So, you own a gym or group exercise class/bootcamp and 2020 is YOUR YEAR where you really want to grow. The thing is, everyone knows it’s a saturated market and you can probably only do so much social media marketing before you run out of ideas besides a promotional advert.
CUSTOMERS WANT NEW.
There are roughly 6.7 thousand health and fitness clubs in the UK with approximately 9.7 million members according to the Statista report in September 2019. So now, your customer is exposed to more choice than ever before.
So why would they pick you?
You might say you have the best equipment, great staff and flexible contracts – you might even offer a few free trials so that the potential customer has a chance to come and visit your facilities before signing up.
All of which is great.
But everyone does that now and if you can’t think of something ahead of the curve then are you putting yourself in the best position in front of your customers?
Is it time for something new?
Customers want a feel good factor and you, like us, know that it is very important to provide a unique and superior experience to attract new customers. What's more, it is also vital to retain existing members through fresh and innovative developments within a healthy community feel.
Read any marketing article and you’ll find that having a good community vibe about your gym is highly important for such client retention. Your members not only come to the gym to train, but also to socialise and feel part of a community.
As a gym owner or bootcamp instructor you have the opportunity to identify this and implement actions to strengthen this part of your business…
…But how…and what is so good about your own branded fitness clothing?
Because it is NEW, INCLUSIVE, and it WORKS.
Imagine walking into your gym and seeing members training happily whilst wearing YOUR BRAND. Now put yourself into a new client’s perspective and wonder how they would feel seeing a community of like-minded people training together and wearing the same identity.
You might argue that a few gyms have been selling their own merchandise already for ages now and you would probably be right. The real effectiveness of this solution however, is in the way you do it.
If you already offer your own gym branded merchandise then great- you are already along the right lines, but you might just want to read on and check if it’s working as well as it could be…
If you have heard of gyms running their own merchandise lets face it, you have probably never thought much further than going to a local printer and ordering their minimum order quantity of cotton tshirts and a few hoodies, screen-printing your logo on, and then trying to flog them to your members.
Big mistake.
Your branding is how you present yourself to new and existing customers and is therefore very important. As a gym owner, you are an industry expert.
Have a think about it - your customers will ask you about the facilities and training advice; you might then be asked about nutrition too. This is because from a member’s perspective you are the expert and so why not get all they need from one place.
So why do we not recognise the same importance through apparel? What is stopping gyms from being able to offer their own high quality gymwear to the standards that their clients want?
I’m not asking you to compete with the likes of Nike and Gymshark, but in the spirit of pushing your limits – couldn’t we raise the bar a little?
Members are much more likely to not only wear your products more often in the gym, but outside the gym too – if the quality is such that they never want to take it off. You could be signing up hundreds of your members to voluntarily walk around town wearing an advert for you… but better still… they pay you for it?
With quality branded gymwear you can increase your revenue and lifetime value of your clients by a staggering amount. Not only will it generate more revenue which you can reinvest into new equipment etc, but it also builds on that community aspect of your gym.
Now you have a solution that you can actually implement quite easily, one that will put you ahead of most other gyms and will give you more uniqueness. A solution like this can bring you more sales, more community AND more clients, whilst keeping your existing members happy and engaged.
What if I don’t have time to run all this? - Of course you don’t, you are running everything else! But we can do the leg work for you. We design and integrate your own online store that works seamlessly with your website. Not an old fashioned one that has all your suppliers branding on, where you have to search through ‘portals’ on an external link – we mean an actual store that sits in your website.
That way your clients can order whenever they like, wherever they like – and you can pat yourself on the back and start leading from the front.
But what if it doesn’t work, or I don’t need a WebShop option I just want to order manually?
By all means ask your members first and that will probably tell you how excited they are…but if it doesn’t sell for any reason, then you don’t lose anything. With Azura Sport there are no minimum order quantities, so you don’t have to spend any money on stock - and if you want to order manually without a shop because you have spare time... you can order as and when your client does.
We have worked with a variety of different active/fitness businesses and so we are sure to have insight into any questions you may have about your own enterprise.
If you know it’s time to start implementing extra revenue into your business or are just keen to find out more head over to www.azurasport.com or feel free to get in touch with us and we can see how to best tailor this solution to you and your business.
