Having a Fitness Business Marketing System Gives You a Competitive Advantage
The fitness industry continues to be a highly competitive market. If you want to attract fitness consumers, you’ve got to stand out. And to stand out, it’s imperative to have a strong fitness business marketing system that not only attracts new clients but also fosters loyalty among existing ones.
What most fitness businesses resort to is sporadic, disjointed marketing efforts, jumping from one tactic to another in hopes of attracting clients. They have a ton of fitness marketing ideas and they just throw them all against the wall.
This ‘randomness & hope’ approach leads to inconsistent messaging, wasted resources, and limited growth. Even the best gym marketing campaigns end up being just hit-or-miss, at best.
In contrast, if you know how to market your gym systematically, you can unlock a significant competitive advantage, get more clients, and grow your gym.
Marketing is more than just ad campaigns or promotional events; it’s a systematic approach to building awareness, generating leads, and converting these leads into loyal customers.
Marketing can be a system. Or it can be a guessing game.
Here, we’re sharing the concept of building a marketing system for your fitness business and the Triple A Marketing Method as the linchpin of the system.
This ensures that your marketing efforts are not just sporadic initiatives but a cohesive, focused strategy aimed at sustainable growth.
Why Your Fitness Business Needs a Marketing System
A marketing system aligns strategic thinking and practical action. When that happens, it can feel as if you’re playing on another level from everyone else. You’re ‘in the zone’.
Without a cohesive marketing system, your fitness business will continually struggle with things like; inconsistent messaging, difficulty in tracking success, issues with scalability, reactive instead of proactive gym marketing strategies, client retention issues, and an abundance of wasted time, effort, and money.
On the other hand, a well-defined fitness business marketing system provides consistency, efficiency, scalability, and a means for tracking success. It allows you to adopt a strategic, holistic approach to fitness business marketing.
Building Blocks of a Successful Fitness Business Marketing System
To build a marketing system that truly delivers value, you need to start with four strategic building blocks: Solid Core Offer, Ideal Client Profile, Local Market Positioning, and Core Marketing Funnel.
- Solid Core Offer: The foundation of your gym’s marketing plan lies in having a well-defined core offer. Identify and define your core offer, whether it’s strategic and semi-private training, boot camps, small group sessions, or one-on-one coaching. Your core offer should cater to a specific fitness target market, such as fat loss, active adults, sports performance, stay-at-home moms, busy professionals, etc. You also need to consider marketability, which involves creating a brand around your core offer, highlighting your differentiators, and appealing directly to your target audience.
- Ideal Client Profile: To effectively market your core offer, you need to understand your ideal client inside and out. By building out a thorough (and accurate) ideal client profile, you gain insight into their pain points, challenges, and motivations. This knowledge allows you to tailor your fitness business’s marketing efforts to resonate deeply with your target audience and stand out from the crowd. This is, by far, the most common fail point of fitness business marketing plans. Most businesses don’t understand their customers and prospects as well as they think they do. So be extra diligent with your work here.
- Local Market Positioning and Differentiation: Clear and effective communication is key when it comes to marketing your business locally. Develop a positioning statement that concisely communicates who you are, whom you help, how you help them, and what sets you apart from others in your industry. Define your differentiators and showcase what makes your services unique and valuable to your target audience.
- Core Marketing Funnel (aka Sales Funnel): Having a well-structured marketing funnel is essential for generating leads and converting them into clients. Your marketing funnel should include a front-end offer (like a free challenge, trial, etc), and a core offer that provides value and encourages prospects to take the next step. Implement strategies like email marketing, blogging, social media engagement, and paid advertising to drive traffic to your funnel and increase lead generation.
The Triple A Marketing Method: Operationalizing Your Gym’s Marketing System
The Triple A Marketing Method – made up of Assets, Arsenal, and Action Plan – provides a blueprint for a marketing system that can be a game changer for your fitness business.
- Assets: Assets are your valuable resources, skills, or characteristics within your business that can be leveraged for marketing purposes. Identify the assets you possess, such as community presence, networking skills, budget for paid marketing, a large contacts list, or a strong brand. Evaluate each asset and consider how you can effectively utilize it for marketing your business.
- Arsenal: Your arsenal represents the array of marketing channels and strategies you will employ to promote your business. Use at least one internal (ex: referral programs, testimonials for your gym, etc), one online (ex. Facebook ads, SEO blogging, influencer marketing, etc), and one offline strategy (ex. joint ventures, networking, public speaking, etc). It’s important to focus on a few select marketing channels and execute them exceptionally well and then add to them, rather than trying to do too much and spreading yourself too thin.
- Action Plan: The action plan involves defining your daily, weekly, and monthly behaviors or actions that contribute to lead generation. Set targets for yourself based on your assets and arsenal. For example, if you have a referral reward system and testimonials, commit to asking for one referral per week and obtaining one testimonial per month. Create actionable habits like following up with leads, writing blog posts, engaging in networking activities, or monitoring your paid advertising campaigns.
Get The Complete Triple A Marketing Method Guide Here
Push Your Marketing Plan Into A Marketing Calendar
Once you’ve used the Triple A Marketing Method to develop your marketing plan, feed the plan into your Marketing Calendar for scheduling and management. This ensures the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities are scheduled and executed on time, all the time.
A Fitness Business Marketing System Eliminates the ‘Randomness and Hope’ Approach
…By aligning strategic thinking and practical action.
If you understand and implement the strategic building blocks and the Triple A Method, the comprehensive framework will take you beyond random or disjointed marketing tactics.
You can create a marketing system that’s going to attract leads and drive growth consistently.
An adaptable marketing system that can scale as you grow, as the market changes, and as the needs of your fitness business evolve.
That’s why building a powerful marketing system for your fitness business is a strategic move, and why it yields such significant benefits.
Want more information on how to market your fitness business? Learn more in The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Gym Business Marketing Plan.