It goes without saying that Health Clubs need members to survive, and the sharp ability to acquire and retain customers is the lifeblood all fitness facilities must possess to be successful.
I’ve published may posts on retention, but how do you acquire new customers?
The answer is effective marketing.
In this post, I want to share how to execute powerful Marketing Campaigns.
What is a Marketing Campaign?
A Marketing Campaign is a focused, tactical initiative to achieve a specific marketing goal.
For Health Clubs, the goal of a Marketing Campaign may be to generate more leads, it may be to establish more brand awareness within the local area, or it may be to drive more sales.
As a gym, you may have specific goals you want to meet on certain platforms, for example, you may want to attain more email subscribers, you may want to increase the virality of your posts on Facebook or you may want to boost the number of ‘video views’ on YouTube.
Typically, Health Clubs are more concerned with the bigger picture and set their marketing goals around achieving one of the 4R’s; Recruitment (Sales), Revenue (Secondary Spend), Retention and Reputation. Today I want to discuss Marketing Campaigns which drive ‘Sales’.
Sales focused Marketing Campaigns require careful detailed planning so that every step of the process is understood before the launch. I will go through all the key points you should consider.
1. Who is your target audience?
Prior to choosing how you will execute your campaign, you need to determine exactly who it is you want your message to be seen by.
One of the beauties of modern-day marketing channels is you can be really specific with who you want to target.
For example, if you are a Premium Health Club Operator, you may want to attract families with children aged 4-10 during the six week summer holiday period.
If you are a Boutique Studio gym, you may want to target young professionals interested in fitness, who have recently moved to your local area for work and have a higher income than regular professionals.
If you are a Budget Gym Operator, you may want to run a campaign solely to attract newly engaged couples in the lead up to their wedding.
All of these would be possible through Facebook Advertising.
Similarly, if you are a specialist provider of Yoga within your area and you want to target people who work within a 2-mile radius of your studio and are looking online for Yoga facilities, this is possible through Google Advertising.
When it comes to choosing the right audience, you should look at your current member base and define the buyer personas and customer profiles that exist within it. You ought to pay attention to demographics, geo-location, buyer behaviour, and consumer interests.
Once you’ve established your target audience for your up and coming Marketing Campaign, you need to set clear goals and targets.
2. What are your Marketing Campaign goals?
As I mentioned in the intro, Marketing Campaigns can have different types of outcomes: leads, new website visitors, new in-store visitors, brand visibility or social media engagement to name a few.
Your marketing campaign needs to just focus on one of these. If you start trying to achieve everything at once, you’ll end up achieving nothing.
One way to break this down is to focus on one of three broad areas; Awareness, Consideration (Lead Generation and Nurturing) and Conversion.
Once you’ve decided on what it is you want to achieve, you can then decide if you want to focus on improving your performance on a specific platform.
For example, if you’ve decided you want to run an ‘Awareness’ campaign, you may decide you want to ramp up the number of followers and engagement you get on Instagram.
Alternatively, you may just want to boost overall awareness of your brand, which is also perfectly acceptable and may mean you utilise more channels and a different message.
3. How will you measure your Marketing Campaign?
When you’ve identified the purpose of your Marketing Campaign, you need to put in place specific performance metrics that will allow you to determine how your campaign is performing against that particular goal.
For example, if you do go ahead with the idea of running an Awareness campaign to increase the number of followers and the engagement levels on your Instagram, you will need to be able to measure the direct success of your Marketing Campaign. This means that rather than just looking at overall followers and overall engagement your Instagram page has received during the execution of the Marketing Campaign, you need to be able to pinpoint just how much of that activity has occurred as a direct result of your Marketing Campaign.
In essence, the measurement you should be tracking is the ‘incremental number of followers’ and the ‘incremental engagement’ your Instagram has received as a result of the execution of your Marketing Campaign.
Similarly, if your campaign is focusing on Conversion, you need to be able to accurately measure how many sales were made as a direct result of your Marketing Campaign, not just the general number of sales made within that time period.
4. What is your Marketing Campaign hook?
Depending on the type of campaign your Health Club is running, your offer could be a piece of content such as a free training program, it could be a gift such a free 3-day trial, or it could be a discounted membership package. The idea is you promote something that attracts your target audience.
When it comes to choosing the hook, you need to understand what stage of the buying cycle your customers are at.
If you opt to run an Awareness campaign, your target audience may not be ready to buy, so running a discounted package on membership may be the wrong message. It may be better to focus your efforts on driving this audience to an interesting piece of content so they can build up a relationship with your brand first.
Read the example below to explain my point;
You are a Budget Gym chain. You’ve analysed the buyer personas within your existing membership database and you’ve determined that you get a lot of females joining your facility in the Easter Holidays, who are 18-22. Upon further analysis, you can see that this cohort often ‘check-in’ to your facility with a friend, rather than a partner. You can see that they tend to visit your gym from 5.45pm to 7.45pm and do 2 classes per night. Further inspection shows that in August, you tend to see a dip in attendance from this particular group.
Based on all this data, it is clear that your Health Club attracts a reasonable amount of females, who are either students or young professionals, who may be interested in Group Exercise, and have joined the gym with the goal to get in shape for an up and coming ‘girls’ holiday.
While you ultimately want to acquire more members like this, the current month is February, which is 2 months before Easter. Therefore, rather than running a ‘Conversion’ campaign, it may be much more appropriate to run a ‘Brand Awareness’ Campaign to this particular target audience.
The hook needs to be relevant to the consumer. The problem is the reason these particular consumers are joining is to get in shape for their summer holiday, but in February, summer holidays are not on everyone’s minds.
So what do you use as a hook? Relatable content that will resonate with females at that moment in time. For example, try executing a 2-week push prior to Valentine’s Day all about ‘falling in love with your body’. Publish some humorous video content which highlights ‘ways to get back on track with your diet after failing your New Resolutions’. These are just two ways you may spark the interest of this particular audience while increasing the awareness of your brand at the right time. In March, you’ll then be in the minds of this audience and you’ll be in a much better position to run a Lead Generation Campaign which may place more focus more on that up and coming beach holiday.
My golden rule would be to match up Awareness Campaigns with content-based hooks, Consideration Campaigns with free day passes and trials, and Conversion Campaigns with special offers. Appreciate that every consumer goes through a buying cycle and the first interaction with your brand should not be a hard-sell. Take each customer through the three stages.
Exactly how you take each customer through the three stages will depend on the marketing channel you use and that’s what I shall cover next.
5. Which channels will you use for your Marketing Campaign?
The channels you choose to capture the attention of your audience will depend on your budget, target audience and goals.
Earlier on in the post, I emphasised that modern-day marketing channels such as Facebook Advertising and Google Advertising will allow you to tap into more targeted audiences, so to reiterate, if your audience is very niche, it may be much more cost-effective to use these contemporary digital methods.
However, if you want to drive conversions among the older generation, you may still wish to use direct mail.
If you want to establish brand awareness on a particular street, you may deem it better to carry out some leaflet drops in combination with placing prominent adverts on billboards and bus-stops.
If you want to gain more leads from students, attending their University Freshers Fair and striking up relationships with Halls of Residence brand ambassadors may be another avenue to explore.
Essentially, each channel will come at a different cost. The digital methods are much cheaper than traditional methods, it is also easier to measure the success of digital methods, and for most Health Clubs, employing digital methods brings better results. So, if your marketing budget is quite low, it’s pretty obvious which channels you should seek to use. If you’ve been allocated more money to spend, then you should look at the Return of Investment from each channel and select the ones which will allow you to achieve your goals in the best manner.
6. What will your landing page for your Marketing Campaign look like?
If you’ve heeded my advice and decided to run with digital methods, it should be noted that a successful Online Marketing Campaign should always send people to a relevant, optimized landing page that prompts the visitor with more information and a Call To Action (CTA).
If you’re running an ‘Awareness’ campaign aimed at Dads with new-born children ahead of Fathers Day, you should send them to a landing page which contains information about adapting to new life as a dad. As a CTA, you could send them to a free downloadable PDF on how to blast the belly fat while performing daddy duties.
If you’re running a Consideration (Lead Generation) campaign aimed at young professionals who have recently moved into the area with an interest in fitness, you should send them to a landing page which opens up with a headline along the lines of ‘New to the area and looking to get fit?’. This way it stays relevant to your original message. As a CTA, you just need them to register their details so your hook could be ‘Welcome to your new home- 3 Day Free Trial for First-time users’.
If you’re running a Conversion campaign aimed at ‘Couples’ in your area ahead of a new initiative you’re launching for Personal Training, then once again your Landing Page should reflect this through the imagery used and the content. Your CTA should be to encourage sign-ups to that particular membership package only.
When you pay for digital advertising, 50% of your success will depend on your message and the audience you choose to target, the other 50% of your success will depend on the landing page your audience is directed to.
Your landing page needs to be extremely tailored to the people you are paying to reach and it must contain no distractions so your visitors can do exactly what you want them to do. Make your forms simple and don’t give your visitor too many sections to fill in on your forms, these are known as ‘barriers’ to entry and will only reduce the success of your campaign.
7. How will I know if my Marketing Campaign has been successful?
As mentioned previously in the section discussing goals and KPI’s, it’s vital you track your marketing activities and measure your results.
There are a number of results you can measure for each type of campaign.
For an Awareness Campaign, you can measure the incremental reach gained on your social media platforms, you can measure the incremental number of visits to your website or your particular landing page. You can then measure the Cost per Reach and Cost per Web Page View in order to determine the ROI.
With a Lead Generation Campaign, you can measure the incremental number of leads, and you can measure the cost per lead. If you run a multi-channel Marketing Campaign you can measure the cost per lead per each channel to determine the effectiveness of each platform. With more advanced software, you can see how many of your leads later become members.
For a Conversion campaign, you can measure the incremental number of sales, and you can measure the cost per acquisition. Again, you can measure the cost per acquisition across each channel to see which ones performed the best.
By measuring ‘reach’, ‘leads’ and ‘conversions’, you can start to predict how many leads you expect to generate based on the number of people you reach on each channel. You can then forecast the number of ‘conversions’ you expect to make based on the number of leads. This is known in marketing as the ‘sales funnel’.
When you have established your ‘sales funnel’ figures, it becomes much easier to project your future sales and you can allocate the right budget for each channel based on what you’re looking to achieve.
8. How to complete the cycle of a Marketing Campaign?
Your results will indicate whether your campaign has been successful or not. Either way, it’s always important to review your campaign.
Ask the following questions during the review
- Did you meet your goals? Why/Why not?
- Did your hook satisfy your target audience? Why/Why not?
- If you could change anything about the campaign, what would it be? Why/Why not?
- What did you learn about this customer that you can apply to your next campaign?
By answering these, and making a record of your comments, you will be able to make the necessary adjustments next time round and should only improve any future campaigns.
My final words on Marketing Campaigns…
Launching a marketing campaign is not something that should be done in haste in order to achieve quick results. Due to how competitive the fitness industry is, there is often a time and place for quick reactive decision, but these should still be planned to a degree within your initial marketing plan, i.e., if Competitor 1 does this, then we will react with A, B or C.
If you really want to take the lead within the industry and be the best ‘Premium Health Club’ or the ‘Budget Gym Chain’, then you must have faith in your own marketing plan. The last thing you want to happen is for your fitness facility to become a mere puppet to your competition as they metaphorically pull your strings and dictate your activity.
Instead, take the time to play your journey ahead and stay in your own lane; there’ll be less traffic, no speed limit and you’ll arrive at your destination much quicker.