Whether we realize it or not, we all interact with and are influenced by marketing efforts in our daily lives, from the moment we wake up until we turn in for the night. From the Instagram ad you scroll past while still in bed, to the emails you receive from your favorite clothing brands on your lunch break, marketing is all around us. Even after you head home ready to “unplug” for the night, the article you Google for an at-home yoga flow is also marketing at work.

There’s no escaping it and no denying it, marketing plays a leading role in the way we interact with the world. It can inform how we buy goods and services and how we feel about the companies and businesses trying to sell them. For businesses and services across all industries, marketing is make or break. The job of a highly effective marketing team is three-fold. First and foremost, marketers should generate interest and secure sales for their brand. Second, they should cultivate a community of loyal, lifelong customers. And third, they should create a legacy of positive public perception and an upstanding reputation for the company. As industries become more and more saturated, marketing will continue to be a necessary investment that drives and determines success.

For the health and fitness industry in particular, marketing is especially important. According to IBISWorld, there are currently more than 100,000 health clubs in the U.S. commanding a $32 billion market. The number of clubs increased 1.1% since 2019 and is expected to continue growing in the future.

With so many health clubs—not to mention boutique fitness studios, community recreation centers, YMCAs, JCCS, and other fitness facilities—all competing for the same audience, it’s more important than ever to set your club apart from the crowd. The easiest and most efficient way to drum up interest and create a name for your club is through marketing.

MARKETING AND THE MEMBER LIFECYCLE JOURNEY

One of the unique things about marketing for health clubs is that it’s focused on the long term. Rather than focusing on quick tactics that will drive minor, one-time sales, health club marketers have the unique job of convincing consumers to make a deeper commitment by buying a membership and then renewing that membership year after year. Since members have to make a conscious decision to continue reupping their membership each year, marketing for clubs has to continue well past the point of initial interest or purchase. Fitness marketing is largely dependent upon and fully intertwined with the member lifecycle journey.

The key to mastering the member lifecycle journey is catering to the needs of your club members, no matter what stage of their journey they’re experiencing. As they move through each stage, your marketing efforts should adapt and transform to suit your developing relationship. In the following section, we’ll outline each stage of the member lifecycle journey and offer general guidelines for how to approach marketing for each.

Attract

As with any long-term relationship, your relationship with a member starts with attraction. This stage of the journey represents what many think of as “traditional” marketing. Using the simplified definition of marketing as a tool to drive sales, this is the portion where you identify and begin to communicate with your selected target audience. This stage can involve a variety of marketing strategies such as paid advertising, referral programs, and special discount offerings. In this stage of marketing, your goal is to do everything you can to catch the eye of a potential member.

Convert

After the door has been cracked and you’ve earned access to a potential member via the attract phase, your next step is to convince them of your club’s value in the convert stage. This is the critical portion of the journey that decides whether the journey continues or comes to a premature end. To convert a prospective member, it’s important that your marketing efforts are personal, persistent, and prompt. You want to give prospective members a taste of the type of service they can expect once they join your club. Your messaging, through email, text, phone, or even a member engagement assistant powered by artificial intelligence, needs to make them feel as if they’re already a valued part of your club family.

Manage

Once you’ve successfully converted your prospect, this is the point in the lifecycle journey where marketing often takes a back seat, the manage stage. Clubs underestimate the importance of marketing past the attraction and conversion stages. Instead of fostering blossoming relationships through continued marketing efforts, all too often clubs drop the ball and let engagement fall to the wayside. During the manage stage, engage members with surveys and frequent check-in meetings where they can give feedback on how they’re adjusting to life at your club. You can use the sentiment and insight you gather to better serve them and retain their membership for years to come.

Engage

The engage stage is all about communication with the hope of spurring further investment both in terms of dollars and emotional buy-in from your members. You need to keep members engaged with your club community in as many ways as possible. Weekly emails and text reminders about upcoming classes they may be interested in are a good place to start. The same channels can be used to upsell members class packages, spa treatments, and more. A branded mobile app that allows members to interact with your club from the comfort of their homes is a must if you truly want to integrate into their lives. The more members are involved in your programs, the more they’ll feel like your club is a second home, and the more likely they are to keep renewing their membership.

Marketing in the last portion of the lifecycle journey should be dedicated to providing that special something, that added value that lets members know you care. Incentive programs are a nice way to encourage participation; the rewards members stand to gain will deepen their loyalty. Offer free personal training sessions, personalized nutrition or workout plans, and access to premium club offerings. Club branded swag—think hats, T-shirts, water bottles, pullovers—serves a dual purpose of delighting your members and getting your club’s name out into the world.

WHAT ARE YOU COMPETING FOR?

When it comes to owning the market, it helps to know what you’re competing for. In order to truly win, you’ve got to lead the market in five main categories:

1. Mind share is how aware customers are of your brand compared to your competitors. It’s typically measured by how much a brand is talked about by the public. Mind share is determined by brand visibility and popularity.
2. Lead share is taking action to increase business growth by giving and receiving business leads within a structured environment. The more leads you can drive, the higher your chance of conversion.
3. Market share is calculated by taking your company’s sales over a period and dividing it by the total sales of the industry over the same period. Market share gives a general idea of the size of your company in relation to its market and other competitors.
4. Wallet share is how much a customer regularly spends on your brand compared to your competitors. If a given customer has a certain portion of their budget to spend on a specific product or service, wallet share is the percentage of that money that goes toward your company instead of toward your competitors.
5. Loyalty share is a measure of how devoted your customers are to your company based on how much time and money they spend on your company. When customer are loyal to your brand, they’re more likely to refer their friends via word-of-mouth marketing—one of the most effective and hardest-to-come-by tools of marketing.

THE FANTASTIC 4 OF MARKETING

The marketing playbook is ever changing. As trends and technology advance, tactics for better marketing will evolve around them. Though strategies may—and should change—to remain relevant, these four cardinal rules will always be applicable to your marketing plan. Like a perfectly worn-in pair of blue jeans, they’re tried and true—and never going out of style.

#1: Add Value

The end goal of basically all business practices is of course to make a sale, but the distinction between marketing and sales exists for a reason. As a marketer, your job is to engage and capture the attention of your audience before passing them along to your sales team who will guide them through the buying process. The best way to get someone’s attention is to have a definitive answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?” If your marketing campaigns are essentially product-pushing information dumps, you need to flip your approach. Remember: Your audience is the hero of this story. You’re just the one there to guide them to their inevitable glory. All content marketing should follow the 80/20 rule, meaning it should contain 80% value and only 20% sales talk. This rule applies whether you’re posting a blog, presenting a pitch deck, or even making a Facebook post. Help your audience see you first as a source of information, guidance, and aid. After you’ve earned their trust, the sales part will come a lot easier.

#2: Understand Your Audience

There’s nothing worse than a tone-deaf marketer. Without a deep understanding of who you’re selling to, your marketing materials may as well be in another language. Do the work to get to know your audience. Gather data on who’s interacting with your content marketing pieces, employ A/B testing, send out surveys, and generally make an effort to listen to what your audience wants. This can be explicit through direct feedback or implicit through actions and habits. Once you’ve clearly defined your target audience profile, don’t let your profile become stagnant. You may find that the persona you had in mind when starting your club isn’t connecting like you imagined, but there may be a whole other segment of the market that’s primed and ready to step in as your new targeted audience.

#3: Make It Personal

When it comes to marketing, it pays to make things personal. No one wants to feel like just another name on a list. When customers devote a portion of their budget and significant time out of their week to visit your club, they deserve to be treated accordingly. Take time to build up your relationship with members through personalized emails, recommendations suited specifically to their preferences, and social events that encourage community building between your community and your staff. Recognize a “Member of the Month” who is awarded special club perks like a free massage, café meal, or a designated parking space. When crafting marketing materials aimed at attracting members, show off your club’s personal approach by using customer testimonials and spotlights from current members. This practice not only provides proof of satisfaction to potential new members, but it shows current members that you value what they have to say.

#4: Know Your Brand‍

Your brand is your reputation, your legacy, and one of your greatest assets. When developing and promoting your brand, inconsistency is your single greatest enemy. Everyone knows precisely what brand a swoosh represents because Nike has been using it as their primary logo since 1971. Similarly, the phrase “Just Do It” can’t be uttered without thinking first of the world’s most popular sports brand. When creating collateral for your club, whether something as simple as a welcome sign for an event or as extensive as a guide for new members, your brand should be prominently displayed. That means using a set color palette, font family, and voice for all your materials. Even the way you interact with customers should represent your brand. For example, you know that at every Chick-fil-a across the country, your thanks will always be acknowledged with a “my pleasure.” Chick-fil-a’s brand is built around excellent service and their key catch phrase is an example of the undeniable brand experience they’ve built.

How many times a day do you get on the internet? Whether to scroll through your Twitter feed, look up a definition, or find out who that actor is you couldn’t quite place, the internet is the answer to nearly every question or curiosity that pops into our minds. The same is true for most Americans. Did you know that 81% of Americans get online every day? And of that 81%, 28% say they go online almost constantly.

If marketing is about meeting your audience where they are, the best place to find them is on the internet. The process of communicating with an audience through the internet is called digital marketing, and it encompasses any marketing effort that takes place on the internet or via an electronic device. We’re talking social media, email, search engines, websites, videos, online advertising, sponsored posts, content marketing, and more.

The world becomes more digital by the day, which means the same for marketing. In fact, from 2015-2019, the number of people who reported being on the internet almost constantly went up by 7%. That trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

One of the biggest advantages digital marketing has over traditional marketing is its ability to track engagement and monitor success. With analytics dashboards, you can see how many times a certain email was opened, how long an average viewer watched your video, or how many views a blog post received. With physical marketing strategies like billboards or print ads, it’s much more difficult to gauge your return on investment (ROI) for specific campaigns.

Here’s a short overview of some of the most prevalent digital marketing platforms and strategies used by fitness businesses today.

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is one of the biggest segments of digital marketing, with more 70% of marketers actively investing in content marketing and 24% planning to increase their investment in the future, according to HubSpot.

From blog posts and e-books to white papers and infographics, content marketing comes in a variety of forms. The common theme behind all content marketing is that it brings an audience to your company. It can do so by increasing brand awareness, traffic, or lead generation.

All content marketing should provide value to potential customers by sharing data, expertise, or insight related to your market. For your club, create original content that supports your mission. An article about how to properly use gym equipment or an e-book with a week full of healthy dinner recipes provides value to customers and furthers your mission to provide health and wellness to your community.

Potential customers who may consume your content will begin to see your club as an authority and source of information for health and fitness needs. Adding a clear call to action for readers to learn more about your fitness club provides a natural transition from the attract to convert stage of the member lifecycle journey.

Growing your content marketing is often a precursor to growing your member base.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Unless you’re completely green to the world of digital marketing, chances are you’ve heard the term SEO thrown around a time or two. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website, blog, or infographic to come up at the top of a search engine results page. This increases the amount of free traffic your page receives. It also creates qualified leads because those who end up on your page have implied that they’re interested in becoming members of a health club based on the search they submitted.

To make your website and blog posts SEO-friendly, you’ll want to master on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO is determined by the content on your page. To improve on-page SEO, you want your content piece to provide answers to questions you anticipate online users to be searching. By researching and including keywords related to your industry in your blog post or article, you increase the chance that your content piece will come up as a top option for users interested in fitness. Some of the top related words and phrases associated with health clubs are “gym,” “fitness,” “health,” and “how to lose weight.”

Off-page SEO is determined by factors outside of your page. This includes inbound or backlinks, i.e. the number of times other sites link to your pages. To increase your off-page SEO, consider partnerships with other publishers and sites who share your audience. Write guest posts for a reputable fitness blog or organization to increase your authority and direct a larger audience to your website and blog posts.

Local SEO includes your business listings on sites like Yelp, Bing Places, and most importantly, Google My Business. Your club likely already has a Google My Business listing, whether you created it or not, and it’s likely a major result whenever anyone searches your club in your area. Think of it as your first impression. Make sure every bit of your club’s Google My Business listing is accurate and complete.

Technical SEO refers to the backend of your website and how your pages are coded. Search engines like Google rank pages higher that have quick load times. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% for each additional second of load time after the first 5 seconds. Compress images and optimize files to keep your page loading quickly and at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Each of these categories works together to determine your webpage ranks, so it’s important to master all three to experience the full benefits of SEO.

WEBSITES

If eyes are the window to the soul, then consider your website the eyes of your club. They tell your health club’s story from afar, without anyone ever stepping foot in your facility. A website is often the first impression a potential member gets of your fitness club. Just as you wouldn’t choose a low-quality restaurant for a first date, your first date with a potential member shouldn’t be on a low-quality website. This crucial interaction with a prospect could set the tone for a long, prosperous member relationship, or it could be both the beginning and the end of your journey together.

When creating a website, here are some general dos and don’ts to keep in mind.

Do stick to you brand.

This includes design elements, color scheme, sound, and tone of voice. Your website should be an extension of the experience you offer within your club walls, not a departure from it.

Don’t use stock photography.

Your website should give potential members and staffers a taste of your club experience. Using stock photography that misrepresents your club can be confusing at best and harmful at worst. If a client is expecting to see a sleek all-black facility based off the photography you picked, but your club actually has a light and bright aesthetic, they may feel they can’t trust you to deliver elsewhere.

Do hire a professional.

For photography, design, and website build, enlisting a professional is a must. Responsive design—or how well your website adapts to a device—is one of the most important factors in determining the amount of conversion your website drives. With Google’s current algorithm, websites that perform well on mobile devices rank higher than those that do not. If you want to put your best foot forward, additional front-end investment to optimize your site is a must.

Don’t go overboard.

Make sure your website includes all the basic information a lead might want to know about your club (location, amenities, rates, class offerings, etc.), but don’t overdo it. If you jampack your site with excessive sections and confusing organization, a lead might feel overwhelmed and move on to another club.

Do include plenty of clear calls to action.

The goal of your website is to drive leads to take the next step. Make sure each page on your website includes an invitation for a prospective to continue the journey. Whether that be by filling in their contact information, scheduling an appointment, or signing up for a trial week, there should always be an obvious answer to the question “What now?”

Don’t oversell.

Beware of including too many pop-ups or obvious attempts to sell on your website. While the end goal is to recruit members, you don’t want to bombard them with what may seem like shallow attempts to bring in revenue.

Do include a blog or resources page.

Flex your content marketing muscles by including a blog or page of resources on your website. Not only will it increase traffic to your website by multiplying your chances of ranking high in a search, it also promises expertise and value to potential members.

For more on websites, see our 10 Things Your Club Website Must Have list. Get the Checklist

DIGITAL ADVERTISING

One of the major pillars of marketing, advertising is the strategic and typically paid effort to spread awareness about a product or service. In the past 20 years, U.S. advertising spend has done a complete 180, with most advertising mediums (radio, magazine, newspaper, and TV) seeing a large decline, while internet (or digital) advertising skyrocketing and “out of home” advertising (billboards, signs, theater previews, etc.) experiencing a small increase.

According to a report by Zenith, internet ads made up only 3.8% of ad spend in 2000. In 2020, internet advertising accounts for a whopping 44.7% of ad spend, surpassing the second highest medium, TV, by nearly 15%.

So what makes digital advertising so appealing? Your ads should go where the people are, and as we’ve noted, the people largely are on the internet. The expansive and diverse audience of the internet coupled with the wide range or digital ad styles makes it the most effective platform for advertising today.

Use a combination of these basic types of digital ads to connect with customers and drive conversions.

1. Display Advertising – Banner ads consisting of words, images, videos, and audio that are placed on websites that publish ads. Display ads are great for getting your club out there, but they don’t result in the highest click-through rates because they’re not always contextually relevant to the person viewing them. Retargeting ads can solve for this problem by using cookies to target users who have previously interacted with your website or brand by visiting your website.
2. Paid Search Advertising – Also known as pay-per-click advertising or Google advertising, paid search advertising is a text advertisement that appears at the top of the search results for relevant terms on search engines. They achieve higher click-through rates and their success is largely dependent on your choosing the right keywords to bid on.
3. Mobile Advertising – Includes mobile banners, in-app advertisements, and text messaging advertisements. With mobile phones accounting for roughly 50% of all internet traffic, mobile advertising is becoming increasingly popular.
4. Video Advertising – Any form of online advertising that includes a video, whether a pop-up on a website or as a precursor to online video content on YouTube or another video streaming site.
5. Social Media Advertising – Paying to promote a product or service on a social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, or TikTok. Includes both boosted posts (paying to have your social content disseminated to more people) and traditional ads (targeted to reach and obtain the information of strategically qualified leads) (on Facebook and Instagram.
6. Audio Advertising – An audio ad played between songs on an audio streaming site like Spotify or Pandora, as well as ads played during podcast episodes.
7. Native Advertising – Advertising made to blend in with its surrounding content. Can take many forms, including product placement or reviews in videos, display ads that blend in with surrounding content, or written ads embedded in articles.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

The last 20 years have held something of a revelation for social media. Six Degrees, one of the first recognized social media sites hit the internet in 1997 and took 4 years to accumulate only 1 million users. In 2003 and 2004 successively, LinkedIn and Facebook were born and social media hasn’t been the same since. Today, Facebook has 2.6 billion active users, and a whole legion of other social media sites with their own massive followings have added to the growing landscape.

Social media as a marketing platform holds a host of benefits. It gives companies a chance to share their story, increase brand awareness, connect with customers, learn about customer preferences, keep up with competitors, and promote products and services. It’s also a major driver of leads. Whether via LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, followers who connect with your club on social media often become qualified leads.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the most used platforms for marketers, but they’re not the only ones with skin in the game. Don’t neglect other platforms that can expand your brand and audience. Social media trends change quickly, so it pays to cast your net wide and make sure your health club has a presence on every major channel. Different platforms attract different demographics. For example, on Pinterest you may reach stay-at-home moms looking for group fitness classes. While on YouTube, you might find Millennials looking for state-of-the-art fitness facilities. No matter which combination of social media platforms you choose to use, it’s important to not only create engaging content, but also to post it on a regular basis. There’s nothing more discouraging than getting excited about a new company and looking them up on Instagram only to find that they haven’t posted in 6 months. It’s a sure way to lose mind share and credibility.

Top social media platforms your club should consider:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Reddit

EMAIL MARKETING

The pinnacle of digital communication, email marketing is the easiest, cheapest, and often most effective mechanism for reaching members and potential members. Email offers a massive ROI (return on investment) for health clubs of all sizes because it requires next to no spend and offers the opportunity to connect hundreds or millions of members in one fell swoop.

Approximately 306.4 billion emails were sent and received on each day of 2020 across roughly 4 billion global users. Additionally, 90% of U.S. internet users also use email. If you’re looking to communicate with almost anyone in the digital world, email is the way to do it.

Outside of its ubiquity as a communication channel, email is also valuable for its versatility. Email campaigns can be deployed for nearly anything you’d like to inform your health club’s audience about, from holiday promotions to follow-up notes.

Popular email campaigns for fitness clubs include:

• Weekly newsletters – Weekly newsletters are the perfect way to keep your members informed and engaged with updates on latest happenings and offerings in your club. Include member or staff spotlights that give your community the chance to get to know each other.
• Broadcasts – Send a quick note reminding members about a soon-to-close class registration, a cancellation, or a new merchandise offering.
• Welcome emails – Nurture new member relationships with a series of welcome emails that highlight specific portions of your club. Include the name, number, and email of a staff member your reader can reach out to with questions.
• Follow–up emails – There are a couple use cases for a follow-up campaign. Maybe a visitor downloaded something off your website and now you need to keep them invested with more content and an invitation to come visit your club. Or maybe a member went to a new group fitness class and now you want to keep them engaged with information related to that class.
• Specials – Whether you’re running a limited-time referral incentive or a holiday promotion for loyal members, get your message out with an email campaign.

With so many types of emails to send and so many campaigns to keep up with, sending emails can very quickly become a full-time job. That’s without mentioning the incredibly daunting task of updating and maintaining email lists based on member interest. You hired your staff to connect with your members, but they do that best when they’re walking your gym floor, not hiding in an office sending thousands of emails per day. A tool for email marketing automation is one of the greatest gifts you can give to both your staff and your members. Your members will receive a steady stream of emails they’re preconditioned to care about, your staff will get hours back in their day, and you’ll have an easy way to track delivery data, email clicks, and the general effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Lead generation is often how marketers measure success. They set goals to generate a certain number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads), and once that number is met, they make the mistake of thinking their work is done. With every lead, the ultimate goal is to convert them into a member. MQLs need to become SQLs (sales qualified leads) and eventually customers in order for your marketing spend and effort to be justified.

So how do you get there? The answer is lead engagement. Lead engagement is the process of nurturing a potential member through the purchasing journey. Lead engagement bridges the gap between MQL and member, and it’s where the real work begins. It’s easy to attract a lead with a clever marketing campaign, but keeping a lead interested in your health club and moving toward membership is much more difficult.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has taken a front seat in aiding companies with lead engagement. Especially in the highly competitive world of fitness, AI can be a huge help in managing and keeping all your leads engaged and on the path to membership. A member engagement assistant, like the one offered by Conversica, is not only vital to the member acquisition stage of the lifecycle journey, but it also can be used to serve existing members through communication campaigns that increase engagement and retention.

One of the most exciting things about health club marketing is that it’s ever-changing. Innovation is welcome and celebrated in this community of motivated, driven marketers. So, if you’re feeling penned in after sending your 10th email campaign of the week, there’s always a new strategy to apply or marketing trend to try.

Here are three marketing trends guaranteed to keep you and your audience engaged:

1. Event Marketing – Your level of involvement in event marketing is up to you. For low commitment, find a popular, well-reputed event related to your industry and get your club involved either by buying booth space or by sponsoring. If you’re ready to take your event marketing to the next level, consider hosting your own event that will attract an audience to your fitness club.
2. Influencer Marketing – While many view influencer marketing as a narrow subset of marketing designed only for millennials and Gen Zers interested in apparel brands, it actually has huge cross-over potential. The top 20 fitness influencers on Instagram have more than 100 million followers. That’s a lot of pull. If you can identify fitness influencers or local “celebrities” who embody your health club’s brand, a partnership is a smart move for both parties. You gain original content and a new audience, and your influencer gets a free membership and a share of your audience when you repost their club-related social content.
3. Podcast and Educational Channel Marketing – Upgrade your content marketing with a podcast and educational channel on YouTube or another video streaming platform. This is a great way to recycle existing content marketing information to serve diverse audiences through new mediums.

As you can see, marketing for health and fitness clubs is a multifaceted endeavor that requires effort, buy-in, and investment from your entire staff. Knowing the tricks of the trade is helpful but implementing the proper tools to supplement your work can make all the difference. Ready to upgrade your club’s marketing plan? Club Automation’s digital marketing solution paired with supplemental tools like Conversica, a mobile app, and SMS messaging, is the perfect way to jumpstart your marketing to drive dynamic revenue and membership growth. Get started by scheduling a free demo today.