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Creating a fitness marketing plan for your business is essential to achieving revenue goals. While most fitness businesses aren’t short of promotional ideas, surprisingly few have a strategic plan behind their activities.
In this article, learn how to create a fitness marketing plan or strategy document for your gym, studio, or personal training business (with a free template and example ideas you can use).
We’re a specialist fitness marketing agency with 15+ years of industry experience that helps gyms, studios, and coaches promote their businesses. Learn more about our strategy and consulting services here.
FREE Marketing Plan Template
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What To Include In Your Marketing Plan
Having a strategic fitness marketing plan gives you a huge competitive advantage. While other businesses are being reactive about their promotional activities, everything you do will support your business goals. So what does it need to cover?
Let’s start with an overview of the three fundamental parts of a solid marketing plan…
- Objectives – WHY are you marketing? What are you trying to achieve?
- Strategies – WHAT are you going to do? Who is your target market?
- Tactics – HOW will you execute it? Which promotional channels, social platforms, and content types will you share?
Let’s look at how to approach each of these areas in more detail so you know exactly how to create your plan…
1. Objectives – Why?
Identifying your objective or ‘why’ is a crucial first step. In order for marketing to make a significant impact on your business, everything you do needs to be aligned with your end goal.
But if you don’t have a defined objective, then how can you work towards it? Unless you know your destination, it’s very difficult to get there.
When it comes to fitness marketing objectives, there are a few themes that we hear consistently from clients…
- I want to attract more training clients or gym members
- We want to launch a new fitness program or online course
- I want to build credibility in my niche area
- We want to keep existing clients loyal
Do any of these apply to you? Once you know your theme, you need to get specific and make it measurable. How many clients do you want? What % loyalty are you aiming for? By what deadline?
Here are some examples of specific and measurable objectives…
- Attract clients – Attract 10 new clients within the next 2 months.
- Launch program – Launch course and gain 20 students in the first month.
- Build credibility – Get featured in 5 industry publications or websites by 31st December.
- Maintain loyalty – Increase retention to 70% by 31st July.
2. Strategies – What?
Now you know your end marketing goal, you can define WHAT you’ll do to achieve it. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so you’ll need to tailor your approach based on your own specific objectives.
- If you’re trying to build credibility, then an educational approach is probably best.
- If engagement is your goal, then an entertaining and interactive approach might be ideal.
- But if you’re trying to attract new clients, then a mixture of educational and inspiring content would be better.
Whichever strategy you opt for, it’s also essential to identify your target audience at this stage. Part of your strategy is knowing exactly who your ideal client or customer is, what their needs or problems are, and how you can appeal to them through your marketing.
>> We have handy guides to defining your target market for gyms here and for personal trainers here.
Let’s look at some examples of fitness marketing strategies that you can adapt to your own business…
Attract more clients
If you’re already selling a product or service, then it never hurts to have more customers. Here are some marketing strategies for gyms and personal trainers that’ll help…
- Encouraging referrals
- Running competitions and fitness challenges
- Building relationships
- Answering FAQs
- Networking with other social media accounts that share the same target audience
- Motivating and inspiring followers to take action
- Advertising, promotions, or sponsored posts
FREE Marketing Plan Template
Get this free PDF marketing plan template & create your one-page strategy.
Enter your email below…
Launch new programs or online courses
Launching a new product involves building buzz and excitement, communicating the benefits, and getting people to purchase. Ways to do this include…
- Sharing teasers, snippets, and behind-the-scenes sneak peeks
- Getting member input on the format or naming of new classes
- Counting down the days or hours until launch
- Telling stories about why you developed your solution
- Describing what people actually get for signing up (features and benefits)
- Addressing objections
- Sharing quotes or testimonials from beta testers or founding students
Build credibility
Building credibility is about establishing trust and positioning yourself as an authority. You can do this by…
- Hosting polls and surveys, then publishing results
- Summarising or evaluating scientific journal articles
- Educating through tips, tricks, and time-saving hacks
- Educating by clarifying facts vs. fiction
- Promoting your credentials, qualifications, or experience
- Providing social proof and case studies
FREE Marketing Guide
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Maintain loyalty
Existing clients need a reason to stay loyal. So, motivate them to keep working towards their goals, and surprise them with extra bonuses. Effective loyalty marketing strategies for fitness centers and health clubs include…
- Providing exclusive bonuses like recipes, meal plans, shopping lists
- Sharing motivational quotes and photos
- Previewing future releases like workout videos or new classes
- Running community challenges
- Publishing inspirational success stories from other clients
- Addressing their problems or issues
- Offering exclusive access to you or your team (e.g. live video Q&A)
It’s much cheaper and easier to generate repeat business than to spend time and money attracting new customers. Not to mention the fact that they’ve already invested in your business, so they deserve to be looked after!
Once you have an idea of your marketing strategies (aka WHAT you’ll do to achieve your goals), you can move on to outlining exactly HOW you’ll do it…
3. Tactics – How
When most people write a fitness marketing plan, they usually jump straight to this stage. We all want ideas that we can implement quickly to get results straight away.
But it’s crucial that we go through the first two strategic steps first, to ensure that the ideas we come up with are aligned with our bigger business goals. Otherwise, we’ll waste time and money on marketing activities that don’t actually move us in the right direction.
So, now you know exactly what you’re trying to do, you can brainstorm ideas for HOW to actually do it. This is where you get really specific about the exact marketing activities you’re going to do, the format you’ll use, and the platform you’ll promote through.
When writing a marketing plan for your gym or PT business, don’t be tempted to go off topic. There are so many things we could do, but if your ideas don’t align with your objective and strategies, then park them for another time.
We find it useful to put our ideas into the following structure…
Purpose + Format + Platform
Here are some practical examples of fitness marketing tactics…
- Address common fitness objections with a ‘time-saving tricks’ article on Facebook
- Run a referral competition where people enter by tagging friends on Instagram
- Provide motivational case studies in infographic format on the blog and Pinterest
- Share testimonials in video format via YouTube
- Provide exclusive recipe bonus in ebook format via the blog and Facebook
- Share inspirational photos of previous clients using before-and-after collages on Instagram
By following this structure, you’ll include all the fundamental elements of a strong marketing tactic. Here are some more formats and platform ideas to help you plan…
FREE Marketing Plan Template
Get this free PDF marketing plan template & create your one-page strategy.
Enter your email below…
Write Your Strategic Fitness Marketing Plan
By following these steps, you can create a fitness marketing plan that helps you achieve your business goals. Aligning your objectives (why), strategies (what), and tactics (how) will make your marketing activities MUCH more effective.
If you’d like done-for-you fitness marketing plans and more guidance, then check out our Fitness Marketing Kit. It includes ready-made marketing plan examples for personal trainers, gyms, and studios (editable Word documents and PDFs). Plus a blank template and step-by-step planning workbook that you can use to write your own.
Get The Fitness Marketing & Business Growth Toolkit
This is the only toolkit you’ll ever need to promote and grow your fitness business effectively. Generate quality leads, consistent sign-ups, and more sales revenue for your gym, fitness studio, or personal training business.
You’ll get 114+ resources covering…
These are the same resources we use with our own clients. The bundle includes everything you need to promote your business, sign up more customers, and grow revenue. Learn more here.
