B2P Case Study: Dramatically Increasing Membership Among Science Teachers
Increasing relevance via data, segmentation and using a B2P Approach
Digital continues to disrupt traditional models and practices. The growth of content alone has upended formerly lucrative publishing businesses and radically changed the relationship of associations to members and member prospects.
What was once seen as a easy purchase, join or renewal decision is now made more challenging as “loyalty” isn’t a given. The “choices” in today’s marketplace are vast and the expectations of individuals are highly personalized.
The modern buyer (whether considered B2C or B2B focused) have coalesced their behaviors, particularly their decision making to correlate strongly to personal choice and high expectations correlated to the value they seek.
As such, organizations and businesses formerly classifying themselves as B2B focused should consider a shift to B2P (Business to Professional).
Why?
In today’s marketplace, with information available with a few clicks or swipes (including competitor content or services that only you used to offer), the modern buyer wants you to bring forward your value proposition positioned and communicated to the benefits they personally seek.
Many would classify physicians or teachers as B2B but ultimately a physician or teacher is making a value decision on the basis of how they believe the service, content or offering is best matched to a need they have.
Their awareness, consideration and decision practices leverage and default to the same discovery, investigative and searching used to make personal decisions. Digital has given them informed power and tools.
As such, we believe it is time to leverage digital and data to deeply describe the current and prospect members, recognizing and respecting who they are and how an organization or business can best match the benefits of their services and offerings to meet their expectations and perceptions of value.
Digital and data give you the insights and intelligence you need to fundamentally change your former practices and strategies and experience new levels of engagement, commitment, loyalty and value.
Your current or prospect members:
Have a problem they want to solve.
Have a need that needs met.
Have expectations that are highly personal.
Have loyalty that could be yours.
Below we offer highlights of a recent client case study. It showcases the story of an association who sought to increase the quantity of members through a segmented approach.
Through the use of B2P strategies and targeted marketing, they were able to yield fantastic results, along with a blueprint to follow for future targeted, multimedia campaigns.
Executive Summary
One of the world’s largest professional scientific associations with over 100,000 members world-wide sought ways to increase their membership based on value by focusing in on key segments in the STEM community.
One segment was K-12 science teachers.
By using a cross media campaign to communicate the value of membership to K-12 science teachers based on their needs, the association increased their K-12 teacher membership over 50%.
Challenges
Science teachers represented a small minority of membership with 900 members, a small number of the overall 100,000 members.
And yet, the association has a lot of value to offer teachers including:
- A world-renowned weekly journal.
- Direct access to scientists and engineers across all disciplines.
- Fully vetted classroom materials using the latest standards for STEM education.
So, it seemed that the message of value was not getting through to this audience.
Value Proposition and B2P
Prior to implementing the B2P approach, the association used a feature driven B2C marketing program with no specific audience targets.
While this was simple and relatively easy to implement it generated below average results (less than 1/4th of a percent acquisition rate), the gains relied heavily on discounts further devaluing the brand; and expensive with a $200+ per acquisition cost.
The association used a five-prong approach to create a campaign that was targeted and effective.
Recognizing that teachers are professionals and their needs are driven by their profession, the association used a five-prong B2P approach to create segmented campaigns that incorporated a value proposition based on individual needs.
- Conduct research to understand teachers’ concerns, needs, and goals.
- Build a value proposition that focused on specific benefits for a science teacher derived from the association’s products and service.
- Develop a message that was focused on the science teacher as a professional with a strong, value-oriented, call for action.
- Cultivate targeted lists that leveraged data from the association’s in-house lists.
- Implement a cross media including social media, traditional direct marketing, dedicated landing pages, and email.
Results
The response to the B2P approach and resulting campaigns exceeded all expectations:
- Science teacher members grew by almost 50%.
- Acquisition rate increased to over 1%.
- Acquisition cost decreased to less than $50.
This campaigned also revealed a number of internal processes and systems that needed to be reviewed and upgraded to support a more sophisticated, multimedia campaigns in the future.
Read More about B2P Value Proposition and gain insights into our methodology and process in the first post of this B2P series.
Have a question or want to learn how we can help you? Take a moment and drop us a note via our contact us page.