4 Marketing Strategies to Strengthen Your Gym’s Brand

Retaining gym members and driving new prospects starts with marketing. At Darwill, we help gym owners and managers in the fitness industry build and execute complex marketing strategies that accomplish overall brand goals and are tailored to your local markets.

Let us help you stay ahead of the competition and ever-changing consumer needs with these four marketing strategies.

Know Your Niche

Determine where your brand fits in the market. Decide what audience your club or gym caters to. Are you a luxury fitness center or cost-friendly? Is the atmosphere trendy, fun, or serious? Focus on dominating a particular category in the market and avoid trying to appeal to everyone. Use your desired brand position and the characteristics of your geographic market to establish your price points.

Analyze the demands of consumers and create fitness programs that cater to their specific needs and preferences. By identifying areas where your services can solve problems for your target audience, you can attract leads and potential new members to your gym.

Target Your Marketing

Think about your audience and how to best target them based on demographics, behavior, interests, and more. Understanding your customer demographics and how they currently use your fitness programs will help you retain them as well as inform prospecting efforts to look-a-like audiences. Consider creating personalized messaging based on their behavior to increase engagement and response. Tailoring your messaging, creative assets, amenity highlights, and purchase incentives will help you better align your brand message with the member or prospect's purchase journey.

Another targeting tool is location data. With Darwill's Geo-Data capabilities, you can find prospects and current gym members based on physical intent and serve them targeted ads. We use this data to build unique custom audiences, see which competitors your leads are going to, target them with relevant campaigns, and understand how far they are willing to drive. Plus, using geo-date is 100% cookie-free as we track consumers by their latitude and longitude coordinates.

Make Sure All Your Marketing Tools Work Together

For seamless marketing, you will want to ensure that all your marketing tools work hand in hand. Some questions to ask yourself include:

1. Does your customer relationship management (CRM) data drive automated marketing tools?
2. Are you using data for retargeting prospects?
3. How often are you reaching out to members and prospects?
4. Is there consistent brand messaging across all the channels you are using?

CRM software can help unify your marketing efforts. The customer data stored here can inform automated trigger campaigns to deploy based on member and prospect behaviors or actions. For example, automated triggers can be sent for members' birthdays, including special messaging and a free fitness class offer. We can also use data to trigger retargeting mail and digital ads to leads who have shown interest in your health club's services to encourage them to become members.

Using CRMs and automated tools can help you track the progress of your marketing efforts. With these insights, we can outline the best frequency to deploy direct mail campaigns and create a digital plan for how often ads are served to the person's phone, computer, or TV.

Direct mail and digital marketing efforts can work together through an omnichannel approach. Darwill utilizes data to ensure we are targeting the same consumer with the same message across every channel to influence your customers and prospects through more touchpoints. Using an omnichannel approach, you can better provide your customers and prospects with a cohesive, personalized experience while also improving customer loyalty and leads, increasing sales, and driving better brand awareness.

Location-based Marketing Approach

Another strategy that can strengthen your gym's brand is a location-based approach. Using our data tools, Darwill can find your prime target audiences around each of your locations and determine who should receive marketing based on their likeliness to convert. Every gym is different based on the town and the people who live there.

That means your marketing approach needs to be localized per gym. Our data modeling and scoring help to build marketing recommendations for your budget based on the opportunity per location. Our user-friendly budgeting dashboard shows you the opportunity across your locations, highlighting where to focus your budget and marketing efforts.

Retain Members and Welcome New People to Your Gym

With Darwill on your side, you will see a rise in memberships and build loyal relationships with existing customers. We will work together to understand your brand and use data to target the right people based on your gym locations. Start seeing gains with Darwill as your strategic marketing partner.