St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club is one of the top health clubs in England, but even this renowned reputation couldn’t prevent Covid from impacting membership levels. As the pandemic began to impact membership renewals, the Club asked Aspire to extend our working partnership. Our goal was to attract new members and ensure the Club would operate at full capacity when restrictions eased.
Facing unexpected challenges
St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club and Aspire started working together in December 2019 to refresh the Club’s online presence and support marketing activities.
Our brief was to increase brand awareness, highlight the Club’s world-class facilities to local communities and attract members from people looking to relocate to Weybridge and neighbouring towns.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, bringing the world to a standstill and closing health and fitness facilities, annual membership renewals were impacted.
Aspire was asked to continue supporting the Club with a new membership sales campaign, and we have continued working together ever since.
“In a critical time during Covid, Aspire helped us to attract new members and showed how to get the best value from marketing campaigns.”
Maximising insight and expertise
St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club initially appointed Aspire PR to support its external marketing strategy, including brand activation, advertorial planning, content creation and the production of a new website.
As Covid started impacting membership, St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club extended our role to support the acquisition of 500 new members over the next 2 years.
With any new partnership, we always take the time to understand our client’s challenges, ambitions and target audiences. We immediately used our existing insight of the Club to support the membership campaign.
Working with a modest budget, we wanted to build brand awareness, raise the profile of the Club in the local community and use the best channels to reach potential new members.
The creation of a new website positioned the Club as a premium venue with outstanding facilities that appealed to their target audience. We evolved our website work to drive traffic and new membership enquiries via the refreshed, user-friendly website and integrated the website with the Club’s internal membership system.
Adding new ingredients to the marketing mix
We introduced a digital marketing campaign involving paid advertising across Google, Facebook and Instagram to increase awareness of membership options. These campaigns enabled us to target ads to a specific audience segment and ultimately drive new memberships.
To complement the paid ads, we carefully crafted and boosted our own social posts to spread the word about the Club, and reach new audiences using a smaller budget.
The paid advertising was supported by an SEO strategy and editorial plan to gain organic traffic from search engines and reach potential new members not familiar with the Club and its facilities.
Creating a seasonal content calendar was a big step forwards for the Club, joining up internal and external content creation. The editorial plan mapped out key topics and defined content for SEO blogs and advertorial content for use across the Club’s online and offline channels.
We also organised the delivery of a targeted brochure drop to the local community and other key neighbouring postcodes. This activity supported the digital ad campaign and was an effective way of reaching people in the Weybridge area.
We agreed a set of marketing KPIs (such as membership form leads, unique web visitors, organic traffic and social media reach) to track campaign goals and identify successes. The Club are using these marketing metrics to assist future marketing plans and business growth.
Generating significant leads
18
membership web enquiries every month
16.8k
Instagram accounts reached every month
3:1
ratio of marketing spend vs return on investment
Delivering positive business impact
Our campaigns for St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club have continually delivered value back to the Club, helping to overcome the challenges of the pandemic period.
Our digital advertising campaign and targeted brochure drop generated increased membership sales and the Club’s social media posts reached nearly 17k Instagram accounts a month in 2022.
There was an upturn in traffic to the website. The number of website users and organic traffic increased, with the Club receiving 22 enquiries a month on average via the website membership form.
In 2021, the ratio of marketing spend versus return on investment was 3:1.
By introducing new marketing initiatives into the campaign mix, such as paid advertising, we consistently met the business needs and commercial objectives of the Club.
We conducted regular content audits to identify the best performing blogs which drive significant traffic to the site. As part of our SEO strategy, we regularly check popular search terms and adapt content plans to meet the goal of generating more leads via the website and increasing brand awareness.
We have created a measurement dashboard to identify how marketing spend is delivering value. The tool is providing useful insights across all external marketing activity and has allowed us to plan effective campaigns that continue to deliver results.
Working closely as a team we have supported the Club with their comms, created content that has multiple uses and amplified the St George’s Hill Lawn Tennis Club brand to the local community and beyond.
