Episode 3: The Art of Evolving Your Membership… Without Breaking it

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

In this episode of "Membership-Driven Business," host Natalie Taylor discusses how to evolve your membership program without disrupting its core. She shares insights on maintaining alignment with your vision and values while adapting to changes in your business and market. This episode is essential for anyone looking to keep their membership relevant and engaging over time.

What You'll Learn:

How to identify when it's time to evolve your membership.
The importance of aligning your membership with your personal and business growth.
Strategies for implementing changes thoughtfully and communicating them effectively.
How to reflect your evolving values and ideas in your membership offerings.

Episode Highlights:

The Need for Evolution: Natalie explores why memberships need to evolve and how to recognize when it's time for a change.
Aligning with Your Vision: Learn how to keep your membership aligned with your current ideas, values, and the direction of your business.
Implementing Changes: Discover steps to implement changes in a way that supports your members and maintains their trust.
Communicating Changes: Understand the importance of clear communication with your members about the changes and how to do it effectively.

Links and Resources:

Contact Natalie: themissingink.co/connect
See how you can work with Natalie: themissingink.co/services

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

What have you been thinking about lately? Seriously — and not just the mundane things like the load of laundry that you need to put away or that you need to renew your driver's license or all of the deadlines and projects you're juggling at the moment.

I want to know what you think about when you give yourself the space to process what is happening for people. Your members, your customers for your audience and community at large.

What are you noticing?
What threads are you excited to follow?
What threads have you been following and what have you learned?

I want to know what ideas come up when you're on a walk or doing something completely unrelated to work. What's been giving you energy lately? I want to know what you're inspired by, what you're curious about, the kind of conversations and experiences you've been craving, both in business and in life.

I'm not asking these questions just because I'm a little bit nosy, although to be honest, I kind of am.

I'm asking because I'm willing to bet that your answers to those questions will reveal what's been missing in the way that you market, sell, and even deliver your offers, especially your membership offer.

Your answers will be the breadcrumbs that will lead you back to a place where your offers feel clearer, sharper, more aligned, and something that you are excited to get out there and sell and deliver in the months to come.

Does the messaging for your membership reflect where you are today — and where you’re headed in the future?

Today's episode is going to be a part two to the previous episode where we talked about the difference between chasing ease versus optimizing for experience in your launches and promotions for your membership — and how thinking in terms of experience can help you make launching more effective for you and your team and more enjoyable for you and your team. And of course, for your audience too.

We ended that conversation with a loose thread, which is what do you do when something just feels off?

The question isn't necessarily about improving sales or retention, though.

Of course, you're always trying to improve those. But really you're asking a question of alignment.

And this is something I don't think we talk about often enough, especially how to keep your offers aligned and feeling good for years at a time when you have a mature business with memberships, especially they are such dynamic offers.

Your membership is always evolving — every month, every launch

The way your membership looked six months ago can be dramatically different to how it looks and feels today. The offer and its very architecture changes with every new class you teach, resource you drop, or change you make to the membership, week by week, month by month.

It really is a work in progress, whether you like it or not.

And so it's completely normal to reach a point a year or two or more down the line and realize that your membership has evolved in a way that maybe wasn't what you were expecting.

Perhaps it's taken on a life of its own, or you've been influenced by outside voices and forces more than you wish you had been.

Or you might find that It hasn't evolved alongside you and yet you have grown and changed. And so has the business and your customers.

And now the membership isn't keeping up with your ideas, your direction and all the things that matter most to you.

So I want to have that conversation today and share a bit of a framework for how you can think about your evolution or that next chapter of your membership and how it fits into your business in a way that works.

Evolving your membership involves so much more than finding a new launch or sales strategy

This work of evolving and doing it with intention is so much bigger than writing a new sales page or coming up with a new webinar topic or putting together a new onboarding sequence for members.

These kinds of changes are important and I do them all the time with my clients. But if all you're doing is making these sorts of improvements, these, these tactical improvements without looking at the bigger picture of where this thing is headed, where you are headed and what the market needs today, then inevitably there's a little piece of you that gets left behind.

And this little piece of you and the fact that it's missing is the reason why things feel out of alignment.

That piece of you is your expression.

It's that mix of opinions, ideas, perspectives, values, and personal style that only you, your brand, your business can bring to the table.

Does your expression match your current direction?

Now, most people I know with a successful business and a thriving membership do this so well, but they often struggle with finding the time or getting the clarity to make sure that their expression is up to date with where they are today.

Not where they were two years ago.

And I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day where I mentioned that when you have a conventional career and you're driven, you're always thinking about your next step and how you're going to grow professionally.

There's an expansion happening there. But when you have a business, we're often told that we have to shrink in order to grow. Simplify, process-ize, find efficiencies, delegate, replicate, do it again and again.

And so rather than an expanding self, there's a shrinking self, this idea that we have to shrink and be the same in order to make money and to grow.

But we're humans. We're always learning and growing. It's natural.

If your offers and your business don't support you in changing over time, it's also natural that you're going to feel stifled.

So why can't our memberships be a reflection of our growth? If you ask me, they should be!

And no, I don't think this means you should be changing on a dime or never working with processes or systems. That is a total nightmare.

What I'm advocating for is that we evolve with intention and that every couple of years we bake this process of review of expansion into our business, our planning and our strategy so that we can do it in a smart way, not a haphazard one.

I really think that in order to expand the work you're doing in the world, to expand your revenue, that there's an expansion of your ideas and how you communicate them — and then how you deliver on them in your membership — that needs to happen as well.

And this is how you stay ahead of the curve.

It's how you have conversations with your audience that no one else is having.

And it's how you can make sure that the direction of your membership is truly aligned with what you want, where you're headed and what your ideal customer wants from you too.

And this is the work that I do with my clients. It's a process that happens from the inside out.

It looks a little bit like this…

You have to get clarity first over what you feel. And of course, what the data is telling you, and you combine that information and use it to guide the changes that you'll make internally to your offer.

And then the thing most people miss because our offers are always changing intentionally or not is about communicating these changes outwardly, not just to your members, but with your potential members too, in your sales copy and in your promotional events.

This is true alignment.

It's what happens when the way you position and talk about your membership matches what is happening on the back-end when they buy, and there's even more magic that happens when your launch and sales experience itself, that is how you interact with your potential customers when you're selling to them or inviting them to buy, when it feels the same way it will when they're a member, although how to make that happen, I think is a different episode for a different day.

And I want to stay focused on this conversation around evolution.

And what that inside out process of evolving your offer and aligning it with where you're headed as a business unfolds.

Is your membership ready for an evolution? Here’s what to do next

So what do you do when you're sensing that an evolution is on the horizon?

Well, the first step is to acknowledge it.

The second step is to reflect on it.

The third is to implement it thoughtfully.

And then the fourth step is to communicate it.

And I'm going to share some ideas with you about all of those today.

I really believe that the best decisions about evolution happen when you're in conversation with someone who can help you see the forest for the trees.

And that's why I have an entire offer around this concept of evolution and optimization called The RENEW Intensive. You can learn about that in the show notes.

As always, here are some ideas to get your gears turning today.

STEP 1: Acknowledge that your membership is changing — and that’s a great thing!

Let's start right at the beginning, which is acknowledging where you're at and that an evolution is in the making for you.

And for most people, I find that you'll be in one of two scenarios here.

Scenario 1:

The first and most common is that your evolution is already in motion, or maybe it has already happened behind the scenes, perhaps the core elements of your membership and how you deliver them have shifted over time.

Maybe the pricing model has changed the level of access to you and how you show up in the membership is changing. It's currently a pretty good reflection of how you want to be spending your time and working with your members. Of course, it's not perfect, but you've evolved behind the scenes.

The problem is that your positioning hasn't kept up.

Maybe you've made some tweaks to your sales copy to update your pricing and what's included, but it's sort of just shoehorned into an old message that you were using to sell a previous version of your membership, a previous iteration. Pre evolution, but there's a new conversation and a deeper conversation to be had about why you're working in this way, why it's needed and how it will help get people what they need today.

So that first scenario is a case where your inside delivery has evolved and it no longer matches the outside message and sales strategy that you're using to get people in the door. So there's a mismatch there.

Scenario 2:

The second scenario is when someone is bumping up against this desire to evolve and change their membership, but the train has left the station. They're running this thing at scale, perhaps to thousands of members already. You have team, you have processes and you don't want to break anything or upset the people around you by making a change.

And yet, you know that it is so needed. You know that you could be doing things better, differently. You could be serving members more deeply, bringing in more of your current interests and ideas and perspectives, maybe changing the membership so that it feels a little less demanding and a little more energizing to you, but you're not sure where to begin.

And this is where the inside and the outside need some attention and are begging to be evolved and updated.

So figure out where you fit in.

Are you in the boat where both your delivery and your message need to be evolved, or have you already evolved the membership behind the scenes and no longer feel that the message or positioning match what is happening inside the membership today — And maybe that you're leaving more opportunities on the table to go even further with how you want to be delivering this membership?

Try to put your finger on that.

STEP 2: Reflect on what a successful evolution looks like for you

The second step is to reflect.

And this comes back to all of those questions that I posed to you at the beginning of this podcast, which really boils down to: what's on my mind? Where am I headed? What do I believe today more than I ever have before?

Some of your answers will hold true over time, and some of your answers will surface some interesting new perspectives about how you want to be working, how you want to be running your membership and the types of conversations that you want to be having in your promotions and your launches when you're talking to new potential members.

So sit with those questions.

What do you believe?

What's on your mind and what really matters to you and what opportunities do you see for how to bring this forth, both inside your membership and then in how you talk about what you do in your copy and your marketing.

Usually you'll also have some data here to guide you or some, some hard figures about things that are frustrating you about your membership.

Maybe there's a part of your membership that takes way more time to deliver than the amount of people who actually see it and use it and benefit from it.

Maybe there's a resource that you could add that would really fill in a gap for people and help them move forward faster.

Or maybe there's something like the group calls that you're hosting and which you know are so powerful and yet it doesn't have the attendance rate you'd like them to have.

So always pair the data with that in a reflection on where you want to be going and the potential optimizations that you could be making to evolve the membership in the right direction.

Side note: an example of evolution in action

So here's an example of what this kind of evolution can look like in action.

My friend Meg Casebolt is an SEO strategist and the founder of a membership called the Content Love Lab, which helps businesses get found by their ideal clients through search.

Now, Meg is no stranger to evolution in the seven or eight years that I've known her and her membership has taken on a few different forms over the years.

It started as a course and then it evolved into a group program and is now a high-touch membership. And when Meg first launched this offer a few years ago, the sales conversation she was having with her audience was really about SEO as an antidote to the grind of social media and never ending content creation.

So SEO as a new pathway to making your dream customers fall madly in love with you. So that was the first version. And of course she and her ideas have evolved over time since she launched her offer, which would grow into a membership. She wrote a book called The Social slowdown. She deepened her thinking about her ideas and what it means to sustainably grow online.

She no longer offers the time intensive 30 Day SEO challenges that she used to use to sell into this offer in favor of a promotional style that's a little more personal and relaxed, which makes sense for the season of life and business she's currently in, and she's reworked her membership to serve people who want to go at their own pace.

Which means there's no set schedule, no rigid curriculum, no paced challenges that people have to complete. People can drop in and get the level of support they need when they need it based on the season they're in at a given time.

So there are some dots to connect here…

I realized that the way Meg was delivering her membership is a perfect reflection of how she sees SEO today, and how she runs her business and who she is as a person.

There's this implied feeling of ease and relaxation that's woven through everything she does in her membership. And her community loves her for it. That is her expression.

And it's undeniable whenever you get in a room or on a call with her. And it got me thinking that maybe in the next year or so, or before her next launch, the next version of Meg's sales page and her marketing could be updated to reflect this evolution, this new conversation that she's having behind the scenes around ease and the seasons of business and how SEO is like this kind of flexible safety net that works for you, no matter how much time you have to dedicate to your marketing, especially when life gets weird or busy.

And wouldn't it be amazing to position the pieces of the membership as resources that give you that feeling of ease rather than the go, go, go, do this now, grow quickly, feeling that we often get when we join a new program and want to do all the things and make big things happen?

It's like an exhale. And for me, that's a perfect example of evolution in action. So maybe that evolved sales conversation that would reflect what is happening on the backend of the membership and really who Meg is in business and what her brand is about.

Maybe it's less about making your customers fall in love with you through SEO content, right? That message is true and it has served her. But maybe now it's more about ease as a marketing strategy and a business ethos that calls people into the membership who are craving exactly that.

That's who Meg is.That's where she's going. That's what she's about in this season. And she's still selling SEO. Her content behind the scenes hasn't changed at its core, but the way she delivers it and how she talks about it, it's changing in real time and she gets to do it with intention.

Okay. Back to the framework we were talking through.

STEP 3: Communicate the changes to your members

So after you've acknowledged where you are and what those gaps and opportunities might be, it's time to put them into action and then communicate those changes outwardly.

So, as I said earlier, start from the inside, what are the changes that you're going to make to your delivery of the membership?

Maybe you'll start with just one or no more than three changes for now.

Is it the structure of the membership?

Is there a new addition or framework or something that you can enhance in the orientation?

Are you shifting the calls and how people get support from you?

There are so many possibilities for how you can model your beliefs and values and ideas inside your membership.

And it doesn't have to be done in a way that is disruptive.

So have this conversation with your team and they'll likely bring some great ideas to the table as well.

And lastly, it's time to communicate those ideas, host a live session for your paid members, if that works for who you are and how you work, or just communicate with them more times than you think you need to through emails and inside your community group, show them how these changes will support them, how it will improve their experience and help them get the result they signed up for.

These changes are exciting. You've done them with intention.

And so it's important for you to position it this way, because otherwise change can feel really scary to members and logistically it can be confusing. So their buy-in matters.

Be sure to get their feedback, keep an eye on the data as you make these changes and make any adjustments along the way in the weeks and months to come.

STEP 4: Ensure the evolution of your offer is captured by your marketing

And when it's time, bring those changes outward in your marketing and in your launches and promotions, explain it in your sales copy.

Maybe there's a whole webinar that you can design around the new ideas and perspectives that you're leading with — perhaps it's just what your market needs to hear from you right now.

And think about how to bring the values that you've been emphasizing into how you launch in the buying experience itself.

There are so many fun possibilities here. So lean into what would feel exciting for you. This is one of my favorite things to brainstorm with my clients.

At a toplevel, that's the process: acknowledge, reflect, and then bring it outward in terms of your delivery, your marketing and your promotions.

Expect that it will take some time and treat it like a true project.

It deserves reflection and thought to get this right and to do it well. And it is so, so worth it.

This is how you make your membership better year on year and how you make it something that you're proud to offer and delighted to sell.

The ripple effect of evolving your membership

A final thought I'll leave you with here is that when we get this evolution, right, it really is an act of branding.

It's our stake in the ground that says this is who we are and the work that we're here to do in the world.

But we often think of branding and selling and delivering as these separate activities.

We build the brand, we design it, and then we sell and deliver our offers in a way that reflects those things. But really it's a two way street.

Your promotions are shaping your brand and your perception in the eyes of your audience. Your membership and the way you deliver it can and should be a reflection of where your brand is headed.

And this is the vision that I have for memberships and for membership driven businesses.

This isn't just one offer in the mix of many it's your flagship, it's your calling card.

It's what you're known for and a true cornerstone offering in your business.

So when you think about making a change to your membership, do it with thought.

The way you evolve your membership is a step towards what you most want to be known for

James Clear says that every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become…

I say that each change you make to your membership is a vote for who you want to be known as in the marketplace.

So always remember the big picture and let's make sure that the direction of your membership is a solid reflection of not just who you or your business are today, but a projection of who you would be delighted to become in the future and a pathway to get you there.

So I hope that some of the ideas in today's episode have sparked something new for you. As always, if you're interested in how you can get my support with refining the way you sell and deliver your membership and evolve your offerings in a way that makes sense, you can find me and get in touch at membershipdrivenbusiness.com.

All of the links will be in the show notes. Thank you for joining me and I'll see you in the next one.