Want to realize membership strategies to market your private club more effectively? Here are a few tips for creating a successful membership marketing plan
Why would I need a membership marketing plan?
Whether you run a small, single club, a medium sized one, or a large management company, whether your club is newly founded or well-tried, there are certain daily challenges that you, as a club marketer, must inevitably face. These include driving member referrals, satisfying member demands, and achieving business goals. Such business goals should not come into being randomly or just by gut feelings. Rather, your marketing plan should be the basis of your corporate agitation. The process you should follow, in creating your marketing strategy, will be outlined for you in this article.
Make sure your membership marketing plan doesn’t become a monster, but rather is constructive and focused on the most important elements. There is no point in investing hours and hours of work into a plan just to disregard it in the end. In order to achieve your personal business goals, the membership marketing plan you devise should be something you can use in your daily operations. There are several things you should pay attention to when composing it. This means that full concentration and sufficient time are required when you sit down to devise this plan. However, the act of creating the plan alone is of course not sufficient. Your membership marketing plan should at the very least be updated regularly (say once a year) and be coherent with the general business strategy. This brief article should give you a rough understanding of how to create a private club membership marketing plan, and eventually serve you as a tool to sustain your position within the harshly competitive private club business.
Preconditions for a membership marketing plan
In order to determine precise marketing goals, you should already have formulated a clear business strategy. To do so, it is important to observe your club from a bird’s-eye view and to ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are our members and target audiences?
- Why should prospective members join out club verse our competitors? What advantages do we offer our members?
- Who are our competitors?
- What are we specialized in? How are we differentiating ourselves from our competitors? In which departments and amenities are we better?
- What are our products and services – and for which of them did we receive positive or negative feedback?
- What are some weaknesses of our club?
- What is our philosophy / our vision?
You should have convincing answers at hand for these questions. Only then can you begin drafting precise goals for your marketing strategy, defining concrete demands to be achieved over a specific period. Those goals must be formulated in such a way that they are verifiable and controllable. Maybe you want to increase membership inquiries from your website by 5%, or you want to strengthen your presence on social networks. By choosing specific targets, you can later measure your performance. Do not forget to define and include budgets for marketing measures into your calculation. In the end, it’s all about making those measures worthwhile for you and your club.
Create specific marketing measures
You have taken an important first step by doing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis as well as defining a business strategy. By now, you are getting ready to actually start working on your membership marketing plan. That includes developing certain measures for the following categories – the so-called four P’s.
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Place
It is highly recommended that you do some sort of brainstorming with different managers from respective departments of your club. Hear everyone’s opinion, let them speak, and be open and even eager for new ideas. Afterward, you can – either on your own or with your team – make a cost-benefit analysis of the various ideas. Those measures that show great promise for your budget can then be included in your membership marketing plan. Concrete examples of frequently used elements could be:
- Club logo / business cards
- Direct mailing / Club Newsletter
- Presence on social networks
- Online Advertisements
Concrete measures must be formulated precisely and be achievable within a certain time frame. Do not hesitate to be ambitious here, but do stay down-to-earth. Often, multiple small steps are necessary if one wants to achieve a single, bigger goal. Always keep your target audience in mind and set up a logical agenda, coherent with your business strategy. Share your membership marketing plan with all of your employees, letting them know that they are a part of this plan and have contributed to its development.
This process also has the advantage of giving different departments the chance to better understand the work of their colleagues, as they search to include everyone into a general business strategy.
Performance review
Your membership marketing plan should be your guide into the future. As such, you should constantly challenge the goals determined within. In the fast-shifting club business, a correct analysis of the situation and the related goals one day can be outdated and irrelevant overnight. Internal changes can have an impact on a club and its marketing efforts, of course, but so can shifts in the social, political and economic environment your club is attached to. Keeping your plan up to date doesn’t mean that you need to hire economic and political experts, but you should pay attention to external events and be ready to adapt when necessary.
A performance review offers valuable clues as to the effectiveness and profitability of your business strategies and marketing efforts.
Somewhere between the constant optimization and adjustment of your strategies and the necessary patience to let your ideas come into being, you might find the secret to an effective membership marketing plan. Control your success regularly by looking at numbers and stats, as well as by organizing team meetings. It is the only way to ensure that you achieve the goals as you’ve set them out in your membership marketing plan.
Final words
A membership marketing plan supports you and your club in different ways. Not only does it help you gain new prospects and turn one-time guests into new members, it also helps you embed unclear and indefinite business goals into concrete frameworks, and eventually to implement them with well thought out measures.
As a first step, it is important to develop and formulate a general business strategy, essential for your club to position itself properly. In due course, you and some handpicked coworkers should also determine some clear business objectives, from which you can deduce certain marketing measures.
From there, things get more elaborate as you have to put your – to this point still purely theoretical – membership marketing plan into practice. From here you need to be patient, as well as vigilant of how your strategies will fit your day in, day out work processes. Ideally, you want to create an action plan for and with your employees to describe how exactly you want your ideas to be applied.
Once you’ve managed to successfully implement the membership marketing plan into your daily workflows, you must not forget to carefully observe the impact of your measures. Not until your strategies bring about real improvements, your employees work together to realize objectives, and you’ve managed to prove a profit, can you consider the implementation of your membership marketing plan completed successfully. Until that happens, be critical, do not hesitate to challenge formulated goals and adapt them to altered circumstances. This is the only way for you to guarantee – whether you happen to run a small single club, a medium sized one or a large management company – that you have done everything in your power to tap into the full potential of your club and membership.
