When marketing your float center, it’s vital to ensure each step of the way is aligned
with an integrated message and goal for customers to help ensure your success.
What is integrated marketing? It’s a strategy to ensure that all aspects of your float center’s marketing mix (advertisements, social media, website, emails, print materials, signage and more) are in alignment to increase the likelihood of converting and upselling customers.
It’s important to constantly be thinking and putting yourself in the shoes of your customers in relation to your marketing. Even asking some customers what their experience was like or getting some people to walk through your website and other materials with you can help you understand how it’s being seen through their eyes, along with any questions that pop up.
Typical funnel for first time floaters
Ideally, you want to walk people confidently step by step through a funnel something like this (for new customers):
- Advertisement that introduces floating set up for clicks
- Website or landing page focused on the first float experience and process
- Email capture (if they’re not ready yet) or to receive a special offer
- Remarketing advertisement following up with first time visitors who haven’t purchased yet
- Store or booking system to book their first appointment
- Conversion is tracked and attributed to the proper advertisement
Understanding the mind of your customer
Here are some questions you can ask to get you started (a full breakdown to follow):
- How are new customers finding you and where do they go to have their questions answered?
- Do all aspects of your marketing work together for the same goals or are they segmented?
- Where are people getting confused or dropping off the most in your sales flow right now?
- What are the common questions that you get asked in comments, emails, etc?
- Are these questions being easily answered in your marketing? How many clicks does it take?
- How are you currently working to address concerns of first time float customers?
- Is there a strategy behind each aspect of your marketing or is it done more sporadically?
- Are you managing your advertisements to avoid annoying and exhausting customers?
- Are you providing value to your customers with your marketing or just selling?
- Have you setup your advertising properly to be able to track the effectiveness of your ads?
- Are your advertisements segmented to customers at different stages (first timers, members, etc.)?
- Does your website and booking system work well on mobile devices?
The more that you think through how your marketing is experienced by your potential and current customers and adjust accordingly, the better your marketing will perform. Now it can be a lot of work to create and manage all of the marketing work, not including all of the strategy and optimizations like this, which is where hiring a marketing manager you can trust comes in.
Gaining a partner that you can trust
We know the difficulties and work involved in managing a float center from working with many over the years and we’ve seen how quickly pieces of the marketing mix can be dropped or strategy starts to fall through the cracks because issues pop up that are a bigger priority within the facility. That’s why it’s so valuable to bring on a marketing manager who can take that responsibility on and ensure that all the pieces are working together on the same message and goals to bring in better results across the board. When a customer is getting the same message (in unique ways and with limits to avoid annoying them) at each step of their journey, they’re much more likely to convert.
This is the main reason why our plan is set up to include and cover all aspects of marketing for your float center, from your Facebook and Google ads, to the social media posts and any work that’s needed on tasks like email blasts or website updates. You can see our plan here, more about how we work, and the results we have achieved for our partners from this strategy in our case studies.
