platforms make money and how brands interact with consumers.

Influencer marketing

Regular people promoting products, earning a living from it, and getting higher engagement than celebrities with millions of followers? This idea may have been laughed at by marketers even just a few years ago. But today micro- and mid-level influencers are being pursued by brands big and small. They are all but replacing traditional celebrity endorsements as people find them less relatable and authentic than influencer content.

Continually improve

The second important concept to remember when you’re implementing a disruptive marketing strategy is that if you wait for it to be perfect, you’ll be waiting forever (and probably, a competitor will beat you out in the meantime). Part of being disruptive is launching quickly and then working to continually improve based on audience response.

To clarify: this does not mean being careless. Instead, it means thinking of ways to get your idea out there, continually assessing its performance, and improving as you go.

An easy example is your social media content. You post content, track its engagement and performance, and adjust your strategy as you go. You don’t wait until every post is perfect to get active on social platforms because then you’d never do it!

The same goes for a potentially disruptive marketing idea. Flesh it out enough to be launched, see how your initial audiences react to it, and make it better as you expand it. This strategy will make you more agile and help you test assumptions about your audience along the way.

4 Examples of Great Disruptive Marketing

Okay — by now you might be thinking: is disruptive marketing really for me? We’ve looked at examples like Uber, Facebook, and Apple. What happened to disruption helping small brands get ahead? How can you actually be disruptive in your own niche (and perhaps on a limited budget)?

Great questions. And here’s the answer: you can do it with content.

Content marketing is used today by 91% of businesses across industries. It has proven to earn 3x the leads and 6x the conversions as other marketing methods, and at only 62% of the cost.

Your content is a huge opportunity for disrupting the marketing status quo. Let’s find inspiration from 4 brands that have already done it successfully.

Dollar Shave Club

While every other razor brand was trying to one-up each other on the smoothest and most luxurious experience, Dollar Shave Club came onto the scene in 2011 with a game-changing assumption: people don’t actually care much about those things when it comes to shaving.

They also cut right to the chase about the currently inconvenient experience of buying a razor.

Dollar Shave Club’s first commercial — now viewed a whopping 24+ million times on YouTube — uses a healthy dose of snarky humor to pretty quickly convince potential customers that they’ve got a better option.

They totally flipped the standing narrative in the razor industry and convinced the masses that less is actually more. Today they have more than 4 million subscribers.

La Croix

La Croix has been around since 1981 in the extremely competitive beverage industry. Celebrity endorsements are common in this industry (we can all name a few Pepsi or Gatorade commercials featuring famous faces, right?) and once social media became a thing, influencers were just as common, too.

Rather than go after heavy-hitting influencers, however, La Croix decided to take a different approach. They started partnering with micro- and nano-influencers (some with only a few hundred followers) to generate content that felt more relatable to their audience. Then they began featuring it on their own social media pages.

La Croix Instagram post featuring micro-influencer content.

Image Source: Instagram

It worked! La Croix’s sales doubled over five years between 2013-2018, showing the power of micro-influencers to attract and engage their audiences.

AirBnB

AirBnB capitalized on user-generated content — influencer or not — to create a brand name now known for its authenticity (and for inspiring wanderlust in its audience). Remember that AirBnB doesn’t own any of the property for rent on their platform. To find and share content, they decided to look toward their customers.

In 2016, well before user-generated campaigns became the norm, more than 75% of AirBnB’s content was generated by app users.

In 2016, more than 75% of content shared by AirBnB on Instagram was generated by app users.

Image Source: Pixlee

They moved away from the industry norm of sharing property photos and focused on selling the actual experience of staying at a place. As we know now, it paid off in spades.

Wendy’s

What if I told you that snark marketing was founded in the… fast food industry? You read that right. Wendy’s, specifically, spearheaded the idea that snarky, clever interaction with customers and other brands would be a good way to stand out on crowded social media spaces.

Their snarky replies to customers (many who quite literally ask for it) evolved into an annual #NationalRoastDay when Wendy’s roasts Twitter users, competitors, and lots of other good-sport brands who get in on the fun. And they definitely don’t miss a chance to get one in on their top competitor when the opportunity presents itself:

Example of Wendy’s using snark marketing on social media.

Image Source: Twitter

Wendy’s social media snark has earned them followers, created a new part of their brand personality, and kept their brand name active in online conversation. Worth the risk!

Over to You

Could your brand be a disruptor in your industry? From blogs to video to social media posts and more, your content is a driver of new ideas and opportunities for your marketing strategy.

If you want to boost the quality and volume of your brand’s content, Marketing Insider Group can help. Our team of writers and SEO experts will deliver you optimized, ready-to-publish content every single week for one year (or more!).

Check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation with me to get started.

The post The Content-Driven Guide to Disruptive Marketing [With Examples] appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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