Teaming Up To Maximize Your Fitness Club Marketing

Maximizing your fitness club marketing is a challenging endeavor. Too many of us go it alone when we really don’t have to. You can maximize your health club marketing time – and dollars – by working cooperatively with other businesses in your area.

There are three steps to this process:

1. Identify who your clientele are
2. Identify who else in your area serves a similar clientele
3. Identify complimentary businesses and serv

Maximize Your Fitness Club Marketing Step 1

Think about who your customers are and why the come to your club or use your services. Is your clientele part of a distinct demographic group: elderly, teens, working professionals, stay-at-home moms? Are they part of a distinct economic group: do they have a lot of disposable income or a moderate amount of disposable income? Do they feel that a trip to the health club is a luxury or a necessity? Lastly, consider whether they are part of a distinct geographic group: is your facility downtown and therefore your clientele is mostly working professionals? Or is your health club in a rural town with a mix of clientele?

Maximize Your Fitness Club Marketing Step 2

Once you undertake this simple analysis of your members or clients, you’re ready to look for other businesses in your area that serve the same group. You may find a masseuse, a natural food store, a tailor or dry cleaner. If your store is in a plaza, you won’t have to look far at all. Chances are your fellow business owners are in the plaza for the same reason that you are – to attract the same clientele you want to attract.

Why do you want to identify other businesses with the same type of customer? Because their customers are your customers. How many members do you have? Five hundred? Twelve hundred? How many do you think the dry cleaner has? The natural food store? If 10% of their customers started to frequent your salon, that would be quite an increase in business wouldn’t it?

Maximize Your Fitness Club Marketing Step 3

Once you’ve identified complementary businesses approach them with the idea of marketing together. Why? It’s cheaper and it gives you exposure to prospective members who might not have normally considered your club.

There are a few ways that you can market together. You might put a guest pass or coupon on each other’s counter offering some type of discount or special offer. When the dry cleaner’s customers ask about your club, the dry cleaner will enthusiastically tell them where you are located and why he is proud to be associated with you. A personal endorsement or recommendation is by far the best way to attract new business. Even though you prompted the conversation with your guest pass, the positive word-of-mouth the dry cleaner shares with his
customer is an endorsement of your club.

Another way to market together would be to do a joint mailing. You can put up to four sheets of paper in an envelope before the postage price goes up. If you gather four similar business people together and share your customer lists, you can inexpensively do four mailings a year to not only your members, but to your cooperating business partner’s customers as well. If you each bore the cost of assembling the mailing and paying the postage one time per year, it wouldn’t be an overwhelming or expensive task. Similarly, you might do a joint newsletter and share the cost of printing. This would save you quite a bit of money and would increase the chance of your newsletter being read because there would be a wealth of information and advice.

Lastly, you may offer a free product from your cooperating business partner to your members for referring friends to your club. For instance, every referral “earns” your customer a free week of dry-cleaning. You would actually pay the cost of the dry cleaning (which, hopefully, your cooperating business partner will give you a price break on). Likewise, the dry cleaner might offer a free 14 day pass for every 5t h suit that is dry cleaned. The benefits of this last marketing tactic are twofold: 1) you increase the frequency of current member referrals because when people are “earning” something they are more serious and diligent about singing your clubs praises 2) you attract and grow a new group of prospective members from the referrals of your marketing partner(s).

The fitness club marketing ideas offered in this article should get your creative juices flowing. Don’t limit your fitness club marketing ideas to your members alone – think about who else’s customers might one day be yours – and go after them today.