Social media at Craigie Leisure Centre

Today I completed my final day of work experience at Craigie Leisure Centre and now only have one week remaining at the City of Joondalup before I finish my entire work placement experience for the semester. Helping out over the last couple of weeks at Craigie has been a great experience. The marketing and public relations activities are all based around promoting sports and leisure so there are always plenty of exciting things happening. I have also come in at a great time as Craigie is in the middle of implementing a lot of new changes to their branding and are updating the ways they use certain communication channels to reach the public.

Craigie has decided to update their website and develop more of an online presence in order to increase awareness about the centre as well as to build up their brand image in the eyes of the public.

In order to do this they are undertaking a large amount of research to see how customers are currently receiving information about the sports programs and classes offered by the center as well as how customers wish to receive such information. Craigie was able to collate this information by including the two questions at the top of enrolment forms that customers filled out to enrol in any group fitness class, to enrol in swimming school as well as booking forms for children’s swimming pool parties.

I spent a large portion of the day tallying up responses, entering them into an excel chart and creating graphs to view results.

Results showed that a majority of people had heard about programs through flyers in the center, the website and through friends (word of mouth). People said that their preferred method of hearing about upcoming events and new classes was through email or SMS.

After this I had a discussion with Rochelle, the head of the marketing team at Craigie who told me about their plans to revamp the company website so that it is more interactive and informative.

Craigie also uses Facebook to reach the public that they are aiming to update more often with photographs, status updates and information about upcoming events. While working on research into the publics preferred communication methods, they achieved one of their key performance indicators relating to the number of interactions they received on their Facebook page. It was interesting to hear key performance indicators being discussed within the context of a real company and realising that people working in public relations and marketing actually apply them to their day to day work. It was great to see that choosing key performance indicators to measure the success of strategies is not just a university exercise but something that we will actually be using in the workforce.

Overall I really enjoyed my time at Craigie. I spent most of my time working on analysing ways that Craigie can improve communication with their current customers and how they can improve their online profile to gain new customers. The leisure centre put a lot of effort into background research before making any changes and it was very interesting to be a part of this.

Next week will be my last post, after I complete my last day back at City of Joondalup on Monday, where I will summarise everything I learnt there.