How to Find Your Gym’s Target Market In 3 Easy Steps

Knowing the target market for your gym is crucial for successful marketing. If you don’t know who you’re audience is, then how will you appeal to them? Whether you run a fitness centre, health club, or gym studio, it’s vital to know who your target customers are.

In this article – we outline how to find your gym’s target market in three easy steps (with practical examples that you can use).

What Is a Gym Target Market?

A gym’s target market refers to the people they want to sell their services to, whether that’s memberships or personal training packages. A target market is also known a target audience, ideal client, customer avatar, or buyer persona – they’re all essentially the same thing.

The target market for a gym will be the people who are ideally suited to their products or services. The ones who’ll truly appreciate and value what the gym has to offer, and have the money to pay for it. They’re the ideal clients or prospective members that gym’s REALLY want to work with…

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Why Finding Your Gym’s Target Market Matters

Finding or choosing a target market for your gym is important for several reasons. Skipping this step will undermine the effectiveness of your marketing. Yet it’s a common rookie mistake that we see clients make.

Here are four reasons why is it so important to identify your gym’s target market…

Understand Your Market

Firstly, it helps you better understand your market. This enables you to develop more effective products, services, marketing messages, and sales pitches, that actually appeal to THEIR specific needs. Understanding your ideal client informs all aspects of gym marketing, from which social media platform you should focus on, to the best place for advertising.

Target Them Precisely

It also allows you to target your gym’s marketing efforts at specific types of people instead of the mass market. Talking directly to people who are ideally suited for your services, makes your sales and marketing efforts MUCH more effective. Building your marketing plan around your audience means you’ll get a much better return on your time and money.

Focus On The Right Audience

It also enables you to focus your time, money, and effort on attracting gym members that YOU want to work with. Instead of being reactive, and trying to sell to anyone who might be interested, you can be much more selective about who YOU want to spend time training. And then be proactive about attracting those types of client.

Drive Sales & Marketing Efficiency

And lastly, it shortens and simplifies the membership sales process, which saves you time and effort. Because ultimately, it’s much easier to sell to someone who wants and can afford your gym’s services.

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How To Find Your Gym’s Target Market

Now let’s dive into how you can find a target market for your gym, fitness studio, or health club. Here are the three steps to follow…

1. Define what makes your gym different
2. Identify your ideal client
3. Find and appeal to them

The approach for gyms differs from the way personal trainers should find their target market. This is because PTs have more flexibility to choose their ideal clients based on training preferences and expertise. However, gyms typically have a relatively fixed range of facilities so they need to decide what makes them different first…

1 – Define what makes your gym different

Step one is to define what makes your gym different from the competition. What sets it apart from other fitness studios or health clubs in the local area? Why is it unique or special?

Here are some questions that can help you identify what makes your gym different…

• What facilities or equipment do you have that others don’t?
• Is there anything special or convenient about your location?
• What are your gym’s values?
• What do your members tell you that they particularly like about your gym?
• Are there any niche or specialist types of training that you offer?

Make a list of all the things that set you apart. If you’re stuck for ideas, then you might want to read about how to differentiate your fitness business.

2 – Identify your ideal client

Your ideal clients are the members that you REALLY want to join your gym… They’re the people who are ideally suited to your products or services. The ones who’ll truly appreciate and value what you have to offer, and have the money to pay for it.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that’ll help with identifying your gym’s target market…

• Who would benefit most from my gym’s facilities or training services?
• Who will value my gym’s offering?
• Which people have the disposable income to pay for gym membership?
• Which types of existing member are most profitable and why?

You can go a step further by thinking about demographics for your members. This can be helpful if you’re planning on advertising your gym. Social media platforms allow you to target specific demographics with their ads, so knowing your audience in detail can make this more effective.  

Demographics info includes considerations like…

• Age group
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Education 

Some marketing companies go into an excessive amount of detail when defining a customer avatar for their clients. In our experience, it’s about the quality of the insights rather than the quantity. What matters is that the information is useful and actually informs how you market and sell to your gym’s target customers.

3 – Find and appeal to them

Now you know the type of person your gym should target, you need to find and appeal to them. Think about where they’re likely to hang out, either online or in person. Where can you get in front of them?

• Where do they eat, drink or shop in your local area?
• Which magazines, websites, or blogs do they read?
• Which social media platforms do they use?

By identifying where your target market is, you can create promotional campaigns that appeal to them. It might be running a workshop at a local health food cafe, investing in Google Ads, or partnering with local businesses to attract corporate memberships. There are endless gym marketing ideas you can try once you know who you’re trying to target.

Gym Target Market Example

Let’s look at a specific example – a good target market for gyms is local people who live or work within 5km of the facility and are aged 35-75. Research shows that people in this age group value their health more than younger segments and are more prepared to invest in it. They have the interest and money for your gym memberships.

But this is still quite broad – you’ll need to further refine your gym’s target market based on the steps we’ve outlined above. Think about who within this market will value your facilities, equipment, or specialist training offering, and go from there.

Gym Marketing Templates

Learn more about identifying your target market with our fitness marketing templates. The bundle includes a buyer persona worksheet that’ll help you define your gym’s target market. You’ll then know exactly how to target and appeal to them, which will boost all aspects of your gym’s sales and marketing.

Fitness Marketing Templates [NEW]

50+ ready-made templates, cheat sheets, and done-for-you examples to help you promote your fitness business.