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This post is part of an ongoing series, which is based on the ebook "Top 21 marketing ways for membership sites Written by the Subscription Coach Amanda Northcutt.

 The entire collection is available in a book

The big six social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn. Pick 1 or 2 channels on which your users are located and on which you enjoy interaction. Be active on these channels five days a week. 80% of what you say should be helpful or useful for your viewers, with only 20% being marketing. Thus, 1 five social media posts should be "salesy," that's it. No more, no less.

Your social strategy should tie to the content marketing plan. If, for instance, there is a theme for the month or theme in your membership, then your content marketing (remember you need an unpaid or. paid content strategy to make this work) should be aligned with that monthly theme. Not surprisingly, the social media strategy you choose to implement should promote and relate to the content that you are releasing for free each month. You don't have to reinvent your wheel. Streamline your content marketing and social strategy by piggybacking on what you're doing behind the paywall for your members who are paying.

Facebook is the best option in terms of paid advertisements for the majority of membership sites as there are 2.3 billion active users. Infinite customizations are allowed, but it's not the ideal site for your activities on social media unless you've got an established Facebook Group.

It's not my intention to take a deep dive into the benefits and drawbacks of every medium since it's not within the scope of this article. However, we recommend Instagram, Pinterest, and/or YouTube when your group's activities revolve on highly visual instructions or education, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn if your membership is B2B (business to business). Using a social media scheduler, like Buffer or Edgar can help you manage your social sharing and alleviate the burden of being present on the social media platform daily. That being said it is important to show up often and engage with those who are interested, but it's likely unreasonable to add daily social engagement to everything else that you must do as a membership site owner.

Your once-weekly promotional, more salesy, or social media interaction social media should absolutely have a call-to-action (CTA) which is in line with the steps your followers on each platform might be willing to complete in order to join your group. This could include participating in an engaging contest, taking part in a test, registration for a webinar visiting your website or a specific landing page as well as downloading your lead magnet.

When you require an email address in exchange for the content you've created the content serves as what's called lead magnet. A lead magnet is a piece of content with a high value and relevance that you offer to your potential customer in exchange for the email addresses of those who sign up. If someone enters their email address should be able to immediately get the content promised by email, and also be added to your list of email addresses. Don't allow them to be on your email address for the occasional newsletter email or something similar. Instead, have a strategy put in place to turn the new customer into an active member on your web site! It is done by preloading an lead nurturing email sequence, which will automatically go in the event that somebody downloads the lead magnet. And yes, this is labor-intensive, but it is by far the most efficient set-and forget marketing tool available to you. Do it once, and examine your nurture emails each six months.

Your primary goal for your social CTAs is to collect a prospect's email address so they start receiving your automated nurturing email sequence. Like all marketing efforts actions, social interactions should be intentional relevant, appropriate to the context, and quantifiable. If you don't have accurate information regarding click-throughs conversions, shares, and likes, retweets, lead captures and more. It's possible that you're in the wrong place. Do you have it?

To learn more about Facebook Live, grab Hubspot's Ultimate Guide here.

Marketing with organic influencers

Working with people who hold the interest of a large bulk of your targeted group is the most efficient route towards growth for a membership website. Try to accomplish this organically or directly making a payment.

For the purposes of membership sites, the term "influencer" is someone who has amassed a large, loyal, and engaged following online because they are the expert in their field, or just super funny/interesting/etc. People love being with them. Engagement is the key metric to look for when seeking out influencers in your field. There are some influencers with several thousand or more followers. But it doesn't matter for those who overwhelmingly do not follow and don't engage with their influencer.

It's been reported that there are instances of paid influencer marketing when celebrities are hired to serve as the spokesperson of an established brand. Entrepreneurs and bootstrappers have applied the same concept to niche markets and applied it to specific niche market.

Chances are that there influencers within your field. What author has published a book about the topic of your membership? Who hosts conferences for your target audience? Which are the best 3 blog, podcasts and YouTube websites that your customers pay an attention to? These are your influential people. You need to identify, find, and start by helping them. Learn how to make sure you are putting your best foot forward to ensure that over time, you can forge real relationships with influential people and work towards mutually beneficial, collaborative projects.

Offering value to the industry's influencers through being nice and helpful is the right way to get on their notice. Your overarching goal with this marketing channel is to begin by establishing genuine connections (to make a friend or befriend) with said influencers - Then, in time you can work on creating mutually beneficial ways to reach each other's audiences. Take care to treat these relationships like kid gloves. Take care, be thoughtful, and mindful the fact that they often have the ability to influence purchase decisions of their audience. This should work for you rather than against you.

It is easy to become a more helpful person by consistently doing things such as engaging with them on social media (retweets, likes, comments, etc. ) and reviewing the book(s) through Amazon and leaving a positive review of their podcast on iTunes, consistently leaving useful comments on blog articles, sharing their content to your followers and tag their social networks with a quick thank you, and so on. Get these kinds of activities in your schedule as a recurring event so your organic influencer plan stays on track.

If you send an email or initiate an outreach on social media to introduce yourself, it's smart to provide a quotation from the influential person from a blog article or interview on a podcast, or recently held speaking engagement, along with an interesting comments about the way their guidance or expertise helped you or ask you a follow-up query. It shows that you've completed research and aren't arriving from the blue, with an agenda to execute.

Then say you've been a for a long time a admirer of the work they do (because that's what you've followed and helping the team for a while, right? ), you've published their work to your readers multiple times and you're in the same industry and thought it might be helpful to make connections. Then, you can offer to introduce them to anyone in your network that might be beneficial to their business (great when you've got particular people who you're sure they're buddies with). Make sure you don't request anything during this first contact. If they are positive proceed slowly but steadily and keep providing the value they need to that individual. Work at their pace however do not be afraid to inquire to collaborate if it makes sense.

If your working relationship progresses the relationship should naturally to collaborate on information when it is relevant. You should also be on each other's podcasts and cross-promote services. bundle offers for services as well as explore other innovative partnerships for sharing content with your audience.

If your influencer marketing efforts organically come up short, or you are low on time, don't fret and try sponsored influencer marketing instead!

Influencer marketing paid for

Similar to natural influencer marketing you'll initially have to determine the influential people in your sector, but you can speed up the entire process by reaching out to them about paid promotional opportunities.

Some recognized influencers could have a media kits of sorts on their website when they've conducted paid influencer marketing for others previously. If you're not sure if they've been paid for collaborations or exposure to their followers before then you may need to determine whether they'd even think about it. Regardless, you're better off if you've followed the relationship-building steps outlined in the previous section on organic influencer marketing so you're on their radar before you make that inquiry.

Opportunities for paid influencers might include: sending a paid email sent to their mailing subscribers and a sponsored blog and a guest slot on their podcast and paying them to become an invited participant on a webinar and/or paying them to do an interview, paying them to speak at your event or conference and anything else you can think of that is beneficial to the context of your business.

Borrowing someone else's audience is the fastest and often most cost-effective way to grow. Be aware of the influence that marketing has in your acquisition and marketing strategy.