Marketing for an Industry Association is very difficult because there are a limited number of businesses in each industry and only a percentage of those businesses are willing to join an association. Also many industry associations compete against each other and in some cases there are several Industry Associations for a single industry. Then there are often regional associations and not every company wishes to join all of them. This makes it difficult for Industry Associations to survive. For this reason many Industry Associations work very hard to recruit vendors of the industry to also join to support its members. Unfortunately if too many industry vendors join invariably the members who are constantly being bombarded with marketing and sales reps choose not to renew. Most large Industry Associations have annual conferences and Expos to keep their Industry Association strong. Often they also have trade journals or they work with other magazines in their industry to help promote them in a win-win situation. Large Industry Associations looking for more ways to market and increase revenues and many are turning towards online Expos, which allows them to help market all of their industry vendor members to their regular business members. E-Expos are nice because they work 24/7 on the Internet and this allows new leads to constantly manifest themselves for the vendor members. Perhaps you have noticed in your industry this new tactic of E-Expos and its growing popularity. It is rather nice for the business members because they know where they can find information, which will be there all the time. Such a strategy for E-Expos and Industry Associations is a very good use of the Internet for sales and marketing, association brand name and keeping peace between the various types of members in the Industry Association. A decade ago this did not exist, but it is becoming very popular today. It is another good way to turn an Industry Association web site into an industry portal and therefore increase membership of all types of members. Please consider this in 2006. |
