Episode 1: Becoming Membership-Driven

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & RESOURCES:

In this inaugural episode of "Membership-Driven Business," host Natalie Taylor dives deep into what it truly means to be a membership-driven business.

She explains the fundamental differences between simply having a membership and adopting a membership-driven mindset. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to transform their business by making their membership the heartbeat of their company.

What You'll Learn:

The difference between a membership and a membership-driven business.
How to overcome a Membership Identity Crisis.
Key features of a successful membership-driven business.
Strategies for member engagement and progress.

Episode Highlights:

The Membership Identity Crisis: Natalie discusses the common issues that arise when a membership loses its focus and identity over time.
Membership-Driven Business Model: Learn about the three defining features of a membership-driven business and how to implement this mindset for sustainable growth.
Engaging and Retaining Members: Discover the importance of having a clear process for new members and ensuring that your membership content is structured for success.
Integrating Your Membership with Other Offers: Natalie emphasizes the need to connect your membership with other business offers to create a cohesive and valuable experience for your customers.

Links and Hepful Resources:

Contact Natalie: Contact Page
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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

There is absolutely a difference between having a membership and having a membership-driven business.

Deciding that you are going to see yourself and your company as membership-driven will change how you make decisions, how you serve your customers, what you sell to them, and how you do it in a really powerful way.

So for the first episode of the podcast, I want to break down what it means to be membership-driven and how you can apply this thinking to your business to solve some of the challenges that you might be facing around the direction of your membership, how to grow it, and how to make sure it aligns with the kind of business you actually want to be running — both now and in the future.

Who am I?

A quick introduction, if we haven't met before: my name is Natalie Taylor, and I've been working with online membership owners since 2017, helping them refine their offers, launch their memberships and position their companies for more growth and more happy customers.

I got my start as a direct response copywriter, working behind the scenes on promotions for memberships and online courses that have generated as much as 4 million in revenue in a single promotion… although you and I of course both know how much time and investment goes into making that happen.

These launches are literally months, even years in the making and not without a substantial spend on paid ads as well.

But all of this to say, I know what it takes to run online programs and memberships at scale to attract hundreds or even thousands of new customers at a time, and the kind of growing pains that entrepreneurs typically face at this stage of their business.

Enter👉 The Membership Identity Crisis

A really common challenge I see at this level is when you have a successful membership, people are buying it. And yet you're having a bit of an identity crisis.

The nature of running a membership is that the way it looked six months ago can be dramatically different than how it looks today.

Maybe in the past few months, you've added new features. You've moved things around inside the learning dashboard, popped in extra bonuses from your last launch. Plus you've uploaded new content every month as promised. That's a lot.

It is really common to feel like you're on a hamster wheel of creating and delivering, creating and delivering until you reach a point where you've lost focus and you're not totally sure the membership has a clear identity or if your customers are getting the result you want them to get.

At this point, you might be tempted to make some big changes, to cut things out, to move things around again, to add even more new things.
But before you do, I want you to ask yourself if you are thinking like someone who has a membership… or someone who is running a membership-driven business.

I'm really confident that if you make your decisions about the future of your business, from this perspective, you'll be so much happier with the outcome and your customers will be too. So let's talk about what that looks like.

What makes a membership-driven business?

In my experience, there are three defining features of a membership-driven business.

The first and most obvious one is that your membership is the heartbeat of your business. It's not just a thing you sell on the side that makes up a little bit of extra income or the icing on the cake, but in many cases, it is your main source of income, not your only source, but your primary source of income.

So a common scenario I see is when someone is making, say, a million dollars per year. If their membership sits at the heart of that, then 50 percent or more of their annual income is coming from that membership. So not only are they getting a big cash injection once or a few times a year when they launch, but because of those ongoing subscriptions, their membership gives them a somewhat steady revenue baseline month after month.

Now, of course cancellations are in there, but we're talking about tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars of ongoing revenue per month that has been created by this membership, this heartbeat of your business.

And personally, I think this is the only viable way to run a membership!

If you're selling at scale to hundreds or thousands of customers at a time, the membership model is awesome, but we know it can demand a lot of you as a business and as a team to deliver on.

Even if you've got it dialed in, not only do you have to sell it consistently, you've also got to deliver content indefinitely — most often every single month — keep members engaged and do the work of retaining your customers so that your revenue can stay as consistent as possible.

And it's a lot.

The Membership-Driven mindset is essential for sustainable growth

So my argument is this: if you're going to have a membership and you know, it's going to be time intensive to deliver on for you and your team, then let's make a plan to make sure this membership will generate a significant amount of revenue for you in return.

And going even further than that, let's commit to making sure this membership showcases the heart of your work, the best of your work and the key concepts, frameworks, and information people need in order to succeed at the thing you teach.

So in this way, a membership-driven business is really less about giving someone access to a bunch of content, which is actually how I see a lot of memberships looking in the early stages.

Say someone has made a lot of resources or products or small programs that they sell separately, and then they centralize them all into one place for one easy subscription fee.

It's just like Netflix, and maybe you've even used that kind of language: “It's just like Netflix” to sell your membership in the past. And that's okay, but I want to invite you to see your membership as being so much better than Netflix.

Your membership is not supposed to be like Netflix (and that’s great news)!

I don't know about you, but I am so tired of opening Netflix and having no idea what to watch. So I scroll and I scroll and then I see something I might want to watch. And then I've picked up my phone to look up reviews. And then suddenly I'm Scrolling Instagram instead. And then an hour has gone by and I didn't actually get the thing that I wanted to… and I start thinking about maybe canceling this thing that I'm paying for.

I don't see the “get all my content in one place” approach working so well anymore when it comes to memberships.

It's just not a reason for buying and it's not a reason for members to stick around. And that's because it lacks direction, it lacks a clear identity, and it does nothing to solve the content overwhelm that all of us are feeling in our lives right now.

In contrast, when you see your membership as being the essence of the work you're doing in the world, the heart of what your company is all about, you start thinking about how you can share your process, your signature method of doing the thing with people.

And then you work on making this the through-line in your membership. Sort of like a yardstick that people can come back to when they feel lost or overwhelmed, or are just starting over again. And this is what keeps them around and engaged clear instead of disengaging and going hunting for that “cancel my subscription” button.

Helping members make meaningful progress: what’s your through-line?

So a question for you is this, can you clearly articulate what you want your new customers to do first, second, and then third, after they join your membership, have you explained what they'll achieve in the first 30 days?

Have you tied that back to one signature piece of content, not a whole library of content, but really superhero pieces of content that you want everyone to know about and engage with?

Do you know how many people, what proportion of your members actually move through your membership in the order and structure that you want them to?

And to come back to the original point that I made about your membership being the heartbeat of your business, does the revenue your membership is generating feel balanced, when compared to the amount of effort it takes to deliver on your offer?

If not, then no amount of tweaking is going to make you happy with your membership until you can solve this issue.

So don't just add more for the sake of it. Start asking questions about how you can get back in balance.

And in many cases, the answer is more about finding ways to connect the dots between the content you already have inside the membership, so your customers can move through it more easily and get the results they want without having to consume more and without you having to create more as a sort of carrot to get them to buy in the first place.

So to wrap up this point, a membership-driven business is fueled by the income generated by the membership. The input of effort matches the output of revenue.

And as such, the membership showcases the best of their work in a process that members are really excited to follow.

And if it's been months or years since you revisited this, it might be time to take a closer look… because we know that memberships can evolve rapidly month to month — and the process you wanted people to follow a year ago could be very different than how you'd like them to get results today.

The best memberships and paid communities help people nurture a new identity

The second feature of a membership driven business is that you're focused more on helping people embrace a new identity rather than just selling them features or content or templates or tools.

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is not just what is the result of this membership, but going further, who will this membership help my customer become?

Who does someone become with me? How will they think differently? How will they show up differently? And how do I help someone become more of the person they want to be in the world?

We're at a point in online business where it's just not enough to be the first to market anymore, because it's been done before in almost every industry. Someone has already done it before you. There are other people out there selling the same result as you, probably hundreds of them. And that competition grows bigger every single year.

And it sounds cliched to say this, but it's true that nobody is doing it in the way that you can do it. And so your prospective customers need to know: what is the experience I'm going to get when I choose you? What is the feeling? What's the vibe? What's the energy? What's the attitude? What's the experience?

Your membership can be your stake in the ground regarding who you are as a company and what you are here to do.

The best memberships help you solidify your brand and your positioning in the market with every launch and with every new customer you welcome into your community. As I'm hearing myself say this out loud, I know that this concept might sound simple or even obvious, but it's really quite challenging to execute and to execute it.

How many times have you run a bit of a slapped together promotion because you haven't had enough time to plan and prepare for your launch in advance because you're busy? Do you feel super solid that every email you send the words on your sales page, the things that you say and do when you sell and even onboard new customers, that all of this is saying something meaningful, something original and something that will help people feel validated, heard, seen, inspired?

It's a really hard thing to do. It's hard to do when you've got a team of employees and contractors to manage when you're juggling 15 other things as the business owner. And it's especially hard with the temptation of ChatGPT to be a pumping out content at volume that isn't actually saying anything of substance (and definitely has way too many emojis).

We can’t outsource this to AI (and we shouldn’t want to anyway)

Our customers notice this.

It is subtle, but they can absolutely tell when we're showing up for them fully and authentically versus just going through the motions or phoning it in. It requires real effort and awareness to do it as the business owner, as the face of the brand, you're human, you get tired, you can't do it all.

And you definitely can't do it perfectly some of the time, let alone all of the time, but it's a question worth asking: am I still communicating with my audience and my customers in a way that feels authentically me? Am I sharing the ideas that only I can share, cultivating the kind of environment and space that only I can create? And have I maybe lost a little bit of that along the way?

If so, that's okay. It's normal. And you can always course correct.

A really good way to do this is if you decide that your membership is going to be an extension of your brand, the best of your brand, the best of your work in the world, how might that change the way you show up to promote it and deliver it?

I'm planning a future episode on this topic, but I've seen time and time again that the most successful launches are the ones where the experience people get on the backend of being a customer match up with how it feels to buy from you.

So if you promise, people will feel more confident when they buy, how can you make your launch itself give them a feeling of confidence, so they're buying from that place instead of a place of fear or frustration or stress? If you promise a way for people to feel more creative when they become a member, how can you cultivate more creativity during your launch for your membership?

It begins before they’ve ever bought from you

When the buying experience matches what it's like to being a paying customer, it gives them a taste of that identity.

You'll help them step into and the unique flavor of who you are. You will get more people buying and those people will be a better fit for what you're selling and what your brand is all about.

One more question for you to ponder here is what would need to change for you to be excited about how you show up and engage with your members? Ask yourself that, ask your team that. It's a great question to ask when you feel like you're stuck in a rut or something isn't quite right with how you promote or deliver on your membership, and especially when you're feeling drained.

What would it take for me to feel excited about this again? You might be surprised by what you find when you ask that question.

Okay. So we've spoken about a few things so far:

The first thing is that a membership driven business really sits at the heart, at the center of your business. It is where most of your time and energy goes as the business owner, as the team, in terms of your effort and delivery. And what it gives back to you in terms of revenue should match that.

It is a key source, if not the main source of revenue in your business. It's also, therefore the place where people can get the best of you. It's the heart of your approach, the place where you shine a light on your framework and really is less about a bunch of content and giving people a sense of direction and a way to move through to get a result.

We've also spoken about a membership being an extension of your brand and a way for you to really create an experience for people, not just once they have bought and become customers, but pulling that experience forward into how you market and launch position and sell your offer itself and creating alignment there will create ultimately better and happier customers for you.

And you're really helping them shape a new identity for who they want to be. It's not just about features or widgets that they can buy.

Seeing your customers as your collaborators

So the last point I want to touch on is this. When you have a membership, you see your customers as just that, the customers.

But when you have a membership driven business, your customers are also your collaborators. In many ways, they are your partners.

There is a two way conversation happening when you're listening to them often. You're hearing what they want. And this informs not just what you do inside your membership, but how you run your business as a whole.

They influence the other offers you create, how you sell them and when you sell them, because if your membership is good, they'll naturally be looking for other ways to work with you, to learn from you and take the next step.

The issue I see here is that many people, even people with really successful memberships are running their memberships in a silo.

They jump from one launch to the next. They put a ton of effort into the membership as they're leading up to the next promo. And as they onboard new customers in that first month or so, and then they're thinking about that next offer.

Just totally normal and human. But what happens is that we don't really get the time or space to think through how the membership connects to those other offers, how to position their offers against the membership as a natural next step and how to communicate differently with our paying customers, differently than you would make an offer to someone, say, who was on your email list, but hasn't bought anything from you just yet.

The conversation is different, but often we end up having the same conversation with everybody. And I feel that this is one of the biggest, most expensive missed opportunities for anyone who's running a membership.

Connecting your membership to everything else you do

You gain such an advantage when you start thinking about your membership as a pathway into your other offers, versus as an offer that lives off on its own, disconnected from everything else you do. But of course, what's crucial here is that the membership itself has to offer real substantial value and the pitch of the next step has to come in the right way at the right time.

Otherwise people will feel like you're just trying to squeeze more out of them, which none of us want. So whenever you're planning a promotion for an offer that isn't your membership, it's one of the other offers in your business, maybe a course or a higher ticket program. So kind of event or experience, start everything with your membership customers in mind, watch how it changes your thinking in the way you make decisions.

If you can do it right, your members are the people who are most likely to buy from you.

But it is so rare to see well thought-out messaging and offers that have been created for existing customers, for existing members. And this is more than just sending an email or two to members. Think of them as your ears on the ground, as your best customers, as your most ideal buyers.

It will change the way you promote and sell your other offers for the better.

What I'm getting at here is that being membership-driven is a way of thinking that influences everything you do in business.

It changes the way you think about your offers, how you think about your customers, how you deliver and how you show up and ultimately it's about putting your membership at the core of everything you do, letting it be a vehicle for your brand, for your message, and a spotlight for the best of your work.

It's about taking your individual offers out of their silos and asking, how does this connect? How does this relate? How can this offer be the next right step for someone?

And how might we adjust or tailor the message for the people you were already buying from us who already trust us and who are well positioned to get a great result?

Casting a new vision for your membership (and what’s possible)

So being membership-driven is absolutely a move that will create more longevity for you and your customers.

It requires you to slow down and ask some hard questions that don't necessarily have easy answers.

But when you do it, it is so worth it. It's how you create a membership that is unique in its positioning in its format and in its impact.

And this is the work I do with my clients every day.

I'm really excited to keep having this conversation with you here on the podcast. I've got a lot more to share and this is just the beginning. So I hope you'll join me for the next episode.

And if you want to get in touch or see how I can help you grow and refine your membership driven business, just go to membershipdrivenbusiness.com for more info and ways to get in touch.

Thank you for joining me and I'll see you next time.