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Articles Tagged with: branding

The Importance of Online Reviews

Who do you listen to most when it comes to purchasing a new product or service? The brand or the happy customer? It has become so simple for customers to share their experiences on multiple online platforms and there is a wealth of information out there for us to see when it comes to buying that new TV, car, latest gadget or joining a local gym. Did you know that 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business?

Long gone are the days when we just go to our nearest shop and buy what we need – research is key, and online reviews often come top of the list in that research. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of customer reviews and here are a few reasons why they can be so great for your business…

1. TRUST

Trust in a brand is of utmost importance when it comes to purchasing from a new company so how does a new customer know they can trust you? You can tell them how great you are until you’re blue in the face, but if your happy customers tell everyone how great you are then that means so much more! In fact, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do a personal recommendation and 77% of consumers say that a positive review makes them trust a business more.

2. SOCIAL PROOF

There is no doubt that a business with a lot of positive or 5* reviews will get more sales than a business with less or no reviews. If you see that lots of people think that buying from a particular business is a good idea then you are far more likely to go along with the crowd and buy from them too.

3. VISIBILITY

Without going into the depths of SEO (we’ll leave that for another day) regular positive reviews are looked on favourably by search engines and will help your business appear higher in rankings. Not only does this help people see your business they are more likely to click because they will see that your website is a leader in your area and therefore more trustworthy. More reviews will also help with keyword content, another thing that will help your SEO and improve your online visibility.

4. INCREASED SALES

We can’t 100% promise that you will suddenly start hitting all your targets if you get some good online reviews, however, studies have shown that improving your star rating and getting more online reviews can have a positive effect on your bottom line. In fact, customers are likely to spend 31% more on a business with excellent reviews.

5. BETTER CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Having lots of online reviews is one thing but what you do with them is another entirely. They are, in fact, a great opportunity for you, as businesses, to get great interaction with your happiest and most loyal customers…the ones that are so important to you and your biggest raving fans! You can comment on and thank people for great reviews, you can even treat them to a freebie from time to time. Let other people see that there is a lot to be gained from saying nice things about you! Similarly, for those that might not be so happy, it gives you a great opportunity to deal with a poor review and a negative experience that a customer may have had. To show people that you care about your customers and take note and act on their concerns.

6. SPREAD THE LOVE

Increasing positive reviews on your own websites or Facebook pages is important but spreading that love and getting people talking about your business far and wide is what you need. Big review sites such as Trip Advisor and Yelp are hugely influential in expanding your company’s online reach and getting more people finding out about the great things you are doing. Make sure your customers are aware that they can leave reviews about you in multiple places.

7. REVIEWS BREED REVIEWS

It appears that when a business has some reviews already, people are more encouraged to leave their own reviews. Almost like a crowd mentality people feel confident to leave positive feedback when others have left similar comments before them.

TA6 have a wealth of experience in interpreting and acting on the data created from our clients’ digital marketing campaigns, and we’d love to share our knowledge with you. To find out more about our PPC advertising services or for a free audit of your marketing activity please fill in your details below.

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The 5 Most Important Pieces of Data in Digital Advertising

Among the many positives of the insurgence of digital marketing is, without a doubt, the invaluable data that it provides us with. We all know that data is invaluable – why else would people be so fiercely protective over it? – but do you know why? How can we use the data left in the wake of people’s virtual actions to enhance both our digital advertising activities and the success of our businesses? We’d like to share with you 5 crucial pieces of data used by marketers to analyse the performance of digital adverts.

1. Click-through rate / CTR

Arguably the most important piece of data of them all, this little number represents the percentage of people who clicked on the advert having seen it. When you know how to use it, the CTR can tell you how well your advert is being received, whether it’s aimed at the right audience, and how tantalising your call-to-action is.

2. Impressions

Whilst it is, of course, important for people to see your advert, a high amount of people having seen it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s been successful. If your overall objective is for people to sign up for a free day pass to your gym, the number of impressions that your advert has received is almost irrelevant. Of most importance is the number of clicks and the click-through rate.Read More

A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Advertising For Leisure

In this short article I’ll be introducing the concept of advertising on social media channels using a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. I find the majority of advertising in leisure revolves around fitness memberships with some marketing also directed towards swimming lessons, courses and a few other activities. I’ll be using memberships as an example to show how you can start to use PPC advertising for your facilities.

Traditional Marketing Can Have Limited Returns

Traditional, or offline, marketing focuses on leaflet distribution, newspaper adverts, outreach events, posters, roadside banners, radio advertising, etc. Many leisure operators find it difficult to track the effectiveness of these advertising channels but continue to invest in them year after year. What’s your go-to channel of choice? What has always given you guaranteed returns for your investment? Tricky to answer isn’t it? Because we often rely on a inefficient tracking methods and anecdotal evidence from years of experience.

So what if there were ways to monitor the effectiveness of your advertising AND guarantee returns? As you’re reading an article on digital advertising you can probably guess where this is going!

Digital advertising opportunities exist on many channels including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to name a few. We’ll focus on Facebook for now and I’m sure you can read about Google advertising in another of my articles in the future.

Facebook has been around since 2004, generates over $40billion of revenue each year and has 30,000 employees worldwide. It offers advertising through its Facebook Ads platform and as it also owns Instagram you can schedule adverts on that channel too.

Facebook Ads are shown to a user in a variety of ways, the most common being the mobile newsfeed, i.e. when you’re on Facebook on your phone and you’re scrolling through the newsfeed you will see ‘sponsored’ posts appearing.

Targeting

One of the huge benefits of digital advertising is the targeting options available to marketeers when placing their adverts. Facebook allows you to target users based on location, gender, age, interests and a few other demographic traits. For example, if you want to promote a new class membership you might want to target 25-50yr old females living within 5km of a centre who have “gym, fitness, dance and exercise” interests. Your adverts would then only be displayed to this group of individuals when they’re on Facebook, regardless of whether they follow your page or not.

Strategy

The next benefit of Facebook Ads is that most advertisers will probably use a pay-per-click strategy. This is exactly what it says on the tin – you only pay Facebook when someone clicks on your advert. So if you’re advert to female class users gets zero interactions, you won’t pay Facebook a penny and yet your advert will have been seen by lots of potential customers. However, don’t go celebrating the free advertising yet as there must be a reason why nobody clicked on your advert – wrong image, no specific call-to-action, poor offer, wrong audience?

Facebook Targeting Options

Destination

The quality of your advert is obviously important when planning a digital campaign, but the real effectiveness of your advertising is probably based more on the outcome from where people are directed. I should say at this point that there is an alternative to PPC which is CPM (cost-per-thousand) and is based on displaying your adverts to an audience and charging you for every 1,000 impressions. This is useful for awareness advertising when you have no obvious destination to send people to. However, if you do have a landing page to send ‘clicks’ to then make sure it is mobile-friendly (over 85% of advert traffic tends to be on mobile devices), provides information on the subject that caused the user to click, captures data if appropriate and uses video and images to be attractive yet informative.

Costs

So how much does a ‘click’ cost then? In our experience a typical click is around 30p. But this can fluctuate from a few pence to over £1 depending on a range of factors. The size of your target audience, the quality of your advert, your budget and the length of the campaign can all have an effect on your spend. However, when setting up an advert Facebook does give an indication of how many clicks you are likely to receive based on your targeting criteria. And you are always in control of your budget so you can set a daily limit of say £5 so once your advert has received enough clicks to spend your £5 then the adverts won’t be displayed any more.

Flexibility

Alongside setting a daily limit you can also limit the length of time your campaign runs for. So you can setup an advert that runs for a week with a daily limit of £5 per day. At the end of the week you should have gained approximately 115 clicks to your website of choice (£5 x 7 days / 30p average cost-per-click). If the campaign is working well then at any time you can extend the duration or daily spend, or alternatively if you are not getting the results then you can pause or stop the campaign.

Through years of experience and regular contact with our Facebook account manager we have developed an expertise within TA6 that is hard to match in the leisure industry. Our adverts have been seen by almost 20% of the UK adult population and we have created over 1500 Facebook campaigns to date.

To find out more about our PPC advertising services or for a free audit of your marketing activity please complete your details below.

Welcome to 2019

So 2019 is here and with it brings another huge opportunity for the leisure industry to continue its growth in participation numbers. With 1 in 7 of us in the UK being a member of a facility the State of the Industry report from last year shows the industry going from strength to strength. And long may it continue as one of our core drivers is to improve the health of the nation.

And we also have two key other drivers: income growth for our clients, and to develop the workforce within the leisure sector.

So what did 2018 deliver? Well us for a start! We launched TA6 back in May of last year and we have had some fantastic successes since. We have taken on new clients from Ipswich, Vibrant Partnerships, Cheltenham, Monmouth, Blackburn, Chesterfield, Hertsmere, Haverhill to name a few! We have also continued to work alongside a number of other organisations and partners. Thanks to support from ProInsight, Power2SMS, Falcon, Brand Chatter we have seen amazing results for our clients.

In the last 12 months…

TA6 worked with over 250 leisure centres
TA6 trained over 3000 staff!
TA6 reached nearly 4 million people through Facebook advertising on behalf of our client

So if you’re interested in working with us in 2019 get in touch. We can help with website design, training, sales, marketing, service, customer retention, print & design, app, e-marketing, digital marketing, mystery shopping and lots more. CONTACT US HERE

Video Shooting Tips

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.

Always shoot videos in landscape. Most social platforms are set up for landscape video and only IGTV and Instagram Stories can play videos filmed in portrait

If you are filming videos with sound i.e. someone speaking, then try to minimise background noise and get them to speak as loudly and clearly as possible. Without an external mic voices can get lost very easily to even the quietest of background noise.

If you are filming a person talking in a shot remember the ‘rule of thirds’. Imagine splitting your screen into 3, your subject should be standing in either the left or the right third of the shot with something less interesting in the background in the other 2/3rds of the shot. For example:

If possible try to use a tripod or phone holder (selfie stick or similar) to hold your device. It gives a smoother video especially if you’re walking around with it, it will help reduce camera shake.

Finally, phones are absolutely fine for taking video, there is no need for a fancy camera, but if you have one….use it! Most phones will be set to the highest resolution setting but its worth checking before recording.

DOWNLOAD OUR FULL VIDEO TIPS GUIDE HERE

Join our mailing list and enter our prize draw!

We’re giving away some fantastic prizes to celebrate the launch of TA6. Simply join our mailing list HERE and you could win an ipad, sports vouchers, £500 of digital advertising and more!

Is Your Brand Alive

How passionate are your staff towards your brand? Is there energy and drive from most of your team to deliver amazing customer experiences and exceed expectations? Do your managers inspire their teams to want to perform, for the brand, for their colleagues?

Creating a brand that lives, breathes and is embedded in all you do is an essential ingredient for survival and growth in 2016 and beyond. Here are five essential elements in creating a brand that is alive and pumping through the veins of all you do:

1. Have vision and values that get your team excited

Too many organisations have a set of vision, mission and values that are just plain boring. They are generally the same as any other organisation in their sector, and sit in a folder. Be brave, bold and differentiate yourself from the competition by creating something your staff are proud to be part of. Install a set of core values that form the basis of everything you do. These values should define your business, the experience you create and the atmosphere amongst your staff.

2. Create alignment at all levels.

If you truly want your front-line staff to deliver customer service excellence in a highly effective way then they have to feel aligned to all levels of management and other business units within the organisation. From the CEO down, the brand values and company ethos have to be lived and embraced. Just expecting your staff to deliver to a set of rules that you’re not prepared to do yourself is destructive and eats away at the soul of a business. Leaders show their team how to behave not tell them, and if I feel aligned to my manager and colleagues I feel involved and engaged. This creates pride in what I do and brings the brand alive!

3. Blow them away at their induction.

If we videoed a new employee being inducted in your organisation and played it to you, would you be blown away or would you cringe? Would you see an induction where the line manager creates energy and passion towards your brand, explaining the minimum expectations of working for the organisation and why we expect those standards? Do they relate these expectations to your values, showing the new member of staff how much they believe in them? Most inductions in our sector are truly terrible and are often just a tick box exercise to get someone set up in their new role. Most people leave their induction feeling flat and bored, but you can change this to show them your company’s true culture.

4. Focus on your brand delivery every day.

Brand standards in a top organisation are never compromised, whereby the management team are the ‘brand police’. Every manager in your organisation has to live the brand every day, every customer interaction, every team meeting, every training session, every team member appraisal, every marketing message, everything you do has to deliver on your vision, mission and values – they are the heartbeat of everything you do. Every team within the organisation needs to be clear on the minimum delivery level and be focused on surpassing it.

5. Mystery shop every month.

Make sure you check and challenge the actual delivery of your brand on a monthly basis. Don’t take your teams’ word for great performance. Video mystery shopping is an essential part off the toolkit of a service provider in 2016. Be passionate about excellence and install a culture of not accepting mediocracy. Watch your brand in action through a proactive and focused mystery shopper programme.

You cannot make your team bring your brand to life, they have to want to do it. Your staff at all levels need to be proud of their employer, the brand they represent and be clear on what the brand expects. When your teams feel aligned to each other and senior management it creates buy-in and loyalty. Your leaders should lead by example, setting the tone for service excellence. Is your brand alive in all you do?

Written by Paul Woodford Director for Marketing & Development