How Customer Personas Strengthen Fitness Marketing

At the start of every year, millions people vow to get in shape. At one time, that might have meant starting a diet or taking up jogging. 

But today, there have never been more fitness options. Some people crave the camaraderie and accountability of fitness classes. Others want the solitude of a treadmill at the gym or the guidance of a personal trainer. Still others seek exciting workout options, like bouldering or paddleboarding. 

For fitness businesses, connecting with customers requires marketing that cuts through the noise. That's where fitness marketing comes in. This form of digital marketing helps you tell your story to attract the right audience.

Because exercise is so personal, customer personas should be a core part of your strategy. In this article, we'll look at the top three ways customer personas enhance fitness marketing:

1. Segmenting your audience
2. Engaging potential customers through remarketing
3. Analyzing progress over time

Let's take a closer look.

Fitness Marketing Tip #1: Use Customer Personas to Segment Your Audience

First, what is a customer persona? In a nutshell, customer personas help you visualize specific groups within your audience. 

These groups might have different reasons for seeking fitness services. If you can understand their motivations, you can craft more effective marketing campaigns. 

For example, let's say you run a gym that offers a range of weights and machines. This year, you're expanding into personal training and classes. Your audience might include personas such as:

• Sally Sometimes: She's a trail runner who comes into the gym when it's raining.
• Weight Loss William: His goal is to find fun workouts that support his weight loss goals.
• Timid Tammy: She's never gone to the gym before, so she's nervous about navigating the machines.
• Newcomer Nate: He's an avid gym-goer, but recently moved to the area.
• Friendly Frida: She comes to the gym to socialize with friends and neighbors.

You'll need a slightly different strategy to reach each of these customers. Once you develop customer personas, you can market services that speak to their preferences and challenges.

For example, maybe Friendly Frida would enjoy a monthly happy hour at the gym. Sally Sometimes might find a group trail run fun. Or Timid Tammy might feel more confident after a new member event where instructors demonstrate all the machines.

Overall, fitness marketing is more effective if it's personalized to specific audience segments.

Fitness Marketing Tip #2: Use Remarketing to Re-Engage Customers

When it comes to fitness marketing, remarketing can be a powerful tactic for building brand awareness. You can use remarketing to remind past website visitors of your brand as they surf the web. 

There are two main types of remarketing campaigns:

• Standard remarketing
• Dynamic remarketing

With standard remarketing, customers who visit your website can receive general advertisements. These ads will appear on Google and its partner sites, or on social media.

With dynamic remarketing, customers will receive ads based on specific products or pages they've viewed. Customer personas take dynamic remarketing to the next level by serving more personalized ad campaigns.  

Like SEO automation, remarketing is a powerful way to make sure your fitness marketing works smarter—not harder. With time, this can help your customers overcome procrastination or reluctance to double down on fitness.

Fitness Marketing Tip #3: Use CRM Software to Analyze Progress Over Time

Too often, businesses invest time in creating customer personas—only to forget about them. After all, customer personas can seem abstract. Consistently allowing customer personas to guide your marketing strategy is no easy feat.

That's where CRM software comes in. This tool helps you manage complex customer relationships. The key benefits include:

• Sending automated email marketing campaigns
• Tracking where leads are originating
• Improving staff collaboration by creating a shared digital workspace
• Segmenting your audience
• Gathering advanced data in a central contact hub
• Applying analytics to marketing campaigns

The possibilities CRM software unlocks for fitness marketing are virtually endless.

To better understand how CRM software can help your business, let's consider an example. You decide to target a specific market segment, such as people who enjoy yoga. Next, you launch a social media campaign about a new yoga event you're hosting. As potential customers opt into learning more on your website, you can track conversions and measure the campaign's effectiveness. 

After the event, you create an automated email marketing campaign for participants. They'll receive a series of emails inviting them to sign up for yoga classes. After a set period of time, you generate an analytics report. The report tells you how many people ultimately signed up for yoga classes. It's so successful that you decide to host more yoga events!

Without CRM software, evaluating this complex process would be arduous. You might find yourself poring over spreadsheets and second-guessing your math.

But with CRM software, marketing to a customer persona such as yoga enthusiasts is as simple as a few clicks. Best of all, you'll know that it's driving real revenue. 

Want to help more potential customers discover your fitness business? Download GoSite's free eGuide to learn five steps for getting started!