The fitness industry is a crowded space, so it’s important to create a memorable brand to attract and retain customers. In order to stay competitive and relevant in today’s business environment, you need to embrace and adopt a strong fitness marketing strategy. Here are the basics you need to know.
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Creating a strong and authentic brand
Having a strong and authentic brand is crucial to your fitness marketing strategy. So how do you create that brand? Building a brand is never straightforward, and when you’re in an industry that deals with people’s health and fitness, it’s important to brand yourself correctly to gain trust with your customers.
A strong brand is more than a fancy logo and tagline. It’s a way to set your business apart from the rest. And fitness marketing is more than just posting photos of your gym or fit people via ads. It’s about communicating with a real audience by providing them with real messages that resonate.
Just like your clients, you need to make sure your brand has a strong heart. Your brand should clearly communicate the philosophy that drives your fitness business and conveys the top-notch quality of your service or product. Your brand is an articulation of your core beliefs, specifically your:
- Vision: What future do you want to help create?
- Mission: How do you create that future?
- Values: What matters the most to you?
Vision
Everyone in the fitness industry understands the importance of settings goals. Your vision is your goal, and it should communicate the difference you will create in your customer’s lives.
Mission
Your mission statement will define your fitness marketing goals. What are you doing to reach your goals? Why? For example, do you want to enhance performance? Or do you want to create a sense of community?
Values
Whether you realize it or not, you have likely already built your entire gym or fitness brand around your core values. And while those values probably include health and fitness, you’ll need to think outside of the box to stand out from your competition. In an industry that’s rife with myths and misinformation, what you stand for can demonstrate your credibility and attract the right customers. This is the key to your fitness marketing strategy.
Your vision, mission, and values all drive what you do, but it’s impossible to be everything to everyone. If you’re marketing messages are going to cut through the noise, they need to be designed with a specific audience in mind.
Winning over the right clients online
When you’re developing a fitness marketing stategy, it’s extremely important to focus on who your customers are, because they’re the center of your business universe. A great way to determine your target audience is through well-crafted customer personas. This is a detailed description of exactly who your customer is, including information such as demographics, goals, behaviors, hobbies, and more. Customer personas help you visualize specific groups within your current and audience.
These groups might have different reasons for seeking fitness services. If you can understand their needs and motivations, you can create more effective marketing campaigns. For example, let’s say you run a yoga studio that offers group classes to its members. Your audience might include personas such as:
- Sarah Sometimes: She’s an avid hiker who only comes to the studio when outdoor conditions are unfavorable.
- Weight Loss Wayne: His goal is to feel comfortable and supported as he works on his weight loss goals.
- Timid Tommy: He’s never gone to a yoga class before and is nervous about the idea of trying something new in a group setting.
- Newcomer Natalie: She’s an avid yogi, but recently moved to the area and doesn’t have a preferred studio yet.
- Friendly Fran: She comes to yoga classes to socialize with friends.
You’ll need a slightly different strategy to reach each of these customers. Once you develop customer personas, you can target your fitness marketing efforts to services that speak to their preferences and challenges.
For example, maybe Sarah Sometimes would enjoy a group hike that ends with yoga in the mountains. Friendly Fran might find a yoga and happy hour fun, so she can enjoy a drink with her friends. Or Timid Tommy might feel more comfortable in a beginners-only yoga class so he can learn the poses.
Overall, fitness marketing is more effective if it’s personalized to specific audience segments.
Building an strong online presence
Having an online presence is imperative for businesses today, since it allows you to generate more leads and target your audience more effectively. Here are a few tips to help you grow and maintain your online presence.
Boost your local ranking
If you’ve ever used Google to search for a service or product, you will surely have noticed one thing: the search results appear based on the location set or that is automatically detected, either from a smartphone or from a computer.
If you’re trying to attract more local leads to buy your services or products, Google My Business is the ideal online advertising tool for you. Google My Business results provide business information including photos, location, hours, contact information, and reviews. Creating a My Business listing for your gym or fitness business makes it as easy as possible for potential customers to find it, maximizing the chances that you will get a new customer.
Here’s how to optimize your Google My Business page to get noticed and stand out from other business.
- Enter complete information: Make sure you fill out as much information as possible on your My Business profile, including your phone number, physical address, and category. This makes it easier for Google to match your business with relevant searches, increasing the odds that you’ll show up in a potential customer’s search.
- Verify your location: Google provides several verification methods to prove your business is where you say it is, which increases the chances it shows up on Google Search and Maps.
- Update your hours: Make sure your hours and holiday hours are up to date on your My Business listing. This lets potential customers know when you’re open for business and improves the reliability of your listing.
- Respond to reviews: Read and respond to the reviews your customers leave about your business. This shows your customers that you care about them. Receiving high-quality, positive reviews from customers will help your business’ image and increase the chances it’ll show up on Search.
- Add photos: Uploading photos to your listing helps you show potential members your facilities, equipment, and amenities, increasing the chances that they’ll choose your business.
Put the “social” into social media
Having your business online is not enough. Your fitness marketing strategy needs to include business accounts on all social media platforms that your customers favor. These accounts help you promote your business and nurture the relationships you have with both current and prospective customers.
Some things you can post on social accounts include posts about students’ progress (if they give you permission), nutrition tips, and video clips of workouts – the point is, you want to be as visual as possible, and social media makes that easier than ever!
Capitalize on content marketing
In addition to social media, content marketing stands out as a powerful and cost-effective strategy to reach an engaged audience and grow your client base. Traditional fitness marketing is geared toward selling a particular product or service, the goal of content marketing is to provide informational content for readers in an effort to establish your company as an authority. This increases awareness of your brand without explicitly promoting your fitness business, making people feel like they’ve stumbled across you all by themselves.
There are many different types of content marketing, including blog posts, emails, podcasts, infographics, and videos. As long as the content is educational, entertaining, or informative and not overtly ‘salesy,’ content marketing can be a highly effective way to demonstrate your expertise and establish yourself as an industry leader.
Developing a clear sales funnel
The final step to a strong fitness marketing strategy is building a sales funnel. This is essentially your customer journey, from the moment they first hear about your fitness company to the moment they sign up for a membership or make a purchase. Most sales funnels start with a general audience and use retargeting campaigns to deliver increasingly segmented ad campaigns to potential customers, depending on where they are in their buying journey.
Start with Facebook Ads
One way to initiate the sales funnel is through Facebook Ads. Facebook advertising, specifically, can be a hyper-targeted way to get the word out about your fitness brand and reach your target audience on social. The best part: Facebook ads are relatively inexpensive.
Follow with Landing Pages
Landing pages are a great fitness marketing tool. They work alongside your website to capture a completely different source of online traffic. While your website is capturing leads from those actively searching the web for “fitness programs near me,” landing pages are enticing viewers with an attention-grabbing promotions.
A landing page is a single page on your website built to achieve a single conversion objective. It’s a page that’s designed, written, and created for a single purpose. For your fitness business, this could mean a number of different things, like booking a gym tour for a potential new member or signing someone up for a free trial class at your yoga studio. Landing pages don’t want you to sign up for a gym membership AND buy workout clothing AND contact a trainer – they have only a single ask.
Bring in the Experts
If you don’t have time or aren’t sure where to start with your fitness marketing, consider hiring a digital marketing agency. Agencies have the tools and expertise to help make your brand come to life. Think of it as a supplement regime – in order for your marketing to be effective, sometimes you need a little help. A digital marketing agency can provide your fitness marketing with a boost of energy to launch effective campaigns that work.
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