TA6 are on a mission to make 2021 a year of learning, seizing opportunities, and, ultimately, success for the leisure industry.
To help you achieve this, we have created and collated a collection of resources, tips, and tactics to ensure the most effective bounce back possible for your business as the UK gradually moves on from the coronavirus pandemic. These include advice on:
And much, much more.
Alliance Leisure and TA6 have launched a strategic partnership with Swim England to encourage the development of more inspiring and sustainable pools and wet-side facilities for local communities. The partnership went live in December 2020.
“Swimming pools can be under-utilised and inefficient in terms of the return on investment but this does not need to be the case. When thoughtfully designed, well programmed and equipped, these spaces become valuable community assets that deliver a viable return for local authorities,” says Paul Woodford, Director of Marketing and Partnerships at TA6 powered by Alliance Leisure.
As the official National Governing Body for swimming in England, Swim England has the insight and experience to optimise pool environments, coupled with a strategic plan to encourage more people to swim. Working together under this new strategic partnership, Alliance will be able to draw on this expertise to find the best solution for local authorities and leisure trusts when developing new facilities or upgrading their existing stock.
Swimming is an inclusive activity that creates opportunities for engagement that few other facilities can match, but only with the right design, workforce programming and management. As the client services arm of Alliance Leisure, TA6 will work with Swim England to ensure the programming and technology implemented in pools and wet-side projects reflect the bespoke needs of the local population, delivering a financially sustainable service that delivers community value.”
Natalie McGuire, Senior Engagement Manager at Swim England who has been fundamental to developing this collaborative approach, said:
“Working with Alliance Leisure and TA6 to actively apply Swim England’s insight, knowledge and expertise provides leisure operators with a tested solution for commercial success.
This partnership is built, not only as a result of complementary products and services but through the alignment of shared values and cultures. We are delighted to be working alongside a sector leader who shares our passion for people first thinking. Together we look to reimagine aquatic provision both in terms of capital development and commercial delivery.”
Quick question: who leads your social media strategy? You may be lucky enough to have a dedicated social media team, but many leisure operators do not. Your marketing manager may take the lead and direct individuals to post content, but some may not even have a marketing manager. Regardless of your team structure, creating a group of social media champions is essential in delivering a truly engaging social experience for your customers. The champions role may vary, from creating and posting content to monitoring and reporting on activity, but here are some tips for creating this dynamic team.
Recruit the right people into this role. It goes without saying that some people just are not cut out for it – and they’ll probably happily admit it themselves. Look for team members who are active on their own social channels. Does anyone have their own YouTube channel? Has someone got a decent following on TikTok? This can often be younger members of staff, but we’re creating a team, so aim for a combination of life experiences, commercial focus, engaging personalities, and social media experience.
Your social channels are at the forefront of communication with your local community, even more so through lockdowns and periods of closure. Your branding, values, aims, and objectives should steer the content and dictate the social media channels use. Don’t simply replicate your website’s content and styling. Social media is meant to be social by definition, so encourage conversations, be humorous, ask questions, and drive engagement.
Inevitably there are times when content needs to be reactive, but 80% of your content should be mapped out the month before. This allows the whole team to get involved and contribute to the plan. If junior members of the team are creating and posting content, then planning ahead means that proposed content can be drafted and screened by an editor before posting.
Your core values will help answer this question, but what are your objectives for having social media channels? What does a successful social channel look like for your brand? There is plenty of data to analyse in Facebook’s insights, but choosing 4 or 5 key metrics to monitor each month will help keep everyone focussed on the goals. Here are our 4 suggestions for insights you should be monitoring:
A big barrier to operators having successful social media channels is a lack of dedicated time given to the task. We started this article by accepting that not everyone has a dedicated social media team, but choosing the right social media champions often results in these characters voluntarily giving up their time to contribute to the process. However, giving your social media champion a few hours each month to create content, schedule content, and report on activity is an investment worth making.
Other resources need to be made available to your champions:
Building a team of social media champions will provide larger organisations with the confidence to create bespoke channels per local facility. Every business should have a company channel, but consider whether the public will affiliate themselves with that profile. Take a moment to consider if you and your friends follow your local leisure centre or club – would you follow a brand as well? We advocate setting up channels linked to a local centre or club. This means that content can focus on the local community while still sharing stories and updates from the company-wide activity.
If you decide to create a social media champion, then agree what that role entails and what is possible in the allocated time given to them. One key area to consider is how, and if, they are responsible for responding to incoming messages. Handling inbound enquiries should be a task shared amongst the team with access to your channels and who have had some training. These staff could also be classed as social media champions, expanding your team of people focussed on your social activity.
Dated ‘member journeys’ or compulsory induction processes are a thing of the past and need to be updated for a modern fitness environment. Having a clear onboarding process in place is important, but to make it deliver successful member retention that builds confidence and routine, it must follow a few simple rules.
Even when we have an onboarding process in place with needs analysis and goal setting, we tend to focus on the what, “how much weight do you want to lose, by when?” and then produce a programme.
To truly meet people where they are, we need to dig deeper and create a more emotional connection to it. We need the What, Why and How.
What – the measurable outcome -weight loss, increased fitness or strength, more energy etc. It is important to quantify it.
Why – We need to follow up with some simple questions
By doing this we find out much more about what has really motivated them to be active and understand the deeper motivations.
This is when we get responses like “I want to feel confident enough to go out with my friends and the weekend and feel good” or “I want to be a better parent to my children and be able to play football for longer than 5 mins without getting out of breath” or maybe “there’s history of heart disease in my family, I don’t want to die in my 50’s” these things matter.
How – how will they realistically build a plan of activity and how will they overcome the challenges that could prevent them?
Simply asking how many times a week will you work out usually leads to general answers they haven’t actually given real thought to – 3 times per week is the standard answer. Asking what specific days these might be makes them really think about scheduling exercise into their life. It may be that 2 is more realistic, if currently they are doing less or none, this is a great start. Stating 3 times a week and only achieving 2 could feel like failure.