Businesses Built On Fitness Certification Paper Fitness certifications are essential in the gym industry. The qualifications you hold are the frameworks that tie this people-intensive profession together. Earning additional personal trainer certifications will help you grow the business. Helping your trainers get new qualifications is a perk that helps them be confident of a future career as well as keeping your company on track. If you already work in the fitness profession, this is probably so obvious you may not even think about it much. So, if you are just exploring how you can own a business in fitness and [...]
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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 [...]
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What Does Mobile Mean For Fitness? The latest trends in mobile apps for fitness and healthcare are heading toward an exciting destination. Mobile devices are everywhere, and it's amazing what you see when you observe at any gathering of human beings these days. Half or more of any group seem more involved with the devices in their hands than the world around them. So, what are the ramifications of this behavior for fitness centers and health clubs? It's About Millennials And What Controls The Lives Of Consumers As a gym business owner, you always need to look to the future [...]
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Boost Your Search Engine Results Page Position A search engine optimization or SEO strategy that gets the highest possible ranking on Google or Bing is one way to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Even a simple presence on the Web is something that you can tweak to resonate with the consumers that you want as members. The Search Engine Journal Website had an excellent post about boosting the search visibility of restaurants; I want to sum that up for gym businesses because what applies there also works in the fitness industry too, but first, a little background. Search Engines [...]
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It's not about having the most technology, but rather the right equipment that is going to help you run your small gym business most efficiently. By running your club resourcefully, you'll get into profit sooner and make the quality of your offerings better. Technology is evolving so rapidly now that you can check in every six months and find new solutions for just about everything. The hazard of occasional check-ins is that you might have missed something in the months in between. The right technology for small gym businesses is that which disappears into the background, allowing you to focus [...]
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How Much Old School Is Too Much? There is a certain romance to the idea of a hardcore backstreet gym where you find the driven athletes and bodybuilders. One that's as run down on the inside as it is on the outside. You can imagine the grisly old owner-slash-coach taking payments in cash and keeping accounts in his head. Only Hollywood writers and Elmore Leonard could get away with this idea of a seedy and decrepit shed. The reality is that the club industry is hyper-competitive and if you want to attract the type of consumers who are committed to [...]
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How Do You Connect With Prospective Members? Across all of the activities that you organize to market your gym business, do you know what the critical touchpoints are in the structure of your membership marketing and management process? Touchpoints are the events and situations that define how you monitor and measure the customer journey that your members experience throughout their customer lifecycles. Converting Lookers Into Loyal Members When a prospect walks into your facility and asks to get more information it is probably not a spontaneous impulse that brought them to that point; they most likely had been thinking about [...]
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Crank Down Sale Costs To Maximize Gym Membership Revenues Selling more gym memberships is a good thing in principle, but do you know how much it costs you to get that sale? There are two parts of the expense required to generate revenue in any business, the cost of sale and overhead cost. Those costs you can attribute to making each sale and everything else, which you pay to vendors, but which you cannot assign to a particular transaction. One of the great features of the fitness business is that to bring members on board you do not need to [...]
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Predicting The Unpredictable As we hit mid-year in 2017, I'd like to touch on a few points about where the fitness business is going. You just need to look at the news to wonder if things will be unpredictable. I think we have reached a time in which you must be the certainty. By that I mean it is up to fitness entrepreneurs and gym business owners to have the discipline and do the things that make your world a little more stable. Preparing For The Future That Is Next Year The days when you would set up and open [...]
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New gym memberships make owners and managers feel great, no doubt! But it's even better if you can hold on to the old memberships longer. Reducing your rate of club turnover and increasing the customer lifecycle are critical practices in building successful fitness businesses. Here on the Gym Insight Blog, I have made the point many times before that retention matters as much as sales. But getting these numbers right is so important that it doesn't hurt to dive into retention and selling gym memberships once again. If you structure your sales and onboarding process well, saying "no" at the [...]
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Blockchain? Bitcoin? Ether-what? In my head, I hear you say, "What does this cryptocurrency stuff have to do with the gym business and my fitness club?" Well, it turns out that the robust technology behind these new things is useful for many different industries, including fitness. Technology is hitting the fitness industry as hard as any other business vertical. Here at the Gym Insight Blog, I've been trying to keep up and inform readers about what's new and what's likely to be coming along soon. So, considering the excitement about cryptocurrencies lately, I want to highlight it here too. Another [...]
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Podcasting Revisited For 2017 Podcasting is a topic that I think is worth revisiting. So, this is an update to a classic Gym Insight blog post, with more good stuff for gym owners. Through podcasts, you can discover insights for gym owners, stay current with issues in fitness, business management, and any other topics that might help you keep up with ideas and opportunities. Producing a podcast is hard to do but don't ignore a fantastic opportunity for fitness professionals if you have something to say, just because of a little hard work. Listening: A List Of Noteworthy Podcasts In [...]
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Putting your employees and representatives in sharp uniforms is one of the most fundamental ways to put a professional face on your fitness center operation, studio, or small gym business. There is a whole range of reasons to put your staffers in uniforms, and the key features are the associations that tie it all together. Branding By Association Members want to know who is in charge - Some common sense guidelines apply to uniforms in any business. Successful branding is about putting all of your visual and written material in one marketing strategy framework. The obvious factors include things like [...]
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When you work very hard to build something significant, and someone makes what sounds like an unjustified remark, it hurts. If you don't restrain yourself from attacking it can turn into a circus in all the wrong ways. Ever see a minor complaint turn into a public relations disaster? It seems like it happens all the time these days and companies still miss opportunities to turn customer griping into chances to amaze larger audiences. Negative Reviews Can Make Your Service Better When someone makes a complaint in public or gives you a bad review, it's going out to the whole [...]
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To Sprout Roots Is The Essence Of Transformative Change What got you to where you are now will not necessarily get you where you need to go; this is a lesson that startups in fitness and every other business sector continuously relearn through firsthand experience. An oak tree is entirely different from an acorn; it has to make some huge transformations to become such a great tree. So, you started a gym, and you have members, you pay your bills, your home mortgage, and usually eat two or more meals a day. However, you realize that you are going to [...]
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