Direct Response Marketing Concepts for Fitness Pros

There are several key concepts that fitness professional must focus on to become an effective direct response marketer:

1. Targeting your audience
2. Responsiveness of the audience
3. Cost per response
4. Cost per new client acquisition

Let's start with targeting:

Geographic

For most studios we are typically focused on a three to five mile radius from your facility. The reality is that many factors influence how far someone is willing to drive on a regular basis to your studio.

Some of these factors include:

1. Whether you are in a rural or suburban or urban environment.
Generally the denser the population, the busier the traffic, and the more choices available the less distance someone is likely to drive. This computation is further complicated by factors such as whether someone is traveling into or away from the city center to get to your location. Whether you are dealing with youth in sports training or adults as clients, and the general characteristics of your area.

2. Psychological barriers such as rivers or interstate freeways. People tend not to cross major barriers such as these.

3. Ease of access and familiarity of location. If you are in a familiar retail area with recognizable land marks clients will likely drive further than in an unfamiliar or hidden area.

Example:

For our private club we get a heavy pull from quite a ways east - which is actually heading into another small town. Much less distance pull from the south and east towards the city center (people are less likely to drive away from the central urban area for services).

We have natural barriers to the north of us – the Ohio River. In our marketing efforts – my results improve substantially if I can focus on the more responsive areas.
Once you have figured out the likely willingness to drive to your area - almost all of your marketing efforts should be focused on targeted prospects within those geographic areas.

Age

Really think about who your business draws currently. You usually are better off to target what you've got - obviously that category of people like what you have to offer - than target what you want.

If you have a heavy sports training clientele it may be smarter to try to find more of the same than to attempt for example to attract adult executives. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't from time to time broaden or expand your market – but these changes really start from within first.
Again, It is often most profitable to expand within a successful niche than to attempt to be all things to all people.

Income

What is the average median income of the clients who you appeal to?
Really look at your existing clientele and figure out who you appeal to and expand upon that.

Psychographics

Can you narrow down some common characteristics of your clients.
What other activities do they participate in. What community organizations do they belong to? What are their occupations?
What is their common educational background? Any demographic or psychographic predisposition that you can narrow in on will help you attract that type of client with your other marketing efforts.

Starting from Scratch

You may be tempted to go the other way and say to yourself - who would I ideally like to attract? There is nothing wrong with that approach except the following reality:

Whatever you are attracting now - indicates who you appeal to most easily. Do you have a generally median income clientele that train at your off the beaten path studio? If that's
so - before making a major push for higher income clients you'd better look at your facility, your location, your service, and your business structure. No matter how much you want to appeal to a given clientele - it will do you no good unless you really have every aspect congruent with your desires.