3 Things that Could Make or Break Your Studio or Gym Marketing Plan

This week, we spoke to Chris Brown from Super Fit Business, one of the UK’s top fitness business mentors and coaches. In the last 2 years, Chris has personally mentored and coached over 150 Fitness professionals helping them to double and in some cases, triple their income.

Chris gives us a killer insight into the three most common things that fitness professionals forget to consider when putting together their gym marketing plan.

1. Create a Strong Offer

Take a moment to consider your studio or gyms offering. Firstly, does it even have one and is it truly unique? For example, ‘one-to-one personal training’ is no longer a competitive offer in itself. In fact, it’s one of the most common, generic offerings in the market. With no comparison in the service being provided, prospects are left to compare the next best thing: price. Think about it, if you’re comparing two services both advertised as ‘one-to-one personal training’, which would you go for? The one that costs €30 a session or one that costs €50?

When competing on price alone one thing’s for sure; it’s a race to the bottom. What can you do? Give them more to compare. Yep, it’s that simple. People have a misconception that everybody’s looking for the best deal in terms of price and that’s not always the case. It’s time you sat down and carved your own niche by creating an offer that only you can provide with your unique skillset. Do you have a training philosophy that differs to competitors or expertise in an area that are highly sought after? At this point, price doesn’t play such a heavy role in your gym marketing plan.

2. Define Your Audience

You may have an incredible offer but if you’re not targeting it at the right people, your gym or studio just isn’t going to grow at the pace you need it to. Take for example a studio owner who has decided he wants to train professional athletes. There’s a few questions you need to ask yourself before coming to the conclusion of whether this is a feasible target audience or not.

a) Is there a big enough pool of people to serve and are they readily available locally?

It’s vital to ensure that the segment you choose to target within your gym marketing plan gives you a big enough pool of potential clients to serve and of course, they must be available in your local area. A small percentage of the people you target with your offering will actually come to you, and only a small percentage of that number again will actually stay and become loyal customers. From the outset, you need to make sure your target is worth investing in.

b) Will they value my offer and have the capacity to pay for it?

If we relate back to the scenario of training professional athletes, we may think it’s a no-brainer that of course they will be able to afford my services. However, realistically it’s often considered a privilege to train professional athletes, sometimes making their willingness to pay an issue.

What can I do? Find an audience that wants help, has the capacity to pay and will value your service. You may have the skillset to train athletes and take them to the highest level, but if the athletes are not easily accessible and not willing to pay up to the value of your offer, then it’s not going to be a viable for your gym marketing plan

3.Be Proactive, Not Reactive

No matter what kind of business you run, a percentage of your customers are going to drop off – it’s inevitable. To avoid the panic at the end of the month, what you can do, is anticipate this loss in your gym marketing plan before it happens by developing a marketing strategy with the goal of generating a pipeline of leads that fit your target audience.

If you know you’re going to lose 5 clients by the end of the month, you need to make sure you have a strategy in place to replenish these 5 clients by the end of said month. For this to happen, you need to map out the length of time it takes to turn a lead into a client. If it takes you 3 appointments to close a new PT client, the 5 clients you lose today won’t be replenished until 3 appointments time, potentially leaving your profits dwindling.

On the other hand, If you want to actually grow your business month by month, you need to go that step further and ensure that your gym marketing plan draws in more clients each month than you’re losing.

If you want help in delivering true value to your customers and increasing your retention numbers, why don’t you consider gym management software? Schedule a demo with one of the Glofox team today. 

Check out the full podcast with Chris Brown below!