The Gym Owner’s Guide to Buyer Personas
Creating effective marketing strategies for your gym requires a deep understanding of your potential members. One of the best ways to achieve this is by creating buyer personas. In this guide, we’ll explore how to develop buyer personas for your gym, address common lead problems, and improve your communication and marketing efforts.
Understanding Your Gym Members
When communicating with leads, it’s essential to understand their fears, motivations, and challenges. Creating personas for the most common types of leads you encounter helps you overcome their objections, making your sales process much easier. Understanding your leads will improve every aspect of your communication and marketing. The more you practice talking to leads by using your personas, the better you’ll get at it.
Common Problems for Leads
- “I don’t think I have time to work out.”
- “I’m too nervous/embarrassed to go to the gym.”
- “I haven’t focused on fitness in a while and don’t know where to start.”
Creating Buyer Personas
Creating customer personas is time-consuming at first but worthwhile in the long run. To save you time, we’ve done some of the initial work for you. We’ve created three personas common in the boutique gym world. These personas will help you:
- Identify the problems that prevent certain leads from signing up
- Communicate with leads and address their objections
- Follow up with leads after the initial conversation
3 Starter Personas for You
Stranded Sam
Stranded Sam keeps reliving his past and spends too much time talking about his former athletic years. He will fall easily into the comparison trap. Focus on having a beginner’s mindset instead of comparing what he used to do to what he’s doing now.
Example Conversations:
- “What do you want to change about your current health and fitness routine?”
- “Imagine taking one step each day toward your goal. How would you feel three months from now?”
Swamped Sara
Swamped Sara is tight on time due to other priorities like work and family. Finding time to work out is her biggest problem. Reassure her that fitness doesn’t require more than two or three one-hour classes a week.
Example Conversations:
- “I hear your goal is to find time to work out. Let’s figure out how to squeeze exercise into your busy schedule!”
- “What three days each week work best for you?”
Venturing Victor
Venturing Victor already sees the value of your monthly gym membership. He needs more context about your gym. Prompt him for more information as to why he’s leaving his current gym and address the specific ways his experience at your gym can deliver more value.
Example Conversations:
- “What’s been holding you back from reaching your fitness goals?”
- “What do you need from your new gym to help you reach those goals?”
Follow-Up Strategies
Stranded Sam
Once Sam becomes a client, send him weekly text messages for the first six weeks to keep him engaged and make sure he’s seeing the value of his workouts.
Swamped Sara
Send Sara a simple goal-setting form to set her up for success with one achievable goal related to her time, like attending a certain number of classes in the first few weeks.
Venturing Victor
When Victor reaches out, send back an initial email that includes your gym’s core values. Customize an active lead campaign email to include your core values and anything else that’ll make your gym stand out.
The Importance of CRM and CSM
If you’re like most boutique gym owners, you’re probably wearing all the hats in your business. A customer relationship management (CRM) software will help you bring in new members by collecting, automating, and organizing all your customer communications in one central location. By streamlining your communications, you’ll ensure that all your leads receive consistent, timely responses when they show interest in your gym.
How Zen Planner Can Help
Zen Planner can help you handle all your gym billing needs, dive deep into member and financial data, schedule classes and programs, and much more! Our marketing automation and CRM platform includes:
- Unlimited users and contacts
- Customizable emails
- An SMS app with two-way texting
- A Broadcast Center to manage all your communications
- Integration with Zen Planner websites and landing pages
Knowing about CRM is one thing, but finding the time and resources to implement it is another. That’s where Zen Planner comes in! We can help you save time and build your business with bulletproof marketing strategies backed by world-class software, training, and support.
About the Author: Zen Planner
