How to acquire new customers? And how to retain existing users? These are some of the questions that entrepreneurs who have just opened a sports center ask themselves. Remember that fitness is a very competitive sector: if you want your business to flourish over time, you must acquire skills related to marketing and sales.
Marketing for a gym means putting in place a series of actions to be carried out over time with a specific purpose. Here are some strategies that can be useful to accompany the opening of your new gym.
5 Marketing Strategies for the Gym That Can be Useful to You
To acquire new customers, you have to define the target of users to whom the services offered by your gym are addressed and implement a series of actions that can lead them to register and, then, to renew the subscription. How?
Offer Solutions
Always keep in mind that people will choose a service or a course from your gym if they consider it a useful tool to respond to their needs or to achieve a specific goal. To gain new customers, you don’t have to advertise at the gym. You have to offer the solution to a problem of your target audience.
Create Powerful Marketing Messages
A marketing message is effective and functional when it is able to attract the attention of those who read and pushes them to perform an action that leads them to buy a product or a service. Identify the target audience you are targeting and put yourself in the shoes of the typical customer. What do you want me to do? Set goals: do you want me to call, set a free trial period, use a discount coupon? Based on your goal, build the right marketing message for your gym.
Study the Competition
Explain in your message what you are offering more and why your service is different, more effective and healthier. Talk to your target audience about the benefits you offer, avoid underlining any economic advantage. If you focus your message on the price of subscriptions, don’t actually focus on differentiation because the customer may choose your gym or another at the same cost. Having trained instructors and offering good service does not make your gym better than the others, because these quality requirements are minimal and indispensable in every gym. If you can convey what is the hallmark of your facility, the customer will choose you, regardless of the price.
Define the Location of the Gym
Offer something new and explain why your gym is different from the others. By positioning yourself clearly, you can get out of the war downwards and also justify any surcharge on your subscriptions.
Here’s how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors: specialising in one type of activity, providing a service that others don’t have, offering something innovative such as a 24-hour gym or computerised services, virtual lessons and performance monitoring apps. Also focus on the user experience: bring your customers to live in your gym an experience that elsewhere could not live.
Exploit the Potential of the Web
Use your social media. People look for a new gym on search engines, ask for information about social networks and let themselves be convinced by the positive or negative opinions of users. It’s important to find the most suitable social network for your target audience (the one where, for example, the largest number of users in the age group you’re interested in are registered) and use this channel to spread your marketing message to the gym. Dedicated to social listening every day: read the comments and reactions of users to your campaign. In this way, you can collect useful information to better understand the behavior of users, to intercept their needs and study a way to retain them. It also uses social networks to create groups, communities in which users can continue to live their experience, it creates moments of dialogue. And why not, contact fitness influencers and bloggers to help you win over the people on the net.
