Growth hacking and creative marketing ideas for fitness industry
Lululemon invented their own ambassador program by leveraging local fitness and yoga coaches for promoting Lulu’s product while helping them grow their business at the same time. This symbiotic relationship worked out tremendously for hyper-local markets (wherever the Lululemon retail stores opened).
Sergio Lopez
Crunch Gym create videos that serve as quick tips for those who are looking to add to their gym workout routine and highlight their personal training program. Personal training is an add-on to the membership fee so this free information sharing is a great bonus for those who can’t afford the add-on or are still undecided on it.
Sergio Lopez
8fit, a nutrition app company, puts together customized workout and meal plans. The brand appeals to a wide range of people: travelers, beginner fitness enthusiasts and healthy eaters. Their approach is a little different between Instagram and Pinterest but it’s clear that image-forward is the way to go for their marketing strategy.
Sergio Lopez
Does growth hacking apply to Fitness? Can the Fitness industry actually implement a growth methodology and active experimentation framework?
Growth hacking is a relatively new focus in the marketing field, which focuses on achieving as much company growth as possible. The goal of its extremely effective methodology is to quickly test ideas that can improve the customer experience before investing a lot of resources, copy and expand ideas that can work, and modify or abandon those that don’t work.
In order to apply growth hacking to our fitness business we should start by studying which metrics best measure growth. The key metrics should always be the ones that best deliver growth to your fitness company, like increasing the number of memberships per month, having new partnerships or lowering the churn rate.
Once we know which metrics are the most important ones, it is time to set our goals. Goals should be SMART, and these are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. So what can we do to improve the course of our business? How can we increase 20% the benefits of upselling complementary products and premium packs in the next 3 months? What kind of complementary products can we offer to our customers and what price should we put on them?
When we already know what brings us growth, which KPIs to focus on and also, what are the SMART goals associated with them, it is time to design or ideate growth drivers. Growth drivers are hypothetical ways to achieve our goals, and we will be validating or rejecting them through small campaigns, called experiments.
Knowing your ideal audience is a great way to start, and reaching your ideal audience has never been easier, but when you stand in front of them, you really need to know what to market to them. Just like when exercising, you need to have a goal.
Now, understanding what works for your gym and what doesn´t, has a lot to do with the type of gym you own. Marketing and positioning for a CrossFit box is completely different from a hardcore bodybuilding gym or planet fitness. Knowing your target audience and what makes you stand out from the competition will help you use the correct vocabulary when marketing. Even after you have defined your target audience and selected a channel (social media, search advertising, mobile app or blog), you need to keep making new experiments. How can we market your gym and what is the best way to do it? How do you make your clients click on your ads, promotions, offers or blog posts? This is something to test!
Nutrition and health are one of the most difficult aspects in gym life! Maybe we can ask an external company to help us make meal plans for our clients in order to make a premium gym membership.
Apart from this, protein, creatine, omega 3 and other supplements are currently highly sought after products within workouts, is there any way to exploit this in our favor? Is it beneficial for us to invest in these types of products? And if so, which ones should we focus on?
On the other hand, running competitions and courses may be the best way in order to differentiate your brand, but how can we advertise it? Can fitness influencers be, for example, an advertising tool for these competitions?
And what kind of athletes would be interested in participating? Should they be free competitions? Maybe we could count on a prize, without experiencing it there is no way to know it.
Besides, referrals may be an opportunity to attract friends or family of your current clients. Or could a free trial day be the key to introducing new potential customers to our business?
All these and more questions are what we have to answer to find the right marketing strategy, answering them from small tests that allow us to have a global vision of the most important thing: What can make us GROW.
Finally, learning. Learnings are essential to document in order to know what worked in the past and what to avoid repeating. You should have a regular feedback cycle and track your learnings consistently.
Want to know more about how to apply growth hacking to your Fitness business? Sign up for Hypertry and ask for a one to one session!
