By Dale Petrie
It’s asked often enough. How do I get my message out there? How often should I contact my readers, my listeners, my fans and my customers? Can I over-communicate to my audience? In terms of tennis players and gym goers and club members, the answer is a Yes and No.
In looking at the tennis or fitness programming at a club, directors of each department are in the first instance marketers. We tend to forget that given that they work within their environment on a daily basis – on a tennis court or on a gym floor. But how can you communicate wisely and not over-saturate your audience? Well, it depends almost entirely on your audience. Is your advertising universe, your listeners or readers – your members, ready to consume more information. If so, go for it. You can communicate quite often, but if varied, targeted, insightful and worthwhile, it can be as often as you feel it is profitable and advantageous.
Vary Your Content
The first secret is to vary your content. Think about your sales universe – the people to whom you are marketing or selling your fitness or tennis programming. Within that group, there are various sub sets created by different demographics: age, vocation or retirement, household dependents and many more. Varying contact begins with addressing each of your sub sets which should demand varied content.
You can easily rotate your content as well. Just like HootSuite and MeetEdgar, the two leading social media posting tools, your emails, texts and mailings should rotate all your timely and valuable content equally. It’s easier to create marketing materials for the audiences you prefer, so it is an objective mind and behavior to create equal platforms.
With all the above in mind, reflect upon your product: tennis, fitness, and club activities. Within this product, there are thousands of products, from clinics to private lessons and group fitness classes. Along with that, you have stringing, shop items across tennis and fitness, and social programming – all of which can be marketed across various avenues – text, email, posters, social media postings, cross marketing with other club departments and reciprocal marketing with competitive or comparable clubs. Cross marketing is almost always a missed opportunity as I work with clubs across Europe.
Vary Your Marketing Avenues
As social media takes a prominent position in our desire to communicate with our clients, customers, and members, it really adds a dimension to our marketing possibilities. Use the different methods and avenues of marketing to vary your message and find different individuals within your audience who may tend to consume your message differently.
You can text one day, add to one of your several instagram accounts another day, tweet the third day, and send out an email newsletter the fourth day. On the fifth day, create a video on your Youtube Channel and on the sixth day we can put a blurb on the food and beverage’s weekend club menu! There are so many ways to reach your audience these days, you can overwhelm them, but if we target certain audiences while varying the avenue with which we communicate with them, we can help to actually dilute the overwhelming content that we are constantly creating.
Target Your Audience
Time should be set aside to create tight and defined sub-sets within your database to appeal to particular groups with your defined material. Any good direct marketer will tell you that targeting particular audiences, those who purchase a particular widget, with a campaign aimed at selling those widgets, will get a better response rate. Blanket communications do not receive the bump in response that a targeted communication does.
You can create various instagram accounts to aim at certain sub-sets of your audience. Just as Facebook is more literal with the spoken word, instagram users consume more through photos. Tik-Tok content should be short, sweet and aimed at your younger members. Facebook audiences are different and should be aimed at a slightly older age group. Instagram posts most likely created for your middle-aged customers.
Keep An Eye On Your Indices
Measuring your marketing should be continuous. With various software used by clubs it is imperative that each department head be well-versed with the back-end of their software. Whether it be the club-held software, google analytics, or statistics coming from your encompassing social media platforms, reading these daily and measuring responses helps to direct and create worthwhile future marketing campaigns and content. Review your open rates if an email newsletter, your response rate if a marketing campaign asking for a response, or the number of followers gained each week on twitter, instagram, youtube channels and other social media platforms. These are all hints as to what you should do as you go forward.
Keep Your Communications Welcoming To All
With that said, you never know who might forward or open your texts or emails, read your blurb on a menu, or open your snail mail envelopes. Therefore, each communication, although perhaps targeted at a certain subset of you audience, should be welcoming and encompassing to all members should they open it by chance. The more welcoming, the more members you will have visit!
Bonne chance dans vos aventures marketing!
Dale Petrie is a well-respected UK-based marketer who works with clients ranging from the FMCG industry through to sports marketers. He holds a marketing degree from the Sorbonne in Paris and works with clubs across Europe and the world including Club 55 in Saint Tropez to Queen’s Club in London.
