How to Market & Grow Your Association’s Career Center

As an association, your career center can be a powerful way to provide value to your members while generating non-dues revenue—a real win-win situation.

In this blog post, we’ll explore 5 practical strategies for growing and marketing your career center, ensuring it becomes a vital resource for your members and a sustainable non-dues revenue stream for your organization.

Understanding the value of your career center

Before diving into the actual marketing strategies, it’s important for you to understand the unique value an active career center offers. It serves as a bridge connecting job seekers in your audience with employers who are looking for talent within your specific field, and so much more:

• Member engagement & retention: By helping them advance their careers in the industry, an active career center keeps members engaged with your association, and coming back consistently. It can also be a convincing selling point to acquire new members.
• Non-dues revenue generation: Charging employers for job postings can create a new revenue stream for your association. But there are many more ways to diversity your non-dues revenue, such as selling access to a resume database of your members or monetizing advertising space on your job board.
• Networking opportunities: Your career center can also act as a pipeline to drive corporate sponsors and employers looking to hire to your association. For example, by facilitating networking events, workshops, or webinars that connect job seekers with those industry leaders.

And this is where Niceboard comes in, offering a user-friendly job board software solution that can help you easily monetize your career center and attract more members.

5 strategies for growing your career center

Now, let’s get into 5 strategies that will help you grow the number of active employers and job seekers on your association’s career center.

1. Leverage your existing network

Your association likely already has a robust network of members and industry contacts. Start by promoting your career center through your existing channels to existing members, for example in your newsletters, on your social media channels, and during industry events. Here are some specific tactics:

• Email campaigns: Send targeted emails to your members announcing the launch of the career center. If you’ve already had a career center for a while but it hasn’t gotten the traction you want, we recommend reiterating the benefits to your members. Highlight its features, benefits for job seekers, and include direct links to your top weekly job postings.
• Social media promotion: Use those social media platforms that are working for your audience, which could be LinkedIn, Facebook, or X to share new job listings and employers from your career center. But that’s not all. You need to diversify your social media content by posting success stories from members who found jobs through the career center or industry-related career advice.

2. Create targeted blog content

Content marketing is an effective way to drive organic traffic to your career center while establishing authority in your field. And a blog is a very sustainable, low-cost way to provide you with traffic over the long-term.

Not sure what to write about? To create engaging and informative content for your career center’s blog, you need to know your industry and audience deeply. Here are some ideas to get you started on generating content ideas:

• Do your keyword research: The key (pun intended) here is understanding what phrases your audience might be searching for on Google (i.e. which keywords they are using). You then want to craft content that answers their questions and addresses their needs while using these keywords. Ubersuggest can help you find high-traffic keywords related to your topics.
• Identify pillar topics: Use tools like AnswerThePublic to find common questions and general topics related to job searching in your field. For example, if you represent a healthcare association, consider writing posts around the general topics of job/industry insights, career advancement resources, and networking all specific to the healthcare industry.
• Invite guest posts: Invite industry experts, recruiters, or successful job seekers to contribute guest posts in exchange for a cross-reference to the their website or publication.
• Ask your audience: It’s always worth a try to directly survey your audience on the common issues and roadblocks they experience when looking for a job in your industry. Your social media profile or an in-person event is probably the best place to ask some informal questions around your audience’s pain points.

If you’re using a hosted job board software like Niceboard, you can use our built-in blog CMS for hosting a fully integrated and SEO optimized blog on your job board site.

3. Optimize your career center for search engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for increasing visibility and attracting organic traffic to your career center. Here are some SEO strategies specifically tailored for job boards:

• Optimize for on-page: Ensure that your job site as a whole and each job listing individually is optimized with relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags. This helps search engines understand what your content is about and rank higher for relevant search terms, bringing you more organic traffic. Some important elements to optimize your site for are fast loading speed, responsiveness for mobile devices and a consistent structure.
• Use category pages: Those specialized landing pages should be created for each job category like job seniority, location, or department to rank for more specific job searches. This is very effective because you'll face less competition and hence achieve higher rankings for more targeted searches. For example, you have better chances of showing up for “nursing jobs in Wichita” than for the highly competitive keyword “nursing jobs”. If you’re using Niceboard, we automatically create these SEO-optimized landing pages for you.
• Build backlinks: Links from authoritative publications in your niche to your site are one of the ranking factors for SEO, helping your site to appear in organic search results and acquire quality traffic. Whether you’ll organically gain backlinks by publishing original content, or you’ll leverage industry directories and resource pages, you’ll see the impact of backlinks on your domain’s rating over time.
• Implement structured data markup: schema.org markup is a way to create structured data for job postings. This helps search engines display rich snippets in search results, enhancing your visibility.

4. Utilize social proof

Social proof can significantly influence potential users' decision-making processes. To get more of your members to engage with your career center—whether it’s posting or applying for jobs—seeing positive opinions from others is influential. Showcase testimonials from satisfied job seekers who found jobs through your career center or employers who successfully hired candidates.

Create a dedicated section on your career site featuring success stories from members who have benefited from the career center. Since this information might not always be readily available to you, you’ll need to set up a feedback loop to get these important insights. This could be a simple email or a detailed survey that you periodically send to your members.

5. Engage with employers

Building relationships with employers is vital for maintaining a steady flow of job postings on your career center. And the more jobs you have listed, the more job seekers you can attract. Hence, improving your association's standing as a valuable industry resource and fostering member satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving acquisition and retention.

• Contact employers from your membership pool: Generally, your member companies should be your first resource, but don’t forget to consider your advertisers or donors.
• Actively help employers fill jobs: To prove your value and get some success stories from your closest connections, get active and help them find qualified candidates yourself. You can reach out to job seekers in your community and collect suitable resumes. Or talk to your connections in the industry and get them to spread the word about what you are doing. Once the employer finds success with your job board, they will spread the word about your career center.
• Reach out to hiring companies: Find employers in your industry that are currently hiring and pitch the benefits your career center, namely the highly qualified and targeted audience you have available.
• Establish partnerships: Consider creating collaborations with local businesses or organizations that align with your association’s mission and are part of your industry. This can lead to exclusive job postings and collaborative events such as career fairs that benefit both of your organizations.

Measuring success

To ensure that your marketing efforts are effective, it’s important to track some key performance indicators, such as:

• Traffic metrics: Monitor the number of visitors coming to your career center using Google Analytics.
• Job posting metrics: Track how many jobs are posted over time and how many applications each listing receives.
• User engagement metrics: Analyze user engagement through metrics like average session duration and bounce rates.

Reviewing these metrics in regular intervals, for example monthly, will help you understand what’s working well and where there’s room for improvement.

By implementing these actionable strategies, you can grow the engagement of your association’s career center and position yourself as a vital resource that benefits both members and employers while generating non-dues revenue for your organization.