It's likely that the amount of people within your community who visit all of your facilities each year is pretty high. Think about it: Between pools, rec centers, parks, outdoor basketball, tennis and pickle ball courts, baseball and softball fields, soccer fields, dog parks and gyms, you have quite a lot of residents spending time at the places you're responsible for. And all those places can be utilized as free marketing tools. From walls and benches to fences and counters, you have a lot of real estate to place marketing for your organization and even other local businesses (who can pay to have their advertising displayed).
Things to Consider
Deciding where you're going to place your marketing materials will help you determine the size, as well as the amount you'll need to have printed or order for display purposes.
Here are a few places to put marketing materials at your facilities:
- Counter tops
- Benches
- Lavatories
- Outdoor signs
- Trash cans and recycling bins
- Walls
- Fences
It would be overkill to flood all the aforementioned locations with posters and fliers. However, think of which places would work best for you, and remember that these marketing materials should be used to increase community participation, not annoy or distract your visitors.
Types of materials to use:
- Banners (inside and outside)
- Posters (inside and outside)
- Cardboard displays
- Countertop displays
- Floor maps
- Murals
Calls to Action
Use your physical marketing materials to promote upcoming classes, programs and events while encouraging community members to visit your organization’s website or social media pages and always include calls to action (CTAs).
Give your community a reason to find your organization online! A simple call to action could say, "Visit our website (URL) to find your next class for the spring!" If you can successfully move people to your website, you'll be able to increase participation.
QR Codes
A great way to make it easy for community members to navigate to your organization’s website, registration page or social media pages is to include a QR code within your marketing. These codes have become quite popular lately because they make it simple and quick for people to just hold their phone’s camera over the code to navigate to a webpage instead of having them type out a web address or attempt to remember it for later use.
What’s a QR Code?
A QR code—short for quick response—is a square barcode that smart phone users can scan with the camera app on their devices to give them contactless access to wherever the person who created the code wants the end-user to go. As mentioned previously, you can easily have members of your community scan your QR code to go to registration pages for classes and programs, your organization’s website or even social media pages.
According to Business Insider, QR codes can store about 7,000 images, or around 4,000 characters, including punctuation and special characters, and can also encode information like phone numbers, as well as web addresses.
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