The Fitness First Club: Marketing communications

With the background information I have been given in this assignment, I have created a key objective for the Fitness First club. I will gather a report that reviews and analyses the marketing communications activities of Fitness First, and outlines recommendations for future communications activities. My aim at first place is to increase the number of members aged 10 – 35 by Jun 2013, I will also propose to use more personal selling to develop new accounts, this will increase the amount of trials and encourage other members to join a fitness club and be made aware of other promotions.

Fitness First is one of the largest health club group in the world. It has 540 branches worldwide and having more than 1.7 million members in 21 states. Fitness First clubs campaign to encourage more people to find out what fitness regime works for them by using former spice girl as the face of the week fitness international. In the UK, it holds 160 fitness clubs with over 405,000 members (Source: Wikipedia). Here is the background information on factors that have impact on Fitness First

Political

In the UK and worldwide government policy has potential influence on the market, specific initiatives could benefit the industry, but there’s also a broader push on the part of the government to try and promote healthy eating and exercise, possibly resulting in more people seeking gym membership. Early this year the government encouraged people to get fit ahead of the Olympic to come.

Economic

The economic factors such as utilities prices and wage rates will affect numerous aspects of Fitness First, the fitness costs will rise and members may need to prioritise their spending as cuts are made on their disposable income, especially in the prospect group. Not a lot of people are willing to spend much in the fitness club when they could on their own practice physical exercise at home, however price will be reviewed in order to well compete in the market and encourage subscribers to join Fitness First.

Social

Lifestyle factors such as growth in convenience foods and home entertainment have resulted in more muddy lifestyles; consumption levels of alcohol are rising which will effect gym participation and subscription. In today’s celebrity cultures, there’s lots of pressure to be looking good in the social life and have better appearance; It has influenced the way people are improving themselves to build six pact bodies to attract more females from the men’s view and such are also the desire of some women encourage their men not to be obese.

Technological

It’s important that Fitness First has up to date machines to compete with others and satisfy the needs of the members. Fitness First also uses technology to target the public in an effective way, text messages with special offers and online free trial vouchers and also create a page on the socials network (Source: Fitness First).

Legal:

Fitness First should examine legal requirements pursuant to the code of practice and should not use high pressure tactics to make sign a membership agreement or take unfair advantage of the lack of your understanding if you do not comprehend certain documents. Fitness First must display a sign that says about the health risks that may affect participation in fitness services. The Signs shall be clearly visible for anyone entering the fitness center.

Environment:

Fitness First should build in an ideal environment for the well-being of the planet and its members by seeking to reduce the environmental footprint of the equipment and invest the most on self-power cardiovascular machineries. Where the proper motion of the user produce all the energy needed to operate the machines, it will attract new customers by providing clean machines that are free of toxic substances, which is environmentally friendly material ( Source: athletics business).

Task2. Marketing communications mix

Like many fitness clubs devote themselves to schedule a marketing plan, research shows that promotion for health club is managed by using telephone (telemarketing) Radio (radio advertising) Biz (business membership programs) Mail (direct mail and email marketing), TV (cable advertising) News (newspaper advertising), etc (Source: fitness360). Looking at the previous campaign made by Fitness First when taping in the power of digital marketing, including display advertising and affiliate marketing. Their goal were to ensure that the skills of a professional fitness and qualifications remain relevant by increasing the number of downloads, due to the evolution of mobile advertising, Fitness First took rapid action to introduce click-to-call extensions with the current locations of users, which was essential for success and having the most competitive position in terms of mobile advertising. O2 been the selected mobile telephonic provider in the UK worked alongside with Fitness Firsts by launching a mobile marketing campaign for Fitness first club. The campaign was to offer five days free subscription and personal training session via SMS to O2 customers who live in specific postal codes near Fitness First clubs (Source: Mobile Marketing). The use of the site for the target consumer maximizes both efficiency and relevance of the offer. By creating this campaign in favor for Fitness First, O2 launched brand communication opt-in on O2’s customers who are interested in health, wellness and sports, aged between 18 and 35 years. O2 provided a daily email with qualified leads in number of mobile customers and postal codes to call the client and make an appointment. The use of this highly targeted medium of communication helps to ensure maximum effectiveness of campaigns, which proves to be moving one of our tools to acquire the most successful to date. Fitness First has also launched an affiliate displaying ads on Facebook and campaigned display advertising targeted Adjug with the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) which is the most common form of internet marketing currently in use worldwide. The purpose of using PPC was to send instant traffic to any website niches most commonly used to send targeted traffic to a page using only keywords related to the product page of the advertiser or trying to sell. It is also very useful for testing long-term strategies of SEO and ensure that your targeted keywords will convert. PPC is a fast and effective way of generating revenue to almost any website. However, if done incorrectly, it devalue your site very quickly and you will lose money, some of the biggest PPC’s networks are Google Adwords, Google Maps, Google advertising investments Yahoo, Microsoft AdCenter and Facebook. As a result of these actions, downloads increased significantly (Source: Latitude)

The tools used by Fitness First have been tested and proven that promotion is custom designed in particular relation with demographics region, time of the season, current members and other information gathered from the club’s profile before starting of the promotion. When analyzing the marketing campaign of Fitness First thought it lead them at the extend they were expecting to be. Nevertheless, I still find some improvement needed to be done to acquire more subscriber in their fitness club, because not many people are on the O2’s network also taking an account of internet marketing, was of good use in the point that technology is mostly used in this 21st century we living on but it could have been far more better to also make the use of other medium channels such as TV, Radio etc. Why so? Because everyone in the UK, living in their own house uses at least one of these tools to be informed of what is happening in the other side of the world.

Task3. Marketing communication plan

Knowing that digital marketing, including display advertising and affiliate marketing worked well for Fitness First, I will in this section shield the strategic day to day aspects of setting up my plan into action to enhance more the advertising portfolio of Fitness First, without pulling apart what have been done by Fitness First, where the use of my judgment and discretion on deciding how to schedule and plan activities, calculating costs and measuring progress will be outlined. Here is how I am going to illustrate my idea of marketing campaign. Every fitness and health club plan’s is designed base on the personal exercise and nutrition history I’ll suggest to employ a pull up strategy, with most prospects aged between 10- 35 mostly targeting primary school to Higher education to offer them services that encourage students. I will also suggest targeting the affordable sector of the market with a competitive pricing. The marketing communications mix will be divided around objectives, message, and media.

The objectives will aim to provide Fitness First consumers, access to sport and exercise opportunities to the top range facilities by adopting a healthy lifestyle. Fitness First will have to work with its local partners in education and people to share information, knowledge, skills and expertise, for example with schools, Higher Education an arrangement of work placements for students will be assigned and will share good practice at national competitive sporting events. My message should sound making bold statements to draw the attention of people, in belief of my commercial messages by organizing a public speaking and fitness group to bring people together to motivate each other by allowing people to be aware of what we are attend to do and reminding them of our existence. To achieve this, I’ll suggest the use of current staff and get them trained and have sufficient knowledge to encouraging people to subscribe, by telling their own experiences regarding the good effect since they joined the fitness club and how physically fit must you be. In so doing, people will understand my overall message, where the key point is to promote physical exercise, sustain encouragement and then for sure people might now develop the need to join Fitness First club.( source: sales-and-marketing-for-you). Media: when hoping to bring a new product or in my case to promote a new service, that will be ruining at Fitness First, you need to carefully consider possible ways to promote your product. However, using different mediums such as Radio, Bus, TV and social network (source: ehow), in order to increase brand awareness. The adverts will show the benefits of healthy lifestyles, giving people the idea about getting in shape. However: Population trends by socio economic group are an important influence on ability and prosperity to spend on fitness club membership. Consumers from the socio economic groups are the most likely to use health and fitness clubs regularly, most are light TV viewers so this medium is not an effective target, Radio is likely to be more effective. (Source: sales-and-marketing-for-you).The use of social media has exploded in recent years as a way to raise awareness and generate free traffic it includes sites and services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and many others. The main advantages are that it is free to communicate and has a capability of going viral and reach a vast numbers of people without additional effort ( source: clickbank)

The cost of the marketing will certainly play a big part in what I am intend to do. Bad sales and marketing is as a general announcement focused on no one in particular. In order to maximize a huge return profit, it is always good to approach the marketing plan with consideration and not devote a lot of money on a single marketing channel or campaign. I will instead try to shape up a range of successful publicity approaches over a time, I will also outline its cost, and how much money will I have to spend on advertising campaign? How long and how much each communication method will be balanced against the marketing communication budget. I will at first place, be concerned about the break-even point before developing any sales and marketing program, including advertising cost. I will also find out how much is each new customer and exiting customer worth to the fitness club? When observing the lifetime value of the health and fitness club subscriber, I will use approximation such as figuring out, how long each customer stays with Fitness First, where the contract will be given for 1-3 years for the new subscribers. Once I know the number and frequency of sales I derived from the average customer, I can then use profit margin to estimate how much each customer worth’s to the fitness club and how many customers is needed to obtain the specific marketing campaign, in order to consider it as a success:

However, to run the campaign of Fitness First, I found that the cost for ITV 1 Yorkshire channel per month is of £48336, people will be target on the daytime services of 11am to be aware of the services, the local radio station is of £160 per month with 8 short spot adverts of 15 seconds per day, cinema advertising will be of £900 per month along with billboard advertising £1920 the month and the cost of transport advertising is of £6360 per month ( Source: Blackboard). My message needs to reach customers, therefore the out home advertising buses will be these that are seen on high street shops and go to different places of the city, where middle and junior management of the social class are living. Based on my research, I will therefore recommend 9 months of advertising on radio, buses and billboard along with 4 months advertising on ITV1 Yorkshire and cinema the total average budget for the advertising will be estimated at the price of £232,188.00 for a whole 9 months period advertisement of all these chosen mediums where the first 5 month will be to remind the people on the existence of Fitness First along to inform them what Fitness First is planning of doing and after the 5 months period have gone Fitness First will now differentiate itself from other competitors by adopting a unique approach and machineries that are of people expertise, when visiting the fitness first club and then persuade them by meeting the needs of people with the choice of services and materials that are environmentally friendly.

Report

Executive Account Statement

To: Brand Spanking Agency

29/10/2012

I Daniel Kevin AMATCHA, I am please to submit my report describing on how I intend to promote the fitness and health club.

The purpose of this report was to gather sufficient information to render professional opinion about advertising your health and fitness club. This assessment includes research and figures concerning the cost of the whole month budget when using the mass media to promote the fitness club: however. I have also included the PESTEL analysis, which is an effective way to analyse external impacts on the health and fitness club, and planned the strategic action that will be of good use for the marketing communications mix as I separated into discussions around objectives, message, and media.

I have also introduced a marketing communication plan on how to work side with the marketing mix, which I have designed along with its schedule and plan activities including the cost of the advertising. You may also find on my plan the monthly statement budget and the chosen mediums to promote Fitness First club for 9 months period.

Bibliography:

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Larry Amon Larry Amon has been working in the computer field for more than 10 years and has experience writing scripts, instructional articles and political commentary. He has been published online, as well as in “NRB Magazine” and “Delmarva Youth & Family.” He started a nonprofit media organization in 2000. Source clickbank//>>common ways to promote products//>>http://www.clickbank.com/help/affiliate-help/affiliate-guides/common-ways-to-promote-products/

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