The 4 stages of an effective marketing campaign

We've asked John Ainsworth, Director of marketing consultancy Make Sport Fun, to share some expert advice on marketing health walks.

This article explores some of the options beyond what is available on this website under 'Top 10 tips for promoting your scheme', and gives options beyond promoting via WalkFinder (although we still recommend you get listed on our WalkFinder!).

Running successful campaigns

Over the past 10 years I’ve run dozens of activity marketing campaigns and researched dozens more. Some of them have been successful and some haven’t. One of the common themes amongst the successful campaigns was that they had four stages:

Know, Link, Try, Repeat

Know – catch someone’s attention and get them to register for more information.
Link – link someone with where to do their ideal activity.
Try – provide a chance to try the activity for the first time. This should be fun, free and friendly.
Repeat – make sure someone’s had a good enough experience that they want to become a regular user, and if not find them something else to try.

I’m going to assume you know what audience you’re trying to reach, and what your key messages are (if not, then answer this short survey to download Make Sport Fun’s introduction to marketing activity where we explain how to figure these things out).

Know

The Know stage is about catching someone’s attention. You can’t communicate with someone if they don’t know you exist. We use this attention to get them to register for more information.

Possible tactics for walking groups:

Work with referral partners to get your message out. These could be council sports development officers, health trainers, local weight loss groups, physiotherapists, cancer nurses, GP practices or anyone who deals with people who need to be more active.

Go to existing groups where your audience gathers and do a presentation about your group (e.g. bingo group, working men’s club, retirement homes, groups at your community centre). Many of these groups are used to having people coming and doing presentations.

Do a door drop of leaflets in areas where your audience lives (use the planning tool on www.promotingactivity.com to see where your audience lives). If you don’t have your own leaflets then you can use the templates on this site.

Ask for referrals from your current walkers once a month – this is probably the best way to get new people along, but it can be slow to build so you have to get some members before this will take effect.

If you don’t have a website then set up a singe registration page to make it easy for anyone to register for more information about your walking group (www.unbounce.com offer a free landing page service).

Get some coverage in your local paper. Come up with a few ideas for a story and then call your local journalists and find out what they’d like to hear about. Ideas include someone taking part in your groups who has made a change in their lives through walking (e.g. recovered from a disease or lost a significant amount of weight); linking in with something going on nationally (e.g. walk to work week, national heart month) see the calendar on www.promotingactivity.com for upcoming national campaigns.

Make whatever marketing materials you use contain a direct response mechanism, some way for people to register with you. This could be a tear off slip on a poster or leaflet, or a form on a website.

Link

Now that you have got people to register you should get back in touch with them to invite them to one of your walking groups.

This is the stage which many people try to miss out. They try to get people to go straight from hearing about the group (Know) to going to a session (Try). Some people will do that, but if you invite people personally then you’ll get a much higher percentage turning up.

Possible tactics for walking groups:

Email – send a simple email to let them know times and locations for their nearest walking group.
Letter – send a simple letter to let them know times and locations for their nearest walking group. Use for people who don’t have an email address.
Phone – very effective for getting people to turn up, but obviously takes more time than email or letter.

Also do the following to make sure that people looking for your groups can find you online.

Make sure all your groups appear on Google Places. This is a free service from Google allowing you to upload your group to Google Maps. Your group will then appear higher in Google results if someone’s searching for walking and the name of your town or walking and a local postcode.

Make sure your group appears on all the activity search directories – local council (talk to the Sports Development Team), Change4Life and the main NHS website (go to www.makesportfun.com/activity-search-tool).

Try

The try stage is based around a low barrier to entry opportunity for someone to try the activity in a taster session. These should be fun, free and friendly. Walking for Health groups are always free, so this part is covered. So just make sure when someone first turns up that everyone in the group is friendly and welcoming.

Repeat

The repeat stage is your regular activity. Most people reading this are much more accomplished at putting on regular, high-quality walks than I will ever be, so I won’t say any more about this.

More information

If you want to know more about marketing walking or physical activity in general then please download Make Sport Fun’s introduction to marketing activity for free.

It’s available by filling out a short survey at http://www.formstack.com/forms/?1107755-apoLo575TB

John Ainsworth