Building a loyal following in the activities sector has several benefits. Your primary concern, however, is separating this concept from followers. Building a following encompasses a structure of ingratiating your service into a consumers’ lifestyle and shoring up your ability to convert online traffic into consistent and reliable sales.
Social media creates a clear platform for building the traffic that can create a following; however, it is essential for it to include the streamlining of your IT processes that ensure operational consistency regardless of growth.
To guarantee operational consistency, you need purposeful IT upgrades while maintaining and improving your consumer engagement with actionable targets.
Providing a platform for consumer engagement
According to the McKinsey report, the COVID-19 pandemic shot digital adoption forward more than 5 years. In 2019, predictions for 2020 were that investment in streamlining processes and reducing operational costs through IT upgrades was likely to increase.
However, with many businesses forced to diversify their business and access points to consumers, digitising programs on social media platforms to maintain consumer engagement was necessary.
Now with reopening and shortages taking a toll on the market, activities businesses need to reassess their relationship with social media. Having clear transformative targets should not replace human interaction; simply they should be placed in areas that can increase your engagement. Personality is important.
Combining a variety of posts that impress personality on Twitter, Reddit & Instagram, can show the significance of your programs and on-the-ground insight that can help you better engage with your consumer base. Put simply, your lifestyle becomes their lifestyle.
Automate or digitise for ease
Streamlining processes can include automating FAQs, booking management, registers, and staffing. Consistency is of course essential to building and then growing a loyal base. In part, the automation benefitted busy parents working from home, however, with growing pressure to continue flexible working conditions, it’s lifestyle orientation that will create loyalty.
People need insights into the human side of your business. This can help reassure parents that automation does not create a face-less environment. In fact, engagement can take the form of creating a community or engaging with the staff themselves.
Taking stock of your own consumers should inform the targets you make, however, this has not been the case statistically. Over 70% of companies did not reach their desired digital transformation outcomes, because their targets were off-kilter or sought to digitise or automate processes that were unnecessary or disorganised from the outset.
A technological audit is important here; not only will it save time, but it will save your business money. The consistency that comes from a digital transformation that is effective has no end of benefits. One that is not, simply hemorrhages time, energy, and money.
The choices you make at the outset must be planned with the understanding that they are based on consumer needs. For more information from the Coordinate Sport team about how we can streamline your booking and operations management, contact the team here for a demo.