People Person Persona
Are there gym member personas that describe the typical groups of members of your fitness center? In marketing, a persona is a profile of the ideal customer for your products or services. You create them as character sketches of the consumers or businesses most likely to benefit from your fitness center.
Well-researched customer personas will also help you grow your membership and profit margin by describing the patrons who are right for your business goals. Professional marketers who specialize in inbound marketing strategy use as many personas as required to define the buyers for their products and services.
Personas Help Your Ideal Members Find You
Knowing the characteristics of your customers is one of the pillars of marketing. You have something to give customers in return for monthly memberships and premium payments. You are attempting to match your skills and facilities to the consumers who will get the most out of it and pay you the greatest return on your investment.
Why would you bother developing personas, rather than just taking all comers? Well, a careful analysis of your membership accounts may reveal that some personas contribute more to your return on investment than others. If you find that one group of members is more profitable for you and another is less profitable, you may wish to refocus your fitness club marketing to attract the former and not the latter.
How To Conduct Gym Member Persona Research
There are many different resources to help you develop informed fictional profiles of your ideal gym members. You can interview willing members, send out surveys by email using platforms such as SurveyMonkey.com. Of course, if you are a Gym Insight club owner, our membership and club management software helps you to see the big picture.
Background – Develop the background of a typical member. You may find that different groups cluster around some feature of your gym. For example, if you have a pool and tanning beds there may be those members that use those features of your club alone.
Other members might thrive on the camaraderie of attending spinning classes or some other group activity. It’s OK to have as many personas as there are motivations to work out in your facility.
Demographics – Some of the factors that influence the appeal your club holds might reflect the membership. For example, if you live in a community with a large special population, such as active seniors. It could be that your location is in a high-income community, which should factor into the personas you create.
Identifiers – Once you have outlined suitable personas based on interviews and other research, think about the behaviors and other identifiers of your personas. For example, you may notice a high-income executive persona tends to have an assistant who screens their calls. This knowledge should factor into your strategies for reaching out to members who fit that persona.
Goals – Make an appraisal of the goals and objectives of each persona. Think about the relationship between persona goals and the value proposition that your business delivers best. Of the different customer types you discover, the ones that have goals that align with the goals of your business are the ones that should become your gym membership personas.
Challenges – what are the obstacles that your members typically face in their pursuit of fitness? And what they believe blocks them from achieving their goals.
How to help – Get the opinions of real members and think back on past interactions with customers; what sort of things can you offer to help them reach their goals?
Common objections – List the typical objections that you can expect from particular personas. Your high-income member who enjoys the competitive spirit of group activities will be much less price sensitive than the student with a part-time job who uses the weight room at three in the morning. From your experience, what objections would you expect from each of these personas?
Real quotes from customers – What sort of things do your members say about any and all of the above? Be alert in your research for memorable member quotes that sum up the needs and pain points of particular personas.
Above all, the personas that you develop should focus on groups that need your services. What you want to establish is who has the need for your products and services and then market to those segments.
A Focus For Your Fitness Club Marketing
Once you have developed a persona or personas to your satisfaction, they become the guiding beacon for your marketing. Personas help you to understand the keyword phrases to rank on fitness industry SERPs for Google and Bing. Once you know the keywords, you will have an easier time developing a strategy for blogging and for content you can create for email marketing.
If you do the first things first, it’s simpler to follow up with the valuable marketing that will help to support and grow your business. If the concept of creating personas is new to you, read up on the topic with marketing blogs.
As an exercise, creating accurate personas might give you some excellent insights into which members grow your business and where you can find more of them. So, set aside a little time for marketing and create a few gym member personas for your club and just see where it takes your fitness club marketing from there.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. 6 Gym Business Tips To Build Fitness Center SEO Muscle. August 28, 2017. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4596-6-gym-business-tips-to-build-fitness-center-seo-muscle/ (accessed September 9, 2017).
-. Finding Your Retention Rate and Why It Matters. March 22, 2016. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3741-finding-your-retention-rate-and-why-it-matters/ (accessed March 29, 2016).
Vaughen, Pamela. How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business. May 28, 2015. https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33491/everything-marketers-need-to-research-create-detailed-buyer-personas-template.aspx (accessed September 9, 2017).