As a medical fitness facility with a focus on rehab patients, you may have the state-of-the-art equipment to provide the best care and treatment possible. However, you might also be experiencing retention issues after your patients finish their program. But that shouldn’t be the end of the road.

Recently, Club Automation’s Director of Enterprise Marketing, Christy Brown, hosted a webinar for the Medical Fitness Association called “Build Brand Loyalty: Marketing Memberships to Rehab Clients.”

The presentation begins by focusing on the impact of the pandemic on fitness facilities. When COVID first started putting the strain on these businesses and associations, things seemed incredibly dour.

But something positive also came through the storm of 2020 and early 2021: people were prioritizing exercise and community through fitness and wellness programs. Did you know that 82% of consumers regularly exercise (or soon plan to) with 75% of those consumers participating in gym-like activities? These statistics give medical fitness facilities a major reason to join the conversation of creating memberships for their rehab clients.

There’s no doubt that your staff is bogged down by wearing many hats and handling many roles from memberships and programming to billing and facility maintenance. Adding marketing to your agenda may seem like just adding another arduous task with little return.

To help combat that feeling of overwhelm, the webinar goes through four steps to help your facility establish, think through, executive, and measure your marketing strategies and campaigns.

It’s incredibly easy to focus on quick campaigns and quick wins when it comes to your marketing efforts. A well-performing social media post, a high email open and clickthrough rate, a blog with record page views. While it’s important to celebrate those victories, you should take the time to help your team determine what you want to accomplish with your marketing strategy. Think through a number of factors including your ultimate goals, your reason for your marketing strategy, your current strategies and methods, and your competitors’ strategies. These will help you start to form a more long-term strategy for your facility.

Part of nailing down your message is discovering the ways that will keep your members at your facility long-term. Club Automation promotes a strategy of outcome-driven messaging in which you focus on what your clients want to achieve as opposed to you talking in general terms about your products or services. Rehab clients who want and need long-term wellness solutions. Examples of outcomes for these clients could include improving overall health, working out more frequently, decreasing risk of injury while working out, and easily managing their memberships online. From there, you can map their outcomes to the services and products that you offer.

There are multiple channels of marketing to leverage, and segments of the population communicate with each other differently. Figure out where your audience is in the buyer’s journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision) and meet them in the specific channel they’re using. Examples of marketing channels in the buying journey include social media, pay-per-click ads, search engine optimization, and directory listings (Awareness); content marketing, reputation management, email marketing, experiential marketing (Consideration); website, app, marketing, and email (Decision).

There is an adage in marketing: What gets measured gets managed. Launching a campaign without a plan to track and measure results is not a great way to advocate for marketing impact. It’s so difficult to prove marketing effectiveness without results. Keep data clean. Identify strategic targets. Prove out your impact.

In addition to measuring and reporting, your facility should learn to scale with technology by being direct, prompt, persistent, and personalized. 48% of staff will never follow up with a prospect. Don’t let those opportunities slip out of your grasp.

Finally, always be testing. Challenge what you assume is going to work is the best way to evolve your campaigns and create solid long-term strategies in the end.

To learn more how Club Automation Mobile can help your medical facility, get a demo today.