Epsiode 12: How to Get Excited About Selling Your Membership Again

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

Does promoting your membership feel like a chore lately — like you're just going through the motions with the same old marketing playbook?

Many membership owners find themselves stuck in a cycle of repetitive promotions that have lost their spark.

In this episode of The Membership-Driven Business Podcast, we're exploring how to bring creativity and excitement back to your membership marketing — both for you and your ideal members.

We're talking about:

🔹 How to unearth fresh messaging angles that spark genuine excitement and start new conversations with your audience (including a fascinating example from Tom Ford's transformation of Gucci)

🔹 Why the structure of your membership itself can be your greatest marketing asset - and how to make strategic tweaks that energize both you and your members

🔹 How to create a more robust member experience that not only improves retention but gives you compelling new ways to talk about your offer

Episode highlights:

🔸 The "Tom Ford Question" that can help you identify what's missing in your space and how to fill that gap

🔸 Why standardization can be both a blessing and a curse in your membership marketing (and how to use it as a launchpad for creativity)

🔸 How to make meaningful changes to your membership whether you have a full team or it's just you and a VA

🔸 Why consumption-based memberships are no longer enough - and what to offer instead

⚠️ HEADS UP: If you want support with bringing fresh energy to your membership marketing, my Mini-VIP Day is for you.

Inside my Mini-VIP days, I've helped membership owners:

Transform their "standard" membership into a unique experience that stands out in their market
Discover exciting new ways to talk about their offer that energize both them and their audience
Create sustainable promotional strategies that feel authentic and exciting

The price is increasing by $900 soon. Book before the end of 2024 to lock in the current rate.

Go to themissingink.co/irresistible for more info.

Links & resources:

🌱 Irresistible Offer - a Mini-VIP Day for Membership Owners: themissingink.co/irresistible

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:

Note: transcripts are shortened for readability. For the full experience with additional details and examples, you can listen to the podcast episode above or in your player of choice.

I want you to picture a traditional Japanese temple. This one is colored in vivid green, flanked by pastel pink cherry blossoms, with soft blue waves lapping atthe edges.

This might be the kind of art you could imagine hanging in a gallery somewhere, or maybe in your favorite coffee table book.

But actually, this is the kind of art you will only find beneath your feet… specifically on a manhole cover in Japan:

Japan is known for having uniquely and distinctively designed manhole covers all around the country. Think rising phoenixes, Pikachus, and Mount Fuji in vivid Technicolor, rendered in hot pink and lime green.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with launching and selling your membership…

When Promotion Feels Heavy and Boring

Today, we're talking about what to do when you feel zero excitement - and perhaps a sense of dread - about an upcoming membership promotion. Maybe you're resisting planning one because it just feels heavy, boring, and repetitive.

When I heard about how Japan has chosen to approach something that is seemingly so boring and standard, yet such a critical piece of infrastructure for a city - the sewage and plumbing systems that keep a city working - it sparked something.

They decided to bring attention to these bland objects by making them beautiful, distinct, and unique. By doing that, they were able to rally more community support and build more investment to continue developing the city's infrastructure.

I couldn't help but think this was a perfect parable for how we could think about launching anything in our business, especially our memberships.

When Your Membership Becomes Standardized, The Boredom Sets In

So much of the way we have come to sell and market our offers has become stock standard. We have formulas that we replicate from others. If you've found something that works in your business, you're replicating your own formulas. You'll keep doing that until it stops working for you, or until nothing feels exciting or interesting anymore.

Of course, it's really important for us to draw attention to our work - otherwise, we end up unseen and invisible, unable to rally the attention and interest we need to thrive and put our work out into the world.

But when our marketing looks like everybody else's marketing, it becomes invisible too. We have to find new ways to get attention and interest for our work.

I think approaching it from the angle of creativity - asking what art we want to put out into the world and what we would be excited to consume - is the most interesting way we could think about our promotions.

Three Ways to Get Excited About Selling Your Membership Again

In today's episode, I'm going to share some of my thinking and work I've done with clients to help them bring more interest, excitement, creativity, and beauty to the way they sell and market their memberships online.

I have three specific ways you can think about your membership differently to bring more creativity and energy - not just to your marketing, but to your offer itself and the experience you provide to members.

Why do we get tired of our own marketing?

Let's start by talking about the reasons that make us feel resistance or dread when we think about our promotions. I see three main factors:

Always in Delivery Mode: When you have a membership, you're always in delivery mode. You've made an ongoing commitment to show up for your members. You and your team are always thinking about supporting the community, responding to customer support requests, managing comments inside the community area, producing content for members, and sending emails. When you're in execution mode, it's really hard to pull back and think creatively.
The Standardization Trap: When you have an established membership that you've sold over multiple cycles or seasons, you find your groove with emails and sales pages. While that creates stability, it eventually leads to stagnation.
Launch Overwhelm: Every decision in a launch creates numerous to-dos. These tasks vary from creative work like messaging to technical backend setup, plus team delegation and management if you have support.

Solution 1: Your Message

Let's talk about Tom Ford and Gucci. When asked about how he revolutionized Gucci and brought the brand back to life in the 1990s, he said:

"I had to put my own point of view out there. What do I think Gucci should be? What is it about Gucci that attracts me?
When I was a kid in the seventies, Gucci meant flash. It meant movie stars. I thought, who are the stars of today? What do they want to wear?
So I took the elements [of the history of the brand] and created what I saw as the modern wardrobe for the moment."

Tom Ford didn't simply ask, "What's trending?" He thought deeply about what he wanted the brand to be.

You might think, "Well, I'm not running a fashion house or creative directing a multi-billion dollar luxury company."

But you can borrow this thinking in some really interesting ways. As it relates to what you teach:

What is the conversation happening right now?
How do you wish this space could feel instead?
What experience would you love to cultivate for your ideal people?

Moving Beyond The Conventional

Memberships are all about experience - the ongoing journey you go on with people. Your marketing can be part of that too. In this moment:

What do you want to give your members more of?
What do you want to liberate them from?
What patterns are they stuck in that you can show them a new way out of?
What would you be excited to put your email address down for?

Often we come into this thinking, "If I'm going to do a webinar, what topic should it be?" These are important questions, but before you ask them, you need to know what conversation you're trying to start.

You have to know where you want to enter the moment your ideal customers currently find themselves in.

A Case Study in Creative Membership Marketing

Let me share an example from a brilliant messaging strategist I worked with in a mini VIP day - Michelle Mazur and her Expert Up Club.

Michelle helps people who are experts, those who aren't quite so flashy in their marketing because they're too busy doing good work.

The story they tell themselves is that this is a fatal flaw - if only they could feel better about showing up on Instagram, maybe they would get noticed like others who make more noise.

When I sat down with Michelle, it became clear that she's really fighting for the experts. So, we positioned their expertise not as a liability… but as a strength.

Maybe the answer isn't that they need to be an expert AND learn to market like everyone else - it's about marketing LIKE an expert.

All the things that make them brilliant at their client work could also make them brilliant at marketing, if they only knew how to leverage them.

Turning a New Idea into a Sales Message for Your Membership

When you have an idea like this, there are many opportunities to weave it through your messaging and sales assets.

How you implement depends on your timeline and support bandwidth.

The quick and dirty version might mean adding one or two new sections to your sales page and mapping out a few new emails that shape your promotion around this new conversation. You can implement without a massive overhaul of your copy and launch strategy.

Down the line, you might rewrite your entire sales page with this new thinking woven through every section. That's something to consider when you have more runway, more support, or more creative space.

Solution 2: Your Offer Structure

Let's talk about the second way to inject excitement back into your membership promotions: looking at the structure of your offer itself.

The way you do things - the pathway you offer people to get a result - can either be unique and interesting or feel like what everybody else does.

I'm currently working with a consulting client whose membership business generates over $5 million per year. She's going through a big overhaul of her membership, driven by:

The experiences she wants to create for members
The results she wants them to achieve
How she wants this season of her business and life to look

This has been a multi-month project requiring multiple hands on deck.

But, sometimes you can make just one or two tweaks that present new opportunities and create excitement. It might be:

A shift in how you run your Q&A sessions (if you offer them)
A new bonus or class
One new module

Small Changes Can Have Big Ripple Effects inside Your Membership

Coming back to Michelle's Expert Up Club example, one of her key perspectives is wanting people to experiment more with their marketing rather, than just throwing things at the wall.

She wants them to:

Make an assessment about what could work
Set up an experiment to test it
Look at the results

This aligned perfectly with her membership's unique position. She had already begun offering marketing experiment coaching calls and processes around conducting 90-day marketing experiments.

We discussed how this could become a bigger part of the membership and how to weave it into her sales messaging.

Solution 3: Your Member Experience

Memberships are no longer appealing if they're merely about consumption. Unless there's no competition in your space and nobody else is talking about your subject, simply offering access to classes that can be consumed is no longer an exciting value proposition.

What people want is a result and to be in consistent motion. We're at a stage where online courses and memberships are no longer new. Many people have either:

Bought a product or membership and been underwhelmed
Given up because life got too busy
Felt overwhelmed and unclear about how to implement
Failed to get results for various reasons

This means there's an implementation abyss we can help people cross.

When I work with people on enhancing their memberships, it's rare for me to say, "This class isn't very good" or "Your idea isn't strong." If you're listening to this podcast, you're likely very smart and solid in your expertise and teaching.

What you might need support with is helping people know what to do with those great ideas - turning information and insight into results and action.

Making Action Inevitable For Your Members

Consider how you can improve your membership so people are never wondering about their next step. Ask yourself:

How can you end every class with clear next actions?
What resources can you provide that make the next step unmistakable?
Are these steps doable for busy, distracted, and overwhelmed people?

Going back to Michelle's marketing experiments example:

Could you provide an experiment tracker?
Should you schedule regular prompts inside the community?
Would an additional monthly or quarterly call help move people through results?

Your Member Experience is a Sales Asset. Are You Using it?

This robust support becomes a sales asset because it addresses the objection everybody has when joining your membership: "Why is this time going to be different?"

This is likely not the first time somebody has tried to create the result you promise.

They've tried with others or on their own and struggled. The fact that you provide more support, more check-ins, and more clarity is an asset you should be talking about in your marketing.

When you make these improvements:

You'll have more membership confidence
You'll have fewer reservations about promoting
You'll decrease customer support requests
Members will get better results and stay longer

Work With Me: Mini-VIP Day For Membership Owners

If you want to refine the way you message and sell your membership, my Mini-VIP Day could be exactly what you need.

I believe anyone with a membership needs this experience, as it will transform how you position and think about your membership.

During our time together, I serve as:

Your creative thinking partner
Your strategic decision-maker
Your second brain in planning execution steps

Importantly, the price of the Mini VIP Day is increasing by $900 at the end of the year. If you book before the end of 2024, you'll secure the current rate, which will not be offered again.

Bringing it All Together

Your membership promotion can be a unique expression of who you are, how you think, and the values you want to model. You can put something out into the world that you'd be genuinely excited to be part of:

Write the kind of emails you'd love to read
Create promotional experiences that are engaging and meaningful
Do it at a scale that makes sense for you

Whether you have a full team and unlimited runway, or it's just you and a VA, a few tweaks can make all the difference.

I would love to support you with that, if you're interested in getting help. But if not, just know that the possibility is there. You don't have to do it like everybody else.

You can start your own conversation… and there's a very good chance that your ideal members are craving it. They’re waiting for you to make the move, extend the branch, and talk to them in a way that no one else has before.