In a recent survey of organizations by GrowthZone, only 11% of respondents said their first-year member renewal rate increased in the past year, whereas 26% said it went down; 61% said it remained about the same.

The theme for SIPA Annual 2019 is Make More Money and no session might symbolize that more than Launching a New Event and Reinvigorating Existing Ones with Brian Cuthbert, group vice president, Diversified Communications. "Learn tips on how to get started with generating revenue for an event, even when you don't have a separate department or resources dedicated to this endeavor."

"The big mistake that some brands make when they think about social content is that they see it as an extension of their traditional advertising and communications plan, which is all about transmitting. Social media requires engagement; it is about understanding that, actually, sometimes it's valuable just to be part of the conversations. You can only do that if you've taken the time to build an authentic brand personality."

We've talked before here about marketing to niches by job titles. HCPro started an association called the National Association of Healthcare Revenue Integrity by looking at registrations for events they were already doing and noticing "a new title popping up that we had never seen before," Elizabeth Petersen, project director for Simplify Compliance, said. "It was revenue integrity specialist. We started picking up the phone and calling customers, [asking], 'What does that mean?'

Over just six weeks late in 2016, HCPro, a Simplify Compliance business, put together, marketed and staged a webinar they called ACDIS Live! Outpatient CDI at Ochsner: A Case Study Approach for their Association of Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialists audience.

When asked about whether to hire a photographer for a recent event, I responded, "Yes, by all means, people love good photos." But I had a caveat: "We have to make strong use of them." Too often I've seen valuable initiatives—photos, articles, websites—crafted excellently but then not get pointed to enough.

A new global study from A.T. Kearney titled The Consumers of the Future: Influence vs. Affluence does a good job of taking the new trends of marketing, filtering in their gained insights and producing real steps that companies—or in our case publishers—can take to adapt to the new business realities. Yes, it's B2C, but the fundamentals here are very similar to B2B.