Many organisations focus on mass marketing campaigns, hoping to catch as many new customers as possible. However this can put strain on your budgets, and ultimately waste money, where a targeted approach, marketing specific messages to the audiences most likely to be receptive, would be more effective. This article looks at how leisure operators can get a better understanding of their member profile, find the right people to join and ensure they get the best value from the investment in their recruitment activity.

1. Understanding your market

One of the biggest challenges for leisure operators is that they are faced with providing everything for everyone. Whilst other industries can focus their products on particular segments of the market, the world of public leisure provision breaks all the rules of marketing - it's not focussed and for many operators, nor should it be. The solution is to accept that while you could tailor your marketing activity to everyone, in reality there are groups, or types of people that take up your offer right now, and other types that just don't turn up at all (or not in large enough numbers to justify being identified as their own type). You might not be targeting them, but in effect, they are targeting you - your market is largely preselecting itself.

So, the very first question you need to answer is what types of people are using your facilities today? Once you know this, it's a small step to finding others who 'look-a-like' them. After all, you are doing something right to get these 'types' in, so it shouldn't be too hard to get more people like them.

It's quite possible to analyse the data in your system, to create your own groups of people e.g. age, gender, activity level, activity type, and concessionary status. Combining these can give you distinct groups of people with common attributes. However it's also worth considering the free to use market segmentation tools provided by Sport England, Sport Scotland and Sport Wales, that are designed to focus on peoples' (or groups) characteristics associated with physical activity and sports. Whilst they draw on much of the data used by the other well-known systems such as Acorn or MOSAIC, they have grouped them into a smaller number of classifications which are more relevant for sport participation.

As an example, I shall focus on the Sport England tool. The segments are broken down into 19 types of adult and there are pen portraits for each. Each pen portrait paints a picture of who the segment is, a breakdown of the types of activity this group is likely to engage in and compares it to age group averages and their current level of activity. You can find further detail on the sorts of sports and activities they are likely to engage in, and the barriers that stop them taking part; a need for childcare, time restraints, cost etc. This helps you build up a good picture of a segment and it's not a giant leap to then look at your own data with the same 'lens' and group them in a similar way. Clearly there is a level of estimation, but I find it's enough to get close. If you don't want to group them yourself you can look at tagging all your members with the Sport England segments they are likely to be, based on their postcode.

This then allows you to analyse your data with the segmentation lens and see how many members you have living at for example, Chloe or Phillip type addresses.

2. Deciding who to target and whether it's worthwhile

Once you have your own members in these groupings, you can use the tools to help you identify groups you'd like to target with specific offers. You can look at certain sports and see which segments are most likely to take part in them. For example, if you were launching a new 5-a-side league you would be able to identify the Kev's in your data who you could this promote to. For quick results, that's a solid use of the market segmentation data, but you could also use the tools to help you reach some of those people who don't currently come to your centres.

You can select the attributes of the people you want to go after and the tool can tell you how many of them live in your area. You can even specify a postcode and radius to plot. With this information you can immediately make a decision about whether it is worth you running a campaign, and if so, exactly where to run it. It makes sense to only pay for 2,000 leaflets sent to the right households, instead of a blanket 10,000 sent to all addresses in a 2km area.

The data provided by Sport England even allows you to see which of the 19 segments are likely to live in each individual postcode. It is possible to work with companies that use this ranking information to look at the top segments at each postcode, and target your marketing activity at only those postcodes with the relevant segments most likely to respond to your offer. By identifying your existing catchment areas and segments, you can find more people that look-a-like your current members, de-duplicate existing member households and have a highly targeted, cost effective recruitment campaign.

Sport England have long talked about "more people, more active, more often". Well now we can deliver the "right message, to the right people, in the right way". When designing your campaign and offers, you can use digital printing to cost effectively target the appropriate offer, wording and images to each address. If you are trying to get Chloe to come to a spinning class it's a good idea to include images of people who look like Chloe; if you wanted to encourage Joy to come to Pilates, again its best to show her images of people like her.

3. Getting value for money

One of the great advantages of a segmented approach using your own membership data, is that it is possible to achieve a very good assessment on the impact your campaign makes. If you are sending marketing collateral to individual addresses, you can analyse how many new members join from those addresses within the campaign dates. That's a pretty good guide as to the effectiveness of your campaign and it's easy to attach a lifetime value estimate to those new members and come up with an return on investment.

Targeted activity using the Sport segments also allows you to identify which types of people joined and where you can make improvements next time. This post campaign analysis is powerful stuff, allowing you to demonstrate where you have affected the bottom line. Take a look at this case study on the Sport England website for an example of when this was done to promote a gym. In this example you will see that the operator took the time to remove existing member addresses which even further enhanced the investment as they didn't waste a penny on sending to addresses where they already had members.

Summary

Using data to drive your marketing work is something relatively new to leisure in the UK. Leisure marketers' hold enormous amounts of information on their customers, which when harnessed can significantly improve return on investment from customer recruitment activity. With just these three steps, you too can make a big difference to your recruitment activity today:

Find out more about who your members currently are, with the help of the national Sport profiles

Define your recruitment strategy and target your acquisition activity at groups accordingly

Report on results to understand the return on investment of your marketing, and inform your future strategy

Cascade3d

Pete Eastwood is the Marketing Services Manager at Cascade3d, Gladstone's business Intelligence Partner. Cascade3d provide reporting systems and services to the Plus2 database as well as marketing services to help operators use data to improve their bottom line.

You can contact Pete on petereastwood@cascade3d.com or call 07808 789155.

Sport England Market Segmentation screenshots are taken from their online webtool and PDF downloads.