Content Marketing Strategy to Increase your Fitness Club and Spa Members

Content marketing has come a long way from where it was a few years ago. With the changes of the Google Panda update and Web 2.0, online tactics have evolved to keep up. At this point, content marketing has become the foundation of any online marketing strategy – which allows any business to compete effectively. Fitness Clubs and Spas can use the same strategies in getting new gym members and spa customers.

There are certain specific tips that you can use to ensure a good creative content marketing strategy for your gym or spa.

1. Define your target market

Just as in traditional marketing, you need to define who your members are.   The kind of content that you create for consumption should also be designed specifically for them and their needs. This is something that will require a fair amount of research to understand your customers pains, their information needs and goals. Take advantage of various online tools out there that will help you identify your customers. Do an analysis of keywords to understand your customers more. Dig deep into your competitors sites.

If you have done your research well, you may uncover hidden opportunities and niches that you can target through your online content.By defining who your client is and their wants, they can easily be targeted with the right content that calls to them.

2. Don’t propagate features, create solutions

There is no point in creating content that details all the features of your gym or spa. You are not likely to increase gym membership in this manner. Neither are spa customers likely to flock to your center after you have told them the kind of massage rooms that you have and the services that you offer. Once you have identified your customer, understand their needs in detail and offer solutions that can help them achieve what they are looking for.

For example, you may choose to increase your gym membership by targeting those who are looking to meet new people by creating more social classes.

In order to market those classes and attract more members, you can:

• give a brief description of various classes, mentioning their fitness benefits – but more importantly their popularity
  
• you can provide online videos of members taking part in the classes and having fun.
  
• You can put video testimonials.
  

3. Define your objective

Even after you have defined your potential clientele and the solution that you want to offer them, make sure that your content marketing strategy has an objective. Do you want to ensure that your clients respect your gym as a trusted name in the industry or do you want them to think of your fitness center as one that has the solution to any obesity problem? Make sure that you conduct a short survey to assess the image of your center at regular intervals to understand the effectiveness and receive feedback.

4. Update the content

Updating content frequently not only keeps you on top of mind, it will also place you top of search engines. With the amount of information that is uploaded on to the Internet each day, it is essential that you post articles, podcasts, blogs and other pieces of information everyday to remain active. Write original ideas or provide well-researched information. Don’t regurgitate the same-old information out there. Above-all, keep the content relevant and contextual.

From trust to action – do not forget that the content marketing strategy that you have developed has a goal of increasing gym membership and spa customers at the end of the day. Ensure that your online content is designed and presented in such a manner that the customer finds it easy to register and make the appointment when ready.

For many Marketing Managers, understanding how to target prospects is a major challenge. Your prospects are inundated by thousands of marketing messages, you need to find a unique way to communicate.You've always known the value that content has towards online marketing. However, with the number of marketing channels there are online, creating content for each one of them is overwhelming! 

Experienced marketers know that providing information that enlightens and educates their prospects gets better results than just sending sales collateral (in B2C,  tugging on emotions produces the best results). Strong brand relationships are created by providing good, authoritative, even leadership-type content.

You know that your clients need information that will help them do their jobs better, but how do you reach them? Do you create an online email newsletter which may go directly to the spam filter? Or do you create a print newsletter or a glossy magazine mailer, knowing it may wind up in the garbage with all the junk mail your prospects receive? What’s a marketer to do? 

If you’re a marketer, you’re not interested in spending resources on wasted efforts. You may split your budget between direct sales and channel marketing, but, by using targeted content, your message is easily heard over the general noise of ordinary marketing attempts.

However, just don't jump into creating a white paper/custom magazine right away!  You need to outline a few key areas that will help you maximize your chances of success, such as: 

• Audience: Who are your prospects?
• Content quality: What do your prospects look for to fill their information needs?
• Competition: What are your competitors doing?
• Measurement:  How will you measure the success of your content strategy?
• Cost: What are the costs of producing and delivering the content? What's your ROI on a dollar basis?
• Time: How much time will it take to produce the various content? 

These points will help you clarify your content strategy approach to potential prospects.

Audience: Obviously, you know your audience and its information habits. You really need to know your potential customers down to a T. Where do they hang out online? What are their information requirements? What causes them stress in their jobs? To whom do they go for advice?

By understanding the day-to-day life of your audience, you are in the best position to provide them with information that will grab their attention. The best way to do that is to create reader/audience personas. A character-based description of potential prospects, their needs, their thoughts and challenges. 

Example:  Peter, a busy IT Manager in a health company, needs to upgrade his servers to handle a new software application that new employees can access remotely. As he’s putting out fires on a daily basis, he doesn’t have the time to spend doing research during the day, and definitely does not have time to talk on the phone with sales people. But because of the priority of this project, he may take time after work to do some vendor research online, and call up a few resellers for RFPs. He will definitely visit some forums to see what his peers are saying and to see if he can get some information there. He’ll read a few industry blogs. And if he can find them, he’ll download some white papers.

Content Quality: You should expect to spend a lot of time on content. Remember, content does not mean direct sales! Content means providing valuable information that helps solve clients’ problems, even if it means giving it away for free. Remember also that content helps build your credibility. Of course, you can say that putting sales materials about your company, the awards you’ve won, the clients you’ve served, is good, but it doesn’t help your clients understand how you can solve their problems.

Credible content is what builds brands, not sales materials. If your content is very helpful and specifically solves your B2B clients’ issues, they will be more receptive to working with you. What would be better:  having a client download a white paper from your site and view an online video about your product, or mailing out a package that provides a print whitepaper, a software demo CD, and an interactive DVD on how your product will help solve their problems after they’ve had a conversation with your salesperson?

Competition: What is your competition doing? Remember that your prospects receive hundreds of marketing messages and phone calls on a daily basis. Are you doing the same thing and getting lost among them? Or do you stand out from the pack by targeting your prospects in other ways? Do some research; find out what your competition is doing and if it’s working. If you find that hundreds of your competitors are doing the same thing, don’t bother repeating their mistakes. Take what works and discard what doesn’t.

Measurement: Can you measure your efforts accurately? Any marketing tactic you choose should create measurable results. Is the campaign working, or is it a flop? How easy is it for you to collect the data? Are you spending too much time trying to analyze the data? Are the results self-evident?

Cost: Cost is one of the most important considerations in campaign planning. Will the tactic you choose provide you with the best return on investment for the lowest cost? But then you have to balance cost with….

Time: How long does it take to prepare the campaign and how long will it take to see results? Is this campaign one instance or more of a branding situation where multiple exposures are required before clients respond?
Failing in a content marketing campaign is an expensive proposition! 

Take these factors into account before running a campaign, and maximize your chances of success.