Owning a fitness studio can undoubtedly be a rewarding and lucrative aspect for any fitness entrepreneur. But, to be successful, it requires your target audience to be familiar with your studio. Whether you’re new to the industry or have been around a while, you must innovate and look for new ways to attract members and retain your current ones.
With effective marketing, you can get in front of the right members at the right time. Here, we explore why you need marketing, the different channels you can use, and 9 marketing ideas for fitness studios. Skip ahead to:
Why market your studio?
Marketing your studio allows potential new members to learn about your services and keeps existing members engaged and interested in coming to it. Plus, it will enable you to get as many pairs of eyes to view your services.
The more people in your local area know about your gym, the more likely your success in a saturated market.
Types of marketing to consider
Before you fully commit to an innovative and solid marketing strategy, you must review all the different marketing methods to help you plan yours. The most successful studios often include one or several types of the following into their marketing plans:
Digital marketing
This is an online form of marketing where you utilize social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok to market your fitness studio. It typically involves marketing campaigns on your tablet, phone, computer, or any other form of device.
This type of marketing allows you to connect with existing clients or potential new ones by creating and sharing content, deals, events, and testimonials about your gym. But for digital marketing to be effective, you must have a solid strategy.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
You also might want to look into SEO which involves getting more traffic to your fitness studio’s website. It involves you using various tools and techniques for your website to appear higher up in the search engine.
Email marketing
If you want to showcase specific deals or offers, email marketing can be an effective way to get more interest from your potential or existing members. It saves you unwanted phone calls and allows you to communicate attention-grabbing messages to them. Typical types of email marketing can involve sending advertisements, requesting donations, or showcasing sails.
PPC advertising
PPC advertising is helpful if your fitness studio is on social media. You can pay for ads per campaign and track them to succeed. But you only pay for the advert when a person clicks on it. This allows you to understand your demographic more and can help make campaigns more effective.
Blog marketing
If you have pages on your website for a blog, then you might want to start writing content or hiring someone so that visitors can read information about your studio. Make sure the information you’re writing is related to what people are actually searching for. If you don’t have a blog, you could find other fitness-related websites similar to your business and write for them.
By simply writing for other companies, you can gain backlinks and might attract new visitors to your website, which could convert to potential customers in the longer term. But, most importantly, simply having a blog can provide you with the best opportunity to gain trust and allow your fitness studio to look credible.
9 marketing ideas for fitness studios
To help you market your studio effectively, you should think about considering the following into your marketing strategy:
Make a user-friendly website
In today’s times, when most people wish to verify something, they tend to go to Google, social media, or check to see if you have a website. But, having a website isn’t always enough; your fitness studio needs to have something bold that aligns with your brand identity and business ethos. In addition, it needs to complement your values, missions, and the atmosphere your clients feel when coming to your studio.
Plus, if you want to gain new business and retain existing members, you will want a well-optimized website for search engines, allowing your studio to have greater exposure. In addition to search engines, your website should be optimized for viewing on mobile phones, laptops, and tablets in combination with search engines.
When optimizing your fitness studios website, you will want to do the following:
- Make sure it’s working with no bugs and is glitch-free.
- That it has a slick, user-friendly, and informative design.
- The values of your fitness studio should be represented in the visuals and text on your website.
- The website needs to sound and look welcoming.
- Enable online booking, class timetables, and sign-ups for new members.
Focus on local SEO
By implementing local SEO, the marketing for your fitness studio can be cost-effective and have huge returns of investment in the long run, especially if you’re ranking high up for the searches in your area. People must find your business quickly to get more members and attention drawn to your studio.
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Discover more People who are looking to work out often search based on terms like “fitness studios near me” or “fitness studios in (city name),” etc. But these keywords tend to be highly competitive when it comes to searching, and it may be challenging for your studio to rank for them. Therefore to help rank, it’s good you work with a professional digital market or SEO expert to help rank for unique local keywords.
Update your Google My Business Page
One major marketing idea that can help your business and local SEO is getting a Google My Business page – Google tends to be everyone’s go-to search engine.
Because of this, it’s a good idea to have a Google My Business page to showcase your studio when people search for them in your area. It also allows people to find your location easily and appear in search results a lot more easily. Moreover, it lets you display vital information like your opening hours, contact number, images of your business, reviews of your fitness studio, links to your website, and more.
Use hashtags
One way to get your fitness studio to have more exposure is by implementing hashtags if you’re active on Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok. By simply using the right hashtags, you can make your content available to a wider audience, raise awareness of your studio, help your SEO, and more.
Similarly, when people search for your location, hashtags to uncover workout plans, classes in their area, and more can help them learn about your studio. Moreover, if you want to track what your members post about your gym, you could create a unique hashtag.
Start blogging
Content marketing is essential for a fitness studio. It might be extremely competitive, but your website could gain more attraction if you know how to use local-orientated content. To give you an idea of the type of local blogs to write, you will want to target your city or area like the following:
- Best outdoor workouts in your (city)
- Best running routes in your (city)
- Where to buy the best fitness clothing in your (city)
Remember, the key is to write about fitness in your area. People who search fitness-related queries based on your cities name will more likely visit your website. Blog content is also great as you can reshare them on your social media accounts, forums and you can send it to existing clients to provide them with further inspiration to use your studio.
Advertise in petrol stations or at bus stops
To market your fitness business effectively, you don’t want to allocate all of your attention online; you should also focus on offline techniques. One major idea is getting your fitness studio advertised at petrol pumps. This is helpful as it helps target your local client base and allows more people to know about your gym.
People spend around 3 minutes on average filling up their car at the petrol station – that’s enough time to make an impact. It’s unavoidable and can help get important exposure. The same also applies to a bus stop!
Share testimonials and success stories
Testimonials, reviews, and success stories are user-generated content that can be a beneficial tool for your marketing. You can gain greater reach and engagement by simply sharing reviews across your social media handles. It also saves you time thinking of marketing strategies and creating user-generated content.
Plus, positive testimonials can help influence potential visitors to make better decisions. It can also make you look more credible and reliable as a fitness studio. More importantly, don’t hide the negative reviews; replying to them in the right way can help show your target audience how you prioritize your members and exhaust all of your efforts to make the situation easy as possible for specific customers.
Add video content
More than written content, video content is key for your studio to thrive and gain more attention online. It allows your potential clients to see what the workouts look like and a sneak peek into the atmosphere of your fitness studio.
Furthermore, it is also a good opportunity to showcase the fun members may have. In addition to uploading video content, you can also use the options to live stream to show real-time information about your studio.
Add a referral program
Often referral programs are a fantastic method to boost more gym members and encourage your existing members to use your services. Referral programs help turn your clients into cheerleaders.
The best way to create a referral program is that you will want to offer both the referrer and referee a treat that you can’t miss. These incentives could be membership discounts, free fitness classes, a giveaway, or sessions with a personal trainer. Of course, it all depends on the type of members you have and their needs.
In summary
Overall, to survive as a fitness center, marketing online and offline is essential to growing your business. You will want to consider offline and online to target people in your local area. This can be done through social media marketing, digital marketing, print advertising, your gym website, and more.
But, at least once a year, you should take time out to review your marketing strategy as the fitness industry is constantly changing, and so are consumer needs. Therefore you must innovate your marketing technique to grab more attention.
