Tapping fully into available technology and using tried-and-true methods to do a better job of tooting your club’s horn are two keys to getting beyond what’s to be gained (or not) from traditional membership marketing methods.
Even the formidable roadblocks thrown up by the recession haven’t stopped clubs’ momentum in making great strides to transform their properties, and reshape their amenities mix, in ways that have greatly increased their chances of attracting the new membership blood that will be vital to their future success.
Clubhouses and other parts of the property have been made more inviting and functional, inside and out. New vitality, imagination and innovation have been injected into core offers like golf, tennis, swimming and dining to make them more appealing to a broader demographic, at the same time that essential new offers like fitness and family programming have taken root. New, less-rigid attitudes are slowly taking hold about dress, cellphones and other issues that can be critical make-or-break decision factors, as new generations of potential members decide whether they want private clubs to be part of their lifestyles.
Even with all of these positive developments, however, this is not a “Field of Dreams” scenario. Just building and creating a more progressive and appealing club is no guarantee that “they”—the new members needed to ensure a property’s future—will come.
To maximize the potential of the changes that have been made in how their clubs look and operate, management and Boards must also take a fresh look at what have traditionally been very passive approaches to membership marketing. In too many cases, “membership directors” haven’t really directed the process at all—rather, they’ve just primarily reacted to walk-in or call-in inquiries, giving tours and handing out membership packets to candidates drawn in through existing member networks.
This has in part stemmed from outdated, entrenched and often arrogant attitudes that clubs are in such demand, there will always be a plentiful supply of ready-made replacements for when current members are lost through attrition. It also comes in part from long-standing fears, or unnecessarily self-imposed restrictions, regarding what private clubs can and can’t do in terms of advertising and other forms of more proactive promotion to extol their facilities and the benefits to be gained through membership.
Even where these attitudes, fears or misconceptions might not exist, many clubs have been slow—or completely asleep at the switch—in fully embracing and capitalizing on the slam-dunk member-recruitment opportunities that the social media explosion has brought within their easy, inexpensive reach.
As the examples presented throughout this special report show, clubs of all types that have not been shy about raising their profiles through more aggressive and targeted use of long-proven marketing techniques like advertising, and by immersion in new technology, have had entire new worlds of membership possibilities open up to them, and have been rewarded for their efforts with quick and tangible returns.
Growing the Digital Footprint
“People use social media for two reasons: to engage people and to be found in an Internet search,” says Paul Hattimer, CCM, General Manager of Pine Hills Country Club in Sheboygan, Wis.
For clubs looking to reach prospective members, or that are hungry to attract more weddings, golf outings and banquets, cultivating a large digital footprint helps spread the word about the club’s offerings well beyond its existing member network. Image-based social media like Pinterest, in which users “pin” images to a digital bulletin board that includes links to outside websites, are ideal for public clubs that have invested in lush photography to sell the club.
Open and largely public social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare can act as an “active marketing piece that takes the place of a pamphlet or brochure,” says Diana Kuenzli, Director of Membership & Marketing for The Polo Fields Golf & Country Clubs.
“On Facebook, we’ll post a lot of our member events after the fact, and it’s an advertisement to prospective members, to see what the club does,” Kuenzli says. “Seeing the visual—the hayride and the magician—has an impact.
“For members, it keeps people excited and interested in coming out, to let them know there’s something going on daily,” she adds. “You get out of it what you put into it; membership has more of a value when you participate.”
The Polo Fields G&CC, which now has two campuses in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Washtenaw, Mich., started an active advertising campaign using billboards, radio and TV spots to extend its brand, and even lowered guest fees to bring more people into the club. Social media like Facebook can convey real-time results of marketing and advertising efforts.
“Getting members to participate is one of the biggest things you strive to attain,” Kuenzli says. “Doing e-mail blasts and using Facebook, we generate more of an upfront immediacy to give us better response for people registering and to know who’s planning to attend events. We can then plan better in advance, because we know how many people are interested.”
But conveying an immediate return on investment isn’t a primary objective for the club, Kuenzli notes. Instead, she says, the club’s Facebook feed is intended to serve as a way to stay front-of-mind with members throughout the day, thus “sowing the seeds for the future,” so they, as well as the general public, will be more likely to think of The Polo Fields first when wondering where to hold a future event.
Contrary to conventional belief, it’s not just younger members who are utilizing digital tools.
“It’s a funny thing—we have members who are young professionals that bring laptops and iPads, and they’ll be checking up on work and Facebook while they’re here,” Kuenzli says. “But we also have seniors who are bringing their iPads, and that’s how they stay in touch with family.”
“I don’t think it’s a particular demographic—it’s a particular mindset,” she says. “People, regardless of age, are embracing the ability to be connected, whether by phone or laptop or iPad.
So rather than fighting it, we’re embracing it, and it’s to our benefit.”
Privacy Tools
Entering the notoriously public digital realm does present a special dilemma to private clubs that, by their nature, must be protective of both their organization’s integrity and their individual members. For many, the solution is proving to be invitation-only apps that allow member interaction and club announcements to be safely dispersed only among the intended parties.
Clubster, a private social media network for private clubs, is not searchable on the Internet and allows only invited individuals to post messages of four different types: news, events, alerts and shared links. The app also has a groups feature that allows members and staff to communicate with specific subsets, such as delivering an announcement only to female members, or sending an instant message to the management team.
Getting members to be more apt to use these apps can also help generate regular and immediate response to club activities and offers. “It’s been shown that one of the reasons people go to social media is because they’ll be rewarded,” says Hattimer, who notes that special promotions where members can collect complimentary drinks for showing the club’s iPhone app can serve as useful enticements. “It’s all a concerted effort to reach members across many different generations and platforms.”
Many clubs have also found value from getting in on the YouTube craze, creating and posting videos with the help of simple, inexpensive filming equipment and editing software. These videos can be used to encourage members to recruit others, or to market upcoming social functions. One thing many clubs don’t know, Hattimer says, is that private clubs can create videos and upload them as “unlisted,” so only people who get the link can see the video, thus keeping the public from stumbling upon the video through a search.
Serving Up An AceWhen Patck Morin got his copy of The Plain Dealer newspaper at his home in the Cleveland area one morning last year, he knew it was the day when the paper was scheduled to contain an insert promoting a 30-day trial membership at The Cleveland Racquet Club in Pepper Pike, Ohio. Morin knew this because he’s a 15-year member of the club, and also because, as an advertising executive, he had lent his expertise to Cleveland Racquet to help conceive and prepare the promotion.
But when Morin opened his copy of the paper, he didn’t find the insert. And that was a good thing. Because one of the points he had stressed to the club was that the advertising should only be targeted to a group—young families—that he wasn’t a part of. Morin then walked the club through the process for working with The Plain Dealer to only send the insert (at considerably less cost) to the segment of its circulation that should get the message. Morin’s guidance on how to cost-effectively fine-tune the distribution of the promotion pieces was just part of the counsel he provided to help maximize the impact of the promotion, which helped the club generate 30 new memberships in a year and rebuild a comfortable cushion over its “magic number” of 500 members. Morin’s input, after reviewing previous promotion efforts at his club and others, also included these important tips: • Show people—“Most club brochures are as stiff as boards,” Morin says. “Showing empty tennis courts or golf courses isn’t going to make someone say, ‘Wow, that looks like a place that’s warm and alive, and that I’d like to be part of.’ Basic advertising research has shown for years that people like to look at other people. Private clubs seem to always struggle with this, and it shouldn’t be that way.” • Set measurable objectives—“This should not only involve how many members you want to add, but also identify who you want to join,” says Morin. “In the case of [Cleveland Racquet], it was young professional families with kids. Defining who we wanted to attract was critical to fashioning the right message, which had to be about more than just racquet sports—we also needed to show swimming, dining and other recreational activities.” |
Hattimer, who serves on Clubster’s Marketing Advisory Board, adds that when it comes to technological tools, users come to anticipate varying degrees of interaction and involvement. “There’s a whole hierarchy of what people will tolerate or expect in terms of messaging,” he says. “If I get one e-mail a day, that’s OK. But I can also get 12 ‘push’ notifications [alerts from apps about new available information], or tons of tweets. Different platforms have different levels of communication.”
To entice new members, Hattimer says he’ll use Clubster to extend an invitation to prospective members to “take a look behind the curtain.” Facebook, on the other hand, is ideal for making people aware of the club and its place on the map.
Knowing Your Audience
Of course, every club has its own relationship with technology, making it critical for each management and marketing team to be in tune with how their particular membership prefers to communicate.
After recently taking over as General Manager of Pine Hills (he was previously Marketing & Membership Director for Blackhawk CC in Madison, Wis.), Hattimer discovered that 60% of the members at his new club were interested in a mobile app. That prompted Pine Hills to shift its focus from social media to optimizing its website for viewing on smartphones’ and tablets’ smaller screens, as a nod to the fact that fewer and fewer people are experiencing the Internet through desktop computers.
On an internal basis, clubs can use Yammer or LinkedIn to communicate and share ideas with fellow employees or professional colleagues. (Club & Resort Business’ LinkedIn group continues to grow in popularity and help club managers from around the world engage in discussions about a variety of topics that are of mutual interest and concern, including membership-related subjects.)
Though not every club can have its own team dedicated to operating the club’s digital presence, Hattimer says it is important to have multiple voices from the staff interact in the process and contribute content. While that might create some additional administrative chores, it also lends more personality and interest to the club’s output. Inviting the chef, for example, to offer juicy details about the dinner menu can help keep the tone of content varied and interesting.
With the immediacy of social media and digital marketing also comes a responsibility to stay up-to-date. An abandoned Twitter feed or Facebook page that hasn’t had a post since last year is nothing but a detriment to the club’s image.
“[Social media is] not something that can just be done once and never looked at again,” Kuenzli says. “So if a club doesn’t know how to do it, they should contact someone to set them up and make sure everything is working together.” Aggregators such as HootSuite and Buffer App can also help sync up a company’s presence on multiple social-media platforms.
At the same time, it’s also important to coordinate announcements or alerts on whatever platform is used, so members aren’t inundated with cyber-noise and repeating messages. Developing social-media guidelines for staff can also help keep the conversation going in the appropriate direction.
“You want to do some training with employees,” Hattimer advises. “You want to be friendly but not familiar, and not say anything you wouldn’t say in the dining room at the club.”
To keep tabs on digital media efforts, Hattimer suggests using the built-in analytical tools made available through platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, having members print out certificates from e-blasts and tabulating them at an event, or simply asking event attendees how they heard about it.
Ultimately, having a variety of options to cater to the needs of members will be the best approach to keeping everyone digitally engaged.
“While I was at Blackhawk CC, one member there said, ‘There’s so much social media out there, what should I choose?’” Hattimer relates. “My response is to choose the one where you are most of the time. If you’re on a desktop, go to the website. If you’re glued to the phone, use an app. If you’re the type of person who wants to put a calendar on the refrigerator, get it on paper.
“There will always will be multiple generations at private clubs,” he notes, “so you have to tailor your message to all of them.”
Covering All Bases
In that way, social media, as the latest communications wave, is proving to follow a long-standing truism about other forms that have preceded it—you can’t ignore the value of any medium, be it print, electronic or word-of-mouth, in helping to get the message out about what a club has to offer. This is an unavoidable fact about an inexact science that was famously summarized by Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker when he said, “Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted—the trouble is, I just don’t know which half.”
At the same time, just as many clubs have quickly learned to hone their social-media approaches, there’s also some impressive evidence of finely tuned promotional advertising campaigns that have yielded strong results for clubs seeking to expand their membership base. In addition to the example of The Cleveland Racquet Club, there’s the success reported by Birchwood Farms Golf & Country Club, part of a resort community property owners association (POA) with over 750 members in Harbor Springs, Mich.
“In 2010 and 2011, we dabbled in radio advertising that involved ‘live reads’ on WJR in Detroit by Paul W. Smith, who has a large following as a morning host,” says John Foster, Birchwood Farms’ General Manager. “With 50 percent of our members coming from southeast Michigan, we wanted to find the best ways to zero in on our target audience in that market.” (The club arranged for Smith to visit Birchwood, which helped add a personal touch to his “reads.”)
“In 2012, we added 30-second ads on cable television, and experimented with placement on a variety of shows,” Foster adds. “We soon found that the spots that ran on The Golf Channel were the best at driving traffic to our website, which is what we want all of our advertising to accomplish. So for 2013, we’re going exclusively with The Golf Channel, which also has the advantage of a much lower cost per placement.”
As Foster indicates, advertising is step one of a promotional strategy that seeks to eventually get potential club members and homebuyers up to the tip of northern Michigan, where the attractions of Harbor Springs and the Birchwood community are the club’s best sales tools.
But because that can be a bit of a trek even from within the state (four hours from Detroit), the club sees advertising as the best way to first get prospects to make the “journey” electronically, by promoting visits to the Birchwood website. Once there, visitors are now greeted front-and-center by a video, “The Birchwood Story,” that starts to play immediately and treats viewers to hard-to-resist scenes of the picturesque property in all of its four-season splendor.
“Our website traffic has been driven up 25% each year by the advertising,” says Foster. “And we’ve seen and heard a lot of evidence that the visuals they see, once they come to the site, are having the right impact.”
Frequently, Foster reports, the appeal of the video leads to inquiries as to whether rental properties are available at Birchwood (they are). And rentals, in turn, are a key component in closing the deal—30% of new owner-members have rented before committing to the community.
“Before we started the advertising, we were running at about 28 transfers [of properties and memberships] a year,” notes Foster. “In each of the last two years, we’ve had 10 more, which brings in significant revenue [from transfer fees].
“But more importantly, when your club is part of a POA, while you of course want everyone to make full use of the club while they are property owners, you must also recognize that at some point in time, they’re probably going to want to sell,” Foster adds. “And especially during an extended period when property values have been challenged, that also means we as club managers must find new and better ways to do all we can to build awareness of our brand and take the ‘mystique’ out of what we have to offer.
“Being a ‘best-kept secret’ in today’s market,” Foster notes, “is really not a good thing.”
Sharing the Wealth of Knowledge
Membership marketing has become such an important aspect of club management, especially for properties tied to residential communities, that at Toll Golf, the club development and operations division of luxury-home builder Toll Brothers, Inc., the general managers and membership directors of each of Toll’s 13 club properties now participate in regular weekly “membership express” conference calls.
“We use ‘see and share’ computer conferencing technology and designate different leaders from among the group each time to direct the meetings,” says David Richey, Toll Golf President. “We don’t have canned presentations—they are targeted but free-flowing discussions about what’s working to find leads and prospects, and how to best tell our stories in a way that gets them to buy properties and join our clubs.”
Even as Toll Golf, after its purchase earlier this year of the Snowmass Club in Colorado, continues to expand its portfolio both in numbers and across a range of markets and geography, Richey says the exchange of membership development intelligence through these conferences continues to be an effective complement to each club’s individual marketing efforts.
“In every call, there will be several ‘Hey, that’s a good idea— can you send me more about that,’ ” he says. “And the really lasting value is how it helps [each marketing manager] not feel like they’re on their own, and reinforces that they have a network of good resources to draw from.”
While marketing club memberships around luxury home sales has certainly had its challenges in recent years, Richey says severe attrition “never really hit” any of the clubs in the Toll Golf portfolio, even during the worst part of the recession. He attributes that success, in part, to how the company has elevated and expanded the importance of the membership function, and given it the proper support. “Member-owned clubs, especially, can get pretty tied up within themselves, and that’s not the best way to find new blood,” he says. “Membership is a critical part of the business, and you have to show that you’re treating it that way.”
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