Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Graham and Ashkahn are very familiar with the question and have answered it a bunch of different times. They’ve practiced and are prepared to tell you what’s what on the demographic front.
Show Resources
FTS Blog – Float Tour Roundup!
FTS Blog – Fancy Acronyms for your Business Plan: TAM, SAM, and SOM
FTS Blog – Know Your Market – A Guide to Gathering Data
FTS Product – Business Plan
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: And today’s question is, “what are your target demographics?”
Ashkahn: Yeah. You know, I get this question a lot, not just from inside the float industry but from outside. When you talk to other business people, this is one of the first things that people bring up.
Graham: I was hanging out with my mom the other day and she was asking me about my target demographics.
Ashkahn: Yeah, just in the grocery store, you know, just trying to buy some bananas and-
Graham: “Excuse me, where are your target demographics at?” So we get it all the time.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Left and right you know. I mean it’s a weird one because I feel like no one believes me when I answer this question. And I say we don’t really have demographics, in a way that a lot of other businesses do.
Graham: Yeah, or at least maybe even in a way that says immediately actionable or functional as some other industries.
Ashkahn: It’s just so wide, you know. We’re kind of this like hey, well everybody comes and floats for this huge varieties of reasons and I feel like especially when you say this, how they’re like business people who are not within the float industry, they kind of look at you as very naïve, you know, you have no idea what you’re talking about, there’s no business that doesn’t have demographics.
Graham: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I get the same things. Usually how I phrase it now, when I’m answering rather than just saying like, “well you know, demographics aren’t the most important thing”, which used to be my answer in the float industry. Now I say, “I get that question a lot before people have opened their centers, and almost never from already existing centers.”
Ashkahn: Uh huh.
Graham: I think it’s kind of the same reason it that once you open a center, you realize that your demographics are just all over the place, right?
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: I also like comparing it to a hat store. It’s like a classic kind of a business saying almost, which is what’s the demographic of a hat store? Anyone with a head. Right? But within that of course you get to decide what kinds of hats you’re selling and who you’re actually marketing to, and so that’s kind of the case with the float center as well. It’s not like you have set demographics of people that specifically ages 28 to 45 who are already doing other pre existing forms of wellness therapy, are going to be your primary customer or something, you know. But, for your center, maybe that’s the case. Right? Just like a hat store could decide to sell only bowler hats or only-
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: High class hats or only ballroom hats or something like that. A float center can kind of decide where their demographics are a little bit more-
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Then a lot of other businesses.
Ashkahn: And to me, that’s kind of one of the really beautiful things about running a float center, that I appreciate, is that it has this kind of malleability to it, where it’s like hey, who is your demographic? Well like, who do you want your demographic to be? Who do you want to hang out with? It’s cool, you can go around and you see these float centers set up and they’re offering the same thing you know, it’s a float tank in there and you’re getting in the float tank, but the context around it, can be so different. We go to places that are … You know we did that Float Tour when we went around to all these different centers and we saw everything from really nice high end spas to gyms, with float tanks in them, like a MA gym with a broom in the back and a float tank, and a colon hydrotherapy clinic with a float tank and there’s an art gallery out there with a float tank in it and it’s amazing, the wide span of places you’ll find float tanks.
And they all make sense. Like you think about a float tank in all those different context and every time you kind of nod your head, you’re like “yeah, yeah, that makes sense, I could see a float tank in there.” Those are like vastly different places from one another.
Graham: Yeah. Again, I guess for each of those too, that place might have a target demographic, right. Like a float tank in a gym, their target demographic might be people who have just finished a workout or people, like an hour before they’re going in to do a heavy workout or whatever it is, but like people already working out, or maybe they decide no, like our float tank is an intro to getting gym membership, so they’re reaching for people who like do yoga and don’t go to the gym, like that’s their target demographic that they’re trying to aim for, so that they can convert them into gym members or something.
Ashkahn: Right.
Graham: Right, but the point I guess is, that’s a specific target demographic for that float center, not for floating overall. And floating overall, again, if you go back to just what’s the demographic of overall floating, it seems much more impossible to define, in a way that when you target it, an exact individual center, you can kind of pin it down a little bit more.
Ashkahn: You know, it means too, even within your own float center, you have the option of kind of reaching out to more specific demographics. This is one thing that we do a lot at Float On with our marketing, is our center itself is a little bit more generic, I guess. I mean, it’s definitely not things, it’s not a high end spa necessarily, like we don’t have really that feel going on. I mean if you haven’t been to our place, there’s like bright yellow walls and crazy ornamental desks and I think Graham describes it as a chique children’s play room.
Graham: That’s how I describe it, yeah.
Ashkahn: I think it’s kind of the best description. So you know, we’re not just completely a blank canvas or anything, but still, it’s not like specifically an athletic set up in our shop or anything but, if we wanna reach out to athletes, what we do is we set up specific programs where we actually do outreach to those athletic groups and we do it with this kind of custom made programs for them, and we’ve done that for artists and musicians and you know, we talk about this I think on a couple of episodes, so I won’t go into all the details but you know, through those kind of individual forms of reach out, we manage to have a little more kind of lazar focus with those demographic groups that we’re trying to pull in but, doesn’t mean we have to like, necessarily, set up our whole shop differently or just specifically restrict ourselves to kind of one group of people.
Graham: Yeah, for sure. And that’s kind of what we’ve found works really well too. Like even though floating kind of does appeal to everybody. There is this, again, it’s like running a hat store, everybody has a head. There’s a reason for almost everyone to float who doesn’t have a water phobia or something like that. And you know, given that though, if you try to just go out there and market that, if you try to go and put up billboards or even Facebook ads and just say, “floating is good for everything”, or even like list them off, you’re like “it’s good for pain management, and pregnancy, and all these different things”, I think you end up, it’s like the old saying, if you try to stand for everything, you end up standing for nothing, right?
And same with floating. So, even though it can appeal to such a wide base, like just choosing, just getting out there and choosing, which target market you are going to hit, and hitting it hard for 3 or 4 months or longer. In the case of something like marathon runners. You might sponsor every marathon that happens in your city for the next 4 months and reach out to all of the marathon bloggers and ultra marathon runners and actually try to get them in for free floats, and the people who are organizing the different marathons and try to get the organizers in and, just like keep that one market really hard and it’s not saying that marathon runners are the only market you can hit, but as long as you choose one and you focus some attention there and really make sure that demographic is aware of a lot of the benefits that are going into what they do, specifically, I think that would be considered a good use of demographics and of, kind of, targeting them.
Ashkahn: So, I guess all this being said, we have looked into our data a little bit on our own kind of back end-
Graham: Yeah, fair amount, yeah.
Ashkahn: To see if we’re just making all this up in our heads or if there is actually some evidence and kind of the people coming in to float with us that matches this. And you know, there’s some stuff in there, obviously, there’s not like a flood of 5 year olds coming in to float with us or anything like that, we’re not completely just taking a perfect representation of the population or anything but even across age, it seemed pretty spread out. I mean, it really seemed like maybe late 30s, early 40 or like beginning of your 30s to mid 40s was kinda the biggest swell but even that was, it was not like a super big hump or anything right there.
Graham: Yeah, and the age range spread is really interesting. If you look at demographics in Portland for the ages at which people are active and have disposable income, it lines up pretty much exactly with our spread of ages.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: If it’s like, the people who are going out and doing things, that is our age range. And the interest also, are all over the place. Even with our members, even if you’re like okay, well maybe for your generalized population coming into float, you can’t say that there’s a specific demographic but what about for your most regular floaters, like the people who are getting in there and using it once a week or more, right? Is there any commonality between them? And I would say disposable income is probably the commonality-
Ashkahn: Uh huh.
Graham: We took our best members out for drinks and actually just picked their brain and do some kind of customer interviews with them and it was all over the place, from a retired couple who just wanted to come in, float for aches and pains, to a computer programmer who floated many times a week, just because we was either up late or up early and he’s sitting at his computer all the time, to a guy who worked in the lumber industry, and he came in to float and was trying to get all of his friends to float because it was so good on his body when he was doing all of this crazy millwork with trees, to someone who was a translator and like just translating languages was another one of our members, who was coming in the most regular. It’s like, across professions, across gender, across age ranges, it was really hard to pin it down and say what made these members want to come in, other than it really helped them personally, either mentally or physically for some reason. There wasn’t this immense amount of commonality between them, like you might expect to find.
Ashkahn: And we looked at gender as well, kind of went back through our schedule and tried to see if there was, what percentage was male versus female. And pretty much over the sample we looked at, I think it was 51% female-
Graham: Male.
Ashkahn: 51% male, 49% female.
Graham: Not that it’s statistically significant.
Ashkahn: Yeah. And it was just of the sample time that we took so I mean, we came out of that kind of with the, even, even, split is pretty much the lesson I took from that.
Graham: Yeah. It was about a 6 month running average of all of our appointments. And we do about 1200 to 1300 appointments a month so it’s a fair sampling of people coming in and yeah. 51% men, 49% women.
So, there’s the kind of interesting news about demographics. It might not have convinced you. You might still … Almost no one that I have this conversation with is convinced until they open a float center that demographics aren’t something they should really be focusing on ahead of time but, there you have it, straight from the Float On’s mouth.
Ashkahn: Alright excellent. Well, if you guys have any further questions you can of course always submit them to us a floattanksolutions.com/podcast, and we will talk to you tomorrow.
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Latest Blog Posts
Timeline for Opening Up a Float Center
Opening up a float center is a lot like climbing a mountain. Even if you can see the peak, it’s a lot further away than you think, and when you finally get there, the journey and the destination usually end up being different than previously assumed.
In this post we’ll lay out a general process and timeline of what you may encounter on your path, from initial idea to actually operating a center.
Can you have volunteers at your center?
So you’re thinking about using volunteers in your float center?
Before we clarify what a “volunteer” actually means, we’ll first explore why a float center might be considering them in the first place. While it can be a way to provide floats to people who are otherwise unable to pay, the impulse to bring in volunteers can also stem from a desire to get some sort of free labor (later in this post we’ll dive into why you can’t actually do this, but it’s important to recognize that the instinct is understandable, especially when you have someone lined up and willing to work for free).
In addition to a desired boost in overall productivity, it’s also a way to invite more people into your center to experience what you do. Some customers actually want to help out and see what happens behind the scenes at a center.
Floating and Athletics, a Strong Relationship
One of the beautiful things about the float tank is that it serves to rejuvenate the whole person. — the body, mind, heart.
Broadly speaking, it’s a tool for homeostasis, an ideal environment that supports balance, health, and growth. This piece will look specifically at floating and athletics. For anyone who defines themselves as an athlete, or as a general pursuant of athletic endeavors, the float tank can be a powerful asset.
In this post, I’ll discuss individual athletes who float and how to look at this from a marketing perspective. I’ll also discuss past and present research, and share some thoughts on how the relationship between the athletic and floating communities might continue to unfold.
A Skeptic’s Guide to Floating
I think it’s time we addressed the giant metaphorical elephant in the salty metaphorical room — there are lots of exaggerated and untrue claims about the benefits of floating being spread around the industry.
Some are anecdotal, some are only half true, and some are just patently false. Floating has historically had a strong oral tradition tied to it — the practice has survived through word-of-mouth, one passionate floater teaching another everything they know. The unfortunate thing about this is that the information disseminated can’t be reliably tested or shared with others on a broader scale. You can’t use “my buddy Chris” as a source for a health benefit of float tanks in a newspaper article, much less for a research paper.
Now that we’re becoming a bit more mainstream, we thought it would be nice to add some clarity to what we should and shouldn’t be telling people about these difficult-to-understand, saliferous containers.
