Episode 9: How to attract more high-caliber membership customers

Written By Natalie Taylor

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Designing a membership with broad appeal doesn’t mean you have to serve anyone and everyone.

(In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons people get tired of their membership and decide to close it down.)

If the people you’re attracting into your membership aren’t the people you truly love to work with, then it’s time to look at the difference between an ideal customer and what I refer to as a “high-caliber customer”.

Your marketing for your membership should speak to your high-caliber customers above everyone else. Better yet, you can create more high-caliber customers for your membership by elevating the way you promote and deliver it.

In this episode, I show you how to define who your high-caliber membership customer is, along with a variety of ways you can attract more of them into your membership through your marketing, while raising the bar for your existing members.

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If you sometimes get the “Sunday Scaries” when you think about your own membership—where the idea of being in your community and supporting your members for the next week or next month just feels heavy or repetitive—then it might be because you haven’t filled your membership with high-caliber customers.

If you feel like you’re answering the same questions, seeing people get stuck on the same things, or dealing with problems you wish your members had already figured out so you could get to the stuff you really want to get into… then it might be because you haven’t filled your membership with high-caliber customers.

If the way you market and sell and launch your membership feels completely uninspiring, and it no longer feels like a place where you’re sharing your best ideas and enjoying spending time with people in your community, then it might be because, you guessed it… you haven’t filled your membership with high-caliber customers.

So what is a high-caliber customer, and how you can you speak to them in your marketing for your membership?

That’s what we’re exploring in today’s episode.

What is a high-caliber membership customer?

High-caliber customers are NOT the same thing as an ideal customer, which is likely something you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about already. I want you to think of high-caliber customers as a step beyond an ideal customer.

Your ideal customers might have a certain job title, be in a certain stage of life, or fit within a demographic you want to serve. Yes, they have a specific range of problems you can help them with. And yes, they have certain desires that you can help them achieve, or outcomes that are important to them.

Your ideal customers are all about the “what”—what do you do, what will it get me, what can I expect at the end of it?

But your high-caliber customers want you to go deeper.

They want what you do and what you’re promising, but they also care about how you do it and the why behind it all.

Your high-caliber customers are the people who just get it. These are the people who get you, who like how you operate, and they share your values and perspective on the world.

When you’re in a room with high-caliber customers, there’s a shared understanding. There’s a sense of ease because you care about the same things, and your outlook is similar, too.

High-caliber customers are a level beyond your ideal customers

If you look around at who is in your membership right now and it feels like the conversations in the community and on your live calls are dominated by people who might be your ideal dustomers—but aren’t your high-caliber customers—and as a result, the vibe feels off and the conversations in the community aren’t at the level you want them to be at, then it might be because you haven’t figured out how to bring those high-caliber customers in.

In my experience, it’s because we spend too much time speaking to the problem, and not enough time speaking to the person. There is an entire subset of your audience who wants what you want, who thinks the way you think, who values what you value and is craving a space where they can be supported to go deeper.

But when you look at your marketing and sales, have you been speaking to those people?

Have you been calling them in? Most of the time, we end up casting a wide net instead of speaking to exactly the sort of people we want in the room.

Don’t Be Afraid to Narrow Your Focus

Maybe it feels like the only way you can grow your membership and scale it up is by speaking broadly. It can feel scary to narrow it down. But it’s actually what we need to do.

When there are so many voices out there, so many different competing options, the only way we can stand out is by speaking to our specific slice of the market we want to attract—and we do that by defining who our high-caliber customer is and what they need to hear in order to buy from us.

Defining your high-caliber customer will make your membership easier to deliver and it will make it easier to promote your membership in a way that stands out.

Not only that, but when you think about it, if we’re running a membership with hundreds or thousands of people in it… isn’t that a room we want filled with people we enjoy spending time with?

This is another way I want us to elevate the way we think about our memberships. It’s not a place for us to just “go wide” and serve the most people. The way I see that playing out in reality is that our members are underwhelmed, and we get bored, or we end up feeling like the work we’re doing isn’t the work we want to be doing.

Having a membership means you’re makikng the choice to be in a long-term relationship with your customer, moreso than you would with a digital product or course. Even if you run live cohort programs or group programs, those have an end-date. You’re really signing up to “go steady” with someone  here, so we have to be even more serious about who we invite into our space.

You’re selective (I hope) about who is in your inner circle of friends and family. I want you to be just as selective with who comes into your community.

I want you to have a membership that is filled with high-caliber customers who are on the same page as you, who are ready to get to work, and share your worldview.

This doesn’t mean they won’t challenge you or sometimes disagree with you—that’s just a healthy part of being in community and leading a community—and I’m also not talking about attracting people who will pay you more money or worship the ground you walk on. This is bigger than that.

Attracting high-caliber customers: call and response

The way you market, sell, and position your membership is like a calling card. There’s a call and response. The way you talk about your membership will resonate with certain people.

This means if you want to change the response, you have to change the frequency of the message you’re putting out into the world.

If you’re talking at a frequency or a level where you’re focused on the problem, on everything that’s going wrong, on the struggle happening in your ideal members’ lives, then you will, naturally, resonate with people who are struggling.

Now, if that’s who you want to help, and you feel great about it—don’t change anything. I mean it. There is seriously no judgment here from me and I’ve worked with people on memberships who serve people who are having a hard time and need support—that’s a great thing.

This is really an invitation for you to get to know yourself and to have some conviction in the kind of work you want to be doing inside your membership, and with whom.

Who is your ideal member? What is the difference between an ideal member—someone you can help, who has a desire to solve the problem you can help them with—and a high-caliber customer (the kind of person you most love helping)?

How is that different from the ideal customers you might have for your other offers?

What are the conversations you want to be having? What are the conversations you don’t want to be having anymore?

When you know your answers, it will help you see how you need to position your membership so that you’re speaking to people who want to meet you at the same level inside your membership.

Speak to the person, not just the problem

I’ve noticed that we have a tendency in our marketing and in our copywriting to focus on the negative. And while I strongly believe that people are motivated to take action when we speak to a pressing need or problem in their lives, we shouldn’t reduce our ideal members to the problem—or else we’ll end up calling in customers who, you guessed it… are hyper-fixated on their problems.

So what’s the alternative? I believe we need to bring richness back to our marketing. Bring back the nuance and the context. Let’s validate what our ideal customers are doing right.

Which parts of who they are do we want to champion? Celebrate? Use as a foundation for more growth, momentum, and results? Our marketing should speak to that.

Our marketing should validate as much as it should capture the problem we’re here to solve. So think about it. Think about who your high-caliber members are. People you LOVE supporting most. What have they already achieved? What are they doing right? How is that the perfect foundation for what’s next? Your marketing should speak to that. If nothing else, it helps you bring in new members who have a sense of their power and their progress… not just their problems. High-caliber customers want you to lead with vision.

The tricky thing is making sure you balance that vision with the reason they need to act now—and this is something I do with my clients, especially inside my Mini-VIP Day called Irresistible Offer, so I encourage you to check that out in the show notes below so you can get my support.

Creating an experience that attracts high-caliber members

The other way we can call in high-caliber members is by creating a space they want to be part of—and making this explicitly clear and even giving them a taste of this experience through our branding and our promotions.

Your high-caliber members have standards. They have expectations. They want you to raise the bar.

Does your brand reflect this? Does the way you speak, the energy you carry during your promotions reflect this too? It’s not just the words we use, but it’s how we deliver that message in terms of the tone and the visual feel, too. So there’s something to reflect on.

Think about the delivery of your membership. Would you describe the experience as high-caliber? I’m sure your teaching content is exceptional. But the details matter, and this is something I speak about in the previous episode about what it really means to over-deliver, and why the experience in between the content we give to members is just as important as what we teach.

Is your communication with members of a high-caliber? Is the delivery of your content high-caliber? Is the look and feel of your member dashboard high-caliber?

If not, it may be worth considering how to elevate those. It will push you to make your membership better, and you will attract more of the right people as a result—those who value the finer things, the details, and the overall experience you offer.

Listen to Episode 8 for more on this idea:

Episode 8: The Antidote to Over-Delivering in Your Membership

Creating high-caliber members from the inside out

The final point I want to make about how you can call in more of your high-caliber members is to think about your launches and promotions. In episode 2 of the podcast I talk about why our launches are the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what it looks and feels like to be a member.

If you want your membership to feel creative, spacious, and powerful—but your launches feel frantic, stressful, and a little bit desperate at times—then we have a mismatch.

So here’s something to reflect on:

If you were to choose 3 words to represent what you want your membership to feel like to members… what would need to change for your launches and promotions to feel the same way?

What would you do differently? What topics would you talk about? How would you talk about the problem you solve and the possibilities that happen when someone becomes a member? The outside—that’s your marketing—should match the inside—that’s your offer.

Have a listen to episode 2 and even episode 1 for more on this idea on what it means to create an experience during your launches that call in more of the right people, and if this is something you want to explore with me, this is the work I do with my clients and I would love to help you too.

Episode 1: Becoming Membership-Driven

Episode 2: The “Ease Edit” For Your Next Membership Launch

How to create high-caliber members

This feels like a good time to dig into the second idea I want to share with you today, which is that we don’t just call in high-caliber customers… we create them! And we do it in two ways.

We create high-caliber customers through our marketing and promotions, and we also do it through our membership experience itself.

I’ve spoken in previous episodes about what makes memberships different from other offers like online courses or group coaching programs with a set start and end date… why they’re not like the other girls! And it’s primarily because I see memberships as being about practice.

We have certain behaviors, skills and ways of thinking that we want our members to practice and repeat, over and over again. That forms the routine and rhythm of our membership.

I talk about this in episode 7 about why your members aren’t making progress, and what it really takes to help your members change their behavior:

Episode 7: If Your Members Aren’t Making Progress, Here’s Why

So, when you think about your high-caliber members… what are their habits? What thoughts do they think? How do they respond to their problems and challenges that’s different from someone who isn’t a high-caliber member? You can help all of your members practice those skills.

First of all, we make it clear in our marketing. Then when someone becomes a member, we make it clear when we onboard them. We remind them how to show up and participate when they join our community, when they watch our orientation, when they consume our regular content. We guide and we remind. (At least, we should guide and remind at almost every touch point.)

So, again—reflect. Are you modelling for your members—both you and your team—and then guiding and reminding them on the key attitudes, mantras, standard operating procedures of “how we do things” in this space?

In many ways we reap what we sow. We set the tone and then we have to maintain it. I have a service called Expert Communicator where I work closely with my clients to define what those key member touchpoints are, and how to elevate those touchpoints so that members know how to engage so they get better results and so we have more fun supporting them. And that’s really what I’m talking about here. Our members will follow our lead.

It’s why I feel so strongly that we don’t want our memberships to be a “choose your own adventure” or “Netflix” style library that people can consume or move through with no structure.

Our members want structure and they want to be guided. It will raise the bar for everyone when we do this.

Align your marketing and launches with your member experience

The other way we create high-caliber members happens before they’ve given us a dollar and it’s what we do in our marketing. I really want you to pay attention to whether your marketing presents your offer as a secret solution or something that, if people could just get their hands on, would fix all their problems.

I wasn’t sure whether to include this idea in this episode because most people who are drawn to me don’t really operate like this, and they tend to avoid hypey marketing or making promises they can’t keep. (If anything, you might be someone who needs to be bolder in your marketing and start owning and articulating the impact of what you do.)

But this way of marketing and selling is so insidious, and it’s something I’ve had to look at for myself, and that I continue to do and help my clients with too—because it’s really tempting to put so much emphasis on our process or our method that our customers come in feeling really powerless when actually, it takes two for change to happen.

They need what we teach, they need your support—but they also need to show up. They need to be resilient. They need to take imperfect action, they need to do hard and uncomfortable things, they need to do the thing even if they don’t feel confident, and they sometimes even need to fail and get back up and try again.

These are all signs that progress is happening but if our marketing doesn’t give the nuance of what it really takes to succeed—if it doesn’t make clear to members how THEY need to show up, what their side of the equation is, and what to expect on the journey—then people will bail when the going gets tough, they’ll get stuck and they’ll decide either our solution doesn’t work or there’s something wrong with them. This is true no matter which niche you’re in, whether you sell lesson plans or templates or help people with complex skills.

Building a membership you love to lead

So what am I getting at here? I think our marketing shouldn’t just be about what’s possible, but it should also be about helping potential members see how they need to show up in order to get the result they want.

Help people understand the experience they’ll have as a member and the kind of actions they’ll need to take. You can position this in a way that feels honest and feels exciting. But I know that when you do, you’ll get members who are actually onboard for the process and willing to experiment with you and be flexible in their thinking. To me, that’s the mark of a high-caliber member.

For more on this, it’s worth listening to episode 5 on making your membership irresistible. I talk a lot in that episode about positioning your member experience as a reason for people to buy and I think it’s going to be more important than ever in the future, because people aren’t enticed by access to content anymore. We’re not selling Netflix. We’re selling an experience.

Episode 5: Making your Membership Irresistible (4 New Ideas)

So my question to you is: how do your members need to show up? How do you wish they were showing up differently? What kind of relationship are you going to be in with your members on a monthly basis?

What’s their relationship going to look like with you, with your content, with your community?

When we clarify this, we bring in more of the right people, and they’re more likely to be successful when they join.

Elevate your membership, elevate your customers

OK. I know we’ve covered a lot of big ideas in this episode. There’s a fair bit for you to reflect on here. Don’t feel like you have to have it all figured out.

If nothing else, I hope that you have a clearer sense on whether the members you’re attracting are the members you actually want to be serving—and if not, where that mismatch might be. Is it the way you talk to members in your marketing, could you be doing more to guide members once they buy, or is it a bit of both?

I work closely with my clients on addressing both of these areas through my Mini-VIP Days like Irresistible Offer, and through my other services too — depending on your needs and your unique membership set up, so if you’re interested in having a thought partner to work this stuff out and someone who can help you strategize some changes, I encourage you to check out the show notes and get in touch because I’d love to talk with you.

Above all, remember that you get to decide who your membership is for and what you want it to be about. You can call in the right people and create a high-level membership experience that blows people away.

That’s my vision for what a membership can be, and what it means to be a membership-driven business owner. I hope it’s your vision, too.

Here’s to more high-caliber members and doing the work we love to do with our members. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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Natalie Taylor
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Episode 8: The Antidote to Over-Delivering in Your Membership