From better ROI to smarter campaigns: Why club marketers love BI

Blog: Professional advantage - BPM blog

Ben is a self-confessed marketing geek. He’s fascinated by consumer psychology, and is always on the lookout for new ways to attract members to his local club where he works as a marketing manager.

Member attendance and revenue at the club have been steady for a few years, but executives are concerned about what will happen next quarter when a rival club opens a few suburbs away. They are relying on Ben’s creativity and experience to keep bringing members through the doors.

The good news is that creativity is Ben’s strong suit. His marketing promotions are consistently innovative, well executed and receive positive feedback from members.

However, Ben isn’t so great at demonstrating return on investment, or using lessons learned from previous campaigns to ensure future campaign success.

Beyond ticket and food and beverage sales at events, Ben also doesn’t know how much revenue his campaigns generate. He has no idea how much each member spends in the club, or which members are most profitable.

This is partly Ben’s fault. He’d rather be coming up with ideas for new campaigns than digging through data and compiling reports. Like many marketing managers, he doesn’t consider himself a numbers man.

However, his club’s systems are also to blame. There is no easy way to analyse data from multiple systems (i.e. membership, point of sale, gaming and food and beverage), so it’s difficult to track what members buy in each part of the club. It also takes weeks to get reports on each marketing campaign or event.

With the club under pressure to stay profitable in light of new competition, it’s time for Ben to lift his marketing game.

A business intelligence (BI) platform could be the tool he needs to bring a sharper focus to his marketing and promotional efforts. Here are five reasons why:

Use data to drive marketing spend

Most clubs can track member visits, but few can see what members are spending in the club, and in which areas. Do members visit on a Tuesday for the lunch special, or do they prefer to play the pokies on a Friday evening?

With a BI solution, Ben could analyse member behaviour to find out exactly what visitors love about his club. He could then develop marketing campaigns based on these insights.

Similarly, if a regular member started visiting less often, Ben could reach out with a targeted marketing campaign based on the member’s preferences and spending habits.

Nurture high value members

A BI solution would give Ben the ability to identify his most profitable members, and reach those members with targeted promotions based on:

how often they visit
how much they spend
what they buy in each part of the club.

By understanding member behaviour, Ben could develop measurable marketing campaigns to keep his most profitable members happy.

Immediate access to post-event reports

If you’re like Ben, you probably rely on your intuition as an indicator of event success. After all, it can take hours to cobble together reports from different systems, and even then it’s difficult to get the full picture.

With BI, however, Ben could immediately see how events affect spending in all parts of the club. He could measure revenue from gaming, food and beverage and point of sale, both before and after the event. This would make it easy to calculate total return on investment. It would also give immediate insights into what members spent during the evening, and in which areas, so Ben could identify what works best for future events.

To find out more about business intelligence and clubs, call Professional Advantage on 1800 126 499.

You can read more about Professional Advantage and ClubIntel here.