Wellness Partners

How a Fitness Influencer Can Grow Your Gym Membership

Last Updated Dec 9, 2024

Time to read: 9 minutes

When gym owners want to get their brands out there and attract new customers, marketing channels such as social media ads, TV commercials, and billboards often take center stage. But collaboration with fitness influencers deserves a place in the spotlight!

Whether it’s a celebrity athlete with a massive following on Instagram, a popular personal trainer on Facebook, or a fitness-obsessed TikToker with a highly engaged audience, these social media superheroes can be your secret weapon as you grow your gym membership totals.

The Benefits of Collaborating With Fitness Influencers

Your gym's partnership with fitness influencers can have numerous positive impacts. These include boosting brand awareness and increasing the number of visitors your website receives.

Increase Brand Awareness

You probably have a good number of gym members. But to grow your business, you need to expose your brand to new prospects who know nothing about your fitness center. The right influencers can introduce your brand to their loyal followers through sponsored posts, gym membership reviews, or brand mentions.

As a result, you reach customer segments that are unfamiliar with your services and amplify your gym’s brand.

Reach Targeted Audiences

Think of your ideal customer — the one who gets fired up about high-intensity interval training (HIIT), meditation, personal training, or yoga.

Well, fitness influencers already have a community of followers who share those interests. If you partner with them, you can target a pool of potential members who are already interested in what your gym offers, which is better than marketing to a general audience. Targeted audiences are more likely to convert into paying customers.

Build Credibility and Trust

People are likely to trust influencer recommendations over a message coming directly from a brand, according to a 2023 survey by Matter Communications.

Influencers create content that resonates with their fans, and you can leverage their authenticity to add credibility to your marketing campaigns and make your brand appear more trustworthy. This matters because, as Adobe’s 2021 research revealed, 70% of customers in the U.K. buy only from businesses they trust.

Drive Traffic to the Gym’s Website and Social Media Pages

Influencers have an army of loyal followers. When you partner with an influencer, you can tap into this large, engaged audience to increase the number of visitors your website or social media pages receive. The more people visit your website and take the desired action, such as filling out a contact form or applying for a gym membership, the more leads your business is likely to get.

How to Find the Right Fitness Influencers for Your Gym

Influencer marketing can help you reach a wider audience, win prospects’ trust, and get more people to subscribe for a membership, but if you choose the wrong influencers, you’ll spend valuable time and money without getting any tangible results in return. Choosing the right fitness influencer for your gym is key to the success of the strategy.

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer/Member

Create a profile of your perfect customers. Are you targeting young or middle-aged adults? Are they mainly male or female? What motivates them to go to the gym?

Maybe they want to lose weight or build their muscles, or perhaps they just want to stay fit. Besides age, gender, and goals, considering your customers' locations and the social platforms they use is key.

Once you identify your audience, choose a workout influencer whose followers meet most or all of the traits of your ideal customer. For instance, you want to collaborate with someone who appeals to your target audience’s motives and has a respectable following on a platform most of your prospects use.

Step 2 :Pick a Niche to Focus On

Does your gym offer holistic fitness programs or specialize in strength training, HIIT, or yoga? If you focus on a particular area of wellness, collaborating with just any fitness influencer won’t necessarily be effective.

You’ll need to find someone in your specific niche. After all, you want to partner with brand ambassadors who speak to your target market.

Step 3: Look Beyond the Number of Followers

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when looking for influencers to collaborate with is prioritizing follower count over engagement (likes, comments, shares, and clicks). An influencer may have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers but fail to engage with them.

You can calculate an influencer’s engagement rate by adding up the number of comments and likes on a post. Next, divide the result by the influencer’s number of followers and then multiply the result by 100.

Written as a formula, this looks like:

Engagement Rate = ((Number of Comments On Number of Likes) / Number of Followers) × 100

If you’re not a math person or you simply want to avoid manual calculations, tools like Hootsuite can automatically show you these engagement rates. A good engagement rate is typically between 1% and 5%.

Step 4: Leverage Search and Social to Find Influencers

Want to find the right fitness influencers quickly and easily? Google is your friend. Open your browser, and in the search bar, enter a string of terms that target your niche.

You can use a template like "[Your Location + Fitness Specialty + Influencers]" for your search — for example, "California yoga influencers." If your audience is on a specific platform, you can use a format such as "[Fitness Specialty + Influencers + Your Target Channel + Your Location]" — for instance, "HIIT influencers with a YouTube channel in New York." The top five results on Google can be a great starting point when you're looking for a brand advocate.

You can also search on the platform itself. For example, if you run a yoga studio, you can search for yoga-related hashtags on Instagram or TikTok to find influencers with an engaging presence.

There are also influencer discovery tools like Modash can help you find the right partner using filters such as location, gender, number of followers, and engagement rate.

Strategies for Collaborating With Fitness Influencers

Finding the right workout enthusiast to partner with on social media is one piece of the puzzle. Another piece is identifying the most suitable collaboration strategy. Here are a few examples to jump-start your mind.

Offer Free Memberships or Trials

With this collaboration method, an influencer can do their favorite fitness exercises in your gym without paying a dime throughout your partnership or a trial period. In return, they share their experience with their followers.

This strategy is one of the best because the influencer's message about your business will come across as natural and authentic. They’ll speak from real experience rather than just following a brand's script.

Affiliate Programs

Each influencer uses a unique link or promo code to market your fitness products and gym services to their followers. In return, they get a commission when someone buys a gym subscription through that link.

The greatest thing about affiliate programs is that they're performance-based. You pay only when a desired action, typically a sale, is made, unlike in traditional marketing, where you spend money on exposure (think of TV commercials). It’s also easy to track the effectiveness of each influencer with an affiliate program.

Host Events or Classes in Partnership With Influencers

Looking to make your gym one of the hottest workout spots in town? One effective way is to co-host on-premise fitness sessions with popular fitness enthusiasts in your niche.

Followers who are eager to meet their favorite internet personality may flood your fitness center. This might be an excellent opportunity to grow your gym's membership count as prospects see how well-equipped your facility is.

Run Contests or Giveaways

Fun fitness challenges like push-up competitions and longest-plank contests can boost your gym membership totals! You can ask influencers you’ve partnered with to announce the contests to their followers and post an entry link on their social feeds or in their bios. Entries for the contest can help you gather contact information for potential leads.

Make sure that the rules are clear on how winners will be selected, announced, and rewarded. For instance, participants may stand a chance to win a free membership, a personal training class in your facility, or workout accessories. The goal is to maximize the number of people interacting with your brand for an opportunity to convert more of them into customers.

Measuring the Success of Your Influencer Campaigns

After implementing your influencer marketing plan, you'll want to know how it's performing and how you can improve it.

Set Clear Key Performance Indicators

Before you can measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns, you must know what you want to accomplish. Two common KPIs for collaborating with influencers are increasing gym memberships and boosting brand awareness.

But to avoid setting targets that are too broad, you need to be more specific. Maybe you want to increase your gym membership sales for a particular demographic or sign up more people in your new fitness specialty, for example.

Use Tracking Links and Unique Promo Codes

In fitness marketing campaigns, trackable links can identify where sales or clicks originated. This allows you to see the specific influencers who are boosting your engagement rate and improving your company’s bottom line.

These programs also use unique discount codes that are assigned to each influencer. When an influencer’s fanbase uses the code during the checkout process, you can track the sale back to the person who promoted it.

This information shows you which influencers are driving the desired results. You can then use these insights to prioritize partnerships with your most effective influencers.

Monitor Website Traffic and Social Engagement

If you want to see whether influencer promotions are driving more people to your site, a close look at your website traffic will tell you everything you need to know. With tools like Google Analytics, you can also identify which influencer’s link is leading the most visitors to your website.

You'll want to measure how well your target audience receives your promotional content. In that case, you’ll need to check the likes, comments, shares, and other engagement metrics on an influencer’s post featuring your brand.

Increase Your Gym Members With Wellhub

Influencer campaigns allow you to reach your target audience on the platforms where they’re already engaged. If you partner with fitness influencers targeting similar market segments, you can advertise to potential customers who are more likely to be interested in your gym's offerings. This maximizes your chances of getting more people into your gym membership program.

However, influencer marketing is not the only way to gain new customers. Gyms that partner with Wellhub drive 40% more new members. And 90% of Wellhub users are new potential customers for our gym partners.

Join the Wellhub network today to gain more customers and increase your revenue without paying any fees!