The best cheap marketing methods for your fitness and wellness classes

Marketing can be a daunting task – particularly if you don’t have much experience in the area. Regardless of whether you have a larger marketing budget or are trying to get the word out on a shoe-string budget, it can be difficult to know where to start when trying to market your fitness or wellness business. Fortunately there are plenty of budget friendly options for you to market your classes – we’ve rounded up some of our favourite tried and tested methods here.

You may notice that we haven’t included paid advertising here. Paid advertising can be an amazing way of getting new customers for your fitness classes but it can get very expensive, very quickly. We’ll be covering what to know about paid advertising for the fitness industry in another post but for now, we’ll only be focusing on more cost effective methods.

Social Media

Whether you love it or hate it, social media is one of the best ways of getting the word out about your business for free. The downside is that it takes time, effort and consistency to get results. The upside is if you do stick with it, it can be an invaluable tool for reaching your audience and building a community at zero cost.

Fortunately, there are a lot of platforms to choose from – from Instagram to TikTok to YouTube. We’d always recommend focusing in on one or two platforms rather than trying to maintain them all. Better to go all in on Instagram for example and do that incredibly well, than split your focus. For fitness businesses, we often find that Instagram, YouTube and Facebook perform the best.

We’d also encourage you to utilise all of the features in a given platform – so for Facebook for example, it would make sense to have a Facebook Business Page. However a private group is also a great way to engage with your customers and encourage loyalty. The key to all social media is to experiment and keep posting!

Google Business

If you offer in person classes (as opposed to a purely online offering), we would absolutely recommend registering your business with Google. They offer free business profiles that can get you found via their search results via Google Search or Google Maps. It’s totally free and a great marketing tool that reaches your customers in exactly the right locations!

Customer Reviews

Linked to a Google Business profile, is the importance of reviews. Don’t be shy about asking your customers for reviews – the vast majority will be more than happy to do so and it can make an enormous amount of difference. It’s always a leap of faith to try a new product or business for the first time so a review from a happy customer can go a long way in converting potential customers. You can collect reviews in plenty of places but we’d recommend consolidating them in one area to get the most bang for your buck. Plus, the more reviews you have – the better your business will appear in search results.

Partnering Up

Partner up with like-minded local businesses – they will likely be eager for the marketing opportunity as well and it’s a fantastic way of reaching your local community. Perhaps there’s a local store that sells fitness clothing where you could host a free class for their customers or a local spa that would be willing to co-host a self-care day with you. The opportunities are always limitless for those with initiative and a few creative ideas!

Flyers and Notice Boards

In a digital world, it’s easy to forget about some more ‘old fashioned’ marketing tricks but leaflets and notice boards can still be hugely effective. Ask at local stores if they’d be willing to take some leaflets for their customers or pin one on a notice board. It’s low cost and a great way to meet others in the community to start building those relationships! Remember you only need a couple of the right people to see your leaflet for that to start a snowball effect with your business.

Referrals

Finally, consider offering a referral discount for your existing customers. This can be anything from a free guest pass for any of your clients (who may find they love working out with a friend!) to an incentive for any clients that refer a new customer. There are lots of different options and not only can this be a hugely effective way of reaching new customers but it can also be a value add for your existing customers!

Hopefully you found this helpful if you were looking for some marketing inspiration. If you have any thoughts, questions or blog post requests – feel free to leave a comment or drop us a line at hello@classfit.com!