Your members are the lifeblood of your gym. Every day, they come in, work out, and pay their membership fees. But how well do you really know them?
The most important part of any fitness marketing plan is to know your customers. Know their goals. Know their needs. Know how they use your health club. From there, you can offer more to your customers than just a handful of elliptical machines and a set of free weights.
Demographics
It seems obvious, but what are the demographics of your members? Depending on where you’re located, you may have a concentration of members in a particular age group. If you can, survey your members to find out where they are in life: age, marital status, whether or not they have kids, and what their household income is. Demographic information gives you important clues about how to create the right messaging.
Goals
The next part of building your fitness marketing plan is to find out the goals of your members. For example, if you realize that you have a large contingent of mothers, their goals may range from losing baby weight to staying fit enough to chase after their kids at the park. Or you may learn that you have a group of people training for an adventure race.
Knowing your members’ goals is the second big part of your fitness marketing plan. You can use that information to double-down on programs that are working. You can also use it to create more powerful marketing messages. When you know what your customers’ goals are, you can create marketing messages that are targeted to those goals.
Gym Use
Finally, find out how your customers are using the gym. Do most of them hit the cardio machines, or are there a lot of strength-training folks? How often are they using the pool? This information is critical to your fitness marketing plan.
If most of your customers use group training, then you should market to people who like group training. But unless you know how your members are using the gym, you can’t know the best messaging to get more people like them in the door.
Once you get to know your customers, you know how to market to them. By knowing what they want and providing more of those things, your gym becomes a place where they can reach their goals. The key to a successful fitness marketing plan is to become what your customers want you to be. And that starts with knowing who they are and what they want.