Advertising your product/service to Members

We are often contacted by suppliers wanting a list/database of our Members so that they can advertise their products or services.  Our standard reply usually elicits some colourful responses.

However, before we get into more details, it is worth painting a bit of a background picture.  The Association is a non-profit organisation.  In broad terms the objectives of Master Builders KwaZulu-Natal are to promote and protect our members, their enterprises and the building and construction industry as a whole.

We currently have around 750 Members and their annual membership subscriptions account for a relatively small proportion of our operating budget.  We also do not receive any funding from Government.

One significant cost of fulfilling our mandate, was the establishment of a bespoke customer relationship management (CRM) system, which allows us to understand more about our members and the industry, in order to deliver a better service.  The system has worked very well.  It does however require constant maintenance in order to keep the information current and useful, so that we can communicate with members and stakeholders in a meaningful way.

We therefore made a decision two years ago that we would nurture and protect our database.  This was based on two reasons.  The first was that we wanted to regulate the frequency of communications to our Members, as we felt that our Members were being bombarded with so much information that they were reading and absorbing very little.  To this end, we now send out an eNewsletter every second Wednesday and try to restrict other communication as much as possible.

Secondly, we saw a mutually beneficial opportunity to utilize our database and existing communication channels to connect suppliers and Members.  The solution is our Advertising Hub (http://www.masterbuilders.co.za/advertising.htm) and has been carefully put together to offer a range of unique options at very competitive pricing.

This is where it get’s interesting.  The majority of the suppliers that we speak to get really excited when we run through the Advertising Hub programme and it’s unique selling points.  However, a handful of people who phone in and ask for the list of our Members get quite irate when they discover that we won’t be emailing the list through.  I guess that from their perspective, there is no harm in asking, but when the tone changes to a demand this does tend to immediately sour the relationship.

If you are in the first group of vendors and would like to partner with us, you may be interested in the latest offering from our Advertising Hub – Digital Advertising.  We have strategically erected three LCD screens on the ground floor of the Master Builders Centre.  This floor is the reception area for the whole building, has 5 meeting and training rooms, a busy retail outlet, a Green Building Exhibition centre and a coffee shop (all open to members and the public).

If you would like to find out how you can reach people by advertising on these screens, please contact Tanya on 031 266 7070.  The first three people who contact Tanya will get a three month trial for free (quote reference – TAN11042011).

Gary Amstutz - Commercial and Online Manager