Swim Club Advertising Tactics
Advertising is one of the most important investments for swim clubs to improve the membership revenue channel, but small advertising budgets prevent many higher-priced options from being within reach. Luckily, there are many swim club advertising options that fit any swim club budget.
Facebook’s social networking platform offers significant reach, and it can be a great advertising option for swim clubs to reach their clients. Why? As Facebook’s popularity decreases with the younger generation, it is still at a peak for the parent-aged audience. This is the exact demographic you need to reach for when selling swim club memberships. Families make up the most common membership packages and reaching families goes through the parents.
Posting on Facebook on behalf of your organization can promote community and introduce your swim club to additional families.
If you have a small budget, you can also advertise through the Facebook platform. You can choose advertising styles to encourage more people to like and follow your page or to put advertisements about your swim club in front of target audiences. You can target people who match your current audience or even select an audience that has specific interests within your geography.
Flyers
For those with a slightly bigger budget, flyers are a simple way to advertise the swim club in your community. It is true that printing fees can rack up, but a lot of printers offer deals for printing in bulk.
Here are two free and effective places to post your flyers:
Schools:
Local schools are an ideal audience for swim clubs and are typically receptive to a request to distribute your flyers. For the younger students, teachers will include the flyer in take-home folders for parents. Older students who receive the flyers might either recommend your swim club to their family or join with a group of friends.
Neighborhood drops:
Have your staff drive around nearby neighborhoods and stick flyers in door handles, mailboxes, etc. The key here is quantity. While this isn’t as efficient as sending them directly through children, it does hit other demographics that may be looking for neighborhood recreation.
Member Referral Promotions
This is a popular method for any kind of business, especially swim clubs. A lot of clubs include member referral promotions in other advertising because it does not require any additional effort or budget. Referral promotions encourage your current members to advertise your club by including membership discounts and other incentives.
Not only will you increase your number of customers, but you will also provide perks and incentives to current members — increasing customer satisfaction.
Yard Signs
Yard signs are a simple advertising tactic. Along with the physical labor that comes with yard signs, the risk of people removing them is high. However, if you make the yard signs available to current members, the signs are more certain to stay up.
The more involvement you have, the more effective the signs will be. After the printing process, have your staff take the signs and stake them directly into the yards of your members who’ve agreed to help you advertise.
Sports Field Sponsorship
Take advantage of the influx of potential members at local parks, sports facilities, etc. Typically in a sponsorship, you will pay the park, field or facility to hang a banner advertisement for their clients to see. With so many young children playing sports, families are constantly attending events at these places.
This tactic is one of the most successful because it specifically targets active families — an ideal audience for swim club membership. It does require a modest-sized budget, but the return-on-investment can pay dividends.
Tracking & Analytics
No matter which swim club advertising tactics you use, you need to test the effectiveness of your advertisements. The best way to find out what works and what doesn’t is to add a “How did you hear about us?” section to your membership form. This gives you direct information on what advertisements reached and influenced the most people. Testing will save you time and money and allow you to invest in the most successful advertising tactics for your club.
eSoft Planner is designed to help you manage your memberships more smoothly, including attribution to referrals and to advertising sources. Contact us for a demo to see how you can spend less time and hassle on administration and more time supporting your swim club and its members.