Tag: Women

Supporting Your Female Clients

Supporting Your Female Clients

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You’ve probably heard the saying before: “Women hold up half the sky.” But, in fact, they may hold up most of your fitness facility. Research suggests that women drive 70 to 80 percent of consumer spending worldwide. Moreover, women, much more than men, engage in word-of-mouth publicity—they talk about their experiences with businesses, products, and service-providers, and, in their social circles. They hold a great deal of influence over the way others choose to spend money. Given that women also purchase fitness-related products and services more often than men do, what does all this mean for your health club?

It means it’s time to design ad campaigns better geared toward them. Here are a few tips for doing so.
First, put away the pink paint, lacy towels, and flower arrangements. The way to show women that other women are comfortable using your gym is not to advertise their presence through pretty embellishments but to highlight the fact of their presence. Using posters, brochures, and social media postings that show women looking serious about their workouts and happy to be in your facility will suggest that you cater to their needs. Supporting breast cancer awareness and making sure members and potential members know you do shows that women’s issues are important to you. Offering—and heavily advertising—childcare programs demonstrates that your club understands the logistics many women must juggle.

Loading your marketing materials with images of women is not enough, however. You must also create real programming for women. Do you offer women-only high-intensity interval training classes, extra women-only swim times, or self-defense classes for women? Do you offer co-ed basketball leagues or squash tournaments? Make your programming for women solid, and then talk it up as much as possible. Highlight your offerings on social media. Send emails. Offer prospective clients chances to take part for free, and invite current members to bring a friend at no charge.

On that note, make sure you’re advertising in establishments and publications that cater to women. Is there a clothing boutique or nail salon near the gym? Ask if you can hang flyers announcing a new women-only cycling class. Partner with local businesswomen’s associations and request that they include mention of your facility in their next newsletter. If you have branches nationally, consider buying ad space in magazines like Self, Women’s World, and Women’s Health.

Finally, engage the advice of the experts. Ask the women in your club what kinds of services do they want, then do your best to provide those services, and let everyone know that you’re doing so. Don’t forget to go to the official experts, too. Some marketing consultants focus exclusively on strategies for marketing to women; they can point out weaknesses in your existing campaign and show you how to polish it up for the demographic. Plenty of books and articles on the subject exist too. I’m not suggesting, by the way, that you forget all about the men—but chances are that if the women are happy, the men will be too.

careers

Tried-and-True Advertising

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Over at the website of the International Health, Racquet, and Sports Club Association (IHRSA), there’s an interesting post about advertising. It features three very different clubs and the three very different forms of advertising they use.

B-fit, a center for women in Turkey, identifies itself not as a fitness club but as a “women’s club.” It relies on word of mouth, creating activities, seminars, and services that give members something to talk about. Brooklyn Sports Club, in New York, uses event-based marketing, offering special events, such as indoor triathlons, self-defense classes, and Zumabathons, that are open to the public (for paid programs, members get discounts and others pay a slightly higher fee). Even if just one nonmember attends and joins, the cost of the event generally is covered, and the club comes out ahead. Re Creation Health Club in Australia relies on good, old-fashioned newspaper advertising. They make sure their ads are big and colorful, and they emphasize the ease of joining a health club these days.

I find it fascinating that not one of these clubs mentions Facebook or other social media. We hear so much about the importance of reaching out to all our audiences via electronic means. (In fact, on the IHRSA website, a post that appeared just a couple days after the advertising post says, “Technology in the fitness industry is here to stay. Not only should it be part of everyday life but, if you want your business to survive, it really needs to be incorporated into all areas.” The post goes to on to describe an important online survey the Fitness Industry Technology Council [Fit-C] is conducting for a technology trends report). But I wonder whether the technology-based methods of advertisement that are available today simply are not the best methods for the fitness industry. Judging by the very small sample of clubs featured in IHRSA’s post, it seems that more personalized, bricks-and-mortar–based methods are preferred.

It’s good to know and worth pondering. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the other forms of social media out there are fantastic for building a brand identity and for adding a personal dimension to communications from facilities to their members and clients (and that personal dimension is crucial in an industry so reliant on building relationships with individuals who are managing their own health). But for getting your name out, and for selling memberships and programs, it might be best to stick with longstanding, old-fashioned, tried-and-true advertising (for now, at any rate).

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Marketing to Women

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“How are we going to make the women happy in this club?” That’s the question health clubs and similar facilities should be asking themselves says Bridget Brennan, author of the book Why She Buys; founder and CEO of Female Factor, a Chicago-based consulting firm that specializes in marketing to women; and keynote speaker at the 2013 Club Industry Conference and Exposition later this week. According to Brennan, women drive 70 to 80 percent of consumer spending worldwide. If they’re not spending the money themselves, she says, then they’re influencing or vetoing someone else’s decision to spend it. Either way, women tend to spread the word: “[They] are the drivers of word-of-mouth publicity,” Brennan explained to Club Industry.

If it’s true that women are the decision-makers when it comes to spending money, then might your club benefit from ad campaigns better geared toward them? On a more pragmatic note, how do you gear your marketing to women?
As Brennan puts it, “The message is not to paint your facility pink.” Nor do you have to buy lacy towels or fill the cardio court with flower arrangements. But you do want to let women know that you’re thinking about how to serve their needs. First of all, how many of your posters and brochures include pictures of women — women looking serious about their workouts and happy to be in your facility? If the answer is not many, then consider a redesign that highlights their presence.

Second, do you have programs geared toward women, and do you promote them? Maybe you offer women-only high-intensity interval training classes, extra women-only swim times, or self-defense classes for women. Or maybe you have co-ed programs eager for more female participants, like basketball leagues or squash tournaments. Whatever you offer that is specifically geared toward women, make sure people know about it. Talk about it on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Send emails. Offer prospective clients chances to take part for free, and invite current members to bring a friend at no charge.

Third, advertise in establishments and publications that cater to women. Is there a cute clothing boutique or nail salon near the gym? Ask if you can hang flyers announcing a new women-only cycling class. Partner with local businesswomen’s associations and request that they include mention of your facility in their next newsletter. If you have branches nationally, consider buying ad space in magazines like Self, Women’s World, and Women’s Health.

Finally, engage the advice of the experts. Ask the women in your club what kinds of services they want; do your best to provide those services, and let everyone know that you’re doing so. And go to the official experts, too. Marketing consultants like Brennan can point out weaknesses in your existing campaign and show you how to polish it up for women. Her book, Why She Buys, and others like it also can shed valuable light on the subject. Oh, and there’s no need to forget about the men in your world: “If you lead by thinking [about making women happy], then you’re going to make your male customers happy, too,” Brennan says.

What Mothers Really Want

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Mother’s Day is a holiday that always makes me cringe a little bit (and not just because I’ve usually forgotten to send a card to my mom). What I don’t like about it is that it encourages showering mothers with gifts we really, truth be told, don’t need. Flowers, chocolates, breakfast in bed? No. What every mother I know truly needs, more than anything else, is time — and, in particular, time to work out.

There are a lot of activities a mother can, and does, learn to do with her children: cleaning the house, cooking, getting groceries, going to the doctor, even completing part-time work. But working out is a different matter. You can run around with your kids, sure, or jog alongside as they ride their bikes, but the focus necessarily is the kids and their needs. In order to get a true, satisfying, fully beneficial workout, a mother needs to go it alone, but daily demands on the schedule often make carving out time impossible.

What can your gym do to help? The best thing would be providing childcare for the length of a class or workout session. If this is an option for your facility, consider giving your clients who are mothers a voucher for a free or discounted babysitting session this Mother’s Day. If you don’t have the capacity to provide childcare, how about making available class packages that never expire (allowing mothers, for example, to purchase ten classes but not specifying that those classes must be used in a month or six months or some other period of time). You might also consider offering more classes during school hours. I love my gym, but it offers most classes in the morning, when I need to work, and in the evenings, when I’m home with my son. What I long for is yoga or Pilates or cycling at 2 p.m. — but between the hours of 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. there are generally very few choices.

One of the reasons I feel strongly about the need to make it easy for mothers to get to the gym is that mothers are particularly susceptible to unhealthy habits. We gulp down a few quick bites on the run, or we grab pizza because it’s what our kids our eating (but our bodies sure don’t process the pizza like our kids’ bodies do). We take care of everyone else and forget to take care of ourselves. We prioritize household chores over working out.

Caitlin Moran, a comedian, writer, and feminist thinker, points out another, more serious problem that many women who are caretakers face: “Overeating is the addiction of choice among carers,” she writes in her excellent book How to Be a Woman. “… It’s a way of [messing] yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to…, [of] slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone.” It’s true: a lot of women who overeat do it because the stress of being a “carer” drives them to seek some kind of outlet, but a kind that won’t cause dramatic trauma, as a drug or alcohol addiction might. For such mothers, the ability to work out would make a world of difference. Your facility can help by helping them find the time to focus on fitness.