In today’s growing fitness industry it is incredibly vital to maintain a competitive edge as more businesses are becoming incredibly creative in implementing new ways to stay above their competition. There is however one way that you can add value to your memberships: integrate with technology for fitness businesses.

There are three main ways you can rev-up your use of technology which will lay the foundations to maintain your competitive advantage:

• Having a powerful and effective website
• Know your online marketing channels and methods
• Build your business within a membership management solution

When looking at your business from a macro perspective, your objectives are to generate and convert new leads and retain existing members to ensure that your businesses continues to scale.

Whip your website into shape

The design and layout of your website and strategic placement of lead capture forms will enable you to leverage off your website to capture leads, build customer loyalty and differentiate your service offerings from your competitors. Most importantly, your website should represent your brand and emulate a translatable environment that the potential new member will experience when they first step into your facility.

The most important ingredients for a successful website include: Strong calls to action, social media widgets, clickable graphics, testimonials, contact information, easily accessible benefits and the main points that give you a competitive advantage and finally ensuring that all the content is easily scannable so that at a glance the potential member can build a broad picture about your service offerings.

Your website may also become a point of recurring interaction from your members if you choose to embed your class schedule and member experience within your site. OneFitStop is a firm believer that the best place member interactions should take place when they are away from your facility is directly from your website where your brand is constantly being advertised. Luckily, with the OneFitStop membership management solution you can embed the entire experience for your members into your website completely FREE.

Rev-up your digital footprint

Another integral component in growing your business is generating the leads. There are many ways that you can improve your online digital footprint in order to create consistent branding and messaging across multiple channels.

It is important to differentiate the impacts of your ‘natural’ or organic online reach and your ‘paid’ impact. Natural channels include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), directory listings (Yelp, OneFitStop, Yellow Pages, True Local etc.) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.). Paid channels include Pay Per Click advertisements through search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo or social media platforms. Paid channels may also include premium directory listings to maintain high position rankings. One benefit that paid advertising has is that your Return on Investment (ROI) is easier to track so you can start focusing on the channels and allocating larger budgets to platforms that have the highest ROI.

Ultimately, your aim should be to begin building your digital footprint and to expose your website to your target customer. The next step is to evaluate your performance across your digital marketing channels so you can optimise your time and money to keep those leads coming through to your website and into your facility.

Fire up managing your members with the perfect software

Using technology to automate your businesses operations and to ensure that your members have a mechanism to continue to interact with your brand outside of your facility will further increase member retention. Furthermore, as your business continues to grow you do not want to seem unorganised or emulate to any member that you cannot effectively manage your growing business. This is where a membership management solution will become a vital component to the success of your business.

So, what should you look for in a membership management solution:

• Easy scheduling tools to manage classes and appointments (creating, updating, cancelling and inviting are the core components to scheduling and you will want your members to stay informed throughout all steps)
• Advanced membership and payment collection modules (you don’t want to go changing your strategic revenue model because a software cannot accommodate)
• Enabling your members to effortlessly book into classes, buy memberships and request private appointments (and if they can do this from within your website even better!)
• Member management tools for personal trainers (if your business offers these services) to track assessments, progress photos, PAR-Q and programming.