To ensure your business thrives in the sometimes-hostile territory of the fitness and health industry, you need to grow your membership base using finely tuned digital marketing.

Digital marketing can cut through the chatter, making sure you’re leveraging what you have by analyzing advertising data and weekly outcomes, while at the same time capturing prospective customers, even if they’re just dropping by your website.

There are tons of free platforms on the web to help you collect, understand and use your data to hone your marketing strategy. With clear marketing goals, a little pre-planning, meticulous reporting and tenacity, you’ll see an enormous surge in membership and sales.

Here’s how to make the best use of the marketing tools at your fingertips.

Planning: A clear roadmap increases your chance for success

The health and wellness industry is booming; in 2019, the IHRSA Global Report stated that the industry made $94 billion, and is not slowing down anytime soon. This is the result of decades of growing interest as well as the efficacy of digital marketing.

You have to go into your digital marketing campaign with a clear plan mapped out before you. The more you can accomplish and set up before the initial push of marketing and rigorous tracking, the better your results will be.

To start, establish clear goals around costs for clients to sign on for a new membership. Respond to all inquiries in a timely manner and install thorough tagging and tracking on all digital communications.

When you can gather data about who is visiting your site and how they found your fitness or health business, whether it’s a gym or a barre studio, you can duplicate the auspicious conditions for swelling success.

Marketing: Turn your creative team loose on social media

Once you’ve started your push for more members, unleash the creatives on your team. With expert use of figurative language and imagery, and all the advertising acumen they can muster, have them create a series of new campaign images and slogans for your business, ready to splash all over the appropriate social media platforms.

Once you’ve created some nifty images, shift much of the marketing pressure onto your primary media parents – Facebook, Instagram, and Google. These services are free, and they multiply your reach immeasurably.

These social media behemoths implement data analysis tools, and your fitness health company should make the most of them. With tracking capabilities and complex algorithm guiding advertising, the companies have a massive amount of financial and marketing clout; you can siphon a small slice of this clout for your own success.

Put to proper use, Facebook and Instagram’s marketing tools can help you build your audience based on weight loss, performance, and an interest in healthy lifestyles. But it’s not just the macro aspect of larger social media platforms, you also have to think about micro perspectives.

Using mapping and geo-targeting, you can increase advertisements in the most auspicious, high traffic areas around your health and fitness brick-and-mortar. This way, your company will use the best of traditional, tried-and-true techniques as well as the most cutting-edge technology.

As with every other aspect of your digital marketing plan, measure everything and get weekly reports from each department.

Reporting: Use the data to inform key decisions

You need a few different channels for your cost revenue, cost per click, download, email, appointment, and, especially, a new member. Once you identify each of these channels, auto populate an Excel worksheet that can be accessed by everyone on the campaign. If your new marketing strategies are going to bring swelling membership ranks, all your staff needs to be apprised of your expectations.

Once you understand where and when you’re gaining interest and potential customers, you can use these measurements to boost presence, but also to cut down presence in areas where you haven’t been gaining clicks. Cut out any losing ads to trim unnecessary costs.

Database: Keep track of customers and prospects

With some tweaks to your existing marketing strategies and some focused and detailed analytics, you will start to see your database fields grow very quickly. And it’s not just members that you’re after, but also any prospects who hit the download button on your website.

You can use the information that you gather for phone outreach, or other engagements. Invite any perspectives to all gym freebies. Free mini-classes, meet-and-greets or membership deals are a great way to attract extra eyes and even more clicks.

The LTV (Life-Time Value) model is an easy way to calculate how beneficial a single customer can be to your fitness health business over their entire lifetime. This is most efficacious with businesses that base their bottom lines on subscription services like memberships.

For an easy way to calculate the LTV of a new customer, multiply your monthly payment by your churn rate, which is the number of customers you lose each month. If your subscription is $500 per month and you lose customers at a rate of 5%, then your LTV model is $10,000. Translated, a new customer’s “lifetime” is about 20 months.

Good plan + hard work makes for a successful campaign

Implementation is always the difficult part of any successful marketing scheme. It’s always easy to dream up initiatives in the boardroom, but the hard work has to be done to see any real results.

With rigorous tracking and superb attention to detail, you can use digital marketing to swell your customers. Make sure to grab captures of anything you can and divert the information into the appropriate fields of an Excel worksheet, available to everyone, so that weekly and monthly reports are easy.