5 Marketing Tips for Gym Owners: Tip #2 - Simplify & Target

Tip 2 of 5 - Simplifying & Targeting Your Marketing Messaging

Last week we covered inbound marketing for your fitness facility. Have you started to look at your marketing in a different way? Where you surprised by what you found when you started to take a deeper dive into your marketing? Like starting a new fitness routine, it always seems like starting is the hardest part. We understand this may be new for you and we want to help. Be sure to keep checking back over the next few weeks as our series continues. Today, we are going to take the inbound idea a little farther by showing you how to identify your target audiences and personalize your marketing messaging for them.

Tip #2: Simplify and Target Your Marketing Messaging

What this Means

You don’t have to be all things to all people, especially when it comes to marketing. Chances are, your gym was designed with a specific demographic in mind, so shouldn’t your marketing reflect this?

Why this is Important

Think about your customer base, including your potential customers:

• Are you varying your messaging depending on which group you are talking to?
• Are you posting the same content to all of your social media channels in a copy/paste fashion?
• Are you noticing that there are certain groups of customers that behave differently than others?

You want your customers and prospects to feel like you have a genuine interest in them (because you do!). So, show them that you care about their needs by addressing problems or concerns they have. This makes your marketing efforts seem more personal and less disruptive, and makes your customer less likely to tune you out and look at your competitor instead. This also helps you find the right customers that are more likely to be loyal over the years.

How to Start Doing This

1. Define your tone of voice.

Understanding how you want your brand to be perceived can go along way in helping you craft marketing messages that resonate with your customers. A good way to do this is to imagine your brand as a person:

• What is their personality like?
• What words or phrases could you see them using?
• What would they wear?

This all may sound silly at first, but it is a helpful and fun exercise to get you thinking about how you want to talk to your customers and prospects.

2. Review your membership.

Look at your current membership and the types of people who are typically interested in your gym.

• Do you see common themes?
• Are there a couple distinct groups that regularly come to the gym?
• Are there people who never seem to sign up no matter how hard you try to get them in the door?

This will give you clues as to where you should focus your efforts. You may want to look at financial information to discover where you are getting most of your membership dollars and who is most likely to renew their membership with you. The results may surprise you.

3. Define your target audience (membership) “persona."

What we mean by this is to create a fictitious representation of your target group that summarizes their behaviors, goals, wants and needs as they apply to your gym.

• What types of questions do they typically ask before signing up?
• What concerns or objections do they have about getting a membership?
• Do you know what other gyms they looked at before choosing yours?

Answering these questions will help you define what your target audiences really want and how you can use marketing to address these things.

4. Create posts, blogs and website content to address each group’s needs.

Pay attention to where each group interacts with you and post content where they are most likely to see it. Be sure to monitor how you are doing and adapt your personas, tone of voice and strategy as necessary if you still aren’t getting the traction you are looking for. Think of this as an ever-changing process that should be revisited and debated often.

For more tips on crafting great online content, please download our latest guide on social media best practices.

Try the Digital Marketing Suite

Check back next week for our third tip on differentiating yourself with content by going beyond promotions and pricing.