If you are an owner of a fitness club, or a fitness clubs network, you should know that the sense of community there is incredibly important. People are so much likely to train when everyone around them is training, too. It is essential, though, that you can’t build a community just by saying that you want to. Continue reading this article if you want to develop a strong and working community within your training facility.
Steps for creating a living community in a fitness club:
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Create a clear mission for your community members
The mission is the main reason your community will stay with you! If they resonate with it, they will stay with you forever. They should think of this mission as their primary goal while spending time with you, and for a fitness club that would be, let’s say, “living a healthier life.”
Your mission could be injected to your customers through various channels:
- branding;
- the tagline;
- website;
- social media;
- And, finally, your app. It could have a welcome screen that would remind your users about this mission, or a group chat that would ensure efficient group communication.
The message you use as the mission should also be told to your customers every time they visit your training facility through banners
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Narrow the audience you will target with your mission
Your business, as well as your mission, can’t be targeted on “everyone who lives in the US and is interested in fitness.” You will need to create a much more narrow audience. Think of workouts your customers enjoy, their demographics and characters. Do not forget to integrate this narrowed audience into the mission you will have.
By creating a narrower audience, you could define their needs & pains easier. If you have this data, it will be so much easier to develop specific and personalized proposals or coupons for your clients. These proposals and coupons could be sent out through e-mail, an app, or given out personally.
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Still, you have to be inclusive
Your community can only grow if there are newbies that want to join you. Entering a community filled out with people who are very much alike, yet look like hyped out folks can be scaring for new members. That is why your tribe has to be inclusive. As a community leader, you will have to be in charge of being welcoming. Meet the newbie in person, explain to him or her the training process, guide her or his way through the training hall. Give him or her a high five at the end of the training, and do not forget to remind this person of your app!
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Create a FOMO
Have you heard of FOMO? This term can be deciphered as the “Fear Of Missing Out.” Make your community meeting (in case of a fitness club this would be a training) so valuable that your members will feel sorry to miss it. Through your fitness app, you could create a leaderboard or a badge system which would be based on the number of visits to your fitness club. Whenever the users would visit this particular part of your app, they would think of working out more — with their community, if course!
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Do stuff other than workout
Do you organize team buildings or other events for your team? Why? To maintain the level of interest, your employees have towards their jobs? That is something you need to do with your client community, as well. Invite them on a BBQ, bowling or a movie night. Your community is nothing without friendship between its members, and other-than-workout events are the perfect places to shape this friendship feeling.
And yes, you could send out notifications or create chats for your non-workout events within your app. This will drastically increase member involvement since everyone will receive a message about the event you organize.
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Create a loyalty scheme
Your community members must feel privileged. They need to have access to extra features, such as a loyalty program. You could reward your members with free services, such as personal training, SPA or massage session. To ensure a fair and open loyalty scheme, you would need to describe it adequately. A special section in a handy mobile app would be the best place for this description. With an app, you could also create a leaderboard or a badge system for the “most loyal” members of your community.
Conclusion
By creating an app for your fitness club community, you resolve a lot of problems, such as group communication and remaining in touch with your members. What is more, you can ensure that your app has an e-commerce module, where your members could request additional services or buy your merchandise. A booking system for your fitness club could also be included in the app so that your members would see who from the community is going to join the particular training.
And yes, booking a personal training would also be so much more comfortable with an app that the Messapps team could build for you! All of these services are open for integration with your CRM or payment systems so that every single action taken by your customers can be monitored, and, later, analyzed. What a digital world, huh?
The image by Ryderwear https://uk.ryderwear.com
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