For most professional associations, content and connection are the primary value drivers for members. Particularly in many healthcare and engineering spaces, your association may be the best source of deep, thoughtful research that drives the whole profession forward.
As association marketers, this content is an asset that can be leveraged strategically, but definitely must be used thoughtfully. There’s a tension between the idea of showing new potential members the value of membership by allowing them to sample content from subject matter experts (SMEs), and the idea that giving too much away for free can discourage membership in the first place. There’s also the problem of making sure you can expose your information to web crawlers and search engines without giving it away for free.
This is an area where a good content management system can be a tremendous help. The journalism world has dealt with this tension for years, and has arrived at a number of strategies that can be applied to association content just as effectively. The most obvious is, of course, what most associations use: you need to be a subscribed member to get access to that content. But let’s take a minute to take a look at some content gating (“paywall”) strategies and how they can help with your association.
Tiered Access
This is probably the most popular content access method I’ve seen in associations beyond the simple member/non-member paywall approach. In many cases, the deepest content and the most in-depth research is more valuable, and can therefore be restricted to a higher member tier. This can also be a question of varying content for the appropriate audience; students and expert members of a governing body will not get the same value from the same sort of content, so it makes sense to gate these differently.
The advantages of tiered access is that you can provide more value to members that are able to contribute more to the association in a way that you can’t with a simple all-or-nothing access model. This is a good way to differentiate content in industries that rely on long-form research content. This can be a challenge to implement, however, if you already have that all-or-nothing access because you have to deal with the perception that you’re taking something away. A better approach would be to either add this when starting up new types of content, or when considering offering a lower priced tier of membership that would align with the reduced access.
Time-Delayed Access
In a time-delayed access model, you can restrict access to the latest information for some period of time, say 60 or 90 days, allowing members (or higher membership tiers) to get a first-mover advantage with the most recent research or findings.
The advantage of this strategy is definitely not universal. This works well for fast-moving industries where having access to the most recent information can offer a competitive advantage, but may not work for other professions.
Metered Access
One option is to meter the access to high-value content; that is, offering a certain number of articles per month. While this may take some technical work to set up, it allows members to tailor their membership level around how often they use the service. Members may also choose to increase their tier level to access more content, but the downside is that the user experience may not feel the best, and in many cases, we want to encourage members to engage with the association. Metered access should either be reserved for free access levels or only very high-value content.
Sharing Codes
A clever way to leverage your membership to engage new potential members is through the use of sharing codes. This allows members to share a single article to users outside the paywall. The idea is that you add a button that lets members generate a unique short URL for the article they want to share, and then they can use that URL to send to others. The unique URL can be associated with that specific member and the shared article, which lets you measure the social impact of the member sharing the content and engage directly with the people that you can reach through their share. Using a unique URL to skip the paywall also allows you to put whatever sorts of controls on this feature that you might like: limiting number of shares, number of views, timing, etc.
The great thing about this approach is that it provides a way for your members to directly help with your marketing. You can also customize the messaging that share recipients see in order to provide compelling membership offers.
Of course, this is something that would need to be controlled, and may not be appropriate for every type of content. It’s also one of the more technically involved paywall methods to set up, but does avoid a lot of the downsides of other strategies.
Your Content And Your Marketing Don’t Have To Be Separate
I’ve seen so many associations put a lot of work into providing valuable content for members, but then ignore all of that when marketing to new members and solely using messaging to market to new members. By demonstrating the value of a membership, you can get double value from your member content and establish yourself as a thought leader through direct evidence instead of just talk.
Many of these strategies can work together, or be applied to different kinds of content to align the value of your content with the cost to access it.