A good social media strategy can have a positive effect on sales as it increases the overall exposure of your club, and it can help you promote your club’s deals and services to a far wider audience.

Because social media is such an efficient way of connecting with people, you can use social media to conduct market research.

You can conduct surveys or polls which will enable you to find out what service or deal you should be offering next. Take a look at what the bigger and more established clubs are doing on social media as this can be helpful when you plan your strategy.

Planning an open day

Take some time to start planning your club’s open day. Here are some suggestions:

Start organising and planning for your club’s open day ahead of time.

While you will not be able to set a date just yet, you can still plan out how the day will proceed and you can work out what kind of budget you want to set aside for the day.

Important points to remember –

• Encourage your club members to bring their family, friends or work colleagues down. This will guarantee you, participants, on the day.
• Ensure you do not run your open day for too long. This will give you a better chance to gain more volunteers as they won’t be giving up their whole day. a suitable time during the week could be from 4 pm- 7 pm or a Sunday could be 11 am- 2 pm.
• Everyone in attendance is to sign the function sheet. This is how we can communicate to the participants to get them back to the club. Also, this can be used for feedback to gather ideas on what we did well and other areas we can improve on.
• Encourage members to bring their coloured bowls down for participants to use instead of the 50-year-old sets. This will make it more appealing for the players and at the same time easier to handle the bowls.
• Make sure all participants don’t go home empty-handed. Develop a club brochure to take home. Other ideas to get them back could include 5% off their next meal at the club, free barefoot bowls, a free drink when next at the club or half-price social membership.

Advertising

Online:

The cheapest and most effective form of advertising is through targeted paid Facebook advertisements, you can target potentially thousands of people in the local area around your club which will help raise awareness of your event over the space of a week for less than $100.

You can also encourage current members of the club to share the ad on their personal Facebook page for free to help increase the reach of your advert, as well as posting on the club’s page and local community group pages.

Word of mouth and letter drops:

Another great way to advertise is through word of mouth, members can invite family members and friends to the event to help boost numbers

Letter drops around the neighbourhood and canvassing in high traffic areas also help promote the event when selling the event it is important to let them know there will be free food, music and a relaxed atmosphere (as well as beverages available at your club’s bar if your club has one).

TV/Radio stations and Newspapers:

Try and see if you can get a small shout out for free on local media outlets about your day, it’s also a good idea to invite them along to the event as they may come down to cover it as a news story which will help provide the club with extra press and exposure. Get to know the right contact person for your local community newspaper and radio station. Any story you can get about your club is free advertising! You may find the more metropolitan news outlets will be less interested in covering your event, but if you can’t sell the story to them as “local club rallying for community support at a time when many clubs are closing” you may find them to be more receptive. The more compelling and newsworthy your story is the more likely they are to cover the event, phrasing it simply as an “intro to bowls day” will probably result in the outlet not wanting to cover it.

We hope that this has provided some ideas for you to help get your club back on track when the time arises.