How to create a social media marketing strategy for your fitness business

If almost half of the world’s population (48% or 3.78 billion) is active on social media, your fitness brand should be too.  

But creating social content to promote your fitness business in 2022 isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to first find the best social media channels for your brand then create interactive content and promote it. 

Social media marketing campaigns are usually designed for specific purposes. 

For example, you could create a campaign at the end of the year to create hype around your gym to increase the number of New Year membership signups. Or your campaign could be for new products, advanced equipment, unique classes and so on. 

No matter your goal, creating a marketing strategy for your fitness business is a delicate process. 

Skip ahead to:

• What’s included in a  social media marketing strategy?
• Why does your fitness business need a social media strategy? 
• A step by step guide to creating a social media strategy for your fitness business 

What’s included in a  social media marketing strategy? 

As a small business or new gym owner, you need to set goals for your social media marketing. How you achieve those goals is what’s included in a social media marketing strategy. 

Here you decide on details of your demographics, business goals, marketing objectives, content types, social channels, social content, and tactics for promoting your gym.  

This is where you spend most of the time while planning out the marketing strategy. Because without a well thought out campaign, it can be rather difficult to achieve your marketing objectives. 

Why does your fitness business need a social media strategy? 

Having a social media strategy ensures that your marketing efforts do not go in vain because your efforts are targeted and backed by data. 

In this day and age, you need to compete against international fitness brands. A strategy can help you outline measurable objectives to determine how you’re performing against other gyms. 

It can also save costs. Without a marketing strategy, you could end up wasting away your budget on less effective social media sites. 

Here are some more reasons why you need a social media marketing strategy for your gym: 

1. It helps you develop a social media presence and grow organically because you’re creating content with the target audience in mind. 
2. It saves time and brings you to your goals much quicker because you’re active on the right social media sites. 
3. Helps you be authentic and maintain a uniform presence across all your socials and the website. 
4. Helps you create loyal customers and lasting relationships by strategically interacting with the users.
5. Allows you to be creative by showing you what can work best for your gym. 

A step by step guide to creating a social media strategy for your fitness business 

Here’s a step by step guide to help you curate the best social media marketing strategy for your gym or health studio. 

1. Understand your target audience 

The kind of content you should post on social media depends on your demographic data. 

That makes creating and understanding your user personas essential for developing a successful social media campaign for your gym. 

The more data-driven your social media marketing strategy is, the better your results can be. You need to have the know how of who the primary consumers of your content are so you can develop the content accordingly.

These user personas should include data such as age, favorite social media channels, the preferred format of content (pictures, videos, short clips, gifs), hobbies, interests, income and so on.  

2. Identify your business goals 

As we said in the beginning, social media marketing strategies are usually designed around specific business goals. But for that, you need to first know what those goals are. 

Set these before you begin to lay out the social media marketing plan for your fitness business. You can switch the goals for each campaign or launch multiple campaigns from time to time shaped around the same goal. 

You should be as specific as you can here. 

For instance, if your business goal is to gain new followers on social media then define the social channels and the target number of followers. Make your goals measurable, achievable and relevant to the growth of your fitness brand. 

3. Analyze your competitors 

Do a competitive analysis on other local and international gyms’ social media to find inspiration and untapped opportunities. It can show you what’s working for them and how the people are responding to different types of content – so you can do something better.  

That’s especially beneficial if you’re new to the industry and don’t have a lot of data to base your social media strategy on.  

You could search different channels for mentions of your competitors’ gyms. Then notice trends that you can capitalize on and create your marketing strategy around them.  

4. Narrow down your social media channels  

Narrowing down the list of relevant social channels is a difficult process for most fitness brands because business owners don’t know where to begin.

According to Forbes, Instagram and Facebook are the two most common social media channels for fitness brands. Some other popular ones include Tiktok, Snapchat, and YouTube. 

Your choice of social media site should depend on your business goals. You need to be where your audience is. 

So for instance, although you could be on LinkedIn, it might not be the best channel for your gym if you post short workout clips or generally document your day as an instructor. 

But if you create informative content around nutrition, forms and lifting techniques, injury prevention and such topics – then LinkedIn might just be the place for your gym. 

Here’s another example. If you want to drive traffic to your website and in turn increase conversions, then you need to find a channel that allows users to easily jump to your website instead of them having to manually type in your website in search engines.

5. Optimize your social media accounts 

Next, optimize your accounts to accurately represent your fitness brand. Add a great logo, a short yet informative bio to show who you are, a link to your website, and then follow that with quality content. 

Your mere social media presence isn’t enough to make your marketing strategy successful. You need to optimize your accounts with the right keywords, be consistent with posting and respond to users. 

If you’re new to social media marketing, then it might be best to start with one or two social media channels. That way, you can properly optimize the profiles and not spread yourself too thin.  

6. Design a content strategy 

Your tweets and social media posts can’t be random if you want great results. You’ve got to have a strategy behind what you’re posting. 

Once you know your business goals and your user personas, you have to decide on the type of content you should create. This includes choosing formats such as infographics, pictures, text and videos. 

You can post the infographics as posts on Instagram. Then add quick updates, pictures of classes and announcements as stories. 

Suppose your business goal for the social media strategy is to increase brand awareness.  Your content strategy for that could be to generate content that shows people the amazing features of your gym, interact with the users, and integrate your website with social accounts. 

You could also utilize user-generated content for that by having your members post updates about your fitness center for you to reshare it. 

7. Create a content calendar 

A content calendar gives you a routine that helps your users know when to expect new quality content. 

If you don’t know what a content calendar is then here’s a quick rundown. It’s where you schedule posts according to the day of the week, time of day, type of post and channel you’ll be publishing on. 

You should design the calendar based on past data. Check to see at what time your users are most active and choose that to post new content. 

You can set the schedule for the weeks or months or however long your social media marketing strategy will be for.

A lot of factors go into posting content on social media. And having a schedule makes sure that you don’t fall behind. You can use scheduling tools for this purpose and make things much easier for your social media managers. 

8. Track metrics on social networks 

Run a social media audit on your social channels to see what has worked for your fitness brand in the past. Analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs) – conversions, conversion rates, engagement rate, hashtags, and mentions and compare that to your competitors.    

Tracking your social media activity can give you valuable insights that can guide your next campaigns. You can also keep tracking KPIs while your campaign is running and make adjustments as required. 

You can also try social listening and use software such as Hootsuite for it. 

Here, you comb through social media channels to find mentions of your brand and see what the people are saying about you. This information should help you design creative social media marketing strategies for your gym. 

But while you’re looking at your social media analytics, be wary of vanity metrics. These are the opposite of actionable metrics. 

Vanity metrics are those numbers that look good to others– such as the number of followers (could be ghost followers) – but don’t necessarily help you with designing future marketing strategies.  

9. Use social media marketing management software 

Brainstorming and creating content, scheduling posts, tracking performance, optimizing profiles and the rest of it all can get hectic. That’s why you should use a social media management tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer. 

It can help you meet your social media goals. Here, you can have access to different analytical tools to measure social media success and stay on top of your strategy. 

10. Promote social media content 

Promoting content is an essential part of marketing campaigns. 

It can be different for different channels. You can use a referral system to get your users to promote your posts or you could pay the social media channels to boost your content. 

Don’t be afraid to experiment here. If you want the strategy to be successful, then you’ll need to try out unique ways to get the word out about your services and offers. 

In summary 

Digital marketing can be time-consuming. 

If you’re just starting out with creating high-quality marketing strategies for your social media platforms, then you can search for templates to give you a head start. 

Or better yet use Glofox’s marketing tools that offer you a lot more than the templates. 

Here, you can integrate Facebook and Instagram with the gym management software, get new customers directly from social channels and automate a lot of the heavy lifting work.