A promotional marketing campaign is a tried-and-true solution for fitness businesses looking to grow their memberships and profits. Unfortunately, although it may seem like a simple concept, it can be difficult to get it right.
Coming up with a promotion is only the first step to creating a successful marketing campaign. What will truly determine how well your promo does is how well you execute it. Understanding your goals, how to market, and how to manage your campaign are all essential aspects of effective execution.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at how you can put your gym promotion ideas into profitable action!
Start by researching common industry promotions.
A competitor analysis is a great place for you to start as you’re coming up with marketing strategies for your gym. Investigating what promotions and marketing tactics have been working for other fitness clubs that share your audience gives you insight into what is and what isn’t working in the current market.
What kind of membership discounts are your competitors offering? Are they discounting services or retail products? What channels are they using to promote their campaigns? Arming yourself with this knowledge before you start designing and executing your campaign helps prevent you from wasting time and resources on strategies and offers that don’t work.
Outline the goals of your campaign.
If you don’t know what you’re working toward with your marketing promotion, then you’ll be flying blind when it comes time to implement it. Give your campaign a clear direction by setting one or more goals before you get started. Try to follow the SMART goal strategy — creating a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. If you’re running a promotion with a free first month of membership, for example, a SMART goal would be, “Obtain X new memberships by the end of the first promotional month.”
Don’t forget to consider the market you’re targeting as you outline your campaign objectives too. Depending on what your goal is, you may want to target specific segments of your audience or expand from who you normally target. For instance, a campaign focusing on bringing in new leads would be more effectively marketed to non-members, while a referral campaign would need only be marketed to current members. The good news is that with the ClubWise Campaign Manager feature, you can easily customize your campaign to target specific audiences via data-driven segmentation.
Get the word out about your gym promotion.
You can set up the greatest promotion in the world, but if nobody knows about it then your efforts are futile. Once you’ve decided what your campaign will be, you need to hit the ground running with your advertising. This is another place where completing a competitor analysis will come in handy. When you researched your competition and how your audience engages with their promotions, you should have obtained a good idea of which marketing channels had the most reach.
There are a wide variety of channels you’ll want to consider using, and likely you’ll want to use most if not all of them to maximize campaign exposure. Here are some examples:
- SMS
- Social Media
- Paid Ads
- Website/Content Marketing
- Mobile Push Notifications
ClubWise’s Campaign Manager will prove useful in this area too. You can easily use our software to automate communications with your audience via email, text, and other channels, to ensure nobody misses out on your promotion.
Simplify the promo process for members and staff.
The easier it is for gym prospects and members to take advantage of your promotion, the more successful it will be. The same goes for your staff too because when you streamline the back-end administration of your campaign, customers on the front end reap the benefits too. If a prospect tries to apply or sign up for your promotion and runs into issues or experiences slow service, they’re more likely to get frustrated and give up than wait it out.
By simplifying the processes for the member, staff, and manager, ClubWise club management system provides the freedom for you to focus on what matters most: meeting your members’ needs. Each step of the campaign process is supported with our software from promo set up to offer communication, and even administration and finance management.
Our promotion management tool also makes it easy to set up specific discounts and offers for promotional campaigns. All you need to do is set up a promotion code of your choice, set the time period for which the offer is valid, and then apply the promotion parameters. These promotion codes can then be used over the counter or when joining online. ClubWise will automatically undertake all of the back-office administration for any reduction or elimination to one or more membership products, whether it’s monthly direct debit fees, pro-rata fees, or fees for a set period.
Complete a post-campaign evaluation.
One of the key elements of successfully executing a fitness marketing campaign is to know that your work is not done when the promotion ends. After all is said and done, it’s important to take the time to analyze what worked and what didn’t — a process referred to as a post-campaign evaluation or analysis. By identifying the strengths of your campaign and any mistakes made, you can refine your strategy and improve with the next one.
Evaluating a promotional campaign is a task that requires the use of hard data and reporting, not just a gut feeling. ClubWise offers full visibility of club performance to help you track all areas of your business, including individual campaigns. Our dashboard presents the information clearly and simply, so you can easily measure your campaign’s performance against targets. You can even view your club performance on the mobile app from anywhere!
Manage Your Fitness Club, Campaigns, Staff, and Members with Ease
Strategic and straightforward promotion is essential to the growth of your fitness business. At ClubWise, we’ve developed our all-in-one club management software with that in mind.
Through our Promotions Dashboard and Campaign Manager, you can easily create campaigns, execute them, and track their progress as you go. When your marketing process is that streamlined, attracting new gym members, retaining current ones, and increasing profits become much simpler.
See the difference ClubWise can make for your fitness club and schedule your software demo today!