✨ Watch Rebecca's full Spotlight interview here!
Welcome back to another exciting edition of Searchie Spotlight! In today's session, we have a special guest from our very own team, Rebecca Bakker, from The Membership Experience™. She's here to dive deep into the world of memberships and how artificial intelligence(AI) is changing the game.
As the TME Brand Lead, Rebecca is the driving force behind ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently. Her role involves creating new and innovative ways for members and students to make tangible progress in their memberships.
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Business: The Membership Experience™ Niche: Rebecca is the Brand Lead at TME that keeps the ship running, and helps create and share different ways for members and students to make progress in their memberships. |
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Paulina at Searchie: Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and who you serve?
Rebecca: Sure, my name is Rebecca and I am the Brand Lead here for The Membership Experience™. And that essentially means that I keep the ship running! So I'm responsible for creating different ways and coming up with different ways for our members and our students to be able to make progress in their memberships.
Paulina at Searchie: So The Membership Experience™ is a couple different things. We have The Membership Experience™, the course… And The Membership Experience™ Plus, which is the membership. What's the relationship between the course and the membership?
Rebecca: Okay. So front end membership essentially means that you have your membership open to the public all of the time. So it's almost kind of on an evergreen basis. And people can come in without having to consume specific content. To be able to join a backend membership is typically run off the back of a course.
And so that's essentially where people are going through your course and getting a foundation of knowledge to be able to join your membership.
So that's how we have our backend membership set up. We run The Membership Experience™. It helps us to create a strong foundation for people to be able to start, implement and grow their memberships.
And then when they come into The Membership Experience™ Plus, that's where we can really support them in moving forward. We help with strategies, we can support them as a community as they move forward in their memberships. So that's kind of how we have put things together on our end.
Paulina at Searchie: Leaning on that, because you do serve a lot of content creators… I wanted to ask about the different trends that you're seeing, how do you see artificial intelligence shifting the membership space and what lessons have we taken away so far?
Rebecca: In terms of what we are seeing in the membership space and what Stu is really actually starting to teach on the front end and help people just really open up to the possibilities of what AI can do for you and your business.
One of the biggest things that we focus on is really just time and people being able to get their time back, and to not feel the stress and the pressure to have to come up with everything completely on your own. And so that's not to say that you're gonna use AI and then, you know, never have any of your own creative ideas again, or never have a unique thought, but really just being able to take it and do kind of the grunt work for it. You know what I mean?
You can put something in, you get something back, and then you can tweak it and really make it your own. So the biggest thing in that respect, kind of on the front end of what we're starting to talk about a lot, is just the value of the time that it's gonna save you in creating content and in conceptualizing different things for your membership.
Paulina at Searchie: The name “The Membership Experience™” sends the message that there is an experience to be had, and there’s a lot of thought that goes into how your team designs a very unique content experience for everyone that goes through your doors.
So what advice do you have for other content creators as they're building their content experience in order to create a rich and engaging content experience for every member? And what kind of tools do you have in your toolkit to help your team when it comes to the delivery of that content experience?
Rebecca: Ultimately the experience that we try to create for our students as well as our members is really to help them move forward.
So if you've ever heard Stu (McLaren) talk anywhere, you will hear him say over and over and over, keep moving forward, one step in front of the other. And so that's really how we pull things together and try to create experience. We create consumable, small chunks of content that people can take one step at a time. We revolve it around something called a success path.
And so that really is designed to help people guide them through the milestones of the foundation that we're hoping to provide for them. So really just one milestone at a time, action steps and being able to move forward in small consumable pieces of content. And the other thing that is really important to note that we make sure that we're always thinking about is that too much Conti content can lead to overwhelm.
And when people feel overwhelmed, that's when they stop, or quit or wanna leave your membership. Right? So a lot of times we think that more is better when actually smaller structured pieces of content is much better. So for the overall experience, we just wanna make it kind of a smooth success path.
Rebecca: In terms of the tools that we use, we've really been leaning into (Searchie) Wisdom as of late. What we've been able to do with Wisdom is take hours and hours of content that we have, and kind of slip it into the backend out of sight for people, but it's still accessible.
So we're able to use Wisdom in a way where people can ask a question, it will still pull from all of that content that we have, but visually it's not in front of them and overwhelming them and also kind of distracting them from making progress.
That's something that we notice a lot in our community when there is more to consume, it overwhelms people, but it also gives them a reason to not make progress and to move forward because we have that thought that we just have to keep learning and keep learning and keep learning. And when we do that, we stop doing and we stop taking action. So we've taken it out of sight, but still accessible.
And the really cool thing is that we still have it turned on where people can get the answer and it will also reference where the answer's coming from. So the content's still available, but again, it's not in front of them and it's not overwhelming them.
Rebecca: And on the back end of that — the back, back end is that it helps our customer success team also be able to provide answers quickly, and to teach our members how to do the same. So we've started implementing where our customer success team will actually screen share themselves getting the answer and then share that. And so that is just again, giving people agency and showing them, you know, that they can kind of take control in their own business, they can empower themselves to get the answer, to be able to make that next best step.
Paulina at Searchie: This has been phenomenal. If you could give one piece of advice to everyone who’s currently managing and trying to downsize their content experience, what would you say?
Rebecca: I would just say that less is more, and you don't have to feel like the value is in giving more of you, or giving more content. And when you can really wrap your head around that and focus on just helping people make progress, it's just gonna relieve so much pressure and stress from you creating your own experience and your experience as a membership site owner.
So less is more. Don't hide behind the learning. Just take action.
Paulina at Searchie: Awesome. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and we'll catch you on another session of Searchie Spotlight.
Watch Rebecca's full Searchie Spotlight interview here!
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