The Evolution of Search and Social: Marketing Predictions for 2025 (Part 2 of 3)
Keep Your New Customers in the Gym – Top 4 Retention Tactics for Your Fitness Franchise
Keep Your New Customers in the Gym - Top 4 Retention Tactics for Your Fitness Franchise
As January has come to an end, so do many New Year's Resolutions or any fitness goals consumers have set for themselves. In the fitness industry, this can hurt customer retention. While you likely saw a significant influx in new customers in January as people pledged to work on their health and fitness in 2022, what is your multi-location gym doing to keep them? Within this blog, we'll look at customer retention tactics that multi-location companies in the fitness industry can leverage to keep customers coming back year-round.1. Stay Active - Both Online and In Your Local Communities
In order to retain your members, your fitness brand must be active both digitally and in your local communities. So what exactly does this mean? If your local gyms don't have an online presence on local social channels, that's a good place to start. While local social can be an excellent way to get new members, it's also helpful in retaining them. A solid local social strategy can help members feel connected to your fitness brand and make them think twice before canceling a membership. When it comes to local social, how often should your fitness brand be posting, and what type of content performs best? Our Top Fitness and Personal Care Brands in Localized Marketing report looked at local search and social metrics for fitness brands crushing their localized marketing efforts. The report found that top fitness brands had 90 percent of their locations posting on Facebook and 53 percent posting on Google. When it comes to posting frequency, top fitness brands were posting an average of 14 times per month on Facebook and once a month on Google. Your fitness brand should be meeting or exceeding these averages. If you're stuck on what type of content to create, our Localized Social Content Guide can help. It’s worth noting that user-generated content including positive testimonials or personal experiences is a particularly powerful tactic for fitness franchises on social. While managing local social efforts across 100s or 1,000s of business locations can seem challenging, SOCi is here to help. SOCi's social media management solution enables multi-location businesses to manage and deploy localized content at scale while maintaining brand consistency at both the enterprise and local levels. Give your local marketing teams the power to publish brand-consistent, localized content and perform real-time customer care on all major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Business Profile. Once you have your local social strategy finalized, your fitness brand should brainstorm additional ways to stay active in your local community. For instance, is there a local food drive your gym can collect canned goods for? Does your fitness brand provide employees with a "Volunteer Day" where they can volunteer within their local community? These are just a few ways your fitness brand can stay involved with the local community, and while customer retention shouldn't be the goal of these efforts, it could be an added benefit. Plus - showcasing your community involvement on your social channels is a high-value engagement booster for your social content.2. Keep Your Members Informed
Another great way to improve customer retention is by keeping your members informed. For instance, if one of your local gyms will be undergoing renovations or there will be a change in your fitness class schedule, this information should be shared with members. The more members feel like they're kept in the loop about upcoming changes, the more positive their experience. On the other hand, imagine if a member shows up to a reoccurring yoga class, only to find out that the time has been pushed back an hour. To retain customers, it's essential to keep an open line of communication. So how exactly can you keep all of your members informed at the local level? There are a variety of ways which include, but are not limited to:- Weekly newsletter with local announcements and updates
- Social media posts announcing any upcoming changes
- A chatbot solution that can communicate local happenings
- Signage inside your local facilities