If you enter the term “health club marketing” into Google you will get more than 33 million search results. A lot of people apparently have a lot to say about health club marketing.
Once upon a time it was yellow pages ads, newspaper ads, radio spots, fliers, and maybe lead boxes. A few marketing (and advertising tactics) was all it took… you didn’t even really need a strategy. Ad hoc tactics got the job done.
Of course today it’s a different story. We have more marketing tactics than you can poke a stick at… e-mail… e-zines… social media marketing (Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Twitter, Blogging)… e-books… e-cards… websites… landing pages… articles… banner ads… Google Ad words… not to mention yellow pages… newspaper ads… newspaper inserts… PR… open days… TV ads… magazine ads… referral programs… radio ads… billboards… guerrilla marketing… fliers… lead boxes… well you get the idea.
No wonder there is so much discussion on the internet. Unfortunately, most of what is being said on the net is about tactics… and it’s being said by everyone… over and over and over again.
The problem today is everyone is busy trying the tactic du jour. In fact Google actually encourages it because Blog posts, articles, and PDF documents with titles like “99 Hot Prospecting Tips for Health Club Owners”, or “101 E-Marketing Secrets for Health Clubs”, or “50 Revenue Generation Strategies” tend to rank higher in searches and get clicked more often.
As a result we are bombarded with marketing tactics often with little, or no, reference to strategy (often because the authors of these publications have no strategy).
Unfortunately, throwing more tactics into the mix (no matter how cool) only creates more, not less, confusion… often resulting in a mess of multiple, poorly executed, tactics in development at any one time.
Today, ad hoc tactics won’t get the job done; today you need a strategy (that pulls all those tactics together)… and a good one.
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