Defining Your Gym’s Target Audience
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Do you have an ideal client in mind when you think about your gym from a business perspective? From the way you decorate your facility to the type (and amount) of equipment you buy, these factors hinge, consciously or not, on that ideal client. Now, compare the details of this perfect client to the average client that walks into your business. If they align, congratulations, you have a leg up and an understanding of who you cater to, but you can still benefit from reading further. However, if you experience a discrepancy or misalignment between your ideal and actual customer, it is time to work on fixing that.
We will help guide you through the process of defining your fitness facility’s target audience on this page through the following topics:
What is a Target Audience
Constant Contact concisely defines a target audience as “the group of people a business is directing their marketing toward — the people most likely to purchase a company’s products or services.” While this definition is to the point and punchy, it may leave many gym owners shrugging their shoulders on where to go.
Breaking it down a little further, a target audience isn’t a group of people, but rather a list of characteristics that align the people you plan to market and sell your service or goods to. These are people who share values and common characteristics that align with the features and benefits you specifically offer. Some of these characteristics can be broad, while others may drill into specifics – but it depends on how specific or unique your offering is.
An example target client type for a local two-person fitness studio could be: women and men ages 35-65 within a 10-mile radius whose estimated household income is $75-125k and who are looking for general strength and wellness-focused programming.
While parts of this example are broad, like the age and proximity, details start to get more focused when outlining the income range and goals. These specific details ultimately narrow the potential client pool to your target audience – this is your niche.
Target audiences are based on data categories and ranges rather than specific people. Therefore, making an ideal client list with actual names would not be a target audience list. Depending on your business, certain details may be included or excluded and emphasized or generalized based on the specifics of product/service usage. Many of these factors are based on the niche your gym caters to.
Why You Need to Define Your Gym’s Target Audience
Setting your target audience is critical because they are the ones that will be the source of your cash flow. Building your business up with these people and their attributes in mind can help you make more intelligent and focused decisions on your business.
Whether it’s logo design, website layout, physical gym location, atmosphere, equipment, and even amenities offered – all of these things should be done with the target audience in mind. For example, a gym catering to general fitness and health audiences may not want a hardcore atmosphere stocked with chains and rusty weights as it wouldn’t align with the general wants and needs of its money-driving audience.
Additionally, marketing is a large factor when it comes to growing members. Knowing exactly who you are trying to advertise to and what type of messaging and imagery resonates with them is critical to getting leads and conversions. This intricate knowledge gained from building your target audience can help you craft more economically efficient ads that drive higher conversion rates for online sign-ups or tour bookings. Additionally, many of these data point categories are available to set when working with many popular online and social media advertising platforms. And when you pair your target audience data points with a series of well-crafted marketing campaigns, you can help drive your success and efficiencies even more – learn more about marketing campaign building here, where we dive into the details and show you how to incorporate this process into your business.
How to Go About Defining Your Gym’s Target Audience
It’s easiest to start defining your ideal client characteristics early on when building your business plan, but it’s also never too late to define your audience on paper. The first thing is simple: what is your vision that led you to want to start this business? Was it to run your own Zumba studio? Or perhaps to have the strongest powerlifting gym in your city? Maybe even to have a place that catered to strongman-specific lifts? Take your “why” and explore it. Who are the people that would be interested in this business? Why would they want to come to your gym vs another (what need do you fill for them)? What are the values and driving motivators of this group?
Writing down the answers to these questions is a start to identifying your target audience and their values. As time goes on, you may find that you want or need to get more specific on certain points (or even go more general in other categories), but the more information you can collect about this group, the more clear of a picture you can paint of your target audience.
But what if you already have a gym and are experiencing that disconnect we mentioned earlier where your ideal and actual clients are mismatched? To start, you’re not alone in this situation; however, each situation may differ. Begin by asking yourself if the current audience is working.
If the answer is yes, and you have plenty of clients and operations are running smoothly – why fix something that is not necessarily broken? You can simply redefine your target audience based on the actual demographics you see and try to recreate that “average client” more often via their common data points.
Conversely, suppose your current situation is not working for you. In that case, it’s time to hammer out your audience’s details and drive efforts to capture their characteristics and values. If you experience a change in audience, you may also have to make some adjustments within your business to cater more specifically to this newly defined group.
Making a Splash
Sitting down and going through this process of defining your target audience and evaluating your current audience may seem like a pain. However, if and when you plan to take your marketing strategy seriously, this data is invaluable as it serves as the foundation upon which you build. Taking it one step further, you may even find yourself rebranding your gym, website, or even your name if you think it would resonate better with your audience and help drive awareness and sales.
Finally, once you have your audience figured out, write it down and keep your notes that include the data points clean and accessible. It is worth reviewing and reminding yourself of the essential values to focus on occasionally with your audience. Don’t forget to update these lists if you start to see trend shifts in your audience or decide to expand into different audiences – you can have multiple target audience types with different and shared values.