West Coast Strength (WCS), a gym in Salem Oregon I frequently visit, does a fantastic job with their online presence and communication. WCS can be found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, their own personal website, and various other review websites such as Reddit and Yelp. All of their personal pages and websites are well put together and organized, and you can tell they put a lot of effort into making their pages clean and useable. Sometimes you will get to a website, cough cough OSU, and are immediately lost on what to click on next. WCS is the complete opposite, everything is laid out nicely in a readable font, and the template of the website flows well and makes sense.
When you first go to WCS's main website you will see at the top of the home page you have 7 tabs to choose from, each navigating you to a commonly visited area of the page. Here you also have a video play that shows the general vibe and equipment of the gym. As you scroll down to the middle you see positive reviews from current/past members and are also shown some of the various training packages that may come with the membership. Finally, when you make your way to the bottom of the page you will see the membership pricing, gym hours, address, and contact information. Having it organized like this on the home page makes the viewer look through everything the gym offers before seeing the final price of memberships at the end. This is effective because if a viewer had not seen the nice graphics, equipment, training, and reviews prior to see the price, they may immediately not be interested, especially considering the monthly membership dues are higher than what a commercial gym's might be.
The business does a great job communicating their identity online. Every page they own that you go to has the same theme and face of the company. Each site they control promotes community, hard work, and cleanliness. The cleanliness aspect comes from #1 how the gym looks in the video, but also how their website is set up. Clean labels, easy to navigate, not cluttered, not buggy, all things that point to the owners caring. Their instagram and facebook promote more of the community aspect as they often repost members posts and are always holding events for the members, bringing everyone together.
This company could improve its online communication by offering an email section to their website or by offering a website communication tool. Calling a gym, especially if you are already a new gym goer, can be very daunting. Having the option to text/email the gym could be a great alternative to get people in the door that would have brushed off the gym due to not wanting to call. That being said, all the staff there are very friendly, so you should not be afraid to call either way.
Comments
Post a Comment