10 Reasons Why Premium Content is Imperative for a Successful Membership Site
Building a thriving membership site isn’t easy, and you want to crack the code to success. But first, you must consider the incentives for your potential customers to join your membership site – and stick around. Enter premium content.
What is Premium Content?
Premium content refers to longer-form, higher quality, locked-down, or full-featured content that you restrict to customers who pay a fee to access the content. It’s not your regular or free content wrapped up in a product, like an ebook. Premium content is the “gold” stuff… the career-boosting, life-changing, mind-blowing goodness that only paying or top-tier members get access to.
10 Reasons to Why Premium Content is Imperative
Since premium content opens the door to a cascade of benefits, from generating interest in your site, monetization, and building revenue, to enhancing brand perception and reinforcing your content authority, understanding these key concepts shows you why premium content is absolutely essential for success. Let’s dive into how to take advantage of this to ensure that your membership site not only survives, but thrives!
1. High Value, High Return
One of the most attractive things about premium content is the high value it offers your customers in comparison to most freely available content on the internet. People have specific tastes and needs – whether they’re looking for information, entertainment, or solutions to their concerns – and premium content gives you the edge you need to provide the useful and relevant value they’re looking for, while cultivating a profitable website at the same time.
If your members already find a lot of value in your free content, they’re going to have the baseline confidence they need to try out your premium content as well. Taking advantage of this not only increases revenue; it also strengthens your relationship with your members.
2. Convert Free Users to Paid
With more and more digital businesses shifting toward content marketing and subscription models, the demand for quality content is higher than ever. Of course, giving away free content is a great way to direct traffic to your site and build a mailing list, but you want to figure out how to retain your audience while generating sustainable revenue.
This is where premium content saves the day, enabling you to convert free or basic members into loyal (paying) supporters by offering them something special that they can’t get elsewhere. This makes them feel valued and also establishes your site as a wellspring of the curated content they need, creating a mutually beneficial relationship. In an era when people can easily find a sea of free content in all directions, it’s increasingly important to nurture these relationships.
3. Instant Gratification
Flourishing companies like Amazon and Snapchat have it down: instant gratification is the new name of the game, and heightened expectations make it harder than ever to compete without delivering immediately accessible content. Of course, this has varying implications if you’re running a membership site.
On one hand, with such a high volume of content available on the internet, as well as rapidly changing trends and technology, you must constantly refresh and replenish your content in order to keep your site relevant and interesting. But you don’t want to give it all away; if your customers get everything they need from your free content, what incentive do they have to buy your premium content?
Fortunately, digital content is (by nature) immediately accessible, which explains its increasing appeal to the modern consumer. Premium content only amplifies this effect by delivering even more value in the same easily consumable format.
4. Simplify Choices
Concepts like analysis paralysis and the paradox of choice highlight the pervasive anxiety and dissatisfaction people experience when presented with too many choices in the marketplace. Presenting excessive options can cause customers to feel confused, hesitant, or even make them give up altogether. Keeping things simple can make a huge difference in improving the overall user experience on your membership site, including making the purchase decision a lot more pleasant!
Membership pricing simplifies things for everyone. You get recurring revenue, streamlining your income and making it easy to predict exactly what you’re receiving each month, while your customers enjoy flat rates that are easy to understand and compare in relation to their budget, as well as the convenience of automatically renewing memberships. Premium content is the bread and butter of this tiered system, allowing you to define your membership levels and entice customers to “level up” in a way that is straightforward – and caters to their needs.
5. An Alternative to Ads
One of the reasons premium content has become a necessity is that ads themselves are becoming less relevant over time. With the increasing use of ad blockers and the contemporary aesthetic of clean and ad-free websites, digital culture is shifting significantly toward premium content as a primary source of revenue.
6. Exclusivity
Why is premium content so sought-after? Well, people are naturally curious, and they tend to want what they don’t have. This means that when you restrict paid content, you’re creating a sense of exclusivity – something that’s very effective in driving sales. Exclusivity is a fundamental component of the scarcity principle, which equates rarity with value; when presented with something exclusive, the consumer experiences a sense of curiosity and urgency to obtain what they might otherwise miss out on. If it’s exclusive, it must be valuable! Just look at the volume of social media posts about “FOMO” – the fear of missing out – and you’ll understand why this is such a powerful concept.
7. Premium Engagement
Want to attract a highly engaged audience? Want to separate the casual members from the loyal supporters? Premium content does just that. The reality is that paying customers are simply on another level when it comes to engagement; they want to be there, and it shows. If your members are willing to spend money on your content, that means that you must be offering them something they can’t get elsewhere and they are probably invested in making the most of it. Don’t forget – premium content also creates a higher-end user experience, and user experience is one of the most important factors that influences engagement and sales.
“Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.” —Warren Buffett
9. Brand Perception
Brand perception and premium content go hand-in-hand. As a rule, customers are willing to pay a premium for content by a reputable brand that has a favorable image and reputation. In turn, your brand perception is enhanced by the healthy consumption of your premium content.
The way your brand is received by your members and potential customers is commonly shown through metrics like return visitors and visitor loyalty, which typically increase with the presence of premium content and its parallel rise in engagement.
Of course, brand perception encompasses a variety of factors (like customer service and social media reputation, for example), but premium content plays an important role in that it sets your quality standard, defines the product you’re selling, and attracts the kind of people who are looking for your content – and will return regularly to consume it.
10. Endless Opportunities
If you think you’re missing premium content for your membership site, take a look at the list below and think how these potential content ideas could fit into your business model.
- Premium downloads. If you’re already selling downloadable products, consider reserving the best of the best for premium, paid members only.
- Private courses or one-on-one tuition. As a tutor, teacher, or expert in your field, you can save your most valuable course material for premium content use only.
- An exclusive newsletter. Are you privy to the latest news and gossip within your industry? Offer an exclusive newsletter that only higher-tiered members can access.
- Podcasts. Share more of yourself and your premium advice with your exclusive members.
- A community. Build a community for your members. Grant access to forums or an online chat service as a premium offering. Allow your members to discuss your content and connect with you and/or your team, as well as other members.
What type of premium content can you offer to your members? And if you’re already using premium content, we’d love to hear what you’re doing! How has premium content impacted your membership site? Drop us a note in the comments and let us know! And if there are any article topics you’d like us to cover, feel free to share those with us too!