Growing a fitness center or health club can be tough. That’s why you need some fitness marketing ideas that will help you craft a campaign that get the job done, one step at a time.
When starting a fitness center or health club for the first time, it probably only took simple marketing actions drive growth. Now that the business has grown, competition has increased. It’s time for a more finely tuned marketing strategy, better communication, and solid activity to grow your business. Here are 8 fitness marketing ideas that will provide the steps you need to produce great sales and marketing campaigns to boost revenue growth.
1. Determine Your Target Audience
If you want solid fitness marketing ideas to help get you grow your health club or fitness center, here’s one: determine your target audience. To do that, stop for a moment and consider who you most enjoy working with at your club? Is that person male or female? What is that person’s age? What other things define them (are they parents, are they athletes, are they currently attending school, are they regular people just trying to stay in shape)? Once you have determined the “who” now think about the “where.” Do they live in the city or the suburbs? Where do they reside? Now it’s time to consider the “why” factor. What would drive that person to take action? What goal are they trying to achieve.
From that data that you have now gathered, you should be able to create a target market description. Two possible examples are below:
30–45 year old men and women who live or work in Lucas County, who want to look and feel like an athlete again because they work in an office all day and want to get rid of the fat and get into the shape they always envisioned for themselves.
30-40 year old fathers and mothers who live in Lucas Country and want to lose 15–50+ pounds because they don’t want to be the out-of-shape person but are afraid of the judgment that they feel when going to the gym.
2. Set Your Goals
Solid sales goals must be tied to revenue goals, not just new client numbers. Fitness marketing ideas shouldn’t just generate leads. It should create qualified sales opportunities to drive long-term revenue growth. Based off your revenue goal divided by your average transaction size, you will see the number of new clients needed to reach your sales goal:
revenue goal / average transaction size = new client goal
Now stop for a moment and consider your close rate (which hopefully you are already tracking). To define a qualified sales opportunity target follow this formula:
new client goal × ((1 – closing %) +1) = qualified sales opportunity goal
The result is what your goal should be for your marketing efforts. To grow, you first need to set the proper goals.
3. Choose a Lead Generation Strategy
There are many strategies you can use for generating leads including print and online advertising, networking and partners, and public speaking to name just a few. To select the best lead generation strategy for your health club or fitness center might take some time. Depending on your target audience, some fitness marking strategies will work better than others. So it is important to try, learn, test, refine, and repeat.
Print and Online Advertising: Print advertising in the form of direct mailers can be expensive and often only work if you have a highly refine and highly targeted list. Digital advertising on the other hand is cheaper and easier to track. Build original content on your website through your own blog to boost your organic search engine results. On social media, consider trying Facebook advertising, Google Adwords, and Twitter advertising to reach your target audience in a more cost-effective manner.
Networking and Partners: Health clubs and fitness centers cannot grow with advertising alone. Networking with other small businesses owners with a product that does not compete your business, but whose target audience is similar. This can be a great way to get the work out and find good quality clients. However, partner marketing requires time and attention so if you go this route, be prepared to spend considerable time on this each month.
Public Speaking: Public speaking is tremendously powerful for any health club or fitness center in gaining recognition as an expert in your local area. Find existing groups that fit your target market and see if you can be a speaker, or learn how to promote and fill your own events. Give great education that solves a big problem, capture contact information, and make a great offer to your attendees after the event.
4. Agree on Follow Up and Conversion Best Practices
Believe it or not, it is fairly common for marketers stop following up on their top leads too soon. Unfortunately, after several attempts, it is thought that if they were interested they would respond. But there are many reasons why they didn’t respond that has nothing to do with interest in your fitness center or health club. It is estimated that 81% of sales occur after 8 or more touch points, but most businesses stop communications after 2 touch points. Stop missing out!
Here are some suggestions to follow up the right way:
1. Send a weekly email newsletter
2. Don’t rely on email marketing alone, even if you have a website
3. Reach out to prospects in your social media, and continue to make different offers to your prospects on a semi-regular basis
4. Don’t stop following up with a lead just because they haven’t reached out lately. Use an automated workflow through Blitz to follow-up with them automatically after 90 or 180 days.
Blitz helps you to nurture relationships and win more customers! Schedule a free demo with us, and we’ll show you how we can help you automate your sales and marketing follow up to increase efficiency at your company!
5. Select Your Brand Positioning
All health clubs and fitness centers need a positioning statement that answers why someone should choose you, how your business is different than competitors, and why should the prospect select you over your competitors? A good brand positioning statement includes:
1. Your business name
2. Anything that adds to your credibility such as awards won, years in business, years of experience among your staff, media coverage, past clients, and what programs you offer
3. The type of services and programs you provide
4. The unique benefits that customers will achieve by selecting your business
5. Determine your business’ category (local gyms or health clubs, boot camps, personal training studios, or other weight loss programs)
6. The negative emotions surround your competitors
7. The reasons that your best customers like working with your health club or fitness center you’re your competitors
Here’s an example of what a positioning statement looks like when it’s all put together:
All American Fitness Center has been voted the ‘best place to workout’ in Toledo and is nationally recognized for providing results-oriented fitness experiences through expert coaching, support and accountability in a family-like environment you’ll love.
6. Provide an Incentive
Offers are powerful opportunities you give your target audience incentive to take the next step in the buying cycle. The best sales offers have to appeal to your specific target market and the help them to solve their problems and help them to reach their goals. Here some examples of just a few offers or incentives to try:
Paid Offers: Trials (30 days or less are ideal), training, complimentary products or services, and assessments.
Free Offers: Case studies, data-heavy reports, cheat sheets, resources or toolkits, consultations, and a quiz or survey.
However, it might take some time to get your offer right. So feel free to try several of these fitness marketing ideas to see what works best with your target market.
7. Create and Implement Your Message
There is a lot to organize, manage, and complete before you launch your fitness marketing campaign. Always be sure to stop and test to ensure that all aspects are working correctly. Consider from the stop your follow up best practices to determine if you want to send or post a follow up after the campaign has gone out, to either those who do or do not respond. Sales and marketing automation software from Blitz can help you do that, and much more.
8. Track, Refine, and Optimize Results
To know where you should be going you need to know where you’ve been. A few of the key performance metrics to watch include:
1. The numbers of visitors to your website
2. The number of opt-ins and opportunities
3. The number of qualified sales opportunities
4. Landing page conversion percentage
5. The closing ratio
6. The actual revenue vs. original goal
Once you have determined what is working and what is not, look at ways to improve and build upon your success. Are you on track to reach your goal? What do you need to do to get there? Be consistent with your fitness marketing ideas and never stop trying to get better and learn from your past efforts.
Effective fitness center marketing ideas can be tough to find, but sales automation can be easy to get started with Blitz! Blitz is reasonably priced, easy to use, and is packed with the tools your company needs most! Contact us today to schedule a free demo and we will share how Blitz’s automated sales and marketing follow up system can help your organization increase sales performance!
Sometimes it can be challenging to come up with an effective marketing campaign for fitness centers and health clubs. But it’s important to keep trying new ideas and not to get stuck. And don’t lose hope that you can continue growing.
Are these any ways to market your fitness club or health club we didn’t talk about here? Share your feedback in the comments below!