One of the most important aspects of starting a fitness business is marketing.

If nobody knows you exist, you’ll be closing the doors in no time at all.

In the beginning you probably won’t have many clients. Some fitness professionals manage to create a following while working for someone else and those clients will follow if he opens his own facility but it’s rarely an adequate number to pay the bills and make a profit.

A monthly budget should be set aside for marketing for at least your first year of business and factored into your startup costs. You should also concentrate on targeting your advertising towards the market you wish to attract, so it’s going to take some research to discover where you will get the most bang for your advertising buck.

It’s also expedient to monitor the responses you get from all your marketing campaigns. If you’re using newspapers or magazines including a coupon from which you can monitor the source will be very helpful. Groupons and coupons that can be used with smart phones are gaining rapidly in popularity.

Of course you will probably start a FaceBook page and a blog for your fitness business and you can also code any coupons and special offers accordingly. The best way to get attract new members initially will be by offering freebies and coupons.

Now, let’s say you’re a few months down the road and you have a growing clientele, how can you use your new clients to generate business for you and why should you?

 

 

Fitness Boot Camp Referral Generation

The best and most inexpensive ways to get fitness leads is definitely word of mouth advertising. That means you should strive to treat all of your clients as individuals, work with each of them so they can achieve their fitness or weight loss goals and go one step further than any local competitors you may have.

Marketing a fitness boot camp by going the extra mile and building relationships with your clients will ensure that they all talk about your business positively, especially when they look in the mirror and see results. Their friends and family will also notice the difference, making boot camp referral generation easy.

Depending where you want to take your business and how many boot camp sessions you want to run each week you may find places fill up quickly. Having people who know each other within sessions can mean members achieve even better results because a competitive element comes into play.

Make sure your clients are aware of your FaceBook page and your blog’s URL and encourage them to participate and post comments – even more opportunities for marketing a fitness boot camp.

Reward Systems

Fitness referral generation can be greatly increased by offering incentives. In fact a reward or incentive system should be set up so when clients achieve preset goals along their weight loss/fitness programs they are rewarded. This keeps clients striving to achieve their goals and gives them a sense of achievement.

Rewarding clients well for bringing in new members is a must, and it will be up to you to decide how you do that.  You should always remember how much it would cost to attract a new member by conventional methods. Hypothetically if you spent $1000 a month on advertising when you first started your business and got 5 new clients, they each cost you $200 – but I hope your efforts were better than that!

But you see what I’m saying, don’t give someone a $10 tee shirt for bringing in a client who pays a year in advance. It’s not worth her trouble and she’ll probably tell others you’re a tight-fisted SOB.

Giving a member who brings in a new client who pays in advance for a year should be rewarded with something valuable, perhaps a free additional month’s membership.  The more substantial the rewards you offer, the harder people will strive to have their friends, colleagues and family join up.

I’ve met many fitness boot camp owners who didn’t have to spend anything on advertising after their initial first few months - their members do all the marketing that’s needed by becoming human billboards.

Understand that you will always have to keep your standard of service extremely high and keep doing your utmost to help every member, old or new, to achieve his or her individual goals. So you must implement an efficient system to record members’ progress and goals, and retrieve that information quickly.

Building and maintaining personal relationships with all your members is vital to healthy fitness boot camp referral generation.

 

 

 

This entry was posted on March 28, 2013 at 4:55 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Boot Camp Business, Boot Camp Marketing, Boot Camp Strategies, Fitness Marketing, Group Personal Training Strategies, Personal Training Business by Steve Hochman | 2 Comments