Fitness Marketing for Businesses

How Marketing Analytics Can Keep Your Fitness Business In Shape!

The top reasons why fitness analytics can bolster your fitness brands growth and help you understand what your customers really want!

Fitness and personal health are key individual aspects of all our lives, no matter who you are. Every person makes conscious choices and takes action in certain ways to better themselves—however, there’s vast opportunity for marketers within each of these subtle decisions! Particularly in the last few decades, the sudden expansive onset of technology and the adoption of increasingly health-focused and wellness-oriented practices from consumers has led to an explosion within the health and fitness industries.

 

More Data-Driven Marketing-Related Content from HVMA:
► Data-Powered Strategy to Drive Ecommerce Conversions
► The Complete 2023 Business Development Guide to Take Your Organization to The Next Level
► Successful Leadership – Data-Driven Decision-Making
► Election Data: Cambridge Analytica’s Strategy Gone Bad

*Connect with us on LinkedIn HVMA Marketing LinkedIn Profile
Need Help Using Your Data To Improve Decision-Making Process? Click Here

 

 

There are more fitness freaks than ever—and the data goes to show! Trends show that customers seek more budget options (Planet Fitness, Snap, easyGym, etc), higher environmental awareness, diverse experiences (HIIT classes, Spartan Race, etc) and a deeper sense of well-being. It’s not a shocker that the highest level of consumer interest in fitness is occurring during the most digitally sophisticated era ever.

The creation of these widespread digital domains also, however, brims with pertinent information about individuals, and gives way to an entirely new methodology in personalized marketing on a uniquely macro scale…Fitness Analytics!

Traditional “Spray-and-Pray” methods of marketing which have been tiredly used out are a thing of the past. Throwing out random messages at massive groups of arbitrary customers is inefficient and a huge waste of valuable budget. Hoping these marketing ploys reach the right consumer aren’t smart business methods either. So, what is the answer?

What if we could hop inside our target gym goers’ minds…discover what they really desire, where they go to look for it and how they ultimately find it. Perhaps in that order…? Questions that were previously unfathomable to answer, but with technology and what Mike Lempner calls the “Proliferation of Data” those dusty doors have been beaten down!

This very data that is the hot talk of marketing firms and progressive-thinking fitness brands are generated in copious amounts by the hour. Every time a fitness center member hops on a Life Fitness treadmill, buys a Zumba class, or even checks into the facility, dozens of touchpoints are created.

Whenever they click on your website, register for a premium membership, or even call on the phone—those are fitness analytics nuggets! This form of ‘big data’ is dense and contains a variety of relevant customer information; a goldmine for potential marketing campaigns and strategies which seek to uncover any marketer’s biggest question—what does the customer want?

So, the good news is you can get inside your customer’s head…it’s just a matter of tracking the byproduct of these thoughts and behaviors! Peoples’ preferences, decision-making processes, online engagements, personal interests, personal health data, and household patterns are vital towards creating a personalized customer experience.

These very valuable fitness analytics can directly provide us with avenues into our consumers’ lives and what makes them decide to purchase or not purchase a certain product or service, or where they travel to at what point during the day. So…why is this important? How can you obtain these types of fitness analytics, and how can you use it to bolster your own fitness brand’s growth? Let’s get some answers!

 

 

WHAT ARE FITNESS ANALYTICS AND DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING?

Traditionally, we never had accurate information about people’s preferences, brand engagement, and what secured a commitment to certain products and services. We could only speak about audiences in broad terms, such as age, location, or gender. Data-driven marketing is all about having a more relevant conversation with your audience groups and understanding how to convey the right message to the right person at the right time.

Specifically, it refers to the marketing strategies driven by insights drawn from personalized customer data and information. It is used to optimize targeted media buying, tailor more precise creative messages, and uncover the best channels and methods to deliver these messages to the right people. The ideologies of Data-Driven Marketing can be summarized as what’s referred to as the 3 PARTS OF data-driven marketing:

 

1. COLLECT DATA

Three Important Questions:

  1. What tools can you use to collect data?
  2. Which types of data and metrics are relevant for you?
  3.  Is your data reliable?

2. UNDERSTANDING DATA

Once you have data, you must evaluate, create hypotheses around it and optimize marketing campaigns so you can conduct continuous testing and experimenting until you reach your goals

 

3. REPORT DATA

– Unless you can effectively communicate what all this data means to the management or marketing team, it’ll be tough to justify a higher budget, prove ROI or ask for approval for experimentation to change strategies/tactics.

Data refers to pieces of information about these consumers’ past interactions, behaviors, and actions taken—along with using this info to accurately predict future customer endeavors and ensure a successful business opportunity. Creative being the way in which you fashion a specific message, and media being the outlet within which you deliver your final message to a designated target consumer.

These three tenets form the foundation of a solid fitness analytics plan (or any data-driven marketing plan at that). It’s obvious that we have moved from a very macro to a more granular perspective on marketing, with the ability to track entire demographics of peoples’ information on such a detailed scale! But, how do you begin to consider data-driven marketing’s benefits, and where do you look to uncover this kind of data? Moving on…

 

 

 

 

Fitness Marketing Insights
Using the data can improve the performance of each member

 

 

More Data-Driven Marketing-Related Content from HVMA:
► Data-Powered Strategy to Drive Ecommerce Conversions
► The Complete 2023 Business Development Guide to Take Your Organization to The Next Level
► Successful Leadership – Data-Driven Decision-Making
► Election Data: Cambridge Analytica’s Strategy Gone Bad


*Connect with us on LinkedIn HVMA Marketing LinkedIn Profile
Need Help Using Your Data To Improve Decision-Making Process? Click Here

 

THE MANY BENEFITS OF FITNESS ANALYTICS AND DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING

Thus far, we’ve gained a better understanding of the modern consumer, the data trails we leave nearly everywhere, and what this data could be used for. However, to gain a true appreciation for data-driven marketing and how powerful a tool it has become in the fitness sector, we must first address the reasons why this type of data is useful in the first place, the benefits it provides and how it can directly apply to your brand and its members!

So, what are some of the more direct results one could expect to see in their fitness brand after utilizing fitness analytics and data-driven marketing? Multiple areas of your business can, in fact, benefit from implementing these ideas.

Digital marketing is one thing. But not all customers are convinced with the same message—and as the years pass by, the more apparent that becomes within the data sets pulled from sales trends, social media analytics, and consumer surveys.

The most intelligent move forward was to use customers’ previous decision factors, touchpoints with brands, and search history to only show ads relevant to them to provide the customer with exactly what they’re looking for while simultaneously personalizing and improving the customer experience overall.

This way, you’re performing efficiently to literally do what you’re supposed to as a business, only dealing with individuals who you know for certain want what you’re offering, save precious budget and ad spend capital that would have otherwise gone wasted towards ten irrelevant consumers and make the customer you dealt with happy—while not sacrificing an iota of scale. The age of generic, one-size-fits-all marketing has died off, and with it a new era of resonating with your leads through relevant messages has been ushered in.

Focusing on data is huge for your business. Fitness analytics helps clubs understand where opportunities truly lie, and which customers provide the most accurate representation of a potential lead. Analyzing and procuring this information in increasingly refined ways helps your brand make faster, smarter, more business intelligent-driven decisions. Data that can notify you whether a customer is at the end of a churn cycle and may lose interest in membership, or what changes current members may want to see!

Aligning with your customers’ interests and behaviorisms can boost member retention and “craft an experience entirely based around them” (Glofox, 2019). Knowing what type of people visit your fitness studio and reusing this information to retarget them or new customers is an even more powerful tool and can drive better decision making for overall marketing campaigns or even day-to-day decisions within your fitness center. This transformative process raises your competitive edge by freeing up valuable time and resources previously allotted to traditional, blind marketing.

 

 

WHERE FITNESS ANALYTICS DATA EXISTS, HOW TO CAPTURE IT 

As a marketer, your focus should align with knowing what the target person wants, how you can convey a message in a personalized way that is non-intrusive and in a manner that may capture their commitment to your brand. You need to be able to provide the best centralized customer experience while optimizing your budget, retaining current customers, increasing sales, and balancing your ROI….sounds impossible right?

Fitness analytics eliminates a lot of this needless worry, as much of the groundwork has actually already been established! Keep in mind—when consumers are looking for an experience, they’re looking regardless of where their interactions occur. Ironically, consumers nowadays almost expect you to know things about them, so that should they reach out, you already know their interaction history with your brand and that they called the front desk and visited your gym’s facility. The term “Internet of things” details the swathe of gadgets, smartphones, tablets, household devices and peripherals that we engage with every day.

These devices retain many pieces of key user entry data, reflecting a person’s tastes, behaviors and decision points. For a fitness brand, that means uncovering who is engaging with your brand on social outlets, or in person at the gym, understanding where they live and their interests perhaps. Research shows that organizations that use customer behavior data to generate insights outperform others by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin (PerfectGym, 2019).

The cloud has proliferated much of this data into an infinitely accessible space where platforms can now plow through much of this data, make sense of it, and use machine learning to automate from the data. They label and look at patterns, and then output insights that are easier for humans to digest and comprehend.

Essentially, with widespread modern technology and digital terminals, data can be generated and gathered from your website, socials, customer reviews, and payment transactions. Or, it can even be procured from personalization. Finding out what makes your customers feel really taken care of with spectacular client-member service is what can earn you loyalty points—and perhaps more!

Glofox reports that a SalesForce survey of over 7,000 consumers found 57% of respondents willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized discounts and offers. That is incredibly valuable insight that can help you help them feel valued and appreciated. Customers will continue to renew memberships. Your customer acquisition and return/repeat customers increases. Meanwhile, they’re using equipment, attending yoga classes, working with fitness trainers, setting goals, objectives and buying a smoothie here and there—all while subconsciously creating hordes of data!

Gain a deep understanding of your clients’ behavior and patterns but also their health, and commit with them to achieving their goals. When they see that they did in fact shed 30 pounds by continuing those aerobic classes on Thursdays, they’ll only have amazing things to say online about your health club. If your mouth isn’t watering by now, it should be. Because this is where leveraging data with robust and actionable plans can yield the most expansive results.

 

THE FINAL STEP: DRAWING POWER FROM NUMBERS!

After learning who and what kinds of people engage with your brand, you gain a deeper understanding of the types of people that visit your fitness center or studio and have massive amounts of data to go with it. Now, you can activate this data—or draw meaning from it—to produce actionable results and drive ROI by personalized databases. This information will optimize your outlook on your target audiences, and who to refrain from wasting budget on.

Rather than spending thousands on rich-media ads such as random billboards and radio or TV advertisements for random passersby, a fitness brand can affordably leverage complex algorithms and machine learning such as those on Facebook or Google to completely remove the guesswork from media planning and buying. These platforms provide tools to construct ‘lookalike audiences’, or audiences that resemble your best groups of members by recycling your current data.

You know, the segment within your users that spends the most time at the fitness center, performs the best, spends the most, etc. This removes the guesswork in building online audiences. After all…you’re using your top members as a baseline template to present your ads to!

To begin, you need to understand:

  1.     Who your best members are
  2.     What are their behaviors
  3.     What are their preferences

 

This phenomenon, known as “profiling”, was a crucial factor that software giant SalesForce brought on by fusing sales and marketing automation with the cloud, and luxury gyms such as Equinox perfected by offering email coupons, mobile app interactions and personal discounts to membership holders.

Their content spanned three main digital touchpoints—paid media, organic web traffic, and emails. Direct emailing campaigns using CRM (Customer Relation Management) software allowed former members to receive exclusive email offers tailored to their specific tastes and preferences.

Messages which were consistent with paid ads, as was the content on the website. Equinox recorded a 500% jump in conversions and an 80% jump in digital sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. (Adobe, 2019). Entire batches of customers can receive customized messages based on these customer profiles, or segments, based on whether the designated segment was a good fit based on what the customer wants and cares about.

These can be sent based on certain triggers, segments, locations, or behaviors. Sites such as Facebook and Instagram also allow for multiple versions of assets and ad versions to be uploaded to the same campaign, allowing marketers to present the most concise depiction of the message in the context of the medium within which it is presented.

Using fitness analytics and data interpretation, one could ascertain the most ideal of their gym goers…the consumers that love going four or five days a week. Or who always interact with your social outlets and purchase from the online shop! By understanding who stays the longest, we know they’re most likely to be active members and provide long-term ROI and financial growth. It’s a win-win!

Form a data-driven approach to fitness analytics by grouping together target audiences to turn the wheels of automation, easily craft personalize messages, and forge one-on-one bonds with customers. Make them feel like they are being spoken to not as prospects, but as humans—by a company that truly cares.

Data-driven marketing, particularly within fitness analytics, has become the next evolutionary system of solutions by which future generations of business owners and managers will operate. Through the most advanced and pragmatic marketing approach to date, marketers will adjacently provide superior fitness and health club experiences for enthusiasts, hardcore fitness freaks, athletes, families, and individuals all across the board. It’s up to you to get on board…

After all, knowing what your customer wants before they do, is the future!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe for more Updates Articles