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Five Tired Phrases Health Club Owners Should Avoid

If you’re using the following five phrases in your club marketing materials, it’s time to revitalize your copy with sparkling, specific language that zeroes in on why your members love your health club...

Past Articles from Step by Step: Marketing

Five Tired Phrases Health Club Owners Should Avoid

If you’re using the following five phrases in your club marketing materials, it’s time to revitalize your copy with sparkling, specific language that zeroes in on why your members love your health club...

Differentiate Your Way to Success

“Differentiate or die” has been the mantra of business leaders ever since a book bearing those words as its title emerged nearly a decade ago. Now more than ever, differentiation is the key to success in today’s resource-constrained, highly competitive business environment...

Can Health Fair Marketing Ever Pay Off?

Many health club owners complain after health fairs that they didn't get even one new member. Yet hundreds of potential members passed right by their display...

What Sets You Apart? It’s Your USP

Most independent club owners haven’t given any thought about who they are, what they are and why people should join their club...

How to Never Run Out of Leads

Most fitness business owners don’t really know how to market their business, and that’s because they’ve never been taught how...

Five Deadly Personal Trainer Marketing Mistakes

Personal trainers are typically caring, warm-hearted and passionate people. Unfortunately, they are also typically awful marketers...

How to Use Podcast Power in Your Marketing

Imagine being able to deliver audio advertising and informational content to thousands of potential customers and existing clients....

Five Strategies to Close a Membership Sale Prior to Presenting Prices

You know the routine. A guest visits your club, you go through the small talk, show them the facility, talk about the amenities and answer a few questions...

Internal Marketing: Six Ways to Uncover the Goldmine in Your Club

Having a marketing plan is often the difference between a successful club and an unsuccessful one...

How to Host a Get Fit Sampler Event: A Marketing Idea to Open Minds

Are your members creatures of habit? Do they do the same things day in and day out?...

Branding vs. Direct-Response Marketing

As an independently operated gym or health club, should your marketing efforts focus on building your brand, or should you focus on getting people through the door quickly through direct-response marketing...

Seven Tips to Bump Up Your Marketing Through E-mail and E-newsletters

Many clubs use formal e-mail newsletters as a marketing vehicle...

How To Market Using The Stages of Change Model

How much time and money has your health club spent selling to people who aren’t ready to change...

Why You Need to Add Blogging to Your Club’s Marketing Mix

For many of us over the age of 40, we only have a peripheral awareness of Internet communities such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace...

How to Use News to Generate Club Sales

Does this sound familiar? The targeted direct mail piece you recently did generated a paltry four new members from the community you have been serving for the last 15 years and cost you upwards of $3,000...

26 Creative Marketing Ideas for Health Clubs

Marketing your club for new members has become more of a challenge. You are required not only to work a little harder but a lot smarter. The traditional forms of advertising, such as print media and direct mail, seem to result in very little, if any, response in many markets....

Top Nine Tips for Marketing Your Personal Training Business

Are you struggling to find new clients or prospects to fill your pipeline? I’m sure many of you are. ...

Creative Wizards Need Not Apply: How To Develop Effective Marketing Materials

Good news: Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to be a creative wizard to develop effective marketing materials for your health club....

New Year, New Plan

As fitness professionals and club operators, we are constantly telling our members about the importance of tracking workouts so that they can determine what is working and how much progress they are making....

Eight Deadly Marketing Sins

Many managers often make mistakes that they don’t even know about. They are akin to novice exercisers who start a fitness program on their own, making unnecessary and costly mistakes. ...

Seven Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in Your Health Club

Health club owners are often so busy putting out operational fires that marketing and advertising programs tend to end up on the back burner. In turn, all health club owners tend to make the same mistakes over and over. Here are seven of those mistakes: ...

Grow Smart with Measurement

Personal trainers manage and track a client’s workout program so they can accurately measure weight loss and fitness goals. Measurement is a motivation tool. Measurement helps your members get fit by getting smart about their bodies because if you can measure it, you can ...

The Difference Between Knowing and Doing: 7 Tips to Improve the Success of Your New Member Campaigns

Everyone knows the best way to drop that spare tire is by exercising and eating right. If the idea is so simple and so obvious, then why doesn’t everyone have glorious buns of steel?...

The Invisible Secret: The Fastest Way to Turn Your Health Club into a Marketing Powerhouse

Sizzling sales copy. Dramatic headlines. Irresistible offers. Emotional stories. Unique selling propositions. A call-to-action that makes your reader dive for the phone. That’s what a lot of people think of when they think “marketing.” ...

Four Truths About Health Club Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk

Health club marketing is an area that has long been studied and perfected by fitness professionals and health club owners looking to be more successful. Over the years, a number of techniques have become truths that all club marketing pros adhere to...

How to Profit From Referrals

There's no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to selling your fitness services. However, if there's any type of prospective client who is close to being a slam dunk, it is a referral....

Four Proven Steps To Networking

Networking is an often underestimated but powerful business tool. Motivational speaker Bob Burg summed it up best by saying, "It isn't just what you know, and it isn't just who you know...

Promoting Your Fitness Facility Through Free Public Speaking

Let’s face it: people are wary of health clubs. Many have joined at least one before and failed to get results. Chances are it was due to their lack of effort, but blaming them isn’t going to help your bottom line. ...

Maximizing Your Referral Promotions

For anyone in the health club business, referrals are a critically important component to sales success and can even account for as much as 60 percent of a club’s new membership sales, according to some industry reports....

Partnering For Profits

John Agoglia, a former personal trainer, reveals how clubs can boost their marketing efforts by partnering with local businesses....

Developing an E-Mail Marketing Campaign

E-mail is fast becoming the preferred communication vehicle, whether you are the sender or the receiver. For health clubs e-mail marketing can be more effective than standard marketing strategies, such as direct mail and traditional advertising, because it’s cost-effective, immediate, based on a fairly intimate ...

Doing Well by Doing Some Good For the Community

Sonia Ricotti, founder of Club Training Forum, reveals how clubs can increase their sales and their bottom line. ...

Tuning Up Your Sales Team for the New Year

Casey Conrad, a 20-year veteran of the fitness industry, tells you how to tune up your sales team for the new year. ...

Archived Marketing Articles Appearing in the Magazine

Maximizing Your Referral Promotions

For anyone in the health club business, referrals are a critically important component to sales success and can even account for as much as 60 percent of a club’s new membership sales, according to some industry reports....

Offbeat Marketing Ideas

This month, we're in the third of six Marketing Matters articles for the year that focus on offbeat marketing ideas. Now that we are into the summer months...

Off the Beaten Track

For those of you who might be tuning into this column for the first time in 2004, it's useful to know that each of the six marketing matters features...

Know What You Are and Who You're Marketing To

Would you go to a Chinese restaurant for a good steak? At the same time, the Chinese restaurant wouldn't feature steaks in any of its marketing efforts....

Flood Your Club With Referrals

Getting flooded with referrals wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be wonderful to have tons of referrals coming into your personal training department...

Do Them a Favor and Close

Two salesmen come back to the office after a day of selling and one salesman says to the other, Boy, did I have a lot of good interviews today, and the...

Casey Conrad's Marketing to Seniors

For many people, the word conjures up images of little blue-haired women and frail old men cluelessly driving 45 mph in the left lane. That may have been...

Casey Conrad's Marketing Matters

If you are childless, perhaps you've noticed them. If you are a parent particularly one who has children under the age of 15 you are living it day to...

Marketing Matters

The Men's Market Go to your local bookstore and peruse the marketing section. Look for books on gender marketing and what you will find is quite amazing....

Casey Conrad's Marketing Tutorial

The Unspoken Opportunity: Marketing to Women It's hard to believe but this month's Marketing Tutorial marks the beginning of this column's third year....

Step By Step

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In This Issue: October 2009 View All Past Issues

Cover Story

Jack the Giant

Few have made an impact on fitness clubs and the fitness world quite like 95-year-old Jack LaLanne, this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

View the full October issue

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