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UK FITNESS SCENE
Marketing in quiet times By Dave Wright Creative Fitness Marketing THE art of good surfing is to not to try and fight the wave or the sea but to work with its power and use it to your advantage. The same goes with summertime when the blistering English sunshine draws our members away from our clubs, leaving many club staff scratching their heads on ways to get members back in. There are a couple of ways to work this to your advantage to try and turn lemon into lemonade. First and foremost is that the sunshine is the time when the emotional needs of having to take off the t-shirt or expose our legs or arms in public come to reckoning. And as emotional needs are the paramount factors that drive members into our gyms in the first place, it’s worthwhile capitalising on that with your own marketing. Outside running or walking clubs have been around for years as they incorporate the sense of belonging to something as well as the motivation of doing activity together. So too boot camps have been a great way to increase that intensity with motivation but enabling members to get fresh air into their lungs. Members also want to get the best use out of their time, so you need to educate them about the benefits of strength training and encourage them that if they are planning to go for a
long walk outside, then get them off the cardio when they come in and tell them to focus on resistance training. If the club is quiet, then a great idea is to write to all your members and then offer them a special ‘summertime supporter’ membership that they can give to one of their friends or family which entitles a friend of theirs a free months membership to the club for the month of August. It gets activity into the club that you can sell them more supplements or drinks, without having to worry about existing members complaining about the busy-ness of the club. It’s also a great time for you or your staff to set up a merchant co-op programme for your business. This involves going to every local supplier and for return of you sending members down to their business, they just give a percentage off what they purchase in the store. So as a member, you get to support local business and maybe are entitled to 15 per cent off everything at a computer shop, 20 per cent off a haircut, or a buy-a-meal get-a-meal free at a pub etc. You can then add up all the values that they get and it could even mean that their membership to your club is free because of all the things that they save if they were to utilise this merchant co-op programme. This ultimately adds great value in quieter times when members look to get as much value out of their memberships as possible. And if all that doesn’t work, then let’s close our clubs for the months of August and December and go on holidays.