For many fitness studios, marketing on Instagram is a must. Whether running advertisements for your fitness studio or just posting, leveraging your Instagram account for marketing can be a critical element to your overall marketing toolbox as a business owner. That said, we will discuss some best practices and ways to increase your engagement and content reach concerning Instagram marketing for fitness studios.
Best Practices
For any fitness-based business (or any small business, for that matter), knowing your target audience is critical for short- and long-term success. Knowing who you are building your content and messaging for helps you better structure your posts to appeal to the right people. While this alone may not be your ticket to success on Instagram, it is a foundational part of building your presence in a meaningful way to your marketing and overall business growth efforts.
Another best practice we like to promote is consistency. Whether it be your hours of operation, your gym’s mission statement, or even how often (or when) you post on your social media feeds, consistency is monumental to long-term success. Therefore, when working on your Instagram account as a marketing tool for your fitness studio, remember that it is a marathon and not a series of small or occasional sprints.
The final best practice points we want to cover involve leveraging clients who follow your fitness studio’s Instagram account for your marketing efforts. First, post pictures, stories, and reels of actual members when you can. When posting these photos, ensure all clients within the frame have signed a photo release form for your studio. Additionally, make sure you tag all individuals who are present in the video. Showing actual members draws the interest of those outside your studio, mainly when they recognize someone in the post, and the tagging prompts additional action of a reshare from their own accounts. The second point we want to cover in this topic is on the converse side of tagging. When clients tag you or your fitness studio in their Instagram content, make sure you repurpose it for your marketing benefit. The resharing of information can also signal to your clients and prospective clients that you are active and engaging with your community. It also pumps life into your social media feed with minimal effort.
Ways to Engage
When it comes to the content you are putting out on your fitness studio’s Instagram, you want to ensure that it engages with your target audience. This engagement will help serve multiple purposes, like building a stronger feeling of community within your current client base, providing quality marketing for your potential clients, and acting as a referral generation tool. So, how do you make more engaging Instagram content for your fitness studio’s marketing?
Responses, Questions, and Polls
Regarding your fitness studio’s story, you can pepper in engagement opportunities with your audience through pre-built tools like polls, questions, or text responses. By asking relevant and engaging questions or bringing up fun topics to solicit input or feedback, you allow your audience to join the conversation. While it might seem straightforward, you can further leverage these questions in other ways as well. Posting the results or summarizations of polls or feedback can allow you to elaborate on your topics further and drive the conversation further.
Testimonials
Similar to our post discussing leveraging testimonials for your fitness studio’s marketing, you can break down content pieces further for social media usage. Turning these testimonials into a text-based post, taking a portion of the quote, or delivering it in video format are all great options for repurposing this type of marketing material for your studio’s Instagram. Additionally, it still leverages the real-person quality content aspect within the post and tells a story of why your studio is excellent. As we mentioned in the best practices section, tag the client in your post, too. These tags will help further boost the engagement potential.
Utilize Video
While posts are premade posts can be an easy win for studio owners to make, schedule, and monitor, video-based content tends to have a leg up on popularity. Delivering video content on your fitness studio’s Instagram can help serve as a quality marketing tactic whenever possible. Adding video into your stories, reels, or even going live can all help drive further engagement with your audience, especially if you do it in a way that prompts interaction. Live sessions are great for this communication exchange with your client following; however, you can mimic this in other formats through requests like “let us know in the comments how you feel about this” or some other type of direct call-to-action.
Clear Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
When building your content, messaging, or videos to drive engagement with your audience, ensuring your efforts have a clear and appropriate call-to-action for your fitness studio’s marketing gain is vital. Whether your goal is to build a strong community, drive referrals, or even increase awareness of additional services your fitness studio offers, clear, simple, and enticing CTAs are a necessary tool. When implemented correctly, these CTAs should work in an engaging way that feeds your audience’s initial interest. While these may not always look like direct sales call-outs, these smaller engagement opportunity CTAs can still feed into your fitness studio’s sales funnel as content that would be more top-of-funnel materials.
Ask
The last point we want to address is the most basic way to promote engagement with your studio’s audience, and that is to ask them directly. It is sometimes amazing how often this simple request is overlooked. Simply inviting friends or visitors to comment, like, share, or even message you can go a long way in driving better interaction rates. Similar to the call-to-action topic, being clear about your ask and making it simple gives clients a simple avenue to continue with.
Ways to Increase Reach
To increase the reach of your fitness studio’s Instagram content and boost marketing to potentially new clients within your market, you can follow some of the recommendations below. It is worth noting that social media platforms’ search and content display algorithms are proprietary and often change as trends do. Additionally, many ways to increase content reach are utilized to increase engagement and best practices. So, your fitness studio’s Instagram marketing tactics for promoting interaction can help you grow new impressions organically by nature as well.
Tagging and Reposting Client Content
Similar to what we’ve already discussed about reposting and tagging clients of your fitness studio in your Instagram efforts, this process also helps grow reach. This increase in impression potential comes from the additional eyes reached when you tap into your individual clients’ social networks. While not all of their connections may align with your fitness studio’s target audience, there is typically a good chance of overlap with some people regarding fitness facility proximity, shared interests, and word-of-mouth referral-like introduction.
Utilizing Posts Within a Marketing Campaign
Another way to boost the reach potential of your fitness studio’s Instagram marketing efforts is to build it into your gym’s marketing campaign program. As with any good marketing campaign, the goal is to boost awareness, interest, and conversions, so it only makes sense that content within your social media can be part of this effort. Therefore, when building some of the fitness studio’s Instagram content into your marketing, you should naturally think about doing it in a way that will resonate with people outside your current client base but still within your target audience. Additionally, as with any good marketing campaign, it should have the following steps and call-to-actions already built in by design to enhance further the ability to gather traction with new impressions.
Collaborations and Partnerships
One method that has shown to be of value for many businesses of varying sizes and markets is establishing content and marketing collaborations or partnerships with other businesses/brands that have some commonality within their audience base and interests. With this in mind, you can leverage each other’s audience base for further message reach that builds on a base of trust pre-established through the partnership. For fitness studio owners looking for examples of partnerships, we’ve seen local facilities work up cross-marketing programs with restaurants in their direct neighborhood (or shopping plaza) where they would do shared events, send emails with mentions/promos, tag and share social media posts, and even carry flyers for each business at their respective locations to help promote their presence.
Run Contests or Giveaways
Running contests and giveaways is a quick way to drive engagement and awareness for marketing many local fitness studios on Instagram. Having participants like, share, and tag a friend in the comments helps drive traffic to your page, post engagement, and additional eyes on your post. Further, when you prompt followers to tag friends, you actively get referral-like interest directly prompted to your page. The biggest cons we see with these programs are they are frequently done, so a deep interest in your personal training studio might not be an overwhelming outcome. Additionally, these only serve as a short-term boost in interest/engagement, and owners can expect a fall-off of growth after the promotion. Hence, we still recommend focusing on long-term consistent and sustainable development over small sprints.
Hashtags and Timing
The last point we will cover is leveraging two elements that can help promote the reachability of a post based on the current trends. First are hashtags. These are not new or unique concepts to Instagram; multiple social and online platforms commonly utilize them. Unfortunately, hashtag popularity varies from platform to platform, and trends within each fluctuate rapidly. Therefore, focusing on keeping up with relevant hashtags can work to your advantage if timed right and appropriately implemented. Second, working on the timing of content. The physical time of a post can also play a part in your message’s overall impression rate. Again, high usage times can change rapidly. Still, many platforms or current management sites may give you insights into high-quality times to post based on your audience or previous content’s success.
Making A Splash
Marketing a fitness studio on Instagram is a complex process based on the amount of competition and overall noise within the space. However, there are still ways to utilize this platform for marketing gain. Whether your plans involve building a community, driving interest, selling memberships, or any number of growth goals, leveraging best practices within your content, driving engagement, and growing your reach is typically pivotal to the overall success of your fitness facility’s goals.
