"The very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior."
"The very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior."
"Ok, grab a clean sheet of paper and let's write down everything we want in our new demo website."
Are you wondering what promotion your YMCA is going to be for the New Year?
How are you going to market it? Where are you going to spend your budget?
Taking your membership campaign can have a low cost and be effect for gaining new members.
Consider this. Most of your prospect’s eyes are online and inside of social media. As a marketers we need to follow our prospects eyes and get savvy online inside of social media. The average internet user spends 2-3 hours of time online and 75 minutes of that time is using Facebook and Twitter. That is only on average, so the time spent on social media could be much greater. So it’s time to transition some of your traditional marketing dollars into social media.
Compare the cost of using your budget on digital media versus traditional - the trade off will amaze you. Keeping a simple spreadsheet to measure member lead acquisition is important. You will need to track the total amount of visitors, total amount of lead forms completed, the total cost of the Facebook ads. Divide the total cost by the total leads and you will have your cost per lead. This number should be less using social media than traditional media and get better over time as you polish your efforts.
Here is a short list of the tasks you need to execute to launch a simple online membership campaign:
1. Change your Facebook cover images to match your campaign.
2. Update your website front page and have corner call outs.
3. Launch Facebook ads: you will spend anywhere from $.80 to $2.00 based on cost per click to target a specific demographic.
4. Change "About" info on Facebook page
5. Create tab app for promotion to link to promotion page - include auto play video (less than 30 seconds)
6. Create Facebook badge that is shareable for people who have participated
7. Create a referral page, allowing current and new members to share the information
Overall transforming a small portion of your marketing budget to social media is very important to recruiting new members to your organization. Be sure to take the time to create your campaign and match every aspect to the needs of your viewers and followers. You wil increase your traffic online and awareness.
In an effort to become more mobile friendly, Thrive is making all sites responsive. What does a responsive site mean? You have one site that is compatible with all devices such as iPhones, tablets, laptops and Android phones.
NO...not right now. Apps are expensive. On average, apps typically cost around $10,000 plus the manpower time to enter data. This means that apps are on the upside of $10,000 - so far. The costs are only beginning to build up.
Not to mention apps have more than one point of entry. One entry for visitors to see and another to enter all the data and information. Having a responsive site is more beneficial than an app because all the information can be entered at one place, requires less manpower time and can be created when the website is created.
The marketing process to promote the app would also push your cost higher. Marketing is a lengthy process and can cost close to $10,000 for digital and traditional media. If you do the math, it comes out to about $40 a user. Why pay that much money when you can get a responsive site for much less?
Apps are a tricky breed. To have an app in the Apple Store, it needs to approved which can tack on some time to production. You cannot use the same app for the iPhone as you would for an Android phone. They have different formats, therefore an app needs to be created for both platforms.
For small marketing budgeted YMCAs, an app would eat up a huge chunk of the budget. Consider making your website responsive to avoid all the extra costs of creating an app and promoting to your members. You will have less to worry about and more happy members who can easily access your site.
Pull up Lake County YMCA on your laptop, then your tablet and finally your phone. Notice how compatible the site is to each device you use? You are still able to easily find each piece of information you may be looking for on a site.
To learn more about ySite options, visit Thrive ySite
Is your YMCA’s traditional marketing to build membership not as successful as it used to be? Why? Your new members are savvy online researchers. In fact they are Google search experts now. Google search has given them the ability to research instantly where they are going to be spending their money on workout memberships. It’s time to follow their eyes to the Internet and be sure that your YMCA can be found easily inside Google and other search engines.
Do you have a YMCA Twitter account? Does your Twitter have a standard background?
I recently was emailing with one of our first YMCA clients, Lake County YMCA. We have formed a great bond with their entire marketing team and have been able to learn a lot about their needs and wants with their YMCA website over the past year.
Fortunately, we have experienced mild success and growth in this vertical market. This growth has caused us to re-evaluate our current process; sales, implementation, follow-up and communication to our most valuable asset, our YMCA customer. I prefer to use words like partner or teammate but for now we will use customer.
This next line is copied and pasted from my email referencing our current Customer Service:
It's currently good, but good isn't "good" enough for us!
This should be your motto with Customer Service and, quite frankly every aspect of your business. Let’s face it, many people and companies are good at what they do. But, how many are great? Great can be hard to quantify but for me, it revolves around effort and interest.
Are you really concerned about your client? Do you care whether the client received the product or service they were expecting? Are you on to the next sale and not “servicing the customer” on your previous sale? Gary Vaynerchuk, aka @garyvee, mentioned at Hubspot’s Inbound 2012 conference that Client Retention is the name of the game. And, in order to maintain your client, exceptional and unexpected Customer Service is mandatory!
Do you take an interest in their business but more importantly their life. I like to form friendships with my business associates. You don’t have to be intrusive, just let it happen naturally. Do they like football, do they have kids, do you share interests? Before you know it, you will have a much deeper bond with your client and may become Facebook friends!
I believe the phrase “good is not good enough” should apply to many facets of your life. For your business to succeed in this social, ever-changing environment, you and your business must stand out from the rest. Your Customer Service is the heartbeat of your success and you should wake up every morning thinking “Good is Not Good Enough!"
