Know Your Niche
1. Position your brand within your market. For example, is your club premium, boutique, budget, trendy, serious, fun, adult, family, or other? Choose a position for your brand that you can dominate and don’t try to be everything to everyone. Set your price points based on your desired brand position and geographic market.
2. Study what customers in your market want from fitness products and services, then develop programs for the needs/desires you wish to serve. Generate leads by identifying problems you can solve within your market.
Target Your Marketing
3. Take a bottom-up approach with your target market to determine the catchment area around each facility/location so you know who to target. Restrict your digital marketing to within the target area which should be defined by drive-time, demographics, and customer penetration.
4. Market to specific segments of your catchment area based on your facility’s strengths and points of difference with your competitors. This can be done with mailing/postal codes with many vendors in many countries/regions.
5. Create custom audiences within your first-party data so you can remarket to your former customers, lapsed customers, missed guests, and web leads across all digital channels. When possible, deliver unique creative to each of the segmented audiences for increased personalization.
6. Choose the social media platforms that fit your business model and post fresh, regular, educational content to position yourself as an authority figure in your market.
7. Consider collaborating with a local influencer to increase awareness of your brand.
8. Consider creating personalized communications based on customer behavior.
9. Create custom messaging, creative, amenity highlights, and even purchase offers depending on demographics, interests, and where the customer is in the purchase funnel.
10. Understand your customer demographics and how they currently use your programs, then market to them based on their specific interests.
11. Send members email messages based on usage and interests—stay relevant.