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What should a specialist trade association CMS include?

The ability to add and edit pages and content

At the simplest level, a good CMS for trade associations should allow you to add and edit all aspects of pages within your website.

Options to optimise your website for search engines (SEO)

SEO has never been more important than it is right now. There is no point in providing great content on your website using a CMS if no-one can find it. An SEO-friendly CMS should provide you with options to edit page titles, meta descriptions and page URLs. If you combine this with other SEO tactics, or employ an external, reputable SEO agency, then you should be on to a winner!

Demonstrate your expertise with a blog

A blog is an online journal that can be filled with absolutely anything you like. Of course, we would recommend that you keep it on topic and all about your specific sector, as a blog is a powerful tool for attracting traffic and demonstrating your expertise.

A strong CMS should either include its own blogging tool, allowing you to publish and manage blog posts on your website, or integrate nicely with existing blogging tools such as WordPress and Blogger.com amongst others.

Email tools that allow you to attract new members and inform existing members

Email marketing is the most cost effective form of communication with your potential and existing members. A strong email marketing tool integrated within your CMS should allow you to schedule email sends based on members’ attributes and on an ad hoc basis.

Once such emails have been sent, your email tool should also allow you to record which emails were opened and which links within the email were clicked. This sort of measurement and reporting will help you to see accurately what works and what does not work within your email marketing. This way, you can constantly improve your efforts and increase the returns that you see.

Log-in areas and searchable member databases

Your members have to be able to see the benefit of being a member and the extra information and support that you bring to them above and beyond the ways in which you inform the general public. Having a log-in area on your website is therefore a great way to provide members-only content within a secure environment.

A good CMS should allow you to create a log-in area and assign users with passwords so they can log in. If you have a database of members, a log-in area is a great opportunity to ensure that your members fill in their details for the database. It also provides an opportunity for them to update their details online. Such a database can then be searched by other members and the general public, or just you, should you prefer.

Events management tools

Getting to see your members face-to-face is a growing challenge as everyone becomes increasingly busy and short of time. Events are one opportunity to get a large number of your members in a room for a prolonged period of time, pass on industry knowledge and best practice and generate revenues for your trade association.

Event management tools within a CMS should enable you to create and list events and details on your website, preferably to a schedule so that they are removed when they become out of date or are fully-booked.

Your CMS should also allow you to monitor bookings and take payments, if you have an ecommerce option enabled. All these features should drastically reduce the amount of administration time you have to spend on each event you organise.

Ecommerce to take payments from members

As detailed above, an ecommerce module within your CMS will allow you to take event bookings and payments but it can also be used by members to pay annual membership fees and other miscellaneous payments.

Social networking and bookmarking options

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year, you will have heard the words ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ or possibly even ‘LinkedIn’ being thrown around as the latest ‘must have’ tools in your marketing arsenal.

I wouldn’t recommend that you jump into all of these tools immediately ­ do some research and identify which are best for reaching your target audience and marketing objectives. I would however recommend that you give your website visitors the opportunity to share your content on these sites using social bookmarks.

Social bookmarks allow your site users to share content with their contacts on social networking sites at the click of a button. Popular networking and bookmarking sites that allow this include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious and Digg.

Allowing your website visitors to do this means your message can spread further without you having to lift a finger.

Found this useful?

This page is an extract from a 38 page white paper written by Intergage all about online marketing for trade associations. You can download the white paper for free here.