Taking It To The Streets

One of my clients sent me this:

“Henry Lewcyk had an interesting statistic at the conference when he was talking about marketing: 75% of all centers invest the bulk of their marketing budget for "in center promotional material". This translates to we are only willing to spend a few dollars copying fliers to hand out to people who come in anyway.

One other comment about the conference: Everyone was talking about how to take your open play bowlers and make them into league bowlers. The reality is most of them do not want to be in leagues and there is nothing wrong with that.

As an industry we ought to spend more time talking about those people who come in a 2X a year and spend a $100 or so.

We need to focus on getting them back 4-5X a year instead of two. That would be a lot more likely than trying to make them into league bowlers”.

Henry is generous. More like 95% of the centers invest in “inside marketing” (i.e. fliers, posters, more fliers, and more posters). Now centers are emailing; do you think it’s a replacement for direct mail?

Getting people to come into the center more frequently is less about communicating the product you have than it is about developing a new product.
• 5 to 6 week fun bowl sessions for busy young professionals at a premium price that involves a charity they can relate to (AIDS, Breast Cancer, Kids Charities, etc)
• 3 to 4 corporate parties scheduled annually as a team building event
• 4 pack of fun: bowl 4 times and get the 5th time free 9 especially good for packaged programs like Pizza Pins N Pop. No you’re not giving it away, you’re getting people to come back two or three more times than normal

Maybe it’s time to take your marketing to the streets because THIS is the new normal.