5 Regional Marketing Methods Leveraging Health Club Software
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Developing a marketing strategy for your health club is a daunting task, but it is necessary for acquiring new customers. However, this challenge can be significantly reduced by utilizing a regional marketing strategy and leveraging the capabilities of your gym software to attract new customers. Regional marketing is targeting your marketing efforts towards a specific geographic region that makes sense for your business, which can save you time and money. These gains in efficiency are amplified when regional marketing is combined with the power of health club management software and data.
Five Health Club Regional Marketing Methods
1. Leverage Social Proof
Social proof involves using your existing customers’ experiences and results to promote your business. It has become such a powerful marketing technique because it makes customers feel more confident about their purchase and that they are part of a larger group. You can use social proof to market your gym by leveraging testimonials and reviews, before and after pictures, client statistics, and blogging. In order to apply this to a regional marketing campaign, use your gym software’s CRM capabilities to segment your customers by the region you are targeting. Then you can pull customer metrics and reviews from this segment to identify satisfied customers in the region who would be willing to share a testimonial. Testimonials and reviews are most effective when the audience can relate to the customers who are sharing them. If the person giving the the testimonial and the person reading it are from the same region, they will automatically have something in common, amplifying the effect of social proof.
2. Customize Your Website
Once you’ve picked a region to target and gathered your social proof, you can use this information to customize your gym’s website. If your health club only serves one region or you are only marketing to a single area, you can feature the social proof and region specific language across the entire site. However, if you are marketing your health club to several regions, you might want to have a different page for each individual location highlighting testimonials and any region specific details. While customizing your website to a specific region can take significant effort, it will also have huge payoffs because it will offer more value to prospects and appear in more relevant search results. Prospects are more likely to research health clubs near them than health clubs in general.
3. Use Your Mobile App to Drive Referrals
Social proof isn’t the only way your customers can help you market your gym; they can also directly refer new customers to your club. While this can happen organically, you are more likely to see results if you entice and remind your customers to bring their friends and family members to your gym. If your gym management software includes a mobile app, you can send your customers a push notification, such as “bring a friend to bootcamp tomorrow,” to the customers in the targeted region of your marketing campaign. If mobile app communications alone are not driving referrals, you may have to consider offering a referral incentive (such as discounted services for the existing member) or using an additional form of communication such as email.
4. Targeted Email Marketing
You may be familiar with emailing your current customers, but have you tried using it as a targeted marketing tool? Gym software with integrated email services allows you to segment contacts into separate lists allowing you to directly contact prospects in the region you want to target with your marketing. In order to be successful with email marketing, there are three things you need to be sure of: all of your contacts have opted in to receive communications from your gym, that your message is personal, and there is one clear call to action for the prospect. Meeting these three requirements helps to ensure your prospects do not mark you as spam, your message resonates with recipients, and they know what to do next.
5. Create Branded Key Tags
While the previous four marketing methods utilized the actual capabilities of health club management software, this last technique relies on the physical compliment to your gym’s software: your gym’s key tags. It is more than likely your existing members keep their key tags on the same key chain as their house and car keys, which means your key tag goes everywhere they go. If you have a branded key tag, you will be able to make a brief impression on anyone who sees your customers pull out their keys. This allows your customers to become unofficial endorsers of your brand, because more than likely, the people your customers interact with on a regular basis are in the region you are targeting. For the best results, make sure your key tag clearly highlights your brand, is visually attractive, and is personalized to the region and consumers you are targeting.
These five methods are a great way to use gym software capabilities to market your health club regionally, and will complement any existing marketing strategy. We also share more marketing information in The Ultimate Health Club Management Guide.
Even these are surefire techniques to acquire new customers; however, they will not guarantee your new customers will keep coming back.
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