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Using FREE to attract new members

In your exploration of methods to attract new members to your club it can be tempting to avoid free offers and deals. After all the common assumption is that if people want to come along they will just come along anyway. However, it’s entirely possible that people just don’t know enough about your club yet and removing the barriers to trying it out can make a big impact on your ability to attract new members.

A while back we discussed the impact that the rise of the internet has had on the cost of everything. In that article I finished up with a look at why things have become cheap or even free, and we discovered how very clever people are using this perception of free to promote their businesses, products and services, in the process exposing their work to a vast audience for virtually no cost.

Today I want to expand on that by asking 3 simple questions about your bowling club:

  1. How many new people (and their circle of friends, family, workmates, personal and business networks) would be made positively aware of, and have a positive opinion of your club if you offered free hire of your clubhouse for kids’ birthday parties, weddings, funerals, music nights, exhibitions, group meetings, coffee mornings, weight watchers, meditation classes, gardening groups etc etc?
  2. How popular and well thought of (and recommended to others) would your club become if it was the central focus for the village or town’s Christmas and new year celebrations, a local arts festival, a beer festival, Christmas, Spring and Autumn markets, scout meetings or even a temporary soup kitchen for the homeless in the coldest months of the year?
  3. How respected would your club become if it became a centre of excellence for everything to do with bowling?: creating and managing performance bowling greens; coaching and developing excellence in junior, county and national bowling sides; training and developing world class umpires; promoting and exhibiting cutting edge bowling club management techniques and training.

Free is the new “paid for” when it comes to promoting your club or business…but instead of giving stuff away for free you are actually gaining a huge amount of value that no amount of money could buy, so it isn’t free at all!

In that earlier article I used the example of a software seller in Australia. In the past to sell enough software to make a living she would have needed to spend a lot of money on fancy packaging, distribution, retailer profits, marketing and advertising; none of which is needed any more as the word about their excellent software spreads around the world, virally for virtually nothing as they give it away for free. If you like it and want to continue using a fully featured version then you pay for that.

This is a very honest and quality focussed way to do business. Only by filling the exact needs of the customer and responding to customer requirements will they be able to guarantee keeping that customer for the long term.

This is actually not very difficult to do if you just assume everyone you encounter is a valuable customer, either directly or indirectly; maybe now or sometime in the future. Every positive interaction that occurs between your club and anyone else is a stored up positive.

Your club can employ exactly the same techniques by thinking differently about FREE as a means of introducing people to your club.

Fulfilling your audience’s expectations.

The process of bowling club turnaround is divided into 7 key steps, one of which is to identify your club’s Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA), as explained and illustrated in detail in Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround.

Once you have a clearly defined SCA it is this that informs all of your publicity and marketing to the user groups and individuals you hope to attract as the loyal members and customers of the future.

This Marketing activity, which should be perpetual and which needn’t cost the club much in the way of hard cash, can be thought of as “promises” being made to prospective club users.

As an aside, if you are throwing real money at advertising, promotion and publicity…please stop unless you can produce documented evidence that proves that it pays for itself in new revenue every time. Please see Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround for help with this.

So, back to promises…

If you consider your marketing as promises made, then you’d better make sure you can live up to these, because nothing disappoints more than an experience that under-delivers on your expectations.

Being good at marketing is one thing, but being good at delivering, at shipping, at getting things done well and on time every time is where you can excel at fulfilling the expectations of your newly identified audience.

This comes down to your Business Strategy and although that sounds boring and maybe even unnecessary for a bowling club you can only skip this if you are already doing very well and don’t actually need help in turning your club around, or getting more members through the door or making more revenue per visitor, in which case you probably won’t have read down this far anyway!

Business strategy at first glance looks like one of those crazy, mixed up subjects that is never ending and impossible to get your head around completely…but it comes down to just one Read more

Teamwork

This week we have been looking at growing club membership and retaining current members.

One of the most important requirements for a project of this nature to be successful is a cohesive team where every member is aware of the goals and is committed to achieving success.

To work effectively and for one common goal within the club it is very important for all involved to share the same vision. This vision should be clearly defined so that all involved understand the direction in which the club is heading.

The key to achieving this level of commitment is Read more

Delivering exceptional service

Yesterday we looked at how your club might be organised in order to fulfil the expectations of its target audience and we boiled that down to a very distinct goal that any club would do well to work towards:

Deliver a little bit more than you promised!

We then went on to look at how this might be achieved consistently. We discussed how the seemingly endless task of business strategy development could be boiled down to its essence, making it a lot more tangible and do-able in the process.

Business strategy for me is about three things; three mini strategies if you like and these are people, finance and innovation.

Today, I wanted to briefly fill out these 3 bullet points to give you a clearer picture of how you can use them to your advantage and guarantee that your club members, user groups, customers or what have you, will always Read more

Bowls Club Success Manifesto

Speaking to club officials as I go around the countryside, it’s never long before the conversation turns to the difficulties in retaining members, keeping the club afloat and general club survival issues.

Of course, the time of year makes it all the worse, as clubs going into the winter with financial difficulties are obviously in a delicate condition. It’s never clear how many members will pay their subs again and want to come back next year.

For many clubs it doesn’t look great this year; the combination of the already prevalent factors related to the state of the game with the very strange series of weather events (very cold and prolonged winter, followed by a very cold and very dry spring, followed by a very hot and dry spell of weather for many of us in June and July) has left a lot of clubs with worries about their survival.

This has led me to change around my plans recently and prioritise my work to make sure you have access to the right kind of information at the right time.

So, although we said that our new eBook: Bowling Club Survival and Turnaround would be available at the end of August, we have delayed this until the 25th September, so that we could bring forward the release of our new Manifesto for Bowling Club Success.

I know, I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but I think “manifesto” describes this new guide most accurately as it provides clubs with a document that can be adopted and then adapted into a declaration of your intention to work on a plan to rejuvenate your club’s fortunes.

Our Manifesto for Bowling Club Success includes 4 main sections as follows:

Part 1. Accepting the New Order of the Game

Part 2. Club Turnaround

Part 3. Long Term Strategic Planning

Part 4. How to Imbed Best Practice

It is available FREE now. Just click here to access your copy; and please let us know what you think and how you plan to use it in your club.