It's a well-known fact that in all cases of gym ownership, brand development requires the constant execution of unique marketing campaigns to keep your place of fitness top of mind for members new and old. The vast majority of CrossFit etc affiliates will invest endless hours testing the most efficient way to advertise in order to keep their gym full, while adjusting for the natural cycle of membership turnover. Important daily marketing habits, like event promotions and blog writing, will elude many gym owners because they are busy working IN the business. Even regular social media posting can be a pain in the rear! Then again, is a constant focus on brand exposure something gym owners really need to practice anyway? If you keep your membership happy, you should have a foundation from which to spread a constant stream of viral word-of-mouth.
All things considered, that assumption may not be the silver bullet you would imagine.
Attention to producing a regular stream of marketing campaigns is just as important to your business profitability as perfecting your lifting posture, and with health improvement resolutions fast approaching now is the perfect time to begin treating customer retention with the same appreciation.
Gym rats everywhere love to rally around the culture of their place of fitness. When we miss a session, it’s easy to question our return: "Was all this soreness worth it?" "Do I have enough time to do the workout today?" "Was I slowing the group down because I couldn’t make the lift?" It’s easy to talk ourselves out of a good thing. But when the membership feels connected around a common goal, what happens? Attendance improves. That’s where a marketing medium like stickers comes in. The answer to group cohesion through smart marketing is a simple one: Creating culture shouldn’t require a bunch of heavy lifting. Now that we've fixed our perception of what it takes to keep your market coming back, lets jump to tapping the power of word-of-mouth through stickers.
No matter how hard we try, losing our grip on maintaining a constant stream of market messaging around how great a regular workout schedule is for our athletes is inevitable. On a Monday, we may become particularly inspired to schedule a series of social media posts, but as the week wears on, challenges of day-to-day operations have a way of creating a breakdown in execution. The enthusiasm that drove you to spend time authoring content about your brand early in the week wanes as other responsibilities take priority. We get sloppy, and might even forget an upcoming holiday that would provide a perfect opportunity to speak to our customer base. We might even send out a hasty email campaign, but the last-ditch effort falls short of capturing our open-rate goals. Planning problems like these are just as common as the palpable energy drop in the room when you first announce a burpee marathon. Tackling these shortfalls by finding solutions that provide more crowdsourced execution is always preferred, and that’s where your inspired membership comes in.
So how exactly do we share marketing responsibility? As fitness instructors and business owners, we can empower our customers to spread the word with custom branded stickers. And if we really want to go the extra mile, we can encourage members to share pictures of the stickers via their social media outlet of choice.
Gym owners, don’t be fooled - you play an integral part in engaging your community in the activity of placing stickers for greater brand exposure. Your influence can activate an entire tribe of brand evangelists by reminding them to help you do something unique with stickers each week. They can be the force that takes your Crossfit gym to the next level with creative ways of using the grassroots marketing power of this sticky substrate. Stickers are a simple way to overcome the distractions of your weekly business operations by placing distribution in the hands of your fitness community.
Marketing gurus constantly bombard us with a complicated list of publishing schedules and flashy tools. But getting a real ROI, at the end of the day, comes down to doing the basics well and consistently. It's high time we turn the spotlight once again to tried-and-true modes of brand representation using the tangible nature of the sticker. Through sticker exchange, we can uniquely tap the proven legacy of the "old school" while securing the vast innovation available via social sharing.