Recently we’ve been working on a project for Macmillan Cancer Support. They want to know how to promote activity to cancer survivors over the age of 50. There are 4 key pieces of information we need to know in order to promote activity effectively to this audience.
- What activities they want to do.
- What their main motivations for getting active are.
- What their main barriers to getting active are.
- How they’d like to hear about activity, e.g. in person, by post, SMS, etc.
The first thing we do in this kind of project is to look at the existing research. We have a research library of hundreds of research reports from round the UK and internationally, so we start with this.
This gave us the information on promoting activity to over 50s, segments from the Sport England segmentation, and research reports from campaigns we’ve run promoting activity to over 50s. Next we got in touch with our research contacts to find out what they knew about. Then we looked on Google Scholar for anything available online. Between all these approaches we had 13 separate research reports and 2 relevant programmes. We studied these reports and travelled out to Bournemouth and Glasgow to meet with people running the programmes out there.
From this we were able to identify key insights for each of our areas of interest. We now knew with quite a high degree of certainty what messages would work, what communication channels to use and what activities to promote. This is already a fantastic level of insight, but that’s only stage 1.
Next we put together marketing materials based on the insights we’d gathered. We identified 7 concepts which we believe will have the most impact on getting our audience active. We designed marketing materials which promoted each of these concepts and wrote out a more detailed explanation of each concept to accompany it.
This week we are starting to test these marketing materials in a type of focus groups known as ‘mini-friendship’ groups. These are small focus groups made up of people who know each other already. The benefit of these is that people are more open about certain issues in this kind of environment.
Once these mini-friendship groups are finished we have 2 more stages to the project to help Macmillan promote activity.
The first stage is to revise the materials based on the feedback from the focus groups, and the second is then to test the materials out in the real world. This will include working with partners who want to attract more people into their activity schemes to distribute the materials and tracking which ones are most effective.
Finally we will write up all these findings as marketing communication plans and provide training for Macmillan staff.
For a friendly, no-obligation discussion of how we can help you learn how to market activity effectively to a specific group then please email john@makesportfun.com or call John on 07776 103 785.