Helping a membership club get new members
The Ski Club of New Jersey is the oldest ski club in New Jersey and one of the oldest ski clubs in the country. The club recently experienced a decline in membership as older members began to age out. At the same time, it struggled to attract new members.
We identified crisp objectives
- Raise awareness about the club's offerings, including social events and a Vermont farmhouse lodge
2. Raise awareness about the club's history and stability and family centered focus
3. Raise awareness about the sport of skiing in general
This formed the framework for content creation for both our static and updated content, as well as our content across our social platforms.
Social
H2 Studio utilizes CoSchedule to plan and post content. CoSchedule makes it easy to push content across social platforms of choice.
Since Facebook is a leading social platform of individuals and groups, The Ski Club of New Jersey decided it would commit to building a social presence on Facebook in order to compete for people interested in skiing and possibly interested in joining a family club. The Ski Club also committed to building out an Instagram presence in order to appeal to a younger audience, as well.
By using a small, targeted PPC budget on Facebook and Instagram, The Ski Club of New Jersey has slowly but steadily built not only a presence on social, but also a steady stream of newsletter and membership inquiry form signups via onpage forms and MailChimp.
Telling the story of Skiing and Snowsports with an SEO mindset
By carefully strategizing around the three, core goals of the website, The Ski Club of New Jersey was able to build personas around the audience of visitors it hoped to attract. Keywords and keyword phrases are judiciously used throughout the site, utilizing the excellent SEO Tool: Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. The Ski Club's site is a custom WordPress build.
In less than a year, The Ski Club saw membership inquiries sky rocket, with hundreds of interested potential members, many of whom have joined the club as active participants, thus guaranteeing an ongoing legacy for future generations of skiers.
Content on the Website
Content on the website focuses on keywords around and closely related to those two generic terms, skiing and snowboarding, but optimized for local seo, and keywords phrases. Creating link worthy, well written content that includes meta tagging, anchor text and alt tagged images for optimal seo helps keep the url at the top of search results.
On Page Sign Up Forms
Proper SEO has created a significant increase in organic traffic, and interesting, fresh content has dramatically improved time on site. The result? A robust growth in The Ski Club’s email list database of queries from people interested in membership. These visitors fill out the on page form triggering a drip campaign that moves them to the macro conversion: becoming a member!
As these people converting on line, and become newsletter recipients, they are coming to membership events and converting to full membership person.
The Ultimate Conversion
A steadily growing newsletter subscriber base (from strictly organic search) as well as a healthy “membership inquiry” base of interested parties, to whom the ski club markets events for the purposes of recruitment.
At the 2017 end of the season meeting the club’s President Brian Conn had this to say:
"This year, thankfully, has been a wonderful year for both our club and lodge. Membership numbers are very healthy as measured by our current count, and by those going through the nominating process."
President Brian Conn, The Ski Club of New Jersey
