Fitness Marketing Strategies for Success
In the fitness industry it can be hard to promote your brand effectively. With a highly competitive market and often as a business owner your experience is geared towards your specialism or area of expertise. This can lead to a lack of understanding when it comes to how to make your marketing effective. And that’s ok!
For many, starting a fitness centre or gym is a huge commitment and can have a huge drain on spare capacity and can leave many unable to fully focus on their marketing efforts.
As the pressure comes for more sales, marketing is more like a ‘spray and pray approach’ which isn’t conducive to any sort of success. The lack of results comes from lack of consistency and the lack of consistency comes from lack of results. It's a vicious cycle which I’ve witnessed time and time again.
There are a number of ways fitness brands can implement marketing tactics easily but it requires a little forethought to enable proper execution and success. Here I'll outline the key areas to help reduce some of the common hurdles when it comes to marketing effectively to help make marketing seem easier and less time consuming.
Understanding Fitness Marketing
Know Your Audience
First of all you have to work out your market. What piece of the pie are you going to be taking? Who is your target market? What do they consume? Where do they hang out? What are their lifestyle habits?
All of this may seem excessive but it really does help to create the foundation of your marketing strategy. With this you can start to:
Utilise platforms which are most used
Disregard platforms that are not beneficial (saving you time and effort)
Create a brand that is in line with your ideal audience
Start to create the brand tone and use specific language that attracts your ideal audience
Create messaging / content pillars that are in line with your brand and audience
You may think you understand your audience, but spending a little bit more time to answer these questions will save you time in the long run!
What Are Your Core Values?
What do you want your audience to know about your brand? What is it your brand is going to be known for? What makes your brand different?
These questions are really important to help define your brand and your messaging that is in line with what you want your audience want.
This often gets missed as business owners feel this is implied, and people ‘should’ know because it’s on your About Us page of your website or your instagram bio. What you need to do is weave your core values into your content to really start to build your brand within the fitness industry. This does take time and repetition but this does start to pay off when you brand values become recognisable within your content.
Digital Marketing in the Fitness Industry
Digital marketing is a great tool for businesses, especially new brands that are just starting out or have low budgets. It’s quick to implement and fairly low cost, traditional marketing used to have high set up fees and long lead times (think about old school print advertising!)
Nowadays businesses have a whole range of options which is amazing. But how do you make the most of them? By using a variety of them.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, such as social media isn’t a marketing strategy.
If anything it’s quite risky, as the platforms are controlled by the owners, so you don’t actually own your own follower data. If your account gets hacked or the platform gets removed, your followers are gone, which is why it’s best to use a variety of platforms and media to make the very most of what’s available!
When it comes to digital marketing for fitness brands and gyms there are a range of different options:
Email Marketing
Social Media
Website Content
Video Marketing
Podcasting
And there are more but these are the most effective to get started with. Are you using one or two of these? How can you widen your reach and maximise your efforts to stretch the content you have to other areas (don’t worry it’s not as daunting as it seems!)
I touch upon this in another blog post in case you really want to find more details of how to do this effectively. The term of using content in multiple ways is called ‘content repurposing’ and is fairly self explanatory, but this blog post will give you some examples to make it easier to work out how to actually make this happen!
Essentially, what you need to do is rather than seeing marketing as 20 different pieces of information to give to your audience in a month. You need to create 1-2 key pieces of content that can be repurposed, recycled, reused time and time again, not only to make the content creation process easy, but also to reinforce messaging, build trust and create cohesive content your audience will love and start to look for.
How To Get Started Right Now
Once you’ve determined your ideal audience, your core values and what platforms you are going to be using this is the very simple basis of a marketing strategy. YAY.
So what’s next? You need to map this out, whether it’s a brain dump on a google doc, a sheet of paper or even a whiteboard (I’m sure you have this!) To really start your marketing foundations off well you need to do the groundwork which is exactly what’s been mentioned above.
Once this is mapped out, you can start to create the bones of your marketing content (remembering not to overload messaging!) Simplicity is key.
This is often where brands can trip up, procrastinate or just ignore this step all together. They don’t know how to map out the content, even the structure of how to do this can seem overwhelming. BUT I’ve made it easy for you!
Here is my FREE sample marketing content calendar for June. Here is a template you can download and reuse time and time again, plus there are even some content pillars for you to use to (if you want to get started straight away!) you’re welcome! Just download the sample content template here.
Use the prompts or create your own prompts to popularise the sheet and get planning for your content. As the topics are all relevant and interlinked you can start to create a blog post or newsletter and chop pieces out for social media (or the other way around!) What you need to remember is the relevance of your content, what is it trying to achieve? Where do you want the customer to go next? So think about what you want them to do as a result of consuming your content. Your content is part of a journey so always offer something else should the customer want to consume more, or find out more about your brand.
When you have populated your content ideas, and added your content either in the doc or somewhere else, that’s the majority of the work done! All that’s needed is create the artwork (I recommend Canva) and then simply schedule the newsletters, blog posts and social media.
How does the content creation process feel now? Does it feel more coherent and inline with your brand?
This simply is a month’s worth of content, when working on a strategy you typically work on 3-6 months at a time. Don’t let this overwhelm you but be something to aim for! As you become more focused and familiar with the process, it will become easier. A bit like a muscle, the more you use it, the easier it will be to utilise it.
Hopefully this has helped, if you still feel like you need a little bit more clarity around your marketing strategy book a revamp strategy call which at the moment has a discount and is
£149 instead of £197 - here we can map out your content and work on the wider strategy to make your marketing easier.
