Wednesday Roundup: Improve Your Association’s Website, Part 2.

Administrative Management, Association Marketing
improving associations website

Last week we introduced our next topic in Wednesday Roundup – improving your association’s website. We discussed creating a friendly member portal, how to measure the success of your edits and what those metrics mean. If you missed it, check it out here >> Wednesday Roundup: Improve Your Associations Website, Part 1

Review Analytics

Before you make changes, it’s important to take a pulse your current content. Where do people click? What pages or areas of your site do they frequent? A heat map is a great tool to show you this data. Crazy Egg and Sumo Heat Maps are just a few options. See the example below. Notice how the “hottest” areas are usually CTAs (calls-to-action). Does your site have CTA’s? We’ll get to this later (see website CTAS below).

Image Credit: Crazy Egg

Content Clean Up

Now that we’ve looked at the metrics, it’s time to begin our work. Many associations offer downloadable resources or frequently add content to their website, whether that’s event promotion, news updates or membership information. To ensure a great user experience, we advise regularly cleaning up your content. This could mean…

  • Removing old event registration links
  • Archiving lists of past board of directors
  • Update old images
  • Check for broken links

Content Relevancy

After you’ve cleaned up your content, updated links and images and ensured all old information is archived, it’s time to analyze the content relevancy. Does the language still make sense? Has the industry adopted new terms? Stay on top of the trends and show your members that your offerings are up to date.

Website Calls to Action

Now that you’ve got your information organized, clean and working properly, it’s time to add some tools. Above we mentioned CTAs. CTA’s “gives users something to do after they’ve enjoyed the content they came for,” says Jerod Greenisen, one of ArcStone’s digital strategists. CTA’s also help direct users to complete a specific action. “If it’s donation time, you probably want to make sure you’re leveraging everything you can to meet the goal, so we put ‘the ask’ (aka the CTA) on the website to prioritize action,” (Greenisen).

If you’re not sure where to begin, check out these CTA best practices from HubSpot or CrazyEgg’s 7 Case Studies for Using and Understanding Heat Maps.

Consider The Members Perspective

Now before you wipe your hands clean of work, walk through your new content and website tools from a members perspective. Does it make sense? Is it easy to understand? No one wants to read boring jargon heavy content – even if they’re an expert in the industry. If your own content bores you, imagine how the member will feel. Try to keep your sentences short. Use language that’s easy to digest and break up your text with images.

Not sure where to start? Improving your website can be overwhelming. Let us help! Just email me at aketcham@arcstone.com.

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