Data Is The Answer But What Is The Question?
Whether you are a new club owner, a professional trainer, or a veteran of fitness club management you can always benefit by extracting more information from the data that you generate in your gym business operations. With every transaction or response received from prospects or members, you create data. This might come in through your payment system, setting up a new account in your membership management system or getting a response from an email blast that you send out to a list.
In most cases, these days the data will come to you in a digital format, if not you can usually convert it without too much difficulty. What you will find within the data is all of the understanding and value that helps you make sales, manage accounts, and decide where you are going to sail your ship of fitness.
The Data Information Knowledge Hierarchy
The question to ask of your data is anything that you need to achieve the results you need. Fortunately, in this modern age, you can turn to specialized software to handle most everything. This includes the reports you find in the Insight Gym Management Software for club and membership management.
Data is the most fundamental resource of the digital era. There is a hierarchy of information concepts that start with data at the bottom. Data is the unfiltered flow of numbers and words that you extract from sensors and files and inputs. Information is the refined and filtered product that you derive from data to analyze and use for useful insights.
Above information in the hierarchy is knowledge, which is the set of information that becomes part of your mental model of reality. Knowledge is harder to quantify because it resides in your mind and becomes part of your frame of reference.
Building A Picture Of Your Membership Personas
Segment your data to find the members you can serve in the data, and you may locate the information patterns are different from what you thought. When you use data management to see more clearly the way that members use your gym, or what training and other premium services they purchase you begin to get an idea of what groups of behavior you are working with and what your users want. You can use that information to create customer personas that represent the typical personality profiles that your business serves best.
When you interact through media such as SMS messaging and email you can record reactions and engagements. You can use the accumulated data to segment your membership into groups by what they want. One advantage of this is that when you see the start of a behavior pattern you can send them offers to which they are likely to respond and leave out those offers that they won’t.
Mining Data For Hidden Knowledge Gems
When you get down to the fundamentals of the club industry, you are always seeking to add members at the same rate as you lose them or faster if you intend to grow the business. This goal is much easier if you can create a strategy to maximize your retention rate. The insights that help you do that are all hidden in the data you collect about the business.
Data that fits into your predefined structure is not a given in data collection and analysis; you can’t always fit what you find into a database table. So-called unstructured data is anything that you have filed away without putting it into your informational framework. Unstructured data includes the images of your members in your management database.
While you have the picture to confirm whether the person in the lobby is the actual member you can’t characterize the pictures or organize them in some order of the features of the image content. Not yet at least, but the way the IT industry is surging ahead that will probably be available pretty soon.
Take Stock Of All Your Gym Business Information Resources
Data comes to you as a set of streams, some a trickle, and others a flood. You process the data somehow to extract the information, and that becomes the basis for the lessons that convert it to the knowledge in your head, which makes you an expert and a smarter gym business manager. From knowledge comes wisdom, or so they say. I’ll leave that for readers to figure out on the continuing journey toward achieving an enlightened gym management experience.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. 7 Customer Retention Tips For Busy Gym Owners. March 8, 2017. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4294-7-customer-retention-tips-for-busy-gym-owners/ (accessed March 10, 2017).
-. Gym Member Personas: Who Are These Idealized People? September 9, 2017. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4611-gym-member-personas-who-are-these-idealized-people/ (accessed September 20, 2017).
Liew, Anthony. “Understanding Data, Information, Knowledge And Their Inter-Relationships .” Journal of Knowledge Management Practice (Walden University) 8, no. 2 (June 2007).
Zeitsiff, Adam. The Four Business Outcomes You Should Consider Before Investing in New Health Club Technology. August 30, 2017. https://www.clubindustry.com/trends/four-business-outcomes-you-should-consider-investing-new-health-club-technology (accessed September 20, 2017).