WAG Marketing

[CoachSam]

Hey guys!

The gym owner has given me the task of coming up with some marketing ideas, both for now and in the future. Here are some of my ideas:
signs on main street (the gym isn't in the best location. Driving on the main street, you would have no idea that there is a gym down the street).
Trunk or treat (and possibly have like a mini open gym at the same time?)
Christmas parade (make a float and all that fun stuff)
End of year/Christmas letter (send to current and past clients. Talk about accomplishments we had through the year)
Volunteering as a staff (get the team kids and parents involved and possibly rec).

What are your opinions on those possible marketing ideas. What do you like? What don't you like? Any other suggestions?

Any input is appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

 

[kayjaybe]

Do you have a good website and FB page? If not, that's where I'd start. Everyone looks online for info on businesses nowadays.

Also, are you trying to drum up business for the recreational side of the gym or the team? I would think the rec is where the money is made and also feeds the team, so rec sounds like where you'd want to focus.

As for the volunteering stuff, speaking as a team parent & former rec parent - I already do enough volunteering with the gym for the team as a team parent. I would not want to spend extra time volunteering for the owner's for-profit business. And as a rec parent, you are a business I bring my child to. I would not want to volunteer to raise money for your business. I already pay you. (And as staff that is probably not making a ton, I would think they may not be interested in giving up their day off to volunteer for the gym.)

What is the gym owner's budget for marketing? As a business, he is going to have to spend a bit if he really wants to promote the gym. It doesn't have to be a lot, but signs cost money, as do floats for parades, and candy for trunk or treat (the last of which is likely to only draw in people that already go to the gym).

If he wants to keep hard costs down, I'd give out "refer a friend" coupons to existing rec students for a free class for their friend and maybe a credit to the current student of $10-20 if their friend signs up for a session. This is easy & cheap.

 

[CoachSam]

We do have a website and Facebook page. They are decent, I guess. I am personally not a big fan of the website.

I should have made that clear, yes, the marketing is really all for the recreational side of the gym.

I should have been more clear on the volunteering as well. I didn't mean volunteering for the gym. I meant community volunteering. And the reason I said possibly have team kids be involved, is because we have a decent amount that are in middle school and high school (a lot of our staff our in high school as well) that could use the volunteer hours.

Yes, signs cost money, but I think that is one that we have to do regardless. And a float wouldn't be too much since we already have a trailer that could be used, but I agree. I would rather just walk in the parade instead of doing a float.

As far as the trunk or treat, I was thinking that too. But if we do an open gym with it as well, they could bring their friends. Do you not think that would be the case?

I have thought of the "refer as friend" before. I personally really like the idea, but I'm not entirely sure how much the owner will. I will obviously still give it go, but that one will be interesting.

Thanks for your input!

 

[flipsandgrips15]

I have a similar position in addition to team coaching at my gym. Here are some of the things I like to do:

Free community open gym on National Gymnastics Day

Bring a Friend Day (friend cannot already be a member...this gets lots of exposure)

Make handouts to be distributed throughout the elementary schools in our county about big, special events

Our local Chick-Fil-A also lets us give them handouts that they put in every order

Host a Halloween Open Gym on the Friday or Saturday before Halloween complete with a costume contest, games, & prizes (we let the kids make a line & parade around the entire inside perimeter of the gym while family and friend line up to watch)

All of these things we advertise on our website, Facebook, & Instagram pages. Social media is a great outlet for advertising & it's pretty easy to maintain. I hope this was at least a little helpful for you. Best of luck! [emoji4]

 

[CoachSam]

I have a similar position in addition to team coaching at my gym. Here are some of the things I like to do:

Free community open gym on National Gymnastics Day

Bring a Friend Day (friend cannot already be a member...this gets lots of exposure)

Make handouts to be distributed throughout the elementary schools in our county about big, special events

Our local Chick-Fil-A also lets us give them handouts that they put in every order

Host a Halloween Open Gym on the Friday or Saturday before Halloween complete with a costume contest, games, & prizes (we let the kids make a line & parade around the entire inside perimeter of the gym while family and friend line up to watch)

All of these things we advertise on our website, Facebook, & Instagram pages. Social media is a great outlet for advertising & it's pretty easy to maintain. I hope this was at least a little helpful for you. Best of luck! [emoji4]

That was super helpful! Thank you! Those are great ideas. Have you noticed an increase in member sign up and member retention since implementing all of these?

 

[flipsandgrips15]

Yes, for sure! When we distribute the handouts, we include a coupon on it for a discount on the registration fee or the first month's tuition. They bring that in when they register and get the discount. We tend to see more kids join when we've recently distributed the handouts and shortly after we do bring a friend days. We also offer lots of themed day camps in the summer and on holiday breaks for school and that helps to get more kids in the door as well.

 

[CoachSam]

Yes, for sure! When we distribute the handouts, we include a coupon on it for a discount on the registration fee or the first month's tuition. They bring that in when they register and get the discount. We tend to see more kids join when we've recently distributed the handouts and shortly after we do bring a friend days. We also offer lots of themed day camps in the summer and on holiday breaks for school and that helps to get more kids in the door as well.

I like the coupons in the handouts. Great idea. How often do you do the handouts for both the schools and Chick Filet A? Once a month? And how exactly is"bring a friend" handled? Do you double up instructors for that?

 

[flipsandgrips15]

We do the handouts with the schools twice a year and with Chick Fil A about 3 times a year. As for being a friend, we advertise within the gym to our current students a month ahead and send out reminders the week before. If classes are younger kids (typically under 9 yrs old), we do have an extra coach to help out if needed (usually a junior coach). We try to keep our class ratio small anyway so when those weeks roll around, it's not really an issue. We usually do bring a friend in September after school gets started and then again in February after the holidays are over.

 

[triplethreat+1]

My dds' gym walks in the Christmas parade, does the 'bring a friend day' (those kids go home with a handout, and it's usually done close to the time to sign up for the next session. Also the younger classes have an extra assistant), and they do a demonstration at the local fair. That one is really fun!

 

[gymbeam]

On Facebook, come up with a really great infographic and then encourage people to share it by doing a giveaway. Such as, "share this post publicly on your wall and tag a friend to be entered for a drawing for $50 off a birthday party, or a free week of camp, or something good that would make not only your current patrons want to share the post but also make others want to reshare it as well.

 

[AlijahsMom]

I used to be an office manager and instructor in Tae Kwon Do for over 10 years.

I agree with needing a good FB and website. Along with that, IG is becoming important too. Especially since you can run ads on it now. I'd google search your school and see if it easily pops up, also, when searching just general searches as "gymnastics" how close to the top of the search it comes up. You can contact google and work with them to bump your school up to first position (don't remember if you have to pay a fee or not).

I know you somewhat touched on retention with the volunteering idea. This was one of ourmain issues for a while. If 3 kids joined for the month, but 5 of our current students left, it didn't matter how we got the 3 to join. So you need to have events/outings for current students throughout the year. We would have open houses where we would encourage students to bring a friend and receive free boards to break (not sure how this could translate to gymnastics, however, offering money off motivated the parents, the boards motivated the kids to invite their friends). We also had parents night out events, a yearly picnic, overnight training, a formal holiday party, bullying seminars, skills seminars, etc.

I agree with the post above about having a "sharing" contest on FB. However, I wouldn't exclude the idea of not having it have to be a gym related award. Again, parents and kids are motivated by totally different things. $50 off a birthday party I wasn't planning on having anyway isn't very motivating to me. A general $50 gift card I can spend anywhere is though.

We also had a demonstration team that did a couple of events a year that weren't in house. Such as Oktoberfest and other fairs in the community. You wouldn't even need elites to do a demo per se. People who don't know the sport or at least don't know it well will be wowed by pretty much anything if it's choreographed and flows well with a few wow moments here and there. We often invited all students to come and participate and it helped foster and strengthen their passion for the art, while showing off to friends and family.

We did use a similar idea for the end of the year mailer to current and pst students, but also included incentives, such as a % off merchandise for current students and a month free to come back for those who had left.

 

[CoachSam]

You guys are awesome! Great ideas! I really do appreciate it. Thank you!

We do have an IG. It's rathe new and I don't personally have an IG, so I don't know how active they are on it. But my guess would be that it's not very active since our Facebook isn't very active. So, I'll definitely bring that up. Being more active on social media and offering give aways. I really do think that this is down fall. And I'll look into that Google thing. When you search our gym specifically, it's the first on the list, but I don't believe it is when you do a general search.

I also really like the demos at the fair. We also have Allstar Cheerleading, so I know that would be a great avenue for them. I'm not entirely sure how to incorporate that for gymnastics. Just a tumbling routine? @triplethreat+1 can you shed some light on how you guys did a demonstration at the fair, please?

We do do Parents Night out about twice a month. But we haven't done a lock in type thing yet. I think that would be a good idea for team, but not rec. I'm not entirely sure how that would work, so I'll have to come up with other events for rec kids (like bring a friend and open house, like you guys suggested )

Thank you all again! You guys have great ideas!

 

[CoachAlex]

We have done bring a friend day and also have a referral program. We also offer a discount "coupon" to all kids who attend birthday parties at our gym if they come back and sign up for classes. A lot of business though is word of mouth.

 

[AlijahsMom]

I know it wasn't directed at me, but I saw a video clip on FB or IG today of some girls doing a gymnastics demonstration. There were about 10+ girls and they had some mats out on a stage. They had them walking across the stage in handstands one girl coming from each direction at a time. That was all I saw, but I assume that they also must've had them do some easy tumbling passes too. Like I said earlier, it doesn't take much to wow someone with an untrained eye. I've had times where I was watching a lower level martial arts demo and was bored out of my mind if it was simple or there just wasn't much of a flow to it. Other adults though who didn't do martial arts were enamored. On the other hand, I can watch a kid doing simple tumbling passes over and over since I never trained in gymnastics.

 

[CoachSam]

I know it wasn't directed at me, but I saw a video clip on FB or IG today of some girls doing a gymnastics demonstration. There were about 10+ girls and they had some mats out on a stage. They had them walking across the stage in handstands one girl coming from each direction at a time. That was all I saw, but I assume that they also must've had them do some easy tumbling passes too. Like I said earlier, it doesn't take much to wow someone with an untrained eye. I've had times where I was watching a lower level martial arts demo and was bored out of my mind if it was simple or there just wasn't much of a flow to it. Other adults though who didn't do martial arts were enamored. On the other hand, I can watch a kid doing simple tumbling passes over and over since I never trained in gymnastics.

Thank you for talking about your experience. It was really insightful. I was worried doing easy tumbling would be too boring, but that's good to know that those passes would still keep people entertained and intrigued if they don't really know what they are looking for. I will definitely keep that in mind!

 

[Sk8ermaiden]

The (enormous) closest gym to me is so popular they've opened a second campus, and are about to open a third. They do bring a friend weeks a couple times a year. They do tons of parent's night outs and have PDO whenever local schools are out. They do an occasional giveaway of a free month of tuition for people who share a post of FB.

Social media and the website is everything to me as a parent. When we moved DD, that and word of mouth was all I cared about. It gave me information and insight into the gym culture. The above mentioned gym posts all the times about their improvements, snapshots/videos of their preschool, rec, and tumbling classes, and team kids. Parents like seeing that the gym cares about their kids at all levels. When gym parents "like" your posts, their friends will see them too.

But as someone above said, really the biggest boon is word of mouth. The rec coaches are good across the board and that's been the driver, I think, when most rec coaches at gyms here are very young with constant turnover (many of theirs are young too, but they're trained well and stay for years.)

 

[CoachSam]

The (enormous) closest gym to me is so popular they've opened a second campus, and are about to open a third. They do bring a friend weeks a couple times a year. They do tons of parent's night outs and have PDO whenever local schools are out. They do an occasional giveaway of a free month of tuition for people who share a post of FB.

Social media and the website is everything to me as a parent. When we moved DD, that and word of mouth was all I cared about. It gave me information and insight into the gym culture. The above mentioned gym posts all the times about their improvements, snapshots/videos of their preschool, rec, and tumbling classes, and team kids. Parents like seeing that the gym cares about their kids at all levels. When gym parents "like" your posts, their friends will see them too.

But as someone above said, really the biggest boon is word of mouth. The rec coaches are good across the board and that's been the driver, I think, when most rec coaches at gyms here are very young with constant turnover (many of theirs are young too, but they're trained well and stay for years.)

I completely agree about the social media. That is definitely an area we need to improve on. Probably our weakest free and easy marketing. We have a Facebook page and Instagram, but it's definitely not utilized nearly enough. And featuring the rec kids on there the most is probably the best thing to do with that. We do do Parents Night Out, but we only do that at one of our two locations, and that probably should be done at both of them.

Thanks for your input! I appreciate it!

 

[Deleted member 18037]

Have Parents night out. On a Friday or Saturday. Pizza, drinks and a couple of hours of gym. For a reasonable price. Work with local schools PTOs. Same type of thing around the holidays. Moms shopping time.

Birthday parties.

Offer field trips for preschools. And send the kids home with "introductory" offers.