How to Market Your Searchie Membership Site
So you’ve been hard at work, creating a value-packed Searchie membership site to build your community and share your knowledge with them. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it—just think of how the content of your Searchie membership site will grow and deepen as time goes by, making it ever more valuable to your clients and prospects!
But how to launch it so that all your hard work truly pays off? A solid marketing plan for launching your Searchie membership site is key to its success. Here’s my advice:
Create the Launch Timeline
First, decide how many times per year you want to open the doors to your Searchie membership site. While there are some memberships out there that are always open to new members, life gets a lot easier if you have two or three focused launch periods per year, where you put energy into spreading the word about your membership and onboard new members, and then spend the rest of your time providing a stellar experience inside the membership.
Now that you have your yearlong launch calendar, let’s focus on the timeline for the initial launch. I suggest that you allow at least four weeks for the lead up to your initial launch, and three weeks for subsequent launches. These weeks will be spent promoting the heck out of your Searchie membership site (more on that below). Then I’d allow one or two weeks for the doors to be open to new members. You want to build excitement as well as a sense that action is required NOW, or else the doors will shut.
Pricing is Part of Marketing
Pricing can be another way to nudge founding members into the door. In your messaging, be sure to let prospects know that founding members get a great deal on price—and that they can lock themselves in at this price, which will never be this low again. This will add to the sense of urgency and provide you with some excited founding members!
You can raise the monthly price of membership with each launch if you choose, making it more and more urgent for new members to join at the current price.
Create Your Messaging Plan
During the weeks of lead up as well as the period when the doors are open, you want to promote your Searchie Membership site via all the channels you can think of. Create a series of emails for your email list, ranging from telling them about the membership, addressing any potential objections, and finally “act now, the doors are about to close” messages.
Plan out social media posts that convey these messages to a broader audience. Let them know who you are and who you serve, what they will gain from the membership, and why it’s critical to get in the doors as soon as they open. Speaking of that, you could consider creating a bonus of some sort—a digital product, a mini session with you, or a discount—for the first 10 members. That will get them running in the doors when they are opened!
Social media ads are a great way to expand the reach of your social media messaging. Be sure to select audience attributes that will help your ads reach the right prospects.
Consider how you can create some media buzz that coincides with your launch period. Can you be a guest on a podcast that will reach your intended audience? What about writing a guest blog post or getting mentioned in an article? While the timeline for media coverage is a bit hard to control, getting press is always a good idea for growing your influence and increasing your credibility.
Membership Launches are Cyclical
When you complete your founding member launch for your Searchie membership site, pat yourself on the back and then do your future self a favor: make a launch folder that saves all of your launch copy from emails, posts, and ads. Do a post-mortem to determine what worked best and what didn’t work so well. The good news is that when you reopen the membership in a few months, this folder will be a resource that makes it so much easier than this time!
In the meantime, you’ll serve your founding members and continue to build your credibility. You should have a practice of capturing every positive comment made by your members to use as powerful social proof in future launches (ask their permission before using their quotes, of course). In addition to this, you can solicit feedback/testimonials from them before the next launch. This feedback can both help you make improvements to the membership as well as attract new members.
You should also provide sneak peeks into what’s going on in the membership from time to time in your email marketing and social media. This keeps your membership top of mind and makes the viewer see what they’re missing out on—so they jump on board at the next opportunity!
Launch Your Membership—Even Imperfectly
It’s a common trap to wait until some future time when you believe you’ll finally be “ready” to launch your membership. This is a good way to hide from our deepest fears about putting ourselves out there! I recommend that you set your launch schedule and then share that with a colleague or in some public way, to give you accountability. And there’s no shame in calling in some support—in fact, launches are critical junctures and it pays to get help. My mission is to help as many entrepreneurs share their offerings with the world using Searchie. I’m here for you! I can set up your Searchie membership site for you or you can do it yourself using my guided template.
Best wishes on your growing your membership!
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