Blog 160: Health Club Marketing: Key Success Factors

Key success factors are the factors necessary for success in a given market. For example, in a highly middle class market, a health club that wants to succeed must have affordable health club memberships for the local community or rely 100% on elite membership. But the other success factor to remember when targeting your prospective members from outside of your community is, do these prospective members that can afford to train anywhere they want, want to travel through the community (the same community you don’t want training at your health club) to train at your health club?

Key success factors are, knowing your demographics, your target market, knowing the prospective members you are trying to acquire, etc. As a health club marketer, you must study numerous pieces of data when it comes to successfully marketing your health club. I have said numerous times, your primary target market as a local health club is, the 5- 12 mile radius around your health club. It is not rocket science, you just have to go online (which the data will be a year or two old but better than nothing) and get the demographic information for your prospective member within that 12-mile radius of your health club. This will take time, a little bit of effort and a lot of research, but luckily some of the information you need is already available on the Internet.

Start with the basic criteria for demographics, i.e., age, income, education, marital status, etc. After you gather this data, break up what you have into different categories. Take the percentages of how many prospective members fall into a specific income bracket, specific age bracket, specific educational background, e.g., how many prospective members have a graduate degree, how many are undergraduate, how many of have a high school education. How many residents are single, how many are married, etc.

All of this data plays a major role when it comes to profiling your ideal target (prospective member). The reason why most health clubs don’t do research is, one, they have no concept of the vast benefits of gathering demographic data, two, they are uneducated on how to maximize the benefits of the data and third, they don’t have the personnel it requires to pull the data. That’s why MMC® has a research center that spends 24 hours a day, seven days a week, pulling all of the research data on every health club we work with.

Knowing your demographics is time-consuming but the payoff is astronomical especially when it comes to your return on investment (ROI).

When you start marketing your health club, learn the key success factors as they pertain to your health club and you will grow your health club and your health and fitness career.

For more free tips on increasing your health club membership base through health club marketing, health club promotions, professional health club membership sales, and advancing your health and fitness career visit us today @ www.healthclubmarketingmmc.com or call 904-448-5727.