We hosted an interview with Shanna Kane, the director of marketing for O2 Fitness, on online marketing. We discussed what O2 Fitness is doing to boost its Web outreach to members.
Q: O2 Fitness recently hired a third party to work on its search engine optimization (SEO). How has enhancing your SEO benefited O2 Fitness?
A: Greatly. I’d say it’s one of the best investments we have made when it comes to online marketing so far. We were already fairly good when it came to our search engine organic results, but now we can pretty much guarantee that we are number one for fitness keywords in our area. When we combine SEO with our PPC/Google campaigns, we dominate searches on Google. Our SEO company, Unlimited Web Solutions and PPC company, PPCE.net do a great job!
Q: What aspect of your website do members use the most?
A: I’d definitely say our group fitness class schedules. We update them weekly so we can always have a fresh schedule to keep people’s workouts exciting. Our members also use our online Member Portal a lot to track their workouts, goals and diet. This service is provided through our membership database software, Club Ready. We are planning on adding in more interactive features in quarter four of 2012 and quarter one of 2013, which we are really excited about.
Q: What is the benefit of O2 Fitness’ blog to the club?
A: The benefit is two-fold:
1. We get to teach our members more about what O2 and our team loves — fitness/nutrition, plus our upcoming events. We have put a blog schedule into place where each of our 10 clubs rotate the writing of the blog. We do this because our members love to see blogs written by the O2 team members that they know and trust. It definitely lets us show our members that we are true fitness professionals!
2. The blog also helps with our SEO – Unlimited Web Solutions goes in behind us and optimizes the blogs using our target keywords so Google will be more likely to pick up on it. It also helps us build additional links on our website, which Google loves as well!
Plus, blogs are fun.
Q: How does O2 Fitness use video?
A: We currently use video on our blog, social media and on our mobile app. On our blog we have used video to show off new classes. On social media and mobile app, we use video to let our customers see our television commercials, which feature our very own team members and O2 members! They have been a big hit. Incorporating video is definitely something that we are working on using as a marketing tool more often, and will be a larger part of our website in the future.
Q: What’s a piece of advice you could give to clubs on online marketing?
A: Just give it a try! It is amazing how easy it is to track results and try new marketing ideas at a low cost to see what works best for your company. It’s also great to use when promoting last minute specials/discounts because it doesn’t require too much preplanning when necessary.
So start a blog, spend some time working on your Facebook page and don’t forget — people love visuals online!
Interview by Rachel Zabonick
