Fitness marketing is a highly competitive business – but you probably knew that anyway. To stand out amongst the masses of brands already mercilessly investing in varying forms of marketing activity for their health and fitness business, you need to play it smart. If you don’t, you run the risk of wasting serious time and money only to find a bit further down the line that you’ve not made much of an impact at all.
We can’t tell you all the areas you’ll need to focus on in order to ensure your fitness marketing is successful in one article, but here are four top tips to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
- Local Businesses Must Embrace Local Marketing
If you run a store, a gym, a studio, a restaurant or anything with a physical location that customers can visit, then you need to embrace local marketing. Don’t run straight to big digital platforms to spend money, make some noise locally first. Local papers, outdoor advertising, partnership opportunities with other non-competitive fitness businesses etc. are all great places to start spreading the word.
You should also make sure you’ve set up your Google My Business listing, so your location shows up on maps and local search results. This is free to do and is especially important if you don’t have your own website up yet. You can upload images, share opening times, post videos and create special offers and events as well as attract client reviews. Get started at google.com/business.
- Give to Your Audience
Fitness marketing is a people business, even more so than in most other industries. Keeping this is mind, more effective fitness marketing is about putting your audience first and consistently ensuring that your marketing content is all built around giving something to them.
Your content should serve a purpose for the intended audience. This means all of your social media posts, blogs, video posts, emails – everything – must meet this mandate. Is the message and the content you’re putting out useful and valuable for the audience? If it is, then they’re much more likely to absorb it and in return better rate and trust your business and brand.
- Use Video
Video has a much higher engagement rate than other media types and allows you and your business to become ‘real’ to the internet user. Video can seem intimidating, but the medium isn’t like it used to be. With the standard of smartphone cameras and free video editing software, you can make decent quality videos for next to nothing.
Pro tip though, invest in a good microphone. Ideally a wireless one if you’re going to be moving around a lot and shooting the videos yourself. A lot of first-time video producers fall down on capturing good quality audio, not the video itself.
- Be Consistent
It’s tough feeling like you’re producing and giving things away while business is slow. But buying into new brands and businesses takes time and a gradual build-up of trust. Don’t expect to win over a mass audience overnight. If you keep producing worthwhile content and keep reminding your audience that you exist and have a purpose, the customers will come.
