The proverb “Health is wealth” holds true in today’s environment when pollution is so high and people have to be on their toes to stay fit and keep working. Even the slightest of carelessness can book your trip to the nearest doctor’s clinic and thus cost you time as well as money.

Even though money can be earned again, the time that you lose while being bed ridden or under care cannot be brought back. The level of stress which entails the various job profiles requires a person to be fit both mentally and physically so as to handle the workload efficiently. For the one’s who have started out recently on their mantra to stay healthy, have only place of rescue; the gym. Professionals with the right amount of experience are there to train people and help them stay in shape.

Moreover, seeing as the world trends are going, staying fit has now become more of a style statement. This has helped gym owners a lot as business has started to increase over the years. With more and more people coming the awareness radar, it is now up to the business owners to grab the opportunity and increase their revenues along with helping people fulfil their goals and what better way than to embrace digital marketing in this modern age to help business grow as well as build a reputation.

Further ahead we shall discuss why it is important for fitness centers to go digital, certain challenges faced by them while using digital marketing and certain tips to help increase the efficiency of the ad campaigns.

Why Fitness Centers need to embrace the Digital Approach

The biggest reason to use Digital Marketing as the main marketing tool for your business, is that you will be able to target your audience, which simply means that you will focus and spend your resources in areas from where you can get tangible results. Running surveys, general questionnaires helps you get to know the audience.

Along with that, you can stay updated about what people want new when it comes to fitness; whether any new exercise is in demand or if the people are looking for rewards beyond discounts. This point hold validity because you will not pitch the same thing over and over again to everyone. Your target should be to maintain your set of members as well as persuade new people to join your gym.

Having an online presence through social media or personal websites helps as stats suggest that nearly 75% people depend on reviews and comments online while trying to decide which option to go for in the fitness area.

Challenges ahead while using Digital Marketing

Without wasting any precious time, let us take a look at some of the hindrances which might arise when you use Digital Marketing as your basic marketing tool-

1) Large Competition: The fitness sector is not different from any other business. Like you there are ten more gym owners who are looking to capture the market and with digital marketing levelling the play field, your chances of getting quick results is very slim. This simply means that no one can guarantee you spontaneous results. During the initial stages you might have to incur losses behind running the ad campaigns, but patience is the key. As per a recent survey conducted city wise, small and medium fitness center owners have only 2 new members join on an average in a quarterly period, despite having built an online presence.

2) Consumer Needs: It is common knowledge that the needs of customers keep on changing and it becomes quite an extensive issue when using Digital Marketing. With so much of activity going on in the virtual world, it becomes difficult at times to keep a track. Continuous supervision may lead to the main work area being ignored, and if a constant check is not kept you may lose out on the latest trends and thus fail to attract customers. Finding the perfect balance is difficult and nearly 5% of the business owners believe that having to hire someone for this role increases their cost of maintenance by 2% annually.

 What can be done to increase the efficiency of Digital Marketing Ad Campaigns:

Just as ever dark cloud has a silver lining, there is a solution to the above mentioned problems and we shall dive right into them to know the tricks to increase the efficiency of digital marketing campaigns-

1) Target Marketing: Remember we said that the biggest benefit of using Digital Marketing for the ad campaigns of your fitness center was that you could choose whom to target and where to spend your resources? While many owners have been doing the wrong thing by advertising everywhere, the 30% who have acted wisely as per the demographic data collected by them through surveys have reported a 10% annual increase in membership and revenue. Moreover, target marketing helps you to stay visible in the right market. For example, if a 10 year old kid sees the advert of your gym while surfing the net for online games will ignore it, but a 15 or 16 year old might act and contact you to know more, thus becoming a lead automatically.

2) Social Media Advertising: Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the new resource hubs for the current generation and they tend to search for a lot of information there. Hence, if you are present at either of these platforms with the proper answers and have the backing of a few followers and reviews, chances are you will generate more leads in a months’ time from what you would have in a quarter.

Launching offers online is the best way to grab attention, and apart from these a few things you can do to boost your social media presence is announce challenges every two weeks where in the winner would get a reward, give out information related to healthy food habits. Even though this will not effect the direct membership count, people will start to follow your activities more closely.