Deneen Laprade, the VP of business development with Instinctive Insights, shares how adaptive marketing can create sustainability.
Marketing is a necessary investment to maintain and grow any business. To say that pre-pandemic health club marketing was not simple is quite an understatement. The reality is that right now, during the pandemic the knowledge and skill required to execute effective campaigns have reached a new level of complicated, and operators are well-advised to seek marketing agencies with proven practices using data-science methods.
Club marketers must do their due diligence to find a marketing partner with real data-driven capabilities by digging into the prospective agency’s reputation. Interview them. Ask for referrals from current clients, assess their full digital presence and consider if they’ve engaged your brand in any capacity over time. If yes, what content was shared? Did it resonate or get deleted? Are they a trusted source that consistently provides relevant, useful information?
It’s tough to talk about the present-day approach to marketing without using sexy buzz words like data, science, data-driven marketing, predictive models, and personas. These attractive terms describe very complicated data processes and algorithms that are real daily activities for some agencies, and frankly, lipstick on a pig at most. It’s critical to know with confidence the agency of choice owns tried and true processes tested and evaluated regularly, designed to adapt and respond to real-world activity and instinctively adjust to identify the next target groups most likely to convert.
Ask the necessary questions to truly understand the prospective agencies’ processes before working together. The key aspects to affordably executing profitable campaigns include member data, market data, data analysis and modeling, personalized content and creative, channel selection, performance and ROI reporting. Their explanation should clearly express the club client’s end-to-end experience and set expectations for campaign ROI.
Adaptive marketing is critical for health clubs to achieve sustainability and make profitable marketing investments in today’s bizarre world. Taking the time to find a partner with proven data experience, an agency committed to the fitness industry by investing time and money engineering predictive models and algorithms that produce profitable marketing campaigns is guaranteed time well spent.
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Deneen Laprade is the vice president of business development with Instinctive Insights and can be reached at dlaprade@instinctiveinsights.com or visit instinctiveinsights.com.
