It’s now officially 2015 and that means it’s time to get your business strategy mapped out for the coming year. Although most people make resolutions on New Year’s Eve, it’s never too late to solidify the guidelines you’ll follow to achieve success for your organization. Below are four tips you can use during the next 12 months to help grow membership, improve visibility, and increase cash flow:

SEE ALSO: How Recruitment Advertising Generates Non-Dues Revenue for Your Trade Association

Are You Leveraging Social Media?

One of the most important steps you can take throughout 2015 is to properly leverage social media to gain attention from and communicate with your organization’s members and prospective members. Through sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can easily and quickly send out information about upcoming events, but you can also receive direct feedback regarding your organization, its policies, and more. Likewise, through social media, you can post content that has the potential to go viral, meaning more exposure for your organization.

Dive Into Analytics

Another point of focus for 2015 should be analytics, and more specifically, how you interpret them. Today’s online software tools, such as Google analytics and Hubspot, offer business owners a very high level of detail in analyzing all kinds of data regarding things like traffic referral sources and page views month over month. Using analytics tools, you can obtain valuable insights into what is working and what is not when it comes to the content on your site and your marketing efforts. Additionally, you could go even deeper and begin tracking things like phone calls to see where your lead generation efforts are paying off.

Provide a Message Board

Aside from social media, providing your members with a message board is an easy way to give them a chance to not only communicate with your organization and its leadership, but also to communicate with one another. Using this method, members can also market their own businesses with the potential to form partnerships with others. You can also get a feel for how members view your organization by reading through conversations on your message board, providing you with valuable feedback that is not directly solicited.

Deliver Premium Content

You can also look at 2015 as the year your organization began offering premium content for a fee. By providing premium content, you can generate non-dues revenue all year long, and you’ll also be providing something of value to your members. On top of that, offering premium content may be a way to attract new members. Anything from interviews to seminars can be considered premium content, so leverage your connections within the industry to gain access to people who have information to offer.

You might also consider offering some content for free to entice members to pay for additional content, or you could offer a subscription-based content service that is billed once a month or once a quarter. Approaching things as a subscription may lead members to be more willing to pay since there is no long-term commitment involved.