So you have built out an amazing MemberVault to house your coaching program, courses, membership site or other amazing digital assets. Your marketplace is ready, but you're clueless as to how to get eyes on your MemberVault. Here’s 12 simple ways to get you started, corresponding to three key phases of marketing your business. But first, here’s a little more about the three phases:

Phase One: Getting Leads and Traffic

You know you’re at this phase if you’re still trying to get attention on social media, become known for that “thing” you do and build your email list to over 500-1000 subscribers. You’re building your brand awareness and trying to get noticed while collecting your initial testimonials as “social proof” that you rock what you offer. 

At Phase One, you need to focus more on getting leads over to your free lead magnet or “freemium,” that evergreen piece of content that is so juicy people can’t stand not to get it when they see how much it will help them. 

Phase Two: Conversion & Nurture

You’re getting people onto your email list, but need to do better at nurturing them toward a sale of one of your offers. 

This requires educating them and exciting them about what their life will be like after consuming your offer. Some ideas to consider doubling down on in Phase Two are optimizing your sales pages, reviewing your email nurture sequences, member highlights or makeovers with before and after contrasts, and running masterclasses or challenges or other online events for them to develop their “know, like and trust” of you.

Phase Three: Engagement, Gamification, Retention & Referrals

Now that you have leads and are converting them to your initial offers, how well are you retaining them, upselling into next level offers and getting word-of-mouth referrals? Did you know it is 5-7 times more expensive to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one? What strategies are you currently using to engage your current clients or students to create a referral engine for your business?

Strategies to engage in Phase Three include optimizing instructional design and onboarding for a delightful client/student experience, using affiliate, JV partnerships and curated expert content to cross-promote one another’s content, leveraging native MV features to promote high engagement, gamification and bonus content and finally, using unique member case studies to highlight your most engaged students (rewarding and retaining them) to motivate others to get similar results.

OK, now let’s look a little deeper at strategies to engage within each phase!

Strategy #1 [Lead Generation Phase]: Optimize your Social Media descriptions, graphics and include links to your MemberVault from each social platform (using close to the same description across each one). Create a single lead magnet in alignment with the next thing you offer. And then provide a single Call to Action (CTA) for that one lead magnet that pulls people over to opt-in to get your free resource. For example, if you offer a coaching program on how to nail your keynote presentation, build a lead magnet on “The Top 10 Things to Include in Your Keynote to Kickstart Your Public Speaking Career”. Your lead magnet will then focus on what they need, but will not show them exactly how to do it (save that for your paid content).

• Pro Tip: Add an email sign-up tab to your Facebook Page with your CTA embedded in Header graphic. 

Strategy #2 [Lead Generation Phase]: Use consistent branding so when you’re pulling visitors over from social media platforms to your website or MemberVault, they know they are in the right place. Then create stunning graphics for social posts, curriculum overview maps, testimonial graphics and mock-ups of your program or course materials to create compelling sales/landing pages to entice people to purchase what you offer. And always make your CTA buttons “pop” with color so they know exactly what next step to take along their customer journey.

• Pro Tip: Use http://buttonoptimizer.com/ to create stunning buttons for sales pages!

Strategy #3 [Lead Generation Phase]: By consistently delivering free content on every angle of your core offer, you will naturally draw the right people to find you. Content marketing can be done in three key formats: written word, audio or video. Do you prefer to clearly craft your message in advance, to speak extemporaneously or to speak in front of a camera or do screen share, tutorial-style videos. Usually people have a strong preference for one type over the others.

• Pro Tip: Pick ONE format and ONE platform and stick to a consistent publishing schedule for 3-6 months to begin getting traction before expanding out to other formats or platforms. 

Strategy #4 [Lead Generation Phase]: Research strong Search Engine Optimized words to get found on search engines, Pinterest and YouTube results. You want to make sure as people enter search terms into any search engine, that your ideal audience is finding your website and offers. Main keywords have a lot of competition, but more specialized phrases, called “long-tail keywords” have less competition and are more effective.

• Pro Tip: Check out www.soovle.com or Ubersuggest Keyword Finder Tool as a fun tool to suggest long-tail keywords. 

Strategy #5 [Conversion & Nurture Phase]: Once people find your website, your blog, your MemberVault marketplace or schedule a call with you via our Scheduler, your role is to try to convert them into a paying customer--even at a low ticket price. Everything on these “landing pages” or sales calls need to be designed to move them toward a specific call to action (CTA).

• Pro Tips: Have you optimized your landing pages with specific CTAs on each one? Do you end your live Discovery or Strategy calls with a well-rehearsed CTA? Help people move to the obvious next step by sharing how you can help them and the cost of not getting that help now. 

Strategy #6 [Conversion & Nurture Phase]: You need a strong email list building strategy in place to convert leads from search engine and social media to opt-into your email list using a very targeted lead magnet to draw in your ideal customer. But any good lead magnet needs to be evergreen or retain its value over time. The best lead magnets are reverse engineered to lead your ideal customer to your next offer. To do this, consider answering the following questions: 1) Who would I invite to a party to discuss my favorite topic (my offer)?, 2) What are the greatest struggles around this issue or pain they are experiencing that my offer would help them solve? And  3) How are they going to feel after they get my free resource, take action and get results? Then, throughout your email sequence, you are nurturing a relationship with your audience as they grow in knowing, liking and trusting you.

• Pro Tip: Create a single, timeless lead magnet that you use on all your platforms to draw people to your main free resource hub in MemberVault. 

Strategy #7 [Conversion & Nurture Phase]: After people “find” you online, have opted-into your email list, they may be ready to buy. So if you send them to a landing page or 3rd party checkout cart (like ThriveCart, Samcart or ClickFunnels), you need to provide a compelling reason to buy now. Most sales pages are complete with an offer stack of all the value you will get by purchasing your “thing.” And it is this unique combination of multiple things they get that compels them to buy your offer, rather than just a single product. Many business owners will also provide multiple testimonials or snips of Facebook comments as “social proof” on their sales pages that your offer has proven results as well as vivid call to action buttons and program mock-ups showing everything you’ll get with your purchase. 

• Pro Tip: Get Karem Mieses’ free “Productive Sales Pages” for a complete sales page template to create compelling sales pages. 

Strategy #8 [Conversion & Nurture Phase]: Host online and live events to draw your ideal customer, educate and excite them about what you offer (how you help) and then reveal an offer as a follow-up to the event. What kind of events? Online summits, conferences, webinars, masterclasses, retreats, bootcamps, 5-30 day challenges, makeovers and more! And the amazing thing is that MemberVault can house the training videos and downloadable resources for any of these events, while keeping all content organized and let you know where your students are in terms of consuming that content.

• Pro Tip: Use MemberVault’s dashboard to see students’ top interests and which topical modules are drawing their interest under warm and hot leads for further market research. The dashboard will also inform you what content to create in the future to delight and engage your audience. 

Strategy #9 [Retention & Referral Phase]: Using great instructional design and student onboarding experiences helps to further build your relationship and trust with your students. Always begin with a “Start Here” module giving an overview of your entire program, what students can expect from full participation, how much time to dedicate each day/week and what typical results are from those who engage the process. If your program includes a companion Facebook group, reiterate the community guidelines, provide the link to join and give a schedule of typical weekly post prompts to orient them to your group’s engagement practices.

• Pro Tip: Include the graphic banner of your Facebook group to help your students get visually oriented to confirm they are in the right place on Facebook prior to joining.

Strategy #10 [Retention & Referral Phase]: Use networking and cross-promotional strategies like joint-venture (JV) partnerships, curated content from multiple experts around the same themed topic and affiliate ambassadors to create a referral engine for your business and get in front of other people’s audiences (email lists) to cross-promote one another’s offers.

• Pro Tip: Use MemberVault as an intake information portal to gather and house information for your JV partnerships or curated information from multiple experts to prepare their promotional pages with their headshots, bios, testimonials, social media links and offers. 

Strategy #11 [Retention & Referral Phase]: Use MemberVault’s native features including engagement points, MV Actions, gamification with bonus release of additional content, and the binge and buy marketplace to further engage, retain and upsell additional offers to your audience.

• Pro Tip: Create a bonus product or module that automatically opens when students reach a certain completion point in your course. Be sure to mention they will “earn” this bonus in your introductory material to inspire them to persist until the end. Along the way, use MV quiz questions to gather student testimonials (while still making it optional) as part of their completion to earn the bonus. Win-win!

Strategy #12 [Retention & Referral Phase]: Feature unique case studies of your students and clients to provide your audience with different mental frameworks on how you can help them grow or overcome their common pain points. This is a great way to highlight and showcase the hard work of your most engaged clients and students while motivating those who are less engaged to re-engage the process to get similar results. People tend to stick around in membership sites not so much for the content, but for the community and growth experienced by collaborating with like-minded others.

• Pro Tip: Create a monthly challenge and request your students or members to post their results in a companion FB group as evidence of engagement. Select one person from those who have posted to highlight and feature their business by doing a “hot seat” session with them to answer all their questions, contribute ideas to build their business and then feature their website, offers, or other resources they offer to the entire group. 

Need more specifics on how to incorporate these 12 strategies to Market Your MemberVault? Need to know where to start?

If you're feeling overwhelmed by all the possible marketing strategies being touted on social channels and by "expert" entrepreneurs, don't allow yourself to get bogged down or overwhelmed.

Each strategy may have its place, but only when you're at the correct business phase to maximize each specific strategy. 

Take the free MemberVault Virtual Visibility Quiz to laser focus your marketing efforts on those that will benefit your business most at your current phase!