A successful app can help you to engage with your customers, promote your facilities and activities, and map customer preferences and behavioural patterns.
Whether you’re launching a new app or your existing app needs a boost we’ve got some great tips to ensure your app is as successful as possible.
Social media has a global penetration rate of 51% (71% in the UK), meaning over half of the world’s population uses it. With the right strategy and knowledge, it can be used to take your marketing to the next level. Take a look at our top do’s and don’ts for effective social media marketing.
Your social media strategy should act as an outline for how your company will use your platforms to achieve your communication goals and will ensure that your content is being kept relevant and to the point.
It should be used as the basis of all social media posts you make and should mean that the tone of posts is kept consistent regardless of who within the company makes them. Consider it to be a recipe book for your company’s posts.
Adding media to your social media posts is essential in ensuring that they stand out from the crowd. With so many posts and so much high-quality content out there, simple text just doesn’t cut it any more.
There is a huge amount of evidence to prove the effectiveness of video in social media marketing, so try to include them wherever possible.
Try and maintain your brand style and tone of voice in your social posts.
Remember you are trying to engage with your community and not just sell to them so maintain a good balance between local engagement and on-brand messaging.
Avoid overuse of Google images which can cheapen the look and feel of your feeds.
Remember that the social media posts you publicise are giving an impression of your facility, so it’s very important to keep a professional tone with any and all interactions.
Using an emoji in a tweet has been found to increase engagement by up to 25% 😲. Use emojis that make sense in the context of your post, in the same way you would in a text message; keep it relevant and don’t go crazy! 👍
Social media is a gold mine for feedback, so why not utilise it?
Chances are the majority of your customers will be on social media, and this can be used to collect and re-share positive experiences, which in turn will promote a positive brand image. As mentioned in the section about encouraging interaction, your customers will enjoy feeling included in the conversation too.
It’s important to remember that you are representing your brand on company social media platforms, not yourself.
Try to be careful when it comes to discussing personal opinions on company social media pages, and remember to stick to the aforementioned marketing strategy.
By spreading across too many platforms, your content may become diluted and stale. As well as this, some platforms may not be appropriate and clash with your marketing strategy.
Focus on the social media platforms that work best for your content. For leisure facilities, the most effective platforms tend to be Facebook, Instagram, and then Twitter.
Has lockdown forced you to close your centre? Although it may seem strange, now is not the time to go silent! Customers will be looking to your social media channels for information, so make sure you provide them with that along with some added extras to demonstrate your value.
To help you out, we’ve put together a series of tips and ideas to keep your membership engaged with you while physical sites are closed.
Check out our monthly Social Media Guides for more detailed tips and tricks, as well as more awareness days and social media platform updates.
At TA6, we are completely dedicated to supporting the leisure industry throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. We have therefore created a free resource library for all operators to use, containing plans, templates, social media assets, and more, to help you through this challenging time.
You can browse our other Covid-19 resources, support tools, and services here.
Finally, if you would like to speak to us in order to discuss lockdown strategy, a comeback campaign, or any other kind of marketing or training assistance, you can contact us here.
If you fail to plan, then you’re planning to fail. Follow our 4 A plan and you can’t go wrong! Now more than ever leisure providers have got the opportunity to plan for the survival of their business. Whilst marketing is just one element of the business that needs to be mapped out, it is an essential strand of the recovery plan needed for operators to bounce back following lockdown.
In this article we take you through 4 stages of running a successful marketing campaign starting defining your Aims and objectives.
Without setting clear target and objectives you will never understand how successful your marketing activity is or what can be done to improve it next time. Consider what you want to achieve at the end of your campaign. What would perfect success look like?
Usually this might be direct sales, growing your social media audience, generating leads or improving your data capture? But post-lockdown a primary Aim is to get your existing customers restarted and back into your facilities. Inevitably their will be a level of drop-out that needs making up but with restrictions affecting capacity expected the primary focus will be on reactivating your customer base.
Finally, before moving on decide how you will measure these Aims and put the tracking tools in place. Being able to track digital metrics will be easier (online sales, social media audience growth) but consideration is needed for some of the more manual tracking systems. Do staff need re-training on recording enquiries via phone calls or walk-ins? Do your procedures need revisiting to consider how people can check in to the facility if they were previously using fast-track kiosks?
Defining your objectives above will have helped understand who your target audience is. And we’re not just talking age, location and gender. With the targeting tools now available online your marketing activity can be very precisely aimed at small potential user groups.
Facebook gathers information on interests, behaviours, education, income and others. Twitter allows targeting by interests, TV show engagement and behaviours. And Google AdWords campaigns allow targeting based on specific keyword searches and website visits.
Next you have to consider which advertising channels are most appropriate for your target audience. There is still a place for traditional advertising (providing your budget can stretch to it) such as radio, printed media, bus shelters, leaflet drops and direct mail. But again, it depends on your audience and how likely they are to respond. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because 90% of Instagram’s users are under 35 then this is an ideal way to target teenagers. A younger market is often savvy to advertising and will ignore a lot of the digital traffic that is aimed at them. Consider using direct mail to this audience as a letter might actually break through the noise and get read.
Facebook continues to grow its 55+ market and we have seen great results from targeted PPC advertising to the older market.
With objectives set and target audience defined now you have to plan and carry out your strategy. Consider what resources are needed both in time and direct costs. Fully commit to each marketing channel you choose, for example, if you’re planning a Facebook advert, then craft an attractive video to accompany the advert, choose keywords that will capture the potential customer’s eye, setup tracking pixels to monitor conversions, create a landing page that achieves your objectives (data capture, sales, etc.) and decide on the metric that will define a successful advert.
Avoid leaving things too late. With most digital advertising you can schedule your campaigns weeks in advance leaving you time to setup offline advertising, brief your staff and fine-tune your enquiry procedures.
Post-lockdown an element of flexibility will need to be built into your plans. Without knowing what restrictions and limitations will be in place operators will need to be willing to adapt their plans based on Government guidance, customer feedback, capacity issues and income targets.
This is the part of a marketing strategy that is often overlooked by the novice marketer and even experienced ones can struggle to make time to fully evaluate a campaign. Not only does it help refine your next campaign but can shape your existing campaign as it happens. Only a few years ago we would have had to wait for enquiries to walk through our front doors and monitor ‘where they heard about us’ before deciding if our advertising had worked. Now we can login to Google Analytics or check out our Facebook Insights and see what is happening with our campaigns in real time.
Using a url shortener such as bit.ly allows the tracking of clicks on particular links. Monitoring the click-throughs and open-rates on your email campaigns will produce a hot list of prospects.
But remember where we started; what were your original Aims? Have you been able to track success linked to your objectives? What will you do differently next time? Now go plan your next campaign.
TA6 have developed an action plan to support leisure providers in their marketing activity, called T-minus2. For help with your post-lockdown strategy please get in touch with our team who will be happy to schedule a video call and talk through our T-minus2 plan.
Google Trends (Trends.google.com) is a free resource from Google that shows the volume of keyword searches and can be drilled down by country and time period. It does not show actual volume data but a data trend of popularity. If you want search volume then take a look at the Google Keyword planner tool.
Google Trends primary use is for identifying trends in search traffic. For example, take “gym membership” over the past 5 years and you will see expected spikes in January and also increases in September. Note the drop in interest during the coronavirus lockdown.
This is useful information to know when you should be spending your advertising budgets on specific keywords. It also shows that people are searching for topics like gym membership 365 days a year but if your budget isn’t big enough then target the spikes. However, your cost-per-click will likely be higher during a competitive period.
The platform also allows you to compare varieties on keyword searches. For example “kids swimming lessons” vs “childrens swimming lessons”
On average there is 6 times the volume of traffic for the word kids than children, and the trends show the spikes following the school holidays.
This is useful information to help with your organic SEO and what copy you should be using within your website. With this example make sure the phrase kids swimming lessons is on your site.
If this can be difficult to incorporate specific copy into your regular web pages then writing an article or blog can help upload a lot of SEO friendly terms onto your website.
Another one to consider looking up is group exercise classes – compare “aerobics” “group exercise” “fitness classes”. It might sound a dated term but there’s a huge amount of traffic for the word aerobics!
One of the filters you can apply is where the searches have taken place – on the web, images or YouTube. YouTube searches can be useful to identify search topics you can target with your advertising, for example, gym membership is not a popular search on YouTube, but home workouts are. In this case you can see on the chart below the huge spike in YouTube traffic during the coronavirus lockdown. Can this be an opportunity to put your advertising message in front of an interested audience?
Google Trends also gives you a section called Related Topics and Queries based on the keywords you’re exploring.
For example the keyword Swimming will show what other keywords users looked up – in this case swimming pool, times, lessons, timetable also see search traffic.
Changing the filter on the Related Topics to ‘Rising’ will show you the recent topics and queries that are associated with your keyword search. For example, Aerobics has been related with Bungee Cord, Disco and Anaerobic Exercise. So maybe searching these terms will give you some ideas for blogs for your website knowing that they are topical subjects to write about.
As its free there’s no excuse not to go and check it out NOW. Bookmark the page and use it when researching topics and activities that you’re looking to promote. Remember to compare keywords to see if a slight variation attracts more traffic and incorporate these keywords into your website to enhance your organic SEO.
Google Alerts (Google.co.uk/alerts) is a free monitoring platform that allows you to create alerts based around topics or keywords.
1. Monitor your brand – create alerts to see where your brand name or company is being mentioned across the web.
2. Monitor the competition – keep an eye on your competition and see where they are getting talked about.
3. Monitor topics related to your business – find out what people are talking about as it happens.
Setting up an alert could not be easier. Simply choose a keyword or phrase to monitor and adjust the search criteria – location, source (web, blogs, news), how often you want notifying and where the notification is sent to. Now all you have to do is wait for the notifications. A useful tool within the platform when setting up alerts is a preview pane showing you some recent results. This allows you to refine your search criteria so you don’t get unnecessary notifications for irrelevant topics.
Using inverted commas when setting your search topics defines the keywords as a phrase. So New Gym would search for any references that have included the words New AND Gym, but using “New Gym” will only show results for when the two words were written next to each other as a phrase.
It is projected that by 2020 online video will make up 80% of all internet traffic with 78% of people watch online videos every week and 55% view online videos every day (Source: Cisco and Hubspot). So with such huge importance placed on this digital medium here are 5 tips to ensure your making the most of video content.
