Marketing your fitness business is a big task. People can ignore you very easily since there are so many gyms available in the world. Hence, it becomes mandatory for you to create a perfect platform that can attract more customers and other purposes. This article will help you understand some of the latest marketing tools for gyms and fitness industry to help your business grow, keep up with the latest trends and also make you stand out from other businesses.
Marketing your Gym or Fitness business can be tricky. When it comes to fitness marketing, there are so many “Best Tools” out there. The truth is, some of them really help increase leads and sales while others just waste your time and money.
Award Shirts
Letting people who are out of shape buy and wear T-shirts with your business name on them can do you more harm than good. Create award shirts you give to customers who achieve specific benchmarks so they’ll be more eager to wear them. Use a phrase such as, “This Body Courtesy of Lisa’s Fitness.” Set objective parameters anyone can achieve and communicate them to clients in advance so they won’t be offended by thinking you are handing your shirts out to favorites.
Invite-Only Classes
Hold monthly introductory classes for potential new customers who are referred by current customers. Allow customers to invite only one person per class to increase the perceived value of the free sample. When consumers are invited to an invitation-only event by a friend they trust, you get twice the perceived value of the marketing tool.
Social Media Tools
Free and low-cost social media tools help you keep clients engaged by providing regular fitness tips via your website, Facebook business page, YouTube and LinkedIn accounts and tweets. Unlike a print newsletter, social media lets you send regular updates, including links to fitness, health and nutrition stories on news and fitness sites of interest to your clients. Use your smartphone to record and post exercise tip videos on your pages. A social media plan that focuses on providing fitness information rather than self-promotion will position you as an expert in your field. Have links to handy health and fitness tools, such as calorie, body mass index and heart rate calculators, on your pages to encourage repeat visits.
Testimonials
Because of the personal nature of health and fitness, peer testimonials are critical to marketing a fitness business. Fitness consumers want to know that people like them who have used your center or trained with you have received the benefits they want. Consider offering free or reduced-fee memberships or sessions in exchange for allowing you to use before-and-after photos of clients in your marketing materials and on your website. At the very least, use after photos with a one- or two-sentence testimonial from satisfied clients.
Research and Statistics
Segment the marketplace by finding health and fitness statistics that apply to women, men, seniors and children, and use these to create different marketing messages. For example, organizations such as the Wellness Council of American list the costs to business of worker illness and injuries. More than 100 million employee workdays are lost each year due to lower back pain. Creating a brochure with facts such as these can help you generate corporate wellness clients. Letting senior women know that 50 percent of females over the age of 50 will suffer a fracture will help you sell resistance-training programs that improve bone density. Use statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to sell parents weight-control programs for children.
Google My Business
Google is the most widely used search engine in every country except for China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Czech Republic and South Korea.
In every other country Google is the most widely used search engine. If you’re in one of the countries not listed above, it’s a good idea to create a Google My Business (GMB) page so that:
- you can appear in local packs
- people can find your address, hours and phone number easily
- potential clients can see your facilities in images
- existing or past users can review your business
A complete Google My Business page will result in your brand showing up in the search engines like this when people search for your brand:
People can easily see your fitness center’s information on the right hand side and choose to visit your website to get additional details.
Just be sure that all club information is updated and you choose the category of your business correctly. If you’re managing multiple locations, you can create multiple entries under one account.
Keywords
Keywords are the terms that people type into search engines to find your club. 72% of the time when users search for a business online they will visit that business within 24 hours.
Coincidentally, if someone already knows about your gym, they will search for your brand name.
Other times, they’ll use local keywords to find your gym like the ones described above.
Whatever the case, be sure to always be as specific as possible when marketing your gym in local search.
If you have one fitness club in a city, then include the city name in your home page and in your meta description as it is in the example below.
If you have multiple clubs, create a dedicated page for each club on your website with the city name or neighborhood in the title of that page, as it is below.
Each example has the city in the title and meta description and in the case of the Glasgow gym, it’s included in the URL as well.
You can even go deeper in your descriptions on your websites with multiple locations. An example of this might be:
“Located just off the 405 freeway in the Brentwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles, Gym 123’s members enjoy taking a stroll down to the Santa Monica Pier after their workouts or grabbing a quick coffee at the [Local Shopping Mall Name] before their morning routine.”
This description uses multiple landmarks to identify the gym’s surrounding areas, which helps its visibility in the search engines and its overall search marketability.
Your descriptions are not only a good opportunity to advertise your fitness business effectively, but also a surefire way to help your search rankings if written well.
Data-Driven Member Acquisition
The best way to leverage your data to acquire new members is to understand who your best performing members are.
With Perfect Gym’s business intelligence module powered by machine learning, you can understand which members are likely to leave your club and which members are likely to stay.
The likelihood a member with leave is shown as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more likely they are to leave and the lower it is means they’re more likely to stay.
However, when you have members that are less likely to leave, then you know they’re your best performing members and you should acquire more like them.
What you can do is export the data of your best members and then use their email address in lookalike campaigns on Facebook or Google Display Network.
Not only will you get members that are similar to your best members, but you’ll have ones that are more likely to convert and have longer tenured memberships.
Written Fitness Content Marketing
While it’s always a good practice for gyms to do content marketing, you should be aware that in the world of search engine marketing for fitness brands, fitness related keywords are extremely competitive.
And they should be. Ranking for a keyword like “how to do a pushup” isn’t going to bring you a lot of targeted results as people coming to your website for that keyword 99% of the time won’t be local users.
However, ranking for keywords that are fitness and local oriented, can help you.
For example, locally oriented content as listed below has local targeting built into it:
- best outdoor workouts in [city name]
- best hikes in [city name]
- where to buy cheap supplements in [city name]
Simply create a blog and start writing about fitness in your area.
These results will bring website visitors that use your city’s name in the searches, meaning they are more than likely residing there.
You can also craft content that is more tailored to widespread audiences if you’re intention is to market it on different channels other than search engines.
You can share it on your social media accounts, local forums, or send it out to churned clients who may need inspiration to get back into the gym.
Video Content Marketing
With social media outlets all promoting video content, it’s a definite no-brainer to join the frenzy to promote your fitness club.
Video content allows prospective clients to see what workouts are like in your gym, your club’s facilities and how much fun your clients are having!
You can use things like Facebook’s live-stream to show people who have liked your page what’s going on in your club in real-time.
Instagram is also a great outlet for marketing your gym’s video content. It can help when people search via location and/or hashtags to find workout plans, classes or personal trainers in their areas.
It’s a great way to engage with your existing club members and market your gym to prospective clients browsing through social media.
Post on Social Media
After looking at over 100 fitness brands’ social media profiles, we found that 82% of them post daily on either Facebook or Instagram. And that’s no accident.
Gym social media marketing has been around since the social media platforms became universally used, as they have the added benefits of engaging your current clients and showing potential customers what workouts and life is like in your club in general.
Social media has become one of the most widely used channels embedded into any fitness marketing strategy.
Just remember to attach utm tags if you want to measure how many people specifically signed-up for your club from any post or campaign you market on social media.
If you want to streamline your social media posts, you can use a free tool like buffer to schedule posts ahead of time, cross-post between different social media platforms, measure engagement and track your results.
It’s a great tool for keeping your gym’s social media marketing on track and up-to-date.
Start a Referral Program
Sometimes the best marketers for your gym can be your members. If you provide excellent services and facilities and incentivize your members, you can create a gym referral program to get them to invite their family and friends.
When your members refer a friend or family member to your gym and that new prospect becomes a member, you can reward them both so that they’re both more likely to keep referring people.
All at little to no cost!
There are several ways to implement a referral program:
- Have it built into your club’s mobile app
- Referral cards
- Emails
The most important part about starting a referral program for your club is making sure your members are aware you have one.
You can post on social media, send them emails, put up posters in your club or, as mentioned above, have a module in your mobile app.
The second most important aspect is to ensure that claiming ownership of a referral for your members is easy enough. This is why I would suggest doing it digitally with your app so that when a prospect or lead uses a guest pass, the referral number can be tied to your existing member.
Then you can reward your member (and the prospect if they become a new client) with whatever it is you chose to incentivize them with.
Club referral programs should be a universal aspect to any gym marketing campaign for clubs.
Conclusion
Fitness marketing tools and strategies are as numerous as they are nuanced. You can choose to do a few different ones or all, but the most important thing to remember is to always measure the success of each campaign in your club management software.