“So how’s your corporate marketing going?” I’ve posed this question to many club owners and managers recently, and far too often I get the response; “It’s not going very well”.
Corporate marketing at its core is really a very simple concept. You create a relationship between a local company and your health club. The contact point for that relationship is typically the HR Director of the company. You then set up a range of special offers or events for the employees of that organization. The HR Director becomes your communications channel to the employees of the company. You prepare special offers or events targeted to the employees of that organization, and the HR Director uses their internal communication structure (typically email), to send your message to the employees of the company.
As time has passed, HR Directors of the best corporate contacts now seem to have “heard it all”. To gain and maintain their attention, you need to be offering something very compelling that is also in touch with the current needs and thinking of Corporate Wellness programs. An approach that I’ve found to be very effective is to combine some of the new technologies that have emerged within the fitness industry with our standard corporate marketing methods to create fresh new packages that provide compelling solutions.
While clubs have typically been promoting exercise, HR directors have also been very concerned about being “proactive” about their employee’s eating habits. While the word “proactive” sounds great at the corporate wellness seminars, most of them are completely mystified as to what they are actually supposed to be doing about the problem. This creates an opportunity for you. Many easy solutions have become available, and are now quite common. For example, private-labeled online member nutrition tracking tools have rapidly become an industry standard, providing a solution for the health club industry. A significant fraction of the industry now has this solution in place, and many are beginning to use it in their corporate marketing efforts to create a more comprehensive solution for HR Directors.
What all this really boils down to is a new way to close corporate contacts. To show how this works in practice, I’ll describe a sample corporate promotion: This new promotion could be called “The [Company Name] Challenge”… “[Company Name] employees get in shape with 14 days of free nutrition and 14 days of free fitness at [your club name]. Employees must visit the fitness facility by Tuesday to participate in the Challenge”. The nutrition spin does two things. First, it differentiates your approach and gains the interest of the HR Director who has likely been looking for a solution in this area. And second, it gains the interest of employees that might never have responded to exercise alone. Online nutrition tracking tools have made the process of providing a nutrition account very straightforward (the nutrition programs are private labeled as a part of your website, and are self-service tools). Additionally, for members who don’t join your club, this can become a source of passive revenue through the private-labeled reseller programs. Success in a changing world requires that you constantly refine and clarify your approach. By taking basic corporate marketing approaches and combining them with the newest industry solutions for wellness, we are able to keep our message to the corporate world fresh and relevant.
For more information call 301-864-3886, or email jpeters@vitabot.com, or visit www.vitabot.com.
