Background
The team at Active Norfolk had funding from Sport England as part of Get Healthy, Get Into Sport. Their target was to get inactive adults into sport.
The brief
They asked me to sit down with the project team for two days to plan out:
- What target audience they should focus on
- What sports the target audience would most want to do
- The marketing budget needed to reach the target audience
- What marketing messages would be most effective for the target audience
- What marketing tactics they should use to each the target audience
What we did
I sat down with the team and went through the data from the Sport England segmentation for their area. I created an Excel spreadsheet which combined the data on the number of each segment living in the area with the percentage of each segment who were currently inactive and the percentage of each segment who wanted to do more activity. Using this spreadsheet I created a chart showing how many people from each segment lived in the area, were currently inactive, and wanted to be more active.
It’s clear from this chart that Roger & Joy is the best segment to focus on, followed by Philip, then either Elaine or Tim. Because Elaine is more similar to Philip and Roger & Joy we recommended focusing on the Elaine segment as the third priority.
Based on these segments I was able to identify the sports that the target segments would want to take part in:
- Keep fit/ aerobics
- Cycling
- Gym
- Swimming
- Yoga/ pilates
- Golf
- Badminton
- Tennis
- Running
The next stage was to use the information from the marketing plans we developed for each of the Sport England segments to identify which marketing messages would be most effective at reaching those segments and encouraging them to get active. Next I was able to use the results from our previous campaigns to pull together a list of the marketing tactics that would be most effective for reaching each of these segments.
I wrote up all of this as a marketing plan for the project, including suggested timings, budget and action plan. In addition I wrote a direct mail letter which would get a good response from these segments.
Results
The amazing team over at Active Norfolk then went to work putting everything in place, and used this marketing plan to get great results. So far they have reached 75% capacity for their activity sessions, with 80% of those taking part being inactive.