The fitness industry is expected to grow to over $434 billion by 2028, which means understanding fitness marketing is going to be crucial for business owners.
If you want your biz to grab a slice of that $400+ billion pie, then getting specific about how marketing works in the fitness industry is one of the first steps toward success. After all, tech has had a major impact on the industry as a whole, changing what kinds of businesses are even considered part of the fitness world as well as how consumers engage with them.
Luckily, Ranq knows fitness marketing. Let’s take a closer look at what fitness marketing even is, its pitfalls, and some strategies that can help make your efforts more successful.
What is fitness marketing? What’s special about it?
Fitness marketing is simply a way of looking at and applying marketing strategies in the fitness industry. The reason it makes sense to separate it from more general marketing advice, though, is so it’s easier to dive into the specifics of how those marketing principles apply to the fitness industry. Here are some of the key differences to pay attention to.
Audience understanding is paramount
Of course, it’s always important to understand your audience when marketing a product or service, but it’s especially important when it comes to fitness. There are many different segments and each of them is deeply tied to identity. Think of the differences between a weightlifter, a yogi, a spin-class instructor, and a gym owner. Knowing exactly who you’re talking to and what their specific needs are is how you’ll be able to set yourself apart from the crowd.
Educational content about health and wellness is necessary
Helping your target audience understand why they might need what you’re offering means taking the time to educate them. What part of a potential customer’s overall wellness does your offering deal with? Does your product or service deal with building muscle? Losing weight? Postpartum fitness? Educating potential customers on your corner of the industry will not only help boost engagement but also help you gain trust.
Emotional storytelling is the most effective
Because fitness-related businesses are so closely tied to people’s relationships with their physical bodies, it’s a deeply personal relationship. While you can use emotional storytelling in your marketing at any time, it makes even more sense when relationships are this personal. That means you’ll want to key into what emotions your target demographic is most likely to respond to before choosing stories that align with your company’s mission.
Customer loyalty and retention are vital to success
Many aspects of the fitness marketplace are reliant on subscriptions, which makes customer loyalty and retention vital. When 88% of customers say it takes at least three purchases to build loyalty, nabbing that repeat business is going to be tricky, particularly when competition is stiff.
How marketing in fitness works: 5 essential elements
When you get ready to implement a fitness marketing strategy, there are a few basics you’ll need to master to be successful.
1. Understand your audience completely
Because audiences in the fitness marketplace can vary so dramatically, it’s important to know exactly who you’re going after. That means doing significant amounts of research before you ever even consider launching a campaign. A great way to get started is by building out an ICP or ideal customer profile.
Your ideal customer profile should outline the exact type of person or company that would be interested in your product. You can even start by thinking of who your best customers are right now. Your ICP might describe them more or less exactly, or you might see areas where some slight changes would make them even better.
Some areas to consider pulling information from include demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral. Demographic and geographic information might seem fairly self-explanatory, but digging into the psychographic and behavioral research may be where some of your most interesting realizations come from. That’s because those two areas deal more with your target audience’s personality. What are their interests? What are their specific goals? What unique challenges do they face and how might you help them solve those?
The amount of research might seem overwhelming at first; thankfully, Ranq performs extensive audience and competitor analysis before creating any content for you.
2. Set achievable small and long-term goals
What you want to focus on here are SMART goals. A core tenet of any solid marketing strategy, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Essentially, it’s the difference between a vague goal like “be the best gym in town” and “get a 50% increase in memberships by the end of the year.” While technically the second example could support the first, the problem with a goal like “be the best” is that it’s not clear what’s meant by that, how it could be measured, or if that’s even attainable.
Goals in fitness marketing are a lot like the goals one might set in the gym. If you’ve never worked out a day in your life, setting a goal to be an Olympic weightlifter in a year is just setting yourself up for failure. Instead, breaking down your ultimate dream ambitions into manageable goalposts will put you on track for success and give you a clear way to measure your progress.
You can start the process by thinking about whatever your ultimate goals are and then breaking them down into the pieces you’ll need in place to get there. Another great way to thinking about it is by laying out your most ambitious goals as part of a multi-year plan. Whatever your timeline, having a roadmap of small, measurable goals along the way is the smartest way to stay on track.
3. Send the right message at the right time in the right place
Understanding who your target audience is is just the first step toward making sure the right people get your message. As important as it is to target the right people, you also need to reach them with the right message through the right channels. With so many options available from traditional to digital spaces, you don’t just need to hone in on the channels your target audience actually frequents, but make sure your messaging fits the channel.
It won’t matter how carefully crafted your message is if you toss it out into the world in the exact same way whether it’s for TV, a billboard, an Instagram ad, or a radio spot.
Of course, you’ll want a unifying message and a strong brand, but every ad space has nuances. Understanding them and, more specifically, how your target audience responds to them is vital.
For fitness marketing, you’ll want to think carefully about where your audience will most likely to want to engage and then tailor your messaging to them and the particular channel. For instance, while your original SEO content will be chock full of facts and helpful educational info that gets into the nuts and bolts of fitness, your social media posts will be shorter, snappier, and more playful to engage with people in a more relaxed environment.
4. Craft compelling offers with a sense of urgency
Fitness marketing can capitalize on FOMO (fear of missing out) when creating compelling offers for their target audiences. That’s because nearly 90% of people admit to experiencing FOMO at one time or another and 60% of people admit to making a purchase because of FOMO. Those are pretty powerful numbers, and it’s easy to see how they could uniquely apply to the fitness sector. Because FOMO is like a “psychological hunger”, it can be a helpful tool for those in the fitness industry to tap into people’s desire to get in shape.
Social proof is a great way to do this. Social proof is when you position customer testimonials, endorsements, and reviews in front of your audience; you can control how the brand in question is talked about. The more potential customers can get a sense of what real customers think, the more likely they’ll be to join in. When it comes to fitness, it can get even more granular. The more these target audiences see real customers whose fitness goals are in line with their own, the more likely they’ll be to want to try.
The offers you should consider could be anything from a discount to a free sample or even a trial run before they need to commit. Having a great offer that helps relieve some of the pressure from your target audience when combined with strong social proof is what can get them to give you a chance.
5. Build your community and keep them loyal
With how important customer retention is in the fitness world, building a strong, vibrant community can go a long way toward making that a reality for you and your brand. Not only can an online community improve engagement by 21%, 58% of online communities see a strong amount of loyalty because of the community. Community means more positive conversations about your brand and a way for your customers to become more invested in your brand.
How do you go about creating such a community if you don’t already have one? Or how can you foster its growth if the community you do have is lacking? You can start by going back to the ICP and buyer personas you created to think about who you’re trying to engage in your community. Then you need to make sure you have a very clear community purpose (think about Nike’s Run Club or SoulCycle’s SuperSoul Riders). With your audience and purpose set, now you need to make sure you have a dedicated community manager to curate the space and keep an eye on engagement.
You need to make sure you’re providing interesting and engaging content for the community while also encouraging members to create their own, whether by sharing photos, posting reviews, or discussing related fitness info. You can also look for perks to offer your community members to give them further incentives to not only join but also participate.
Common challenges in the fitness marketing world
With such a competitive marketplace, there are bound to be some pitfalls in the fitness industry. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common challenges you might face and some suggestions for handling them..
Technology and consumer expectations evolve quickly
The Problem: Things are constantly evolving in the fitness marketing space. Not only is technology changing, but TikTok is cycling through all sorts of trends at hyper speed, which can make it difficult to stay on top of them all.
What to do about it: While it’s going to benefit you immensely to be aware of the trends and tech updates, learning which ones to follow and which you can ignore will be a great help. When it comes to tech, thinking about what you have to offer, what your values are, and how these tech updates could help your businessby incorporating them is smart. As for the trends, you should feel free to ignore the ones that don’t align with your company’s mission and just tackle good opportunities.
Customer retention based on customer motivation
The Problem: Unlike a lot of other businesses with customer retention issues, when your customers lose motivation, you also often lose the customers themselves. Think of the massive boost to numbers that New Year’s resolutions bring the fitness industry—it makes sense that there would be a predictable drop-off.
What to do about it: Community engagement and creative content can go a long way toward helping you with customer attrition. If you know that you lose customers when they lose motivation, then you can create ways to motivate them. Maybe it’s through educational content, supportive community threads, or even special offers during the months when people are most likely to drop off so you can keep them energized and involved.
A saturated market makes for stiff competition
The Problem: The fitness market is booming, and a booming market means lots and lots of competition. Lots of competition means your target audiences are getting hit with messages from competing businesses on all sides making it even harder for your business and its messaging to stand out.
What to do about it: Instead of focusing on the noise other fitness businesses make, tap into the specifics. You’ll never be able to be everyone’s number-one choice, even the biggest brands can’t claim that. If you drill down into what makes your offerings unique, you can more finely pinpoint the customers who’ll be the most interested in them.
This is part of why the research you do before launching a campaign is so invaluable! But you don’t have to go it alone, either. Ranq continuously monitors rankings and finds any opportunity to edge out the competition on high-performing pages.
Best fitness marketing strategies: SEO, PPC, content, and social media
Once you know who your customers are and who your target audience is, it’s time to get to work. Let’s take a closer look at the strategies you might want to employ.
SEO
SEO can be a great way to cut through the noise of an oversaturated market because it’s a way to organically draw targeted traffic to your site. It capitalizes on visibility and organic reach, making it vital for long-term growth.
Partnering with a company like Ranq makes a lot of sense here (and saves some cents while you’re at it). Experts can optimize every piece of content on your site for search engines, making them easier to find. Ranq also crafts new content to attract even more target customers organically. This way, you can climb your way through search engine rankings and reach the exact customers you want.
Need more evidence of SEO working in the fitness industry? Check out our work with Left Coast Performance, where we increased their monthly organic traffic by 42,000!
Content marketing
Fitness audiences are eager to learn more about health and wellness from established experts, and that could (and should) be you! After all, fitness is your business, which puts you in a unique position to offer your expertise to your target audience in more engaging ways. That’s all content marketing really is at the end of the day.
Since content marketing is closely tied to SEO, all of your content marketing should also be SEO-optimized. Ideally, the content you create will answer questions and teach readers or viewers about an area of fitness they need help with. When you provide them with those answers, you’re not just being helpful, you’re building trust. And when you build trust, you can also build brand loyalty, more engaged customers, and a thriving community.
Ranq offers content marketing services to bolster your website and your business’s credibility.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
Paid advertising is an expensive but necessary part of the fitness marketing world. Especially when you consider how competitive the fitness business landscape is, PPC advertising isn’t a tactic you can afford to ignore because your competition certainly won’t. While relying solely on PPC ads isn’t a great strategy, it can offer useful short-term spikes that can help your business leap ahead of competitors at critical moments in your marketing cycle.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular routes for PPC campaigns. That’s where you buy ad space in a search engine’s sponsored links, which can push your content to the top of the search results for the keywords or phrases you’re most interested in. The keyword research you do for your PPC ads will likely be similar to a lot of the keyword research done for your SEO content—it’s just about choosing which are the best for paid ads.
Social media/influencer
Social media marketing, particularly influencer marketing, is a multibillion-dollar industry. The days of thinking of social media as an afterthought are long gone and it needs to be a central part of your strategy. Fortunately for those in the fitness industry, social media is almost tailor-made for you. There are millions of posts under the tags #fitness and #fitnessjourney on Instagram alone, not to mention the rise of fitness influencers on TikTok.
Not only should your own social media accounts be robust and engaging, but you should look into partnering with the influencers most in line with your brand. By working with influencers, you can leverage their existing credibility and reach to spread the word about what you have to offer.
Digital marketing in the fitness industry is what Ranq does best
Ranq is an essential tool for marketers in the fitness world because we can help your marketing efforts shine. When the marketplace is as competitive as it is for fitness, finding any way you can to get a leg up isn’t just smart: it’s essential. With all the work it takes to make your marketing efforts pack a punch, why not bring in the experts at Ranq to do the heavy lifting?Not only can we put our team of professional writers to work creating original, optimized content just for you, but we’ll help your site rise above the rest in local search rankings. Our goal is to help you get where you want to be so there’s really no reason to wait. Reach out to Ranq today and get started.