Fitness

The Marketing of Fitness and the Fitness of Marketing

By Deneen Laprade
NE Region Director of Sales, Impact Mailers

As a former health club operator, I’m familiar with the 24/7 demands on your time, and know finding affordable, effective means to generate qualified leads is only one of them! Retaining members and increasing their individual spend in-house is an entirely different marketing challenge that adds to your ever-evolving list of to-dos.

For the past several years I’ve worked with owners and operators to create marketing strategies that meet the needs of their growing gym, health club or fitness studio. My combined experience has led me to draw certain parallels between Fitness and Marketing in terms of the process and results!

Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

  1. Marketing is a critical layer to growing any health club, and it all too often takes a back seat to the more immediate needs of daily operations. Most any “apparently healthy” gym will respond favorably to committed, consistent marketing.

Fitness Equivalent: The act of exercising regularly is similarly perceived by your prospects as necessary, yet rarely a 911.

  1. Setting aside time to create a marketing strategy with an execution plan is necessary to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach.

Fitness Equivalent: Making time to exercise, never mind building a plan is an equally difficult task for members and prospects. Their confusion about which are the right things to do, when and how compounds the decision for them. But you know that most “apparently healthy” bodies respond favorably to committed, consistent exercise.

  1. Tracking and analyzing results of marketing efforts enables you to predict future efforts, and positions you to maximize time and money spent with actual data, as opposed to hunches.

Fitness Equivalent: A fitness routine that includes measuring results and progress along the way avoids plateaus in success by exposing areas in need of adjustment to further progress.

  1. Working with an expert is an effective, time-efficient method to establishing goals, and gets you back to running your business.

Fitness Equivalent: There is no doubt that working with professional, experienced personal trainers is the most direct route to a healthy lifestyle.

My goal as a marketing consultant with Impact Mailers is to help you move your business from where it is, to where you want it to be.  If you would like to improve your processes and results in 2017, please contact me at 404-973-2770.

Impact Mailers is a full service direct marketing agency providing integrated print, digital and mobile marketing solutions including direct mail, geofencing, direct IP targeting and text to mobile.  We provide full, turn-key service with design, targeting, printing, placement and mailing services.

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