A lot of aspiring fitness experts go about fitness marketing strategies the wrong way, and end up unable to chase that fitness training dream. Here are a few fitness marketing tips that have been proven and improved and that our automation engine can take care of for you. These strategies prove their worth by requiring as little interaction as possible, freeing up more time for you to train and interact with your clients. Here are seven online fitness marketing ideas you can use to generate automated campaigns and boost client satisfaction.
1. Offer Your Leads a "Carrot"
Something that almost everyone responds well to is some kind of a quantifiable reward. Martial arts supplies this with the belt system. When employed, your title is the carrot. You reach certain benchmarks or maintain excellence and you are rewarded. That kind of a constant, dedicated motivation to reach the next level is something that powerfully motivates people to keep pushing. By putting tiers or awards into your fitness programs, you can ensure that customers of those fitness programs will keep coming back at least until they reach the top, and by then it should be enough of a habit that they want to continue their fitness habits and strategies anyway. Automating a program like this is easy. Simply prebuild your congratulations messages, as well as any messages announcing a special event for the high achievers, and then trigger the emails as necessary by moving the contacts into the proper pipeline, using duplicate filters to ensure that nobody gets the message repeatedly.
2. Recognize Your Clients
Everyone wants their achievements to be recognized. Organizing a place that this can happen is important. In fact, building a gym community on social media or via emails as part of your online fitness marketing is an idea that will motivate everyone to stay and help you to keep tabs on what your clients want as a community. Try setting up a group where people can share their fitness journeys and victories, stipulating that you want to keep the group about fitness and the positive impact of fitness on their lives. Open a group like this on Facebook and then set some automated posts. For example, schedule a series of fitness challenges. You could have a new challenge go up once a week. Maybe once a month, you could share someone's fitness victory in your newsletter as a contest. Both of those are easily automated and can go a long way to building loyalty.
3. Encourage Reviews
There are dozens of sites dedicated to reviews of local businesses, and in order to build the best possible sales pitch, you need strong endorsements from customers. Make sure that you provide a third party website like Yelp, so visitors know that negative reviews won't be taken down. When someone does post a negative review (and someone will) make sure that you jump on the issue and respond promptly. Tell them what you're doing to fix it or explain your position. This way, even on negative reviews people will see that you take the time and effort to try and be sure that concerns are met. In any case, those fitness testimonials and reviews are good to put in a lot of marketing over various channels, and could also be put into a featured post on the earlier mentioned social media group as part of your online fitness marketing strategy.
4. Soft Sell More as a Marketing Technique
By making your posts on social media personal and casual, you are able to effectively soft sell other fitness products that your gym might carry. For example, if you have a lot of weight lifters looking for a protein shake, your trainers can comment things like "I use <insert product here> and this is my experience with it." This kind of social soft selling or publishing success stories of a control group that agreed to test the product for you will soft sell in a way that makes people want to buy what you're selling, increasing revenue.
5. Over Deliver on Your Fitness Promises
When you send emails, text messages, or other messages, try to make sure that you're being as personal as you can without sending everyone individual messages. Take the time to reply when people respond to your marketing with questions. Talk to everyone possible, not just your clients. By always going the extra mile, and by ensuring that you're treating everyone like people and not just income, you'll make much more loyal customers. If they feel important and listened to, they're likely to recommend you going forward. Personalization is important, and can be done through the use of merge tags in your emails that automatically grab the customer's name or other information and pull it into the message.
6. Offer a Coupon Deal for Groups
Provide coupons for couples, families, friends or even work groups. People are always more motivated when they have someone to work out with. Your best deals are going to be the ones that discount for groups of two or more. Because you can't really automate a coupon on its own, you want to be promoting it using your online fitness marketing strategy. Automate the delivery by using a service like Groupon, while you send out emails and SMS promotions telling people to get the coupon code before it's too late. You can also do personalized voice calls with a prerecorded message to businesses in the area, promoting the deal as a company discount that you're offering for a short time.
7. Walk Your Talk and Show it in Your Online Fitness Marketing
As a fitness expert you are a walking, talking billboard for your business. That might mean that your lifestyle choices and reputation affect your company or the company that you work for. If you're not in shape or unable to run long distances because you haven't kept your cardio up, your clients will take note. In other words, if you don't look the part, and you don't show them that you can put in the work, they aren't going to be motivated. Show them that you can deliver the results they paid for. You need to show them in your marketing that you live the life you promote as well, be it in video advertising or just in images on your site. If they see that your strategies work for you, they'll want to share in that success.
These are just some of many online fitness marketing strategies. These marketing tips could be perceived as basic or easy, but the fact is that fitness marketing isn't about being complex or elaborate in your strategies. It's about connecting with your customers and giving them fitness tips and health choices. If you want some more information, check out our marketing automation page to see a full list of our features and pricing.
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