Hi everyone and welcome to The GRM Membership Marketing series! 

Curious to see what three different departments have to say about membership Trends & Technologies for 2023? Watch our video!

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Harry: Hey, guys welcome to the podcast. It's Harry from GRM Digital. I joined today by Nej, Rob and Blue. Apologies for a bit of the background noise if you can hear Blue breathing. He is quite a heavy breather. Today's podcast is all about digital trends and technologies within the membership sector and we've essentially based this off the feedback we're getting from our clients. We've consolidated the top five trends and we're going to be discussing them in today's podcast. If you enjoyed the content, please don't hesitate to drop a like on this video and a comment. With that, I'd like to open it up to the floor. So, Rob, within the membership space, what key trends or technologies have you seen?

Rob: On my list, number one, I've got movement to best of breed technology choices. Sort of getting away from the all-in-one tools that we've seen in some of the smaller to medium size membership organisations and looking at changing the technology stacks to go for like the best concept management system. They can get the best CRM and plugging them all in together rather than going for one single tool that does it all. What do you think about that one, Nej?

Nej: Yeah, yeah. It's another couple of buzzwords, it's moving towards more of a microservices architecture rather than a monolithic architecture. It's a trend that's happening across the board, it's not just membership-specific, let's say. I think what we're seeing is the membership organisations are finally jumping on board and starting to reap the benefits or recognise the benefits in going down the best of breed approach. I think this has also been escalated by the recognition of the inherent limitations of all-in-one solutions that claim to do everything. Membership organisations are all in a record pace as far as digital engagement is concerned. That has been happening pretty much since the pandemic and everybody's been recognising the importance of digital for the ongoing operations of these organisations and I think what that has done is it has escalated the recognition of limitations of all-in-one technologies. More often than not, the organisation's capabilities between all-in-one technologies- I mean, at the end of the day, an organisation that is a jack of all trades is a master of none. When it comes to each facet of the tech stack that an organisation might need, there's nowhere an all-in-one technology provider can compete with the technology providers that specialise in each of the individual elements.

Rob: They're becoming a lot easier to link together now, aren't they?

Nej: They're becoming a lot easier because their whole go-to-market strategy is that they'll easily and seamlessly- a lot of the time, out of the box, so to speak, integrate with other leading technologies and I think they're becoming a lot more accessible from an affordability perspective. The move towards perpetual licensing models- software as a service architectures and Cloud infrastructure has made it a lot more accessible for organisations regardless of their size to be able to go and access the best of breed technologies. Rather than having to do a significant investment to go and buy a bit of software and host a bit of software, you're able to just incrementally subscribe. If you're a small organisation. your subscription's lower and increase it accordingly as you grow.

Harry: Okay, that was really interesting. Rob, an open question, really. One of the buzzwords that I come across quite regularly is real-time search. So, a lot of membership organisations are looking at implementing real-time search technologies to help their members access content resources information. Have you come across real-time search and if so, what are the advantages of that for organisations?

Rob: The advantages of real-time search- they just return results much faster. So, typically, let's just look at traditional search that you might get within a content management system. You'll typically write something in the box and you'l have to click or press enter and wait for it to load another page which then, more often than not is not what you were looking for. Then, you've got to go through a filtering process, it's quite a lengthy process to get to where you want to go whereas real-time search, it just displays the results actually there on the search bar but it's also displaying them based on a number of variables that might be what you've previously looked at. Multiple variables- whether it's a product or something like that. The best examples are like e-commerce platforms where you might play in like red t-shirts but by the time you put red in, all the products that you see are red. For membership organisations, they typically have a lot of complex content which is often hard to find. They have quite bulky navigation structures and this, for us, has been a really good platform working with our current clients to say like, Look, we can help you get your users the content that they want to find quicker and more efficiently;

Nej: To add on to that, I think, again, this is another generic trend about better user experience and user journey. Everything is focused about making it easier for your users to achieve what they want to achieve through your digital interfaces. This is a no-brainer, if the search can show your results as you're typing, it's gonna guide you down the right path. It's gonna mean that after a few letters you're able to select what it is that you're actually looking for. The reason why we're seeing an emergence in this or an adoption of this across the board is in the emergence of enterprise search technologies that enable this and make it feasible. A few years ago, trying to achieve this would have caused you all sorts of performance issues on your side because theoretically, based on how traditional search works, after every letter, there would need to be calls to the database and searches actually happening in order for those recommendations to actually appear. Now, through the rise of platforms like Algolia and enterprise-based searches that are not based on back-end indexing of content, it's made the possibility of that experience; it's made those results instantaneous. It's made it very easy to achieve that instantaneous searchability of content. So, for the first time within the membership sector, we're seeing more and more organisations that are providing that significantly improved and almost seamless user journey when it comes to searchability of their content.

Harry: Rob, have you got anything more to add to that?

Rob: No. I mean, Nej just always looks at the tech angle as well, doesn't he?

Nej: It's the geek within.

Harry: Do you think it's relevant though, especially within the membership space because historically, technology or implementing new technologies hasn't been high priority for them so implementing these new technologies to help their members access the content in a much quicker way is definitely going to help with member acquisition, member retention because those are the trends that I'm finding crop up time and time again in terms of what goals and aspirations these membership organisations have for next year.

Rob: I think just another thing though with the search, I think people have just got to the point over the years where they just don't even go on a search bar anymore because you almost know that it's quicker just to sort of find your way via the navigation. But if you can offer a very fast search to a user- with tools like Algolia, it is the most efficient way to get there.

Nej: A little bit, I'd query that point a little bit, Rob. Because I think that on the contrary, users- members of membership organisations are just human beings that use the internet. Some use it a lot, some use it less. But they'll use it across all sorts of platforms. I think user expectations are at a different standard so, I think you've got to continue from a membership program perspective, you've got to continue progressing just to stay the same in comparison to other experiences. What might have been acceptable five, ten years ago, now, if the users have gotten an- e-commerce are always going to be leaders in user journeys because they are commercially-driven and they see a direct return on improving those journeys. But everybody shops online for something or the other- the vast majority of people do. User expectations of what their experience should be through interacting with an organisation through a website or an app have- the standard has risen. So, by not keeping up with that standard, users are going to recognise more of a contrast if you're still in the old school way of providing search capability and user experience.

Harry: Okay. Really interesting, I think. One of the main things that's come across or come up in conversations that I'm having with membership organisations is that these organisations want to get to know their members better and one of the main conversations that we have is around utilising and implementing a CRM and using it efficiently. Now, in your experience, what is the benefit of having a single point of truth or a CRM which is used effectively?

Rob: He's probably a better one, for measure.

Nej: So, this is our third point of the trends that we are recognising. Again, just to clarify, these are trends that we anticipate being the main trends to continue into 2023 based on our experience with our clients and prospects and the organisations that we're talking to across the board. Digital transformation has been the buzzword over the past couple of years, everybody's somewhere within their digital transformation process and everybody's on varying bits of their digital maturity model, so to speak. The ultimate goal of this is to achieve a single point of truth or a location where you get 360-degree view of your member. What that means- typically, that would lie within the CRM but it would mean a seamless integration with the CMS and the LMS and all the other technologies that an organisation is utilising so, in a single view, you've got all the data- historical and current, that's relevant to a particular member. What that enables the organisation to then do is get much better insights about who a member is, where they are within their membership journey and how to do campaigns or provide experiences and user journeys through things like personalisation, which is I know, one of our other top five points- in order to help provide a better experience for that member and in order to progress that member to a higher membership level or through a certain curriculum or sequence of progressive steps that they're looking to achieve with our members.

Harry: Okay. In terms of engaging the members, one keyword that I've come across on a couple of occasions now is gamification. So, how to allow members to interact with content more effectively, more efficiently and for them to engage with the content that these membership organisations are providing for them. Have you seen any great examples of gamification in the past and how did that work, Rob?

Rob: I mean, one I always remember is when you look at PureGym. I know it's not a traditional membership organisation that we might be working with but like, when you go into their app, for example. You get all sorts of badges based on like, going to the gym X amount of times, stuff like that. I haven't got many of them but-

Nej: I'm just surprised that you've got a gym membership. I didn't anticipate this.

Rob: But that's a great example and for example, it makes you want to go to the gym more. It's the same with like Apple Fitness and stuff like that.

Nej: Would it make sense for you just to explain for our listeners that might not be familiar with the buzzwords what gamification is depending on how you pronounce things. I mean, I always say it was gamification, but- potayto, potahto.

Harry: If you could give us a breakdown in terms of what gamification is, that would be really useful.

Nej: I would describe gamification as a visual representation. It's almost like a videographic of some sort that displays a journey or a process in an easily understandable and conceivable way for a user. Would you say that that's a reasonable enough explanation?

Rob: Yeah, but I would say it's not just about explaining a particular journey. It's a mechanism to get you to do certain things. So, within a membership portal, that might be like a badge for the first time you sign in. Getting something for the first time- you contribute to the forum and that sort of stuff. I think that's the real value where it comes in with membership organisations.

Nej: Yeah, it's tapping into the psychology of all of us humans and that encourages us to do more. People like recognition. That's where the word comes from, right? It's using principles traditionally used in gaming as motivators, motivational factors to drive a certain action. I think that within membership organisations, we've seen great success in the organisations that adopted this to some level. Certain use case scenarios or training courses are sequential, so you have to go down a certain set of qualifications to kind of achieve a certain status and I think simple things like progress bars around their journey to becoming qualified to an X degree. Being represented has made it very intuitive, has created a good user experience and has also shown returns on investment for the organisations by achieving better growth in whether it's a training course or whatever the progressive qualification mechanism is.

Harry: Okay. That personalisation there- I mean, that gamification there feeds quite into our next point which is personalisation. Would those elements essentially drive user engagement on that platform and is that the primary reason behind a implementing gamification and maybe personalising that content to the user in particular?

Nej: In short, yes. I think there's multiple facets to the benefits of it. One, it allows you to display a lot of information in a small space that's easily consumable and understandable. It encourages user behaviours because as Rob said, in some cases you win badges once you get to a certain point that you have displayed against your profile that can- it's a rewarding mechanism for the individuals to feel like they've achieved something and it's also something that will drive people to- I'm nearly there, I'm only one course away from getting my X amount on a badge or getting recognised as a different level of a member or professional in my field. It's absolutely going to drive that. You touched on personalisation. See, a lot of these things are interlinked and this is why we've picked these five is because the same developmental activities are ultimately gonna enable most of these capabilities. So, what we know, what's being learned throughout history now is that the more personalised the user experience is, the more successful that user experience is going to be. Membership organisations are vast organisations that service different profiles of individuals. Each member is likely to have different benefits and different specific areas of interest within any particular membership organisation. Historically, one of the challenges has been marrying the right content and the right events and so on with the individuals who that's going to be relevant. So, by getting your back-end infrastructure right, by having a single point of truth, you're able to better enable a more personalised user journey that's going to be focused, that's going to be populated with more relevant content and things that are of interest to that particular user which is going to drive a better experience for that user. It's going to drive more engagement with that user and ultimately, it's going to result in more revenue on membership renewals and membership growth as a result of it.

Rob: Couldn't put it better myself.

Harry: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We've covered all five points there pragmatically and I really feel that the audience will be able to take some clear value away from that. Is there anything that you'd like to add to anything that Nej has mentioned today?

Rob: No, I think he pretty much covered everything there.

Nej: I think it'd be good to just summarise and reiterate because we've gone a little bit all over the place. So, what we believe are going to be the most of the top five trends that we're going to see as far as digital technology is concerned within the membership sector are best of breed technology choices, real-time search, a single point of truth capabilities, gamification within user interfaces and more personalisation.

Rob: Yeah.

Harry: Now, this podcast will be available on our YouTube channel within the next week and it'll also be published on LinkedIn as well. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel to see all of our latest content. Drop us a comment below as well if you've got any questions, thoughts or ideas around any of the five key points that we've touched on today. From myself, Nej, Rob and Blue, thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week for another podcast at GRM Digital, thank you.

Nej: Please do keep sending us questions and ideas on what topics you'd like to hear us discuss.