Our business has grown out of operating health clubs – we’ve been running them now for over 20 years! In that time we’ve learnt that virtually all members will live or work at most 12 minutes away from the club and that 90% of our members will pay us up front by direct debit. So that means that from a marketing perspective we need to concentrate on the immediate vicinity of where we are based with leaflet campaigns and strategically positioned banners whilst the main focus of our message is to get people to visit our Club – to give us a try before they decide which Club to join. The number of people who join or clubs without having visited them first is negligible.

It’s a simple strategy but one that has worked pretty well for us over the past twenty odd years. So when we started to develop spas we started from the premise that the marketing would work in a similar manner. How wrong we were! The reality of course with our spas is that people travel to use our spas from a far greater distance – we’ve tracked that over 30% of our spa guests will travel over 60 minutes to get to us. That’s a lot of banners and leaflets to cover that kind of geographic spread! And of course a relatively small percentage of guests will have visited our spa before they visit so we rely upon the staff and how they handle the phone enquiry and to a certain extent the spa’s website to secure the booking.

We’re learning all the time but our online marketing strategy is responsible for over 90% of our bookings. It’s a totally different route to our marketplace than that we employ for the health club business. So we’re experimenting with Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and blogs, as you can see(!), creating a whole new marketing strategy and learning a whole new set of skills along the way. We cherish people’s email addresses in the same way we love to get the telephone number of potetial health club members.

And it’s exciting and it’s really starting to work. Over the last 12 months we have increased our spa turnover at our three main spas by a factor of 3. That’s some growth when we are supposed to have been in the depths of a recession. Over the next few months we’ll share some of the things we have learnt with our marketing but, of course, if you’d like to hear about them first hand and how you might increase your spa business through online marketing then please do give me a call on 01603 812727