During the pandemic, many forward-thinking fitness gym owners and trainers leveraged digital to engage with their members and offer their services outside the brick-and-mortar locations. And this is going to continue as customer behavior has significantly shifted with them realizing that home workouts are easy and as effective as gym workouts.
If you are a fitness coach or a gym owner, digital offers immense opportunities for you to expand your business and increase your clientele. Digital solutions will help your clients access your services from anywhere anytime. Apart from offering convenience to your clients, digital fitness solutions and apps, allow you to target a huge audience sitting across various geographies in a cost-effective manner. New digital technologies facilitate greater client engagement as well.
Gemini Consulting & Services offers services to businesses for creating a powerful digital strategy and execute it to build a profitable digital fitness business. We can help you build a custom digital platform leveraging advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Virtual Reality (VR) and integrating websites, mobile apps and other applications. To know more about our services, contact us.
Benefits of Going Digital for Gym Owners & Fitness Coaches
- Huge Market Opportunity: A Transparency Market Research study highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic has given a major boost to the digital fitness market resulting in increased spending by 30 to 35% from pre-pandemic times. In the aftermath of outdoor exercise avenues, such as gyms and fitness centers getting closed, indoor exercise became the new normal. This is triggering fitness conscious individuals to embrace at-home fitness training alternatives for a healthy and active lifestyle. So, if you own a fitness studio or are a fitness professional then this is a good time to go digital and grab the opportunities available.
- Expand Business: Physical services are limited to locations. Digital services cross the barriers of time, distance and borders. By going digital, gym owners and fitness coaches can cater to a global audience helping them earn more.
- Low Investments & Scalable: Digital gyms and fitness coaching are low-investment businesses. And you can serve an unlimited audience through it. Physical services have limitations of space, equipment and other requirements which a digital business will not have.
- Personal Branding: Digital is the quickest and simplest way to build a personal brand. If you’re good and are able to promote your workout solutions, then you have ample tools and opportunities to become popular and monetize your authority in personal fitness in various ways. You can sell fitness products or launch your own product line. Books on wellness and fitness are also in huge demand.
How to Build Digital Fitness Business?
To be a successful live fitness coach, you need to have technology and content. Also, you have to consider how your digital business can continue to support your physical fitness centers. Here are a few key considerations to ponder while offering a digital solution for fitness training at home to customers.
- Plan for Content: You can pick your choice from three types of content: Live streaming, on-demand and personalized coaching. These are becoming popular in the market. Live streaming and on-demand work well with mass audiences whereas personalized content caters to the needs of individuals who seek one-to-one assistance. Make your choice based on your expertise, target market and resource availability.
- Build a Digital Platform: You would need a digital platform for content distribution and engage with your members. While you can use free tools like YouTube, Google Hangouts, Skype etc., for content distribution, you would need to build a platform of your own to build a business and a brand. Fitness is also about experience and quality engagement comes from building custom digital platforms that are tailored to your needs and tastes of your customers. You can build a single digital platform integrating a website, mobile app, content development tools and available with features for live streaming, chat, booking sessions and online payments etc.
- Build Communities: Community is a top influencer and motivator in the fitness industry. People want to talk about fitness with others, share and gain from the experience of others. It is also good for your business as community engagement drives customer acquisition and retention. So, build an online community platform for your members where they can ask questions and share experiences with other members. You can also motivate them and gamify the experience through badges, leaderboards etc.
- Get the Digital Journey Right: The digital journey is the path a customer takes from finding your brand, visiting your website, downloading your mobile app, interacting on social media or other digital touchpoints to purchasing a product or subscribing to your membership on your website. In today’s world, customers seek quality experience and judge businesses on that. So, create an engaging, integrated and omnipresent customer experience journey.
- Connect Digital & Physical: A few months down the line, when the pandemic is over, you can further leverage your digital business by connecting it with your existing physical business. However, to optimize that you need to have a plan to deploy it now so that your digital strategy has the space to accommodate your future needs. You can install digital wall displays at your physical centers and distribute your content there to integrate your digital and brick-and-mortar business. You also have the choice to offer a new type of membership wherein your customers can avail of your services at your gym when they have time and, some days, join you online when they are unable to come to the club.
A few years ago, creating a digital fitness business was a difficult and long process. Today, there is a huge demand from customers for at-home fitness training programs and there are excellent resources and tools available to hit the ground running. The digital fitness business is here to stay even after the pandemic. So, think long-term and invest in building a digital fitness business.
