1. Who is responsible for your gym's marketing efforts? (check all that apply) The owner: 80% An interested staff member: 40%

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1 Five Question Survey: October 2014 USA Gymnastics Member Clubs David Holcomb, Buckeye Gymnastics Marketing Earlier this year USA Gymnastics conducted a survey on marketing for the Member Clubs. As reported in March, 2014, 65% of the Member Clubs responded that they felt that a good web-site and blasts were an effective and worthwhile way to reach interested families in the community. Over half thought that the use of social media (facebook, etc.) was worthwhile, and 25% reported that traditional marketing efforts such as shows, demonstrations, newspaper ads, and yellow pages were still effective. In this brief survey we attempt to drill down into the specifics of those marketing efforts by identifying those individuals within the clubs who actually do the work, what those efforts entail, and how those efforts are evaluated. Some general observation about the responses: YES! Word of Mouth (WOM) is the most effective marketing tool that we as gym owners have. And what is the best way to effect positive WOM marketing? By doing an awesome job with our students every class, every day, every week, all year every year. Easy to say, hard to achieve. When we want to move beyond WOM we need to actively market our programs to the families in our communities. Effective strategies for this type of marketing was the focus of this survey. Please take the time to read all the results and comments. There are some real gems to be found in the comments. These are approaches that have proved to be very worthwhile for the owners who took the time to share them. If you find this entire marketing piece confusing or difficult you are not alone. The difficulty in getting marketing "right" was the most common response among the hundreds of responses generated in this survey. It is my hope that you can find some answers and effective strategies in the survey results that follow that will improve the odds of getting the marketing "right". Thank you to all 279 Member Clubs that responded. Your thoughts and insights are very informative and will certainly aid and even inspire other gym owners around the country. A very special thank you goes out to Steve Greeley and Kids First Sports Center. This survey evolved from a that was circulated by Steve seeking advise and answers to many of the same questions. Best wishes to everyone in all of your marketing efforts and keep that positive WOM coming every day and in every way. David Holcomb, USA Gymnastics Business Advisors How To Get the Marketing Right 1. Who is responsible for your gym's marketing efforts? (check all that apply) The owner: 80% An interested staff member: 40%

2 An outside marketing professional: 14% An interested parent, family member or friend of someone in the gym: 8% A gymnast or student: 3% Other: marketing dept., marketing manager, gym manager, front office staff, program director, spouse, family members, assistant manager, county or city marketing dept. We try to do as much ourselves, but have on occasion utilized our web developer for some projects. Everyone is a potential "walking promotion". I have students, parents and staff referral cards. When they come back with a person's name on it, they get $10 placed on their account. I also have an outside web designer. Each person has a piece of the marketing "pie" combined by me, the owner. Owner - oversees, finds ideas (no compensation) Employee - designs marketing, finds ideas (hourly wage) Parent - s, facebook, online newspaper events (discounted tuition) Parent - google ads, website Outside - coupon magazines, newspaper ads (pay for service) We have weekly meetings with our management staff and owners to talk about marketing as well as other items. I do pay a person to do all the social media. Separately, I do pay a specialize company to direct my facebook and local directory. 2. What are their responsibilities? What do they do that makes the phone ring and drives traffic to your web site? Web site updates, management 90% Print marketing (brochures, flyers, banners, etc.) 83% Social media 73% , e-newsletters 53% Direct mail and/or display ads (parent magazines) 41% Video production 26% External, outreach efforts (local parades, kid fairs, school demos) 15% Tracking, evaluating all campaigns 6% Other: Internal TV system that continually promotes our facility and programs, Local newspaper display ads, classified ads and press releases, Google Ad Words, TV commercials, gift certificates for charity auctions Some strategies are very expensive for a small club and haven't proven ROI especially if it doesn't match the way our market behaves. Our market is motivated by see-touch and personal recommendations. school demos haven't proven lucrative because the parents are not present and when money is tight, children's urging is a very slow push. a good deal come from drive-by's. We are in a downtown area so that helps. Schedule what goes on our sign by the highway, what hand-outs we will give in the classes, what announcements for the "on hold" or voice mail announcements, calls/postcards to specific age groups or dept that need students, coordinate calls to kids who have been out for three months, kids who just came to a special event, those with an anniversary with the gym, and those who just joined the gym.

3 As the program director it is up to me to get the information to the publicist. I feel that our word of mouth advertising is more effective than anything that the publicist ever puts out: either in written form, social media, or public information. This I attribute to the fact that when they advertise for the YMCA, it is the YMCA that people think about and not gymnastics. Therefore, we get lost in the public eye. 3. How is this person(s) compensated? The owner does it 36% Part of a salaried position 29% Hourly wage 23% No compensation 7% Other: Combination of all of the above, $10 referral bonus, PT salaried position, tuition trade, commission. Everything that's done in-house is part of the hourly wages submitted for regular payroll. The exception being the outside work, which is paid as per project. Those in director positions are responsible for marketing and tracking as part of their duties. We are trying a new bonus situation for coaches handing out free trial class cards to people. When a child registers from that card/referral the coach receives a cash bonus. 4. How do you track the effectiveness or value of your marketing efforts? (Please note all that apply) General growth in enrollment (or not) 69% Number of new registrations sign-ups following a specific marketing effort 66% Number of likes on facebook 53% Responses to :"How did you hear about us?" from new gym families. 53% Coupon redemptions 38% Number of clicks or opens for blasts or E-newsletters 37% Number of new family addresses collected at an event 16% Just throw it out there and hope for the best 16% Other: Participation in competitions, vending machine sales, survey at time of enrollment, Jackrabbit registration process, size of waiting list, marketing surveys. This seems to be the hardest. Even when we have run tv commercials, newspaper & advertised in every local event brochure, when we ask they all say either they were referred by a friend or came to a party. No one has ever said it's the ad, facebook, newsletter etc. It's really hard to know if all this digital advertising has any effect. Yes can see how many clicked on your ad, but there's no way to tell if that translated to a student enrollment. Is it worth it? How do we know? Specific "call to actions" & coding on coupons along with tracking all other available data is KEY to marketing ROI. Just began a new program that monitors all web browsers and reports back to us on how many hits and how many minutes people stay online on our website. I use Instagram & our # of followers are important. I don't use Facebook due to security issues & concerns. 5. Whether you happy or unhappy with your current marketing efforts what plans do you have for your marketing approach in the next year?

4 We are pretty content with our marketing efforts. This year, we've been trying to do more internal marketing. We have 'ads' running on a large TV that sits in our lobby. It keeps our customers in the know about things going on, birthday parties, special events to sign up for etc... We also plan on updating our website a little. It is only a three year old website but we feel it is already out of date in some aspects. We would like to also start doing more community events so our company becomes even more associated with the town it is located in. We are still trying to figure out the best marketing approach. Print advertising doesn't work for us anymore. We are trying to increase our social media presence, but we need a younger person who understands it to do the work - we (staff) are mostly in late 50's and a little baffled by it all. It's a work in progress! For the new year we are trying to post something on Facebook weekly. We are not present on Twitter or anything else yet. We do keep our website up to date, but the site itself needs to be refreshed and updated. Small staff and not enough hours to do it all!! I think there is always room for improvement. In this industry it doesn't make financial sense to invest in radio or television advertising. And direct marketing has not been effective. We plan to get more into social media. I am mostly happy. My best ROI are face-to-face events where people can ask questions and pick up the materials they would like to know more about. My second best advertising is WOM. and social media are third. Lastly, I like to use digital billboards in my area. I am looking at adding radio ads to the promotional plan for the holidays to grab the "driving" audience while they are out Christmas shopping. We have completely quit "purchasing" ad space in magazines, newspapers, etc. If we have a gym club member that is selling advertisement for a local school publication, we will support them but we very rarely get any return from that. 99.9% of our advertisement is internet, social media, and sports related article in the newspapers. We have educated our local news media outlets about our program and we now get very good coverage of our athletes when they go to competition. This has helped as much as anything to generate interest in our program and IT IS FREE!!!! We are happy with our current marketing. Our website is getting a face lift. We will ad constant contact on the website. I need to look at facebook more. I am concerned with possible negative responses being put on that site. Class marketing is going well, would like to do more with special events marketing. Also planning a possible trip for a mini class into the local school districts in PE classes. Generally happy. We run a boosted post on FB once a month. Generally Happy. Marketing has changed so drastically in the past 15 years that I needed someone "hip" who understood what moms want t and how they look for their services for their kids. But it continues to evolve and we are very careful not to "over saturate" our clients with internal marketing. Just always need to right balance. My enrollment has grown significantly from social media. We have just added a Youtube channel and I am watching for the impact of that. Currently indifferent in our marketing. Nothing this year seems to be sticking unless the family is specifically looking for a gym. Still trying to update and refresh our website to make it more interactive as we move into next year. Our current marketing ( blasts, social media, small website) tends to do better at retention of current members, but not good at brining in NEW potential members. Would like to be able to have a need for more staff so that we can then rely on that personnel to go to marketing fairs to grow our business. Right now it's not possible because we'd only be using someone for a "per event" basis as all other coaches are busy coaching at the times of the events. We struggle to find cost effective marketing ideas in our area. We work hard to promote word of mouth and use our current customer base to help us spread the word. We recently increased our referral benefits for parents. We are working on new ways - outside of typical classes - to bring people in the gym in hopes of promoting our other activities and classes. Facebook has really

5 helped and we do periodic give always on our FB page to encourage families to check the page often. Happy. We have had waitlists since August. Wish I had a bigger gym. Our marketing focus isparents night out, play groups, camps, open gym. Unhappy. Feel the need to expand and upgrade all that we do. Currently thinking about a service that will centralize all efforts (dashboard that links web, social media, etc.) and help with optimization for a fee. So far pleased with the marketing. The biggest concern is not getting customers but keeping them once they walk in the door. Families now have more disposable income than in the past few years. We, along with other gym owners have concluded that this past summer was low enrollment due to families going on many small vacations since they FINALLY had some spending money. A couple of years ago was better in the summer when parents were buckling down not traveling but keeping kids in gym to not disturb normalcy. This generation of parents like to see fast progress not long term benefits. We are working on changing our curriculum and how we identify progress. Going on 31 years of business. I have made a much better effort at upgrading and updating our marketing programs. Still, it is cumbersome - especially keeping up with new technology. By the time I feel I have a great grip on my current system... they come out with something new. We are very successful with marketing and send 1 marketing out a week, no more than 2 (for special events). We also are very successful with ValPak. We are boosting up our marketing efforts by starting SEO marketing, which we will focus on paid online advertising, as well as organic SEO efforts to help boost our traffic. Our marketing efforts are growing slowly. We hope to use much more social media in the next year, including more photos and video and add a quarterly newsletter for parents. For the most part, I, the owner, spend too much time coaching instead of "running" the business. BUT! I do have a plan. To get off of the floor and spend more time dedicated to these types of efforts. Our hit and miss approach still feels like too much trial and error for the number of years we've been in business (and other gyms) to not have a methodical plan to get children in the gym. ABOVE ALL... word of mouth still seems to be the best tool we have. Our core focus is social media and PAID Facebook campaigns. Our results are nothing short of magnificent. is DEAD (to get new customers). There is always more that can be done. Often it is finding the time to choose the ones with the best outcomes. And even those can change from time to time. I think there needs to be an understanding of the community in which the gym is involved to understand the underlying culture in order to make the best decision. It would be beneficial to talk with other programs in the area and see what has been effective for them, as well. I am always looking for new/better ways to market on a very small budget. My main focus has been on social media. We re-vamped our website where I can respond quickly. I am adding paypal so customers can pay through paypal at the front counter when they come in which releases me from having to take payments, create receipts, and do bank runs. We have found that television commercials have boosted our enrollment more than any other advertising in the past. We also are in a monthly coupon clipper magazine that gives a very strong response. We are very pleased with our current efforts and have over 920 students at this point. On top of the current methods we perform community services when available, do shows at local events, participate in parades, and depend on our customers words of praise for the program. Changing times make marketing a work in progress. We have tried and true methods, but are willing and able to innovate. We rely heavily on internal marketing and capturing any "events" that give us the opportunity to move us to the forefront. Ex. The P and G Championships here in Pittsburgh was a big campaign. I must say though I was very disappointed in the Pittsburgh local

6 media in covering the USA Championships compared with what I see when we travel to other cities. We need to do more videos. But then I need to find more hours in my day. LOL! It is never enough. I have never been satisfied with my marketing for 30 years. It is a never ending process of working all forms of media to increase our chances of reaching customers that will actually register for gymnastics, a birthday party, or a Parents Night Out. This is final short survey for In 2015 it is our intention to focus on the specifics of the programs offered by the Member Clubs and to provide details in how those programs are organized and how they impact of the overall success of the gyms that offer them. Stay tuned.