Your Fitness Business

4 Marketing Questions for your Fitness Business

By Nikki Layton, Co-Founder of Volo Innovations and Co-Owner of Momentum Fitness
December 2009

Most of us fitness professionals have at some point worked as an employee for gym or fitness studio. You may have loved it or hated it but you did work for someone. Now you have decided to open your own fitness business, be your own boss, set your schedule, be the man or woman in charge. Ahhh life is great. Except one thing. You have no customers and if you are like most ex-employees you have no idea where your old boss got their customers.

This is one of the greatest learning curves when starting a fitness business. Marketing! Such a simple concept and really you would think it should be easy, after all, we are inundated with marketing pieces every waking hour by every business out there.

For those who have never had to advertise or market their business heed my warning, do not listen to advertisement reps or agents about what they think, or their promise of access to millions of customers. The bottom line is they sell ad spots so that is all they care about. A dog magazine once said I could sell my personal training to their readers because they walk their dogs. Seems possible but most readers of magazines are in a certain mind frame when reading, it is this mind frame you are after when marketing. The dog magazine reader is probably not thinking about fitness.

You need to know your demographic, know when they are thinking about fitness, know who they turn to for fitness information and you will know where to advertise or market your services. But for a fitness professional just getting started this can be very challenging due to limited budget, lack of experience in advertisement and a brand new company with no reputation or brand recognition. The following are questions I hear most often and my typical responses. Keep in mind there are exceptions, but for the most part the answers will apply to you and are a great place to start.

Should I advertise in print media?

• For 90% of fitness companies the answer is a quick short no. For the simple reason 90% of you are not big enough to generate the rate of return needed to justify the cost of the ad space. Ad spaces can range from $250 to $50K for a full page ad. The numbers you need for a return are huge.

Do you need brochures and business cards?

• This one has two answers. First is yes, you need both, second you will need nowhere near the quantity you think or the print house recommends. Print houses charge a huge sum on small orders to entice you to order hundreds of extras at pennies per unit. But these costs add up quickly especially if you use a graphics person. What you need is a hundred, maybe two hundred. Stay as small as possible because you will change the messages and have errors that you did not see. There isn’t anything worse than throwing away 500 brochures because you spelled fitness wrong.

Do I need a website?

• This one needs clarification most of the time. A web page with some content, information about your business and contact info is a great thing and free to host and cheap to make. A website generally has a constant cost to host and maintain and may not beneeded in the early stages of your business. Once you have been around and have identified your true demographic or niche market then spend some dollars to get a great site up. A tip here is to use a content management system as you can then add pages and content without the expense of a webmaster.

Where is the best place to get customers if I do not advertise?

• Because I am not recommending print ads and expensive websites it seems logical to ask where the people come from. The answer is YOU. You are your business, you provide the service so it needs to be you that goes out and pounds the pavement, knock on doors and gets to know your neighbors. Think about it if I ran an ad in a local paper for Barry’s Better Body Bootcamp and a local receptionist at the dentist office was reading it will she think I am credible and that she has to come in? Now if I walk into their office and hand them some invites to check out Barry’s Better Body Bootcamp they now have a name, a face and someone to feel responsible to if they do not go. Let’s face it. We sell best when they feel guilty about something; this is their pain - you need to know what is causing them pain and use it to sell your business.

In summary, do not spend money marketing your business, instead spend your free time getting out there selling your business! Because once you sell them on it they will sell their friends on it and before you know it you do not need to sell any more because you have a word of mouth chain that is doing all the work and you did not break the bank to do it.

As you say to your personal training or Bootcamp clients, “Get off your couch and get out there and be active in your life”. This same sentiment applies to you and your business. So get up right now and write a list of companies and people that are around the place that you operate your fitness company and get ready to go out meet, greet and WOW them so you can start to get the most powerful marketing engine working for you, the Word of Mouth or WOM. Get others to sell you.

Volo Innovations is a technology developer and vendor of online business management solutions via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology, providing online scheduling, billing & business management software for clubs, studios and trainers. Founders Nikki Layton and Barry Duncan have translated their combined 20 years of experience in the health and fitness industry into software design that has an inherent respect for real world situations and practical usability. Volo Innovations is based in Vancouver, Canada. For more information about Volo Innovations, go to www.myvolo.com.