How to Create a Killer Fitness Marketing Strategies for Your Business

Every fitness business owner knows that a winning fitness marketing strategy can work wonders for your business. It’s a fantastic way to boost exposure, increase sales, drive engagement with your audience, and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

In this post, we’ll discuss seven important steps you should take to design a powerful marketing strategy for your fitness business plans. 

We’ll show you how audience research, competitor analysis, influencer marketing, optimizing post frequency, and tracking relevant KPIs can help you rule over the fitness industry. 

Research Your Target Audience 

The first step to creating a killer fitness marketing strategy is to develop a clear understanding of your target audience. 

Audience and buyer persona research will allow you to dominate your niche by helping you create relevant content, advertisements, and messaging. Preferably, this should be done before you start a personal training business.

Let’s see how you can do that. 

How to find your target audience?

So, how do you find out which group of people wants to engage with your fitness business the most on social media? 

Well, the easiest way to figure that out is by compiling data on your existing customers and followers. 

Data points of your current customer base that are worth considering include their:

• Age
• Location
• Language
• Employment
• Interests 
• Spending patterns and power 

Google Analytics — which is free — can provide data on the age, gender, and interests of customers using tracked data from your website, digital marketing ads, or social media. 

Social platforms like Facebook also already track all your marketing efforts automatically using an inbuilt tool called Facebook Audience Insights. In addition to basic demographic data, Insights provide you with education levels and employment information. 

For spending patterns power, consider carrying out surveys. These can be done using quick social media polls as well as via emails and your website. Consider offering a discount to those customers who complete your survey to gather as many responses as possible. 

Studying these key demographics can help you target customers that are more likely to purchase from you in the future and help you create content that appeals to them. 

This information is also important when creating social media ads because they allow you to hyper-target your ideal customers and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

How to determine the social media platforms your audience uses

After getting a sense of the type of people you should be targeting, it’s time to figure out where they spend the majority of their time on social media. And Google Analytics can help you with this as well. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics lets you check which social channels pop up in your referred traffic reports. If you use UTM parameters, you can use them to assess which social posts are generating the most traffic to your website.

UTM parameters are basically tags that go at the end of your links. Here is an example:

Source

In this example, the UTM parameter starts with the phrase “utm_source=facebook”. And this is telling Google Analytics that users came to your website after clicking this link on Facebook. You could have one for Twitter and Instagram too. 

So if you see that your Facebook posts perform better than your Twitter posts, it might be possible that your target audience prefers using Facebook. 

You can add UTM parameters to your link using Google’s URL Builder. Here’s what it looks like:

Source

The three fields you MUST fill include campaign source — which can be all the social platforms you wish to track and compare — campaign medium, and campaign name.

Campaign medium can include social media, affiliate marketing, or cost per click (CPC). The campaign name is just an identifier to keep your efforts organized. 

After adding UTM parameters to your links, you can add these links to your social media posts to begin tracking. Before doing that, it’s a good idea to use a URL shortener like Bitly to keep your links clean, especially if you’re using Twitter. 

Look at your competitors

One of the best ways to figure out what works and what doesn’t is to look at other fitness brands that are winning at fitness marketing. What works for them may also work for you.

If you’re new to fitness marketing, this is the easiest way to find out things that you can capitalize on.  

How To Run A Competitor Analysis:

The process of social media competitor analysis consists of 4 main steps:

• Identifying competitors
• Collecting data from their social media accounts
• Analyzing the collected data using the SWOT framework
• Implementing your findings

You can do all of these steps manually for each one of your competitors. However, it’s often difficult and time-consuming. 

That’s why it’s recommended to use tools that automate the entire process of finding, collecting, and analyzing your competitor’s social media accounts. 

These tools can generate clear visual reports and allow you to gather extra information such as the engagement rates of a particular page. This isn’t possible when doing manual competitor analysis due to restrictions from social platforms.

Here are a few tools that are worth using for competitor analysis:

• SproutSocial
• Sociality.io
• Hootsuite
• SocialBakers

Try Influencer Marketing

A great social media fitness marketing tactic is to leverage influencers. Fitness influencers often have an engaged audience. So when they share a brand’s message, the audience tends to receive it in a natural and positive way. This makes influencer marketing a great way to boost your fitness business’s exposure.

When looking for fitness influencers, make sure they align with your brand’s voice and goals so the partnership doesn’t feel like “salesy”. It’s also important to look for effective influencers, so you can actually benefit from the relationship. 

For example, it might be a good idea to work with an influencer who uses System2, which is a tool that lets people build a digital coaching business from scratch. 

When looking for an influencer, you should also consider:

• The purpose of your campaign. What goal do you hope to achieve by working with an influencer? 
• Influencer platforms. Make sure the influencer you work with is active on the social media platforms your target audience uses.

You can search for fitness-related hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to dig out popular influencers. But this is a very non-specific way to look for influencers, so vet each one carefully before agreeing to work with them.

You also have the option of using an influencer database (like Modash) to find fitness influencers. 

It’s important to note that the engagement rate matters more than the number of followers when it comes to influencer marketing. Small influencers (also called micro-influencers ) with highly engaged audiences are better than big influencers with fake followers. 

When reaching out to influencers, keep these basics in mind:

• Personalize each email — don’t send blanket emails
• Mention why you’ve chosen a particular influencer. The goal is to make the influencer feel special and validated.
• Mention your authority or success. People are more likely to associate it with power and success. If your fitness company has achieved something substantial lately, mention it.
• Acknowledge the influencer’s work. This could be appreciating a blog post they wrote or an interview they gave. Again, this makes the influencer feel special and tells them you’ve done your homework. 
• Provide a clear call to action. This could be setting up a call later in the week or an in-person meeting. You should suggest a time and date for future correspondence. The idea is not to burden the influencer with figuring out what to do next. 

Here’s a good email template by NinjaOutreach to kick off a relationship with a fitness influencer:

Source

Educate Your Audience

Giving out free, useful fitness advice is a sure-fire way to establish yourself as an authority in the fitness world (and increase your social media follower count). After all, why should people follow your accounts if they don’t get anything helpful out of them? 

For this reason, consider educating your audience by:

• Regularly publishing how-to posts (videos explaining proper workout form, for example)
• Sharing helpful exercises
• Promoting educational, useful, and relevant fitness related blog posts
• Sharing sneak peeks about new services or products about to be launched
• Sharing diet tips

Creating educational posts also means users are more likely to share them, allowing you to harness the power of user-generated content.

Create a posting schedule

Creating and publishing helpful digital content regularly is key when it comes to online marketing. But for a small business owner who has only just stepped into the world of media marketing, posting each day across all social media websites while managing a business can be difficult. 

That’s why coming up with a realistic posting schedule and having an “idea bank” is so crucial. These two can help you post even on the most hectic days with minimal effort

Here’s how you can create a solid publishing plan for your social profiles:

• Divide post types into distinct categories. A few examples include:
  • Client testimonials
  • Client transformations
  • Daily fitness tips from your personal trainers
  • Motivational exercise quotes
  • Gyms roundups, workout plans, and fitness goals
  • Video content
• After finalizing some categories, try creating at least ten social media posts for each category in advance for times when you’re too busy to create new content.
• Make a schedule for posting by appointing a specific time and date to publish every post. It’s also a great idea to capitalize on existing hashtags like #MotivationMonday or #TransformationTuesday. You can also make the most of big occasions like World Fitness Day and use special hashtags on these days to boost your reach.
• Choose how often you want to post. Again, take inspiration from your competitors and their post frequencies. But try not to post more than 2 times a day (or you’ll overdo it).
• Determine the best time of the day to post on different platforms and stick to this schedule. You can do this by adjusting your posting times until you get desirable results. Posting at these times can help you amplify your reach.

If you want to automate all of this at a relatively cheap price, try Buffer. It’s a tool that not only helps you publish social media content but also determines the right frequency and content type for your fitness business.

Establish Clear KPIs and Measurable Metrics 

If you want to find out whether your marketing strategy is working and how you can improve it, then measuring your marketing activities is vital.

But how do you know which KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) you should track?

Well, it depends on the goals of your marketing strategy.

If your goal is to generate and direct traffic to your website, then you should measure metrics like clicks, URL shares, and conversions. 

But if you need to measure engagement, then use metrics like retweets, replies, likes, and comments. And if you wish to measure awareness, then measure KPIs like volume, reach, and exposure. 

You get the idea. 

Most social platforms provide inbuilt analytics that allows you to track these metrics. However, you can also use third-party software like Hootsuite Analytics to measure these metrics if you need to.