Establishing a solid fitness marketing strategy is pivotal for reaching your business goals. Creating an impactful marketing plan might seem complicated, but the correct planning can set you up for the next 12 months.

In this post, we will explore the advantages of having a well-structured marketing plan for your fitness business and look at the steps you can take to get started today.

Why Should I Have a Fitness Marketing Strategy

A fitness marketing strategy is a roadmap to guide you through a set time - most commonly a year.

Crafting and implementing an efficient fitness marketing strategy is not just a choice but a crucial necessity for personal trainers with thriving fitness businesses. This strategy serves as your guiding compass, directing your marketing initiatives and shaping the core of your fitness business.

You ensure seamless alignment with your target client by cultivating a robust fitness marketing strategy. This, in turn, empowers you to curate services and products that perfectly cater to their needs. Moreover, it provides a structured roadmap for effectively conveying the value of your fitness products and services.

Without a well-structured strategy marketing plan for your fitness business, you risk losing sight of your client base, potentially delivering services that miss the mark, and squandering your valuable time on ineffective promotional efforts.

For personal trainers committed to the success of their fitness businesses, a comprehensive fitness marketing strategy is not an option but an indispensable tool for sustainable growth.

Having a marketing plan that you are confident in - and can follow - will provide many benefits:

· Perspective – it gives you space to step back from your day-to-day tasks and see the bigger picture.

· Focus – Compels you to determine your goals and identify the needs of your customers

· Order – Encourages you to take a systematic and organized approach

· Control – Enables you to be proactive rather than reactive

· Regularity – Generates a steady flow of marketing activity rather than flurries

· Consistency – Promotes the use of clear messaging and helps you to stay on brand, which helps you build your fitness brand strategy

· Opportunity – Provides you with a framework for tapping into key dates and seasonal themes

· Insight – Helps you to understand what works, what doesn’t, and what might need tweaking

· Efficiency – Requires you to set and keep control of your marketing budget

Before You Start Your Fitness Marketing Strategy

When putting a marketing plan in place, the most important thing to do is to set time aside for it – not just to research and write it, but also to implement and review it. It’s not always easy for small businesses to find this time, but it is an investment that will pay off.

Carrying out a marketing audit can be a beneficial exercise to inform your new plan. This just means a quick assessment of what you’re already doing in marketing, which tools you’re using and how, and what results you’ve been getting.

Next, find a template to use as a starting point. Choose a format that makes sense to you and will produce a clear, practical document.

The Main Sections of Your Marketing Plan

Different templates have slightly different sections/headings, but the following structure covers most of the content you’ll need:

1. Analyzing the Market and Competition

Embarking on establishing your online fitness business requires understanding the fitness niche you decide to work in and the competition. This will help strengthen your fitness marketing strategy.

As a personal trainer, immersing yourself in this process empowers you to grasp the issues shaping the digital fitness landscape, including trends and evolving consumer behaviors.

Looking at your competition’s strategies will give you some clear indicators of what works but will also bring to your attention any gaps you could use for your fitness marketing strategy.

At the heart of this is your unique selling point, what makes you stand out from the crowd of other fitness trainers, and what will make a client choose you over anyone else.

This will give you the insight you need to grasp your client's pain points and the solutions you can provide them, giving you a well-structured marketing plan for your fitness business that resonates with your target audience.

2. Who is Your Target Audience

Defining who your marketing plan is aimed at is the next step in defining your fitness marketing strategy. You need to be very clear on this to get the message right.

Determining your target audience is a whole exercise in its own right and involves several tasks such as market research, analyzing your services, reviewing your data and talking to clients.

The outcome of this process should result in one or more ‘personas’ (fictional characters who represent your audience, their needs, and their preferences) that you can describe and use in your marketing plan.

3. An Overview of Your Marketing Goals

This section focuses on your marketing plan, so think carefully about what you want to achieve over the next 12 months. These are the kind of things you could consider:

· How much income do you want to generate?

· How many new clients do you want to attract?

· Which services do you want to promote?

· Are there any new services you plan to launch?

· Are there any key events or milestones to tie into?

Use the answers to these questions to help you draw up a set of SMART goals.

4. A Breakdown of Your Marketing Tactics

Welcome to the breakdown of your fitness marketing strategy – the hands-on guide that paves your journey to success. This segment takes center stage, unraveling the 'how' and 'when' to achieve your fitness marketing goals. It stands on two pillars: selecting the right tactics and charting the course of marketing activities throughout the year.

Your marketing choices are decided upon from your work in the preceding sections, and your budget’s scope (outlined in section 5) shapes them further.

It’s the art of creating the perfect message for the perfect audience at the ideal time. Expect your arsenal to encompass the following to ensure a comprehensive fitness marketing strategy:

· Forging and sustaining a compelling website or blog.

· Crafting a compelling email marketing drive.

· Amplifying your presence through strategic social media maneuvering.

Dive deeper to explore avenues like:

· Paid advertisements, spanning both digital realms and tangible spaces.

· Creating streams of passive income, an intriguing subject we recently explored.

· Embarking on external marketing ventures such as partnership projects or guest speaking.

· Pioneering the realm of influencer marketing, a topic to be delved into later.

Tracey Tait’s insightful guide on diverse content types scheduling, crafting, and reimagining throughout the year is an invaluable resource on this subject.

5. Let’s Talk About Budgets

As with anything in business; you must ensure your fitness marketing strategy aligns with your budget.

Setting an overall marketing budget will be one of your first tasks when scoping out your marketing plan and drawing up your goals; allocating this money to different activities will form part of section 4.

This will ensure that you can create a dynamic fitness strategy that can move to the shape of your budget.

6. A Plan for Measuring Success

In this concluding segment, we outline how you'll assess the progress towards accomplishing your objectives, tightly intertwined with section 3 of your fitness marketing strategy.

This process zeroes in on the measurable (M) and time-bound (T) facets of your SMART goals, shedding light on the effectiveness of your efforts, pinpointing areas that require adjustments, and ensuring prudent allocation of your marketing budget.

Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be the yardstick for gauging success. Regularly schedule these measurements into your calendar. Potential KPIs encompass:

· Website Traffic

· SEO rankings

· Engagement and reach on social media platforms

· Growth in social media followers

· Click-through rates for emails

· Number of email sign-ups

Fitness Marketing Strategy for Your Fitness Business

Creating a 12-month fitness marketing strategy for your fitness business demands both an investment of time and, to a certain extent, financial resources. Yet, it also acts as a catalyst for taking tangible actions.

This guide aims to help with the establishment of a potent plan. Once in place, you can refine, expand, and perfect it, fashioning a dynamic and enduring strategy that propels the growth of your personal trainer business.