All businesses are constantly looking for new ways to grow and expand their customer base. For any fitness business, growing customers means finding and signing new members. And just as any other business would leverage a marketing strategy to grow customers, gyms must turn to well thought out marketing plans to find, sign and retain members.
In fact, keeping new members coming through the doors can be even harder for gyms than other industries. With so much competition — not to mention the increasingly short attention spans of modern consumers — gyms have to work twice as hard to sign new members and keep them coming back.
Here are four easy marketing tips your team can implement to increase gym membership:
1. Member retention communications. The first step in growing any business is keeping your current customers happy. After all, satisfied customers — your current gym members — are the best advocates for your gym. Sending out pre-scheduled communication and engagement campaigns can keep your current members satisfied. From birthday emails to social media campaigns to text messages reminding members of upcoming payments, sending out retention messages can help keep your gym top-of-mind while ensuring your members feel special.
2. Custom promotion campaigns. Another way to attract and retain new customers is with customized promotion campaigns. Building custom campaigns starts with collecting data on your current and prospective members. What are they looking for in a gym? What kinds of classes are they interested in? What messaging resonates well with their demographics? Once you have this data in place, you can start to build campaigns across multiple channels — email, social, digital, etc. — using this data. People who are interested in yoga classes will see ads for yoga classes at your gym.
3. Flyers and posters in the community. While traditional advertising methods have taken a backseat to digital channels in the last few years, traditional channels still work when promoting a local gym. If you’re a smaller, community-focused fitness establishment, advertising your gym at other local businesses can increase brand recognition and help your membership numbers grow organically. It just takes a few people from the community to join and tell their friends for your gym to become the “local spot” to workout.
4. Personalized utilization stats. Some of the biggest competitors for gyms aren’t other gyms at all — they’re social media and wearable fitness devices. Instead of trying to compete with these things, gyms can use them to their advantage with personalized utilization stats. By using key cards, fobs or by asking members to pre-register for high-intensity classes, gyms can track the utilization (active minutes) and fitness (calories burned) of members. Then, gyms can either email these utilization reports to members or have them available through an online, member-only portal. This is a great way for gyms to increase members’ satisfaction, attract new members, and stay top-of-mind with members throughout their entire fitness journey.
Joey Rice is the marketing director at Paramount Acceptance. He can be reached at sales@paramountacceptance.com or 800.316.4444. For more information please visit our website at gymsoftware.com/marketing.
Joey – Great article with fantastic detail and depth. One creative strategy I’ve seen help increase exposure and get new clients is to partner with colleges to offer fitness classes through the extended education programs. They’ll get your offerings in their course catalog and are pretty flexible in terms of working with you to schedule them at slow times. You’ll get some free marketing, links to your website, and a small amount of income and introduce a whole new set of individuals to your gym. Once there, give them a great experience and focus on converting them to new clients.