Directing users towards paid membership features

Enterprise Nation is the biggest community of small business owners in the UK. It runs 400 events per year and attracts around 15,000 unique users to the website each month. The online platform has 3,500 members.

The challenge was to identify topics that resonated with their audience and signpost content and features that are only available to paid members. 

The articles received an average of 760 page views – 59% higher than other content published during this period – with an average dwell time of 1 minute 33 seconds. Bounce rates were low and around 10% of readers clicked on a Call to Action (CTA).

Developing audience-led ideas

Enterprise Nation’s monthly meet-ups provide a platform for members to share their challenges. These groups and individual interviews gave us the inspiration for many of the most popular posts:

• The importance of self-care when running your own business

• Small business tips for growing your following on Instagram and making more sales

• How small businesses can create customer-led content marketing plans

Creating relevant and powerful CTAs

The blog posts establish trust by providing useful advice. Including interviews with members helped readers self-identify with the community.

CTAs were used to highlight platform services relevant to the challenge covered in the article. This creates a natural funnel; engaged readers that need support can go on to take advantage of the features available through membership.

Varying the CTAs each time to include highly relevant content allowed us to increase conversion.

Video interviews were embedded using Wista to increase dwell time and capture email addresses. The experts we featured were quoted in the article, so trust was established and they had the opportunity to access more information.

“Content is the first point of contact for potential Enterprise Nation members, it’s absolutely crucial that the tone of voice, quality of advice and range of topics is crafted carefully to gain the attention of our target audience.

Inkwell works closely with the marketing team to truly understand and curate the right style of content to best upsell membership and we definitely see increased interest thanks to them!”

— Lorna Bladen, Head of Marketing at Enterprise Nation

Strengthening the community

Each blog post features comments from Enterprise Nation members and advisers. By highlighting their expertise, we reinforced the credibility of the membership.

Giving these members a platform to share their experiences provided additional value, boosting engagement and strengthening the community.

The combination of familiar challenges and real-life solutions helped us to draw an audience into the membership funnel – Inkwell’s team wrote 70% of the most-read articles Enterprise Nation published in 2019.