If you’re looking to grow your fitness membership, then you’ll need a steady stream of new members joining month after month.
The best way to achieve that? Finding the right fitness marketing strategy – or two – for your membership.
You don’t need to be an experienced marketing whizz either, all you need are the right online marketing strategies to get your brand in front of your ideal target audience, and help turn them into paying members.
We’ve unpacked 8 tried-and-tested strategies to help you come up with a simple marketing plan for your fitness business and make it stand out from your competition. But first, let’s talk about why the right marketing strategy is important for your brand.
Why fitness marketing is crucial to growing a successful brand
Imagine one day you take a detour from your usual route around your local town. You’re walking along an unfamiliar street, coffee in hand, doing some window shopping.
(I know, who has the time, right? But stick with me…)
Suddenly, something catches your eye: the exact type of niche fitness club you’ve been searching for!
Turns out, they’ve been there for years… and all you can think is, “Why didn’t I know about this place sooner?”
Now, how many of your members do you think stumbled across your platform purely by chance? And how many more potential members have you lost out on, simply because they didn’t know your membership existed?
The right fitness marketing strategy lets you take control to make sure your audience finds you.
Take it from Macey and Chase from Fittest Core as they share the 3 winning marketing tactics they used and how it helped to grow their fitness business into the success it is today:
Now, let’s explore 8 different strategies that work particularly well in the fitness industry, and find the right combination for you.
8 tried- and- tested fitness marketing strategies to help convert more members
1. Establish your USP and communicate it widely
USP stands for unique selling point. This is what makes your fitness brand different from the others out there, helping you stand out from your competitors. More than that, your USP should communicate the benefit you bring to members, connecting what you do with how it helps them.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- What is your story? What inspired you to start your fitness membership? A personal story makes it easy for people to connect with you, and shows how you empathize with the needs of your audience.
- Focus on what makes you passionate about fitness. What do you love about it? What drives you to run a fitness studio or online classes? This is your ‘why’ – the purpose behind your brand.
- Now, think about what makes you unique. This could be specializing in a specific niche, creating a community where members feel at home, or it could be your technique and personality that makes for a fresh, new approach to your members’ fitness journey.
Take the Jump Rope Dudes membership for example. Their brand is centered around the benefits of jump rope and they’ve created an entire program focused on helping people boost their health and fitness with it.
Another key factor here is nailing down who your target audience is. The more specific you can be, the more powerful your marketing efforts become because you can tailor them to speak directly to these people, touching on what they care about and what their pain points are.
If we look at Fittest Core’s offering, their membership is built for new moms and pregnant women. They offer workouts which are centered around this target audience’s particular needs, challenges and physical ability as their body grows, changes and recovers:
2. Have some content freely available to give people a taste of what you’re offering
There’s no easier way to explain what you do and what your fitness membership is all about than to show them. Free content can be used strategically to let people experience a taste of what you have to offer.
Make it valuable and engaging, but short enough to leave them wanting more, building a path that lets users sign up to try out your membership after watching the video.
For example, Jump Rope Dudes offer their 7 day beginners challenge for free. When users sign up, they have access to the app and all the benefits it offers so they can fully immerse themselves in the challenge, giving them a taste of what it’s like to be a member of this unique community.
Uscreen data shows that this strategy helps to successfully convert 52% of potential members who engage with your free content.
This is because it overcomes the hesitation of not knowing if these particular virtual fitness classes are going to work for them or not, because you’re giving them the chance to try it out for free.
This strategy is a great way to use the social media tools you already have at your disposal, like YouTube or Instagram which provides the added bonus of helping you to build a strong brand presence on these channels.
Watch how SarahBethYoga uses her YouTube channel to her advantage, and how she’s 10xed her membership on Uscreen.
3. Use live streaming and events to form a connection with your audience
Live streaming is a useful way to market the community aspect of your membership. It brings an audience of people together in real-time and adds an extra layer of authenticity to your valuable content because they’re seeing a genuine take on you and your brand, rather than something that’s polished to perfection.
There’s lots of ways you can make use of live streaming. You could offer one-off online events, or access to regular live classes.
Marnie Alton, founder of M/Body, uses live streaming to maintain a strong community for her members which has become central to the success of her brand.
From the feedback we get, people still prefer to watch the live class versus the polished produced video. People feel closer to us because they’re seeing real things happening in real-time.
Marnie Alton, founder at M/Body
4. Offer free trials and discounts on longer term memberships
Free trials are effective because they let new members experience all the benefits of your membership in a risk-free way. They can try out the platform and engage with your content without having to invest, yet.
The trick is offering the right length of free trial so that these potential members have enough time to try out your content, see how it works for them, and engage meaningfully in the exclusive community, without being able to binge watch everything and feel like they got everything they came for.
Jazzercise offer a 14-day free trial for their membership:
Improving your overall fitness and building up strength and muscle tone takes time, so users aren’t going to be able to achieve results in only 14 days.
But, they have enough time to try a range of different classes and experience the more immediate effects of this type of exercise, like the endorphin rush that works as an effective mood boost.
It’s enough time to start building a routine and enjoy the unique workouts on offer, all of which contributes to the likelihood of users converting into paid members because they want to keep using it.
5. Make a plan for your social media presence
Planning your content doesn’t just apply to your premium content and virtual classes, but what you post on social media too.
Taking the time to plan and create content allows you to be strategic in how you use social media marketing to get the most out of them and drive more traffic to your membership site.
Here are some key things to consider:
- Pick the right platform – this is about meeting your target audience where they are, so you can get relevant content in front of the right people in a format that works for your brand.
- Post at the right time – do your research and find out when the best time of day is to post for maximum engagement, and when’s best to go live for each platform.
- Always include a call to action – think about the ideal user journey you want people to take when they engage with each of your posts. Is it to drive traffic to your sign up page? Take out a free trial? Or sign up for your newsletter?
- Schedule content in advance – this gives you the best opportunity to post the right content at the right time to boost views and engagement. It’s a great way to tie in with key dates or holidays to make sure you have them covered without the need to manually post updates all the time.
6. Gather and share testimonials widely
Customer reviews and testimonials are valuable marketing tools that offer social proof that your existing members are gaining real value from your fitness membership, and that the member experience is worth it.
Put yourself in the user’s shoes and imagine you were the one deciding whether or not to sign up to your membership. You’re seeing some great relevant content, and killer messaging on the website about why this brand is right for you, but there are no reviews to back all this up.
It would be like buying something on Amazon with no star rating or reviews, which feels like a much bigger risk without the validation that reviews provide.
Find What Feels Good showcase a range of testimonials on their website:
It shows real people sharing what they’ve gotten out of their membership. It’s these stories that connect so powerfully with potential customers because it gives that sense of ‘if they can do it, so can I’, and provides real evidence that what you’ve said in your messaging isn’t just words – but has genuinely impacted people’s lives in a positive way.
7. Use email marketing to your advantage
Email marketing is a key tactic for turning qualified leads into paying members. These are people who have interacted with your brand and willingly provided you with their contact details so you can email them.
In other words, these are people who want to hear from you.
Here are a few ways you can use email to your advantage in your fitness marketing:
- Send out a regular newsletter to share updates on your membership, new content releases and upcoming events
- Create promotional offers to entice people to sign up, adding a deadline and sense of urgency to get recipients to take action (the classic FOMO feeling)
- Offer discounts for signing up to your email list
8. Take advantage of your platform’s built-in marketing tools
Choosing a membership platform with built-in marketing tools ensures you get the most out of your fitness marketing strategy because it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Uscreen is an industry-leading membership platform with features designed to help online fitness and yoga instructors motivate and retain paid members, build a strong brand, and become a 6-figure business.
Uscreen marketing tools are designed to help you drive revenue and our data shows that creators who embrace them can see a remarkable 2.5x increase in monthly earnings.
These tools help creators to:
- Build a branded website and personalized landing pages
- Send push notifications through your fitness app
- Set up gift cards and give away funnels
- Send email broadcasts
- Upsell subscriptions
- Reduce churn
- Gain insights on marketing performance through analytics
For more useful tips and Uscreen tools you can use for successful fitness marketing, check out the video below.
The value of getting fitness marketing right
That brings us to the end of our guide to fitness marketing. Ultimately, there are lots of different strategies you can use to spread the word about your membership and reach the right people.
While building an online audience is the first step, you still need to inspire those people to take action and become paying members. Fitness marketing is all about results, which is why it’s important to put the time and effort into getting it right.
Request a demo of Uscreen to find out how our all-in-one platform provides everything you need to manage your content, community and marketing.
Build, launch and manage your membership, all in one place.
