If you are planning to open your own sports club, have already found premises, decided on staff and are planning to purchase equipment, you need to think about how to advertise a fitness club. As in any other business, there are right and wrong methods in the sports field, which we will discuss below.

This article contains a detailed description of outdoor, indoor and other types of advertising for fitness centers and is designed to help entrepreneurs create a working campaign to attract customers.

Decoration of the point (including during opening)

Facade

Showcase

In general, display windows can serve as a good tool for outdoor advertising of a fitness club. So, if you put posters of sports men and women on them, it will attract extra attention from passers-by. If you leave them transparent, passers-by will be able to see the inventory and interior arrangement of the hall. In both cases, you will achieve your goal - you will demonstrate the specialization of the sports center and interest people.

Entry group

The design of the entrance group will depend on the scale of your center. However, even if you are the owner of a small club, you should try to decorate the entrance and make it aesthetically attractive, for example, through railings, steps, and decorative elements. This will form a positive impression of the center and increase loyalty from potential clients.

Outdoor advertising

Billboards

Billboards are a great way to promote a fitness club. However, remember, passers-by have long since become tired of them, which means you need to make a creative and at the same time informative poster. A good option would be to post information about a discount or promotion in combination with an original idea - an interesting idea will attract attention, and a discount in price will interest people.

Signposts

The pillars should be located near the fitness club. They should contain the most basic information - you should not order a sign on which the entire price list will be written in small print, since the likelihood that a passerby will stop to find out about your club in as much detail as possible is practically zero. So, you need to catch people’s attention and attract them with discounts, promotions, and attractive prices.

Advertising in elevators

Many people want to go to a fitness club, but do not want to spend too much time on it. By notifying residents of the area in which the center is located about the opening of the hall, you are working with your target audience. That is why advertising in elevators in buildings located in close proximity to the club is an effective way to attract customers.

Advertising on transport

Remember, advertising on transport will not be cheap. Therefore, it is only suitable for large fitness clubs or sports center chains. If you are opening a small club in a specific area, this method will simply not be practical.

Internet advertising

Website

Today, not a single enterprise or establishment operates without an official website. Fitness clubs are no exception to this rule - the owner of a sports center must start creating it. However, many entrepreneurs think that a website is more of a one-time event, and that, having allocated time and money for this, they can no longer deal with the resource, relying on the fact that visitors will find it themselves. This is a fundamentally wrong approach - the site must be constantly updated and optimized, it must be filled with information that visitors need about discounts, promotions, services, trainers, etc. Don’t overuse pictures from the Internet; let visitors see real photos of your gym and trainers - this will build trust. It is also necessary to optimize the site so that it appears on the first lines of search engines. To do this, you need to hire an SEO optimization specialist.

If you decide to create a website on your own, be sure to read our articles:

Here we have laid out our experience and opinions on the use of various tools that you will simply need in your work. This will allow you to reduce the time it takes to select the necessary resources for its creation and get profit from the site as quickly as possible.

Banner advertising

Place banners online - this will increase brand awareness, bring new visitors to the site, allow you to announce new promotions and discounts, and therefore help increase profits.

Groups on social networks

Groups on social networks are an excellent resource for promoting fitness clubs. So, you can create an account on Instagram, where you can publish photos of the gym, visitors, trainers, as well as groups on VKontakte and Facebook with the additional publication of informative articles about losing weight, giving relief, weight gain, etc. A big plus will be the “before and after” photos of your visitors.

Sending emails

Don't ignore sending emails to interested users. Come up with a promotion, a special offer for which the client must leave his email address, and add it to your database. After which you can use a special program that will automatically send out promotions, special offers, etc.

Printable advertisement

Leaflets

Leaflets outlining the most important and attractive information for clients must be distributed during the first time after the opening of a fitness club. The main advantage of this method of advertising distribution is that you are working with passers-by not far from your center, which means that most likely they live or work nearby.

Business cards

Print business cards for your trainers - this will add respectability to them and perhaps attract friends and acquaintances of the client to your center who are satisfied with his work.

Booklets

Booklets must be present in your fitness club. However, to be honest, they are not so effective in attracting new customers, because only those who have already come to the club will see them. That is why you should think about partnerships with beauty salons, massage studios and other enterprises with a similar specialization: by leaving your booklets with them, and their leaflets with you, you will help your partners and attract people from among their clients.

Advertising in newspapers and magazines

Remember, advertising in print media can bring you many new customers. Thus, large chains use popular publications to publish advertising modules in articles about sports, but such advertising is not relevant for new fitness clubs in small cities. That is why, if you are just starting to promote a brand, it is better to advertise your services in local publications.

Other

Discount cards and promotions

Discount cards or a discount system will allow you to retain regular customers and attract new customers. You can also introduce pleasant bonuses for clients who visit your fitness club regularly - this will motivate and delight your visitors.

Carrying out show events

Organize various events - dancing, entertainment, sports. Conduct master classes, widely advertise them and emphasize that not only regular club visitors, but also simply interested people can come to them. Therefore, there is a chance that after the event they will become your clients. Moreover, your regular visitors will also be satisfied with well-organized leisure time.

Advertising that doesn't work for fitness clubs

1. Advertising in the media - radio and TV. In general, this method of advertising is quite effective for fitness clubs, taking into account the fact that it will only be useful for large chains. The same applies to advertising in print media - if you open a small club in your city, you can only advertise in local newspapers, and then only if their audience includes enough representatives of your target group.
2. Some methods of outdoor advertising: lightboxes, inflatable figures, video boards, etc. Of course, you can use the above types of advertising, but they will require a lot of material resources and will not bring tangible benefits to your club.

Slogans and texts for advertising fitness clubs

1. Energy. Beauty. Life.
2. Heroes are not born - heroes are made.
3. Instinct to be in shape.
4. Network of fitness clubs No. 1.
5. Endless fitness energy.
6. Fitness accessible to everyone.
7. Fitness in the context of life!
8. Lifestyle - fitness!
9. Live at your own pace!
10. Fitness club with an iron character.
11. I love my body!
12. The energy of your success!
13. Take a fresh look at fitness.
14. The joy of movement!
15. The energy of life.
16. Fitness without borders!

Instructions

Ravshana Kurkova, actress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIL5muTBof8&feature=youtu.be

About the X-Fit network

Talk to current clients about their goals and needs. Make sure that your sports program produces tangible results and that your visitors are happy with everything. Otherwise, expand it or eliminate unnecessary things. Also find out what number of classes per week clients consider optimal.

Improve and expand the list of services offered. If you feel that club clients have begun to lose interest in sports training and even stop attending them, urgently come up with something new. Increase the coaching staff, open new sections, update strength training equipment. The environment should be conducive to intense and interesting activities.

In the million-plus cities of Russia there are a huge number of people who want to engage in fitness. Almost everyone has the Internet at home or at work, which they use to find a suitable club. For example, for Moscow, statistics for 2016 look like this:

The fitness center website should regularly bring in new customers.. Work like outdoor advertising and even better. If a fitness center provides high-quality services, then most of the new clients can become regular customers, so do not underestimate the importance of Internet advertising, at the same time, all expenses must be economically justified: you need to pay only for the result.

If we clarify the task, then exactly the site is required to provide as many customer contacts as possible, it doesn’t matter in what form: a completed form (“call me back” or “find out the price”) is the minimum task, a direct incoming call is the maximum task. With the right approach to online advertising of a fitness club you must control the cost of each such communication. In Moscow, contacting a fitness club client with phone, email and full name can cost 200-300 rubles. It is clear that a contact is not a sale yet - but the ability of your managers to process incoming calls already plays a role here, some manage to make 10% of calls to clients, some 30%, and some 50%.

There are some non-trivial nuances and common mistakes that business owners and administrators should know about.

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Effective and inexpensive club promotion.

To advertise a fitness club, it makes sense to use only low-frequency territorial queries (which will include the name of the nearest metro, or the street on which the club is located). The idea of ​​a proper fitness center advertising campaign is that clients will not come to you from far away, so it makes sense to focus only on nearby areas and streets. And here we must try to take first places in search results. It is necessary to understand that being in the top ten search results for low-frequency territorial queries is a weak result, the effect of which will be hardly noticeable.

Example search queries:

• Fitness center + street name
• Fitness club + nearest metro station.
• Gym + Street name
• Yoga + Nearest metro station
• Fitness + area

These are “cheap” requests that even the most modest sports establishment can afford to promote. Monthly promotion budgets can be reduced, and the site can be maintained in good positions for reasonable money with a high efficiency of the Internet advertising campaign.

There is an opinion that the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO) has decreased dramatically, but this is not true in fitness: it is weakly competitive, there will not be 10 clubs around your metro, which means they can all be placed on the first page - the question is who will hang higher. And if you get to 1-2 places in the search, then there are plenty of opportunities to stand out: far fewer eligibility rules are applied to search titles than in the same contextual advertising, which allows you to catch up with it in terms of click-through rate and effectiveness, even if the search is lower context. Play with numbers and capital letters, like this:

Recently, in addition to your neighbors’ fitness clubs, which will compete with you for search positions, stupid sites like zoon.ru, spravker.ru and others have also come into play. Yandex ranks them highly for a number of reasons, but if you are not too lazy to create quality content for yourself, then it is quite possible to overcome them.

Options for increasing fitness club attendance and their cost

Creation of a fitness center website.

Since only a small flow of regional visitors is not expected to visit the fitness club website, you should not underestimate those few who will come to visit you. Each of them can call and become your regular customer. Or maybe not call. At the stage of creating a website, it is better not to save money and invest “to the fullest” - this is done on average once every five years. The site must have a nice design, a detailed description of all services, programs and classes taking place in the club, a detailed map of “how to get there”, an up-to-date schedule of group programs, it is better to add pages of trainers and specialists conducting individual classes at your club. Descriptions of services should be optimized (diluted with territorial queries) in order to be ranked normally in search results, but you should not get carried away with optimization: first of all, all descriptions should answer frequently asked questions of your clients. Many customers save on the description of services, but you need to understand that if you don’t have a page about the pool on the club’s website, then for the request “swimming pool in Khimki” you won’t get to the first position, but it would bring you a lot of clients.

Since 2014, the creation of an adaptive design for a fitness club website has become very relevant - the share of mobile traffic in this topic is constantly growing, as of 2016 it is already almost 50%

It would be nice if you order a website from a company that also specializes in website promotion - at the creation stage many technical details necessary for further efficiency and reduction in the cost of promotion will be laid down. Although search engine optimization can be added at any time, it is not so difficult and expensive, but what should definitely be included at the creation stage: the presence and thoughtful arrangement of all components.

A complex and interesting question - to post prices on the fitness club website or not? On the one hand, by posting prices, you will lose some of your customer contacts and possible communications. This is of course bad. On the other hand, on the website of a fitness club you want to have module for purchasing fitness cards online. This task itself is implemented very simply, through any intermediary payment system such as Yandex.kassa, or directly through your bank - it’s a little more complicated, but there is no commission + a few more advantages. The main point is to try to create an online card store in such a way as not to lose possible customer requests. For your specific case and proposal, the website manufacturer or the company responsible for online advertising of your fitness club should offer a good solution, as a rule, this is possible.

You absolutely cannot limit yourself to a “business card site”- this definitely will not work for the promotion and search engine promotion of a fitness club: the site must answer all the questions that real clients ask the administrator or trainers of the club. As a rule, site programmers cannot know either the questions or the answers to them, so here the business owner is simply obliged to take the necessary participation, or oblige the administrator to do so. It is very welcome when trainers conducting group or individual classes also create a description of their sections for the site.

The situation when a business lives separately from the site negatively affects both the first and the second. This point is usually underestimated and in vain.

Another interesting question What is better for advertising a fitness club - so-called landing pages or a full-fledged website? Landing pages are quickly assembled from designers by companies specializing in contextual advertising. However! According to some studies, the conversion on such pages is no higher than the conversion on a website of average quality. All sorts of “buy now at a discount, 2 hours left” counters and other elements have become boring and have ceased to be an effective tool for generating client communications. Those. Having made a beautiful “landing page” for a fitness club website, you will have the opportunity to use it only for contextual advertising; if you make a good website, you will be able to receive clients from both contextual advertising and search engine promotion. Don’t believe if they tell you that there will be more conversion on the “landing page”, this is no longer true.

What should you not overpay for when creating?

The cost of creating a fitness club website greatly depends on whether you have one club or already have a network of fitness clubs. Moreover, if you are planning to open a second club soon, order a website initially with the network in mind: it may be more expensive, but remodeling an already finished one is an even worse option.

Large networks can afford to order an individual design and engine system on which the site will run, made in modern programming languages. It's hard to say how justified this is. If you look at the numbers of final conversions, then a website made on a free, common engine like wordpress or joomla will not work much worse than a custom-made monster. It will also look normal, all the necessary modules will be present, including adaptive design (mobile version), but the cost may be 50 thousand rubles. against 500 tr.

"Template design" is not always a bad thing. Russian business, unfortunately, has already become accustomed to the fact that this is something wretched, provided by the most budget-friendly RuNet developers. However, there is an alternative -. Believe me, in many cases, a fitness club website theme purchased from a professional will be better and more thoughtful than something custom-made for you by a local Russian expert. We are definitely sure that this is the best option in terms of price/quality ratio, and certainly the only correct option for starting online advertising for a single fitness club or a small developing network. You don’t need to beg a lot of money from the founders, and in the end you will get a more than high-quality product.

Promotion of a fitness club: important stages.

Make sure that your site is designed at the highest level: beautiful adaptive design, employee pages, service pages, news, reviews, ideally a video, photo gallery, location map, price request forms, a “we’ll call you back” tool - go around the sites of top chains, see for yourself what should be there: almost all fitness club chains in recent years they have improved their websites to a very good level.

Contextual advertising is a must have. For territorial requests it is cheap and effective. Requests for a fitness club go to the club page, requests for services go to the service pages. YAN mode and special placement of Yandex Direct. Don’t forget to count the cost of a client’s call/application, at least periodically.

Search engine promotion - if used correctly, can bring as many more clients as contextual advertising brings. But don’t try to push more requests than the site can - don’t take “not your” metro stations, even if customers sometimes come from them. The specifics of search algorithms are such that it will be of no use, but you will waste money. Don't take many requests - only your services, your geography. Search engine promotion for a fitness club should not cost much - this is a weakly competitive topic.

How corny this sounds - develop your website, demand additional improvements from the company running your advertising, something should be done at least once a quarter. If you already have enough visitors (hundreds), experiment: change banners, blocks, slogans on the site - look at the statistics for the result. A\B testing can help you.

There are a few more points that will provide the site with the necessary flow of visitors, and its owner with new clients:

Registration in thematic portals, they can be found by searching “Moscow fitness clubs”. When registering, you must provide as much information as possible; be sure to remember to include a link to the site. Such portals also have a regional division (usually by metro stations) and can work for you as additional search results positions for the required queries. Also, links from large portals will increase the site’s ranking in search results for queries, and even clients who have found a description of your club will call you directly from them. Thematic catalogs and portals are both free and paid. If the budget for promoting an Internet representative office is limited, it is recommended to extend the registration over time: postpone its registration to the next month, i.e. register monthly in 1-2 large thematic portals. For those who plan to stay in this business for a long time, these actions will definitely pay off. Needless to say: the club must be registered in all free catalogs and portals. You shouldn’t delay this; it’s better to register immediately after creating the site - the sooner it starts bringing you new clients, the better.

Location, location and location again!

Most likely, before opening your club, you carefully selected a location, focusing on the cost of renting space and the presence of potential clients working or living nearby.

Surprisingly, similar processes are happening on the Internet: clubs located close to the metro or in the center of a microdistrict are “in plain sight”, receiving bonuses from visitors, while those located further away will have a more difficult time with them.

However, for all fitness sites, a very important point is registration in Yandex.Maps: it is free and only gives a positive effect. If your club is located in close proximity to the metro, you are automatically included in the issuance of cards for the corresponding request “fitness club + metro”. As practice shows, cards eat up half of the traffic from search results for clubs and do not help increase sales from your club’s website. People find fitness clubs right on the map at the top of the search results and don’t look at anything below. If your site is among the lucky ones, it will already ensure a certain constant influx of visitors and clients. The list of fitness clubs on the map is formed according to the principle - those who are closer are higher, those who are too far from the requested location are not displayed at all. In this case it will be difficult, because... the majority of clients from the region will be distributed to other clubs, while yours can only fight for good places in search results, as well as get the maximum from portals and catalogues.

Specifics of the fitness club website.

In Yandex search results, some sites have the opportunity to add a special type of “snipet” descriptions, containing a short list of their services and programs. Fitness clubs are given the opportunity to add a short list of services and the cost of a subscription.

What's best to add here? It is better to add your competitive advantages (if any) either unique services or the most common ones - in this case you will get a small bonus when ranking your site in search results.

Network of fitness clubs.

Networked fitness centers have a big advantage over a single salon, because... the final budget for Internet advertising will be less with the same effectiveness. This is explained by the fact that the efforts spent on promoting one of the network addresses are partially counted by others, promoting their requests. If a club can dream of a target territorial traffic of 50-100 people per day, with expenses in the region of 4-8 thousand rubles per month. Then a network of 10 salons, spending 50-100 thousand rubles on site promotion, can receive 3000-8000 visitors per day (the numbers are not made up, but taken from real life). The flow of live clients will also increase proportionally, each of which costs the network significantly less than for a single club. Moreover, the likelihood increases that visitors who visit the site for general queries that are not tied to any metro or street will choose a club with an acceptable location. And the very promotion of queries such as “yoga”, “swimming pool”, “children’s fitness”, “shaping”, “cycling”, “fitness club”, etc. similar ones become possible for the network, thanks to the promotion of similar territorial ones. And even if you don’t promote these “general” requests, but simply post them on a well-promoted website, the materials themselves will begin to work with some effect. It is for this reason that when creating or modernizing a website, it is better not to limit yourself to a table of contents and structure created on a territorial basis: everyone is doing this now. It is worth duplicating the structure, creating sections on the services and programs of your club and with their detailed description.

All materials and sections of the fitness club network must be on one domain name. In this case, the effect of promotion will be multiplied, bringing in a maximum of clients.

In other words, with an increase in the number of network addresses, the effect of promotion at the same costs can be an order of magnitude higher than that of a personal club website. Needless to say, all the major chains of fitness clubs monitor their websites very well - they have long understood the benefits.

Who should you trust your website to?

Should you trust this to someone? Maybe it would be better to do all of the above yourself?

Is quite real! Websites are promoted not by gods, but by people like them. You just have to come to terms with the fact that it will take a VERY long time, since you will be trying to promote the site for the first time. If your level of computer skills is high enough, you are an advanced Internet user, then with a great desire you can understand the problem and do everything in a month or two of continuous work. It's unlikely to be faster. But then you will be able to perform a similar operation on the second site even better and in less time - this is called experience. In this case, useless, because You have only one site.

There is an alternative method: entrust site promotion to your “geek”(system administrator) if available. If a young man is naturally talented, he has every chance to figure it out and make a cool fitness club website for you, using . You are on a horse - the savings are huge. You risk never knowing how many clients the Internet can actually provide. But there is no need to be too upset here: 80% of sites are created in a similar way and do not work to their full potential - you will not be alone.

Third option: put the promotion on the shoulders of professionals. Undoubtedly, large companies will not be interested in promoting your website if the contract amount is about 8,000-10,000 rubles (and paying more will not be profitable for the salon owner), however, medium and small companies may well start promoting such a project. There is a return from classic promotion for search queries on a club website, but don’t lose control of the process! Require reports on advertising effectiveness: the cost of communication with the client. Don't pay money for air. It would be great if the company that contractors your online advertising also periodically improves your website and offers new modules: online payment, automatic call, etc. - if you find such a company, you are lucky!

How to choose a company? In fact, it is very difficult and fun at the same time: you can try to look the manager in the eyes and ask: “how will the promotion of my site go?” If the manager, without blinking an eye, describes at least 2/3 of all of the above, you can sign the contract.

A healthy lifestyle is a trend that is gaining momentum every year. A very useful fashion is to give up bad habits and develop healthy ones, engage in fitness and infect others with this movement. Everything that is trendy is sure to be reflected in business. We went to marketing analyst Maria Polyakova, who promotes several projects, including representatives of the fitness industry in Tyumen, and also leads an active and sports lifestyle.

Masha, tell us about your main project.

One of my clients now is a fitness club, which is located in the city center in an elite building: in a residential complex, but in a separate building. The total area is about 2 thousand square meters, more than 2,000 visitors. I have been working on this project since January of this year.

This is a fairly large and, at the same time, young fitness club (it is three years old). Now he is in a period of transition to a new level in everything: in marketing, in finance, in general consistency, in regulations, in promotion strategy, in building a clearer positioning.

Now management already knows who their audience is and understands what list of services they can provide - basic and additional. All this, experimentally worked out within the company, now needs to be recorded and looked at the distant horizons.

Do you work with them as a marketer?

Yes. My partner Alexandra Samoilovich and I have a joint project Marketing & Finance, where we work in a tight connection between marketing and finance. These are two inseparable things, but the vast majority of companies do not yet understand that these two areas do not live in isolation.

Why did you choose the fitness industry?

In principle, I am interested in the fitness industry. In addition, I do fitness myself, although I prefer training outdoors rather than in the gym. My profile is rock climbing, mountaineering and running.

My company has been engaged in research marketing since 2011. These have always been largely sociological and marketing studies. Gradually, sociology faded away, analytics and consulting were added, and then promotion appeared.

Mainly two types of clients apply for research: those who are expanding into regions, and those for whom something has gone wrong. Companies of the second type come like to a doctor: “We have this problem... Something happened... Why is this happening?” When we find out the reasons, the question arises of what to do about it, we find a solution.

This is how the service of strategic planning, promotion and strategic marketing was born. When you have extensive experience in the market, when you begin to conduct research, you inevitably become immersed in the specifics of the area under study. Friends are often surprised: “How do you know everything? We talk about heavy equipment - you expertly pick up the conversation, we talk about the agricultural complex - you talk about herbicides and combines, we touch on the construction materials market - you’re on topic there too!” Often your head is simply boiling from too much information.

If we talk about the fitness industry, then in the current rather difficult market conditions this area is developing well. With overall income falling in many areas of the economy, income in the fitness industry is growing. The growth rate has slowed, but has not stopped. There are several reasons for this: the fitness industry market in Russia is growing, it is quite young, and its penetration rate is low, especially in the regions. And another reason: when the vast majority of people are in a state of instability, at the slightest opportunity they begin to improve themselves as a product. With the general trend of a healthy lifestyle set by our president, with the high loyalty of the labor market to the younger and more active population, whether you want it or not, keeping in shape becomes one of life’s priorities.

Therefore, the fitness industry market is growing, it is attractive, and scales well. It’s interesting for me to see how he offers more and more new services and almost all of them are received with a bang.

Since you are actively involved in fitness, you didn’t have to dive in too much? You yourself are a representative of the target audience.

Yes, in this case, I immediately know what is valuable, useful and important to me as an internal client. When you see the picture both outside and inside, it becomes more complete.

Athlete, climber and simply beautiful Masha!

What are the features of promotion in the fitness industry? What should you pay attention to?

This is a service business. This is working with a client, with a person, but not with his primary desires and needs, but with his dream, intention.

This is both a simple and complex business. I help a person realize his dream. A person associates a lot in life with his appearance, health, and inner state of mind. The fitness industry interacts with all of this. It leads to the understanding that to achieve a dream you need to work hard and take gradual systematic steps. We can always “rip off the sleeves of the vest,” but this is of no use. I’m talking about those who buy the most expensive annual card, the most expensive fitness outfit, do three workouts and call it a day, they say, that’s it, their muscles hurt - “this is not for me.”

Or people want very quick results. But, as my grandmother said, “only cats are born quickly.”

There are many other nuances in this area.

Yes, fitness is a dream job. But it’s also fashionable, almost everyone wants to do it. But it’s not a fact that they are doing it. And here fitness needs to maintain a balance between, on the one hand, inaccessibility in terms of beauty, the final product (athletic physique: well-groomed girls and stately male athletes - for us, demigods who descended from Olympus), on the other hand, complete accessibility and openness, so that a person had a desire to come to the gym, start working out, and trust the trainer. It is in this contradictory combination that there must be balance.

Should those who have just started training be encouraged to exercise? And how does it work in the fitness business?

Previously, fitness managers thought that the main motivation was an element of additional sales within the club. Nowadays people are increasingly realizing that the key to success is a personal trainer. I would really like to be a personal trainer myself. This is interesting! So you set a task for a person: “So, Vasya, you need to run from here to lunch!” Vasya ran and ran and fell, his strength ran out. You think: “Hmm, I’m curious how it turned out... Apparently, it’s too much to begin with, we need to reduce the load” (laughs). Just a joke, of course. This is a very difficult and responsible job.

At the same time, a personal trainer does not allow you to sit still, he endlessly motivates, and keeps you within strict limits. This is exactly what many adults dream about today, realizing that without a competent mentor, results cannot be achieved. There are very few achievers who independently reach their goals. The rest are ready to pay money and spend time so that someone will “finish” them to the result.

It has been scientifically documented that it takes 21 regular repetitions to develop a habit - roughly speaking, 21 days. This is true, but as soon as you cross the three-week mark and stop repeating, you quickly return to the starting point. And 21 days of non-repetition also fixes the habit. The habit of doing nothing.

How does the fitness club you are promoting position itself?

This is a family fitness club. A new model that was launched long ago in America, Australia, and Europe. In Russia, it is just beginning to take root - mainly in megacities - and is represented by federal networks.

In small towns it is difficult, since this format requires that all family members receive the services they need. For example, my client has a children's development club, which is located in the same building, it provides both children's fitness services (certified trainers work) and developmental ones. I come as a mother with two children, work out for 2-2.5 hours in the gym, and during this time the children jumped and jumped, sat, thought, and drew.

Nowadays, there is no longer such a demand for just a children’s playroom, where you leave the child to self-employment under minimal supervision. Nowadays, parents want to make the most of not only their time, but also their child’s time. My client offers just such a convenient model.

Do you think that a fitness club should have a narrow niche?

In any case, you need to segment.

If we are talking about a premium club, then for a certain price it provides a list of services that suits its target audience. If these are low-cost clubs, which are usually located in shopping centers, in the local area of ​​residential areas, where there is no reception, fitness bar, massage, fitness testing and other goodies, where there is only a shower, then their own target audience goes there, and one target audience will be uncomfortable in the other’s club.

I am an opponent of discount promotions - when voting in rubles begins among competitors and dragging the client. This is complete nonsense, because at the level of a growing market you need to win new clients, and not pull ready-made ones from each other. Unfortunately, not everyone understands this. A premium club reduces prices, eroding the target audience, and those who do not appreciate the level of comfort, the qualifications of trainers, or the interior come to it. Or rather, he will appreciate it, but he will chronically not understand why he needs to pay for it. Gradually, the primary target audience is being squeezed out: the bank manager will not want to run on the next treadmill with his teller - such is the Russian mentality. And when the club returns prices - after all, comfort must be maintained - newly attracted clients begin to be indignant. In the end, they also leave. Unjustified discounts are a road to nowhere.

Playing with your target audience is like walking through a minefield.

Geolocation is also important, especially when talking about cities with a population of over a million. Your target audience is ranked based on where you are located. If it’s in a lake, then it’s clear that there are roaches and crucian carp. If in the sea, then there are bigger fish there.

What promotion channels work especially well in fitness clubs?

It depends on what stage of emergence and development the club is at.

If the club has just appeared, then for promotion you need to use all channels to notify the audience. Next, we look at what channels the target audience uses directly, and pay tribute to social networks.

There is a fitness club in Tyumen, which is segmented exclusively for a young audience - from 18 to 30 years old - and is promoted only through the VKontakte and Instagram communities. They are not advertised anywhere else. But they pumped up their group so well, they use all its capabilities so well that they don’t need other channels today.

How to organize a sales funnel in a newly opened fitness club? Where to begin?

We sell the client a dream and the understanding that we can bring him closer to this dream, this is the main task. Fitness is not a professional sport. Fitness is when you achieve something and are praised. And you achieve it if you treat your body with the utmost care, without setting any records. Professional sport is a test of the strength of the resources inherent in a person, his unique properties, and fitness is keeping the body in good shape without harm to health. This is the main value that should be highlighted in the sales of any fitness center.

To begin with, the client should be accepted as he first came: usually not in the best shape, with embarrassment in front of the mirror and others. And only then he needs to show what he can become, and convince him that on the path to his dream he will be accompanied, supported, encouraged, that the coach will be a watchful eye.

And this is more about psychology than physiology. Often, oddly enough, people come to a fitness club for psychological support. If you only knew how much and in what detail clients tell their trainers! I think coaches should be paid extra for psychoanalysis! :)

Not every coach is capable of this!

Those who are not capable quickly leave. Every fitness trainer is, first of all, a good psychologist, a good person - in principle, there cannot be bad people there.

Okay, so the trainer loves his client, works with him, improves him. But it also has the function of subsequent sales. Or should an administrator or manager do this?

It is the coach who offers many intra-club services to the client. And he must be taught intelligent sales so that he offers his client exactly what he considers necessary. You need to feel the fine line between the situation when a client trusts you, and when the client understands that they are starting to organize sales on his trust. It is very easy to step over this line and lose a client.

An individual approach and adequately selected loads for the client are the main task of a personal trainer.

Now in the relationship with the client there should be much more humanity and subtle mental connection than there was before.

Does the new generation of coaches understand this?

Specialists in any field undergo natural selection. If a young trainer decides that his calling is to make other people more beautiful, better and stronger, and begins to work without trying to learn anything additional (at least the same interaction with the client), his road in the fitness industry is short. It will quickly cease to be of interest to clients, which means the fitness club will not need it either.

A trainer must constantly learn, develop, be in trend, know new tricks that the fitness industry is quite dynamically producing. The trainer should offer his client to know more about new trends than other people, offer to be in this very trend.

The state of expertise in a person is always relevant.

Speaking of promotion, we will not escape Internet marketing. What to rely on in fitness: social networks, website, fitness blog?

If we are talking about promoting a personal trainer and he has something to write about, then it is necessary to do so.

If we are talking about promoting a fitness club, then its presentation on social networks should be as interesting as possible. Let it be videos, announcements of events and subsequent reports about them, “bomb” photographs, news that addresses directly the representative of the target audience. It is necessary to conduct a personal dialogue with each user.

In my feed there is a representative of the “workout” fitness direction, Frank Medrano, he has developed a huge network of fitness clubs where people with disabilities work out. Frank shows a video in which 180-pound people come to training, and shows how they work out, how hard it is for them, how they do not give up. Or how a wheelchair user does push-ups with a multi-kilogram chain around his neck. Along with the stroller. There is no glamor in all this, you see the real, alive and very cool. Or the famous CT Fletcher “Plush Beard” - just that version of a motivating trainer with a sharp word and kicking, whose videos on YouTube break records in terms of the number of views. You immediately get into it. You no longer feel embarrassed in front of the fitness room, you understand that the same living people who strive for their dreams will come there.

Fitness promotion should be based on positivity, on broadcasting the energy of burning eyes. Fitness always means a lot of energy. Even static yoga is energetic, there’s just a charge inside.

A person comes to purchasing an annual card through emotions; it is an irrational purchase. And the website of a fitness center must be a sales tool; the client must go to it with an already made decision to buy the club’s services. There should be the most convenient navigation so that the client can quickly purchase a card, sign up for an excursion to the club, create a card constructor from the conditions that interest him, calculate his body mass index - all these features need to be provided. The client’s contact with the club through applications and instant messengers should be as short and simple as possible.

Tell us more about the tricks that a fitness club can use to attract and retain customers.

For example, gamification in a club, when a client is awarded points. But I am in favor of it being based on the client’s results, on additional services. And a fitness club should go beyond the club with its clients and travel.

Let's say I live in Tyumen and visit a certain fitness club. And so I came to Moscow - and I’ll stay at the hotel where my fitness club has a discount. Or my club recommends me hotels with an excellent gym and a cool pool.

A fitness club builds the infrastructure of its client’s existence. He is a friend.

You need to develop a partner network, carefully select partners for your target audience - this is very cool both for club marketing and for the partners themselves. Different areas, for example, HoReCa and fitness, come into contact, which means that a common client will certainly be at the point of contact. The same goes for vacations and shopping.

Let's talk about small fitness projects: small centers or studios. What are their features of functioning and promotion?

Now this is a new trend - boutique fitness clubs.

In Tyumen, for example, we have a cycle club. This is the same micro business that needs marketing micro formats. Their implementation is even simpler. There are not too many clients there and it is easier to make a person’s stay in the club as comfortable as possible, to provide that very infrastructure of life.

I think that there will be more such formats, since the vast majority of clients do not really need a huge fitness center with its prohibitive number of services. In small studios, a special microclimate is formed, you can organize master classes, attract healthy food, natural cosmetics, sportswear lines of the local market - all this is not put on an industrial footing, and at this level you can put together a good affiliate program.

You are planning new projects in Sochi. Are they related to fitness? And why Sochi?

I am planning to move to Sochi.

Today, the Krasnodar Territory, in particular, the Black Sea coast, has excellent infrastructure and serious resources in terms of the resort business, organizing outdoor business events, but there is no saturation as such. The very pronounced seasonality today should be blurred by such events, and now this area is gaining momentum. A very dense network of large-scale events: Formula 1, a football championship, an International Youth Festival is planned in the fall, which will be attended by a large number of world-class personalities, including Elon Musk. In this regard, Sochi is developing very rapidly, but it is necessary to attract Russians, and not only for a banal resort vacation, but also for other types of activities.

I will be organizing business events using the resources of the Black Sea coast and Krasnaya Polyana, organizing educational and fitness tours. This is all what I want and know how to do, which brings me incredible pleasure. I think that we will sound in unison with Sochi.

Do you have any technology for implementing plans?

Of course, there is production technology. I really like how Natalia Frankel and Dmitry Rumyantsev work in this direction, and I have my own extensive experience in organizing events.

Are there any specifics to promoting a fitness trend in Sochi?

The specificity is that the Olympic legacy inherited by the resort city is a very big responsibility. Now the city has a huge Olympic park, amazing infrastructure, and Sochi residents simply have to immerse themselves in a sports-active state, stay in it and set an example for the rest of the country. The bar is set high, and the mentality of local residents needs to be brought up to it.

According to the mayor of Sochi, over the past two to three years, about two hundred thousand people have moved to the Black Sea coast for permanent residence, and the city population has almost doubled. Now this population needs to be healed, brought into a state of love for an active lifestyle, sports, and here there is absolutely everything for a healthy lifestyle to spread by leaps and bounds. Therefore, the fitness industry should hold as many events here as possible, both local and large-scale, and invite as many people leading an active lifestyle as possible.

Thank you, Maria, for the cheerful interview, interesting cases and advice. Are there any fitness project managers among our subscribers? Share the features of your business, tell us how you are doing with promotion.

Interviewed by Nadezhda Merkusheva