5 Common Pitfalls When Identifying Your Gym's Target Audience

By Tim Mauk, Special FBA Contributor

When trainers or studio owners want to enhance their marketing to increase business, they are frequently asked to define their gym’s target audience.

Unfortunately, this question is often met with a non-confident or generic answer. In the modern fitness industry, it is imperative to not only know your target audience but also understand how to leverage their demographic attributes to best market and position your facility or services to them to grow long-term successfully.

The Importance of Identifying Your Target Audience

When starting a fitness facility or training clients, many people are concerned about getting clients as fast as possible—even if they have a specialization in mind. While there is nothing wrong with hustling to ensure your bills are paid, over time, an eclectic collection of clients can lead to an unclear map to growing your business sustainably.

Understanding your ideal client type, defining their attributes, and documenting them in a way that gives you a template to recreate that into a persona is a great start to establishing your target audience. This knowledge can then help guide you in business and marketing decisions. By keeping your target audience in mind early on, you can build them into the core of your operations, which can make attracting them (lead generation), singing them up (conversions), and keeping them long-term (client retention) a more manageable and almost organic process.

5 Common Pitfalls With Target Audiences

The idea of target audiences and the value of establishing them is not a new concept. Fortunately, many guides, playbooks, and training sources heavily suggest this concept. Unfortunately, gym owners and trainers looking to implement this concept can sometimes fall short in their efforts. Here are five examples of where this can happen.

1. Too Generalized of a Target Audience

The more precise the picture you paint of your audience, the smaller the population size should be. That said, the higher the viewpoint, the more generic and large your audience will be. Sometimes, people mistakenly consider this larger audience number as a higher marketing/business potential. This viewpoint can be a pitfall because the more extensive the audience, the more generic the marketing, services, and business need to be to appeal to that many variables. Conversely, the more specific the audience type, the more focused you can be in defining your points of distinction, specialization, or expertise within the marketplace.

2. Ignoring Demographic Trends

Demographic information will also emerge when defining your target audience. These points can influence your business from services offered, pricing, or even branding standpoints. However, ignoring the demographic trends of your service area, you may misalign yourself with your available audience. This pitfall can look like a high-end personal training studio in an area that does not naturally support the average income levels necessary for thriving. Demographics don’t have to be limited to cost. For example, misalignment of services focused on age-based groups with the area's average age can cause a lack of demand.

3. Failing to Consider Current Member Feedback

As mentioned earlier, trainers and owners often find themselves already with clients when establishing their target audience. Ignoring current client insights can be a pitfall in these situations. While the customer doesn’t have to be right, it never hurts to solicit input from the people already engaging with your business. Asking questions about the value of your services, where they feel the community thrives, what doesn’t seem to be working, etc., can help give you some insights when strategizing your next moves.

4. Not Keeping Up With Industry Trends

Trends in the fitness industry come and go these days at head-spinning speeds. Fortunately, when you have a specific niche or specialty of focus, many of these trends may pass by with little overlap in your world. However, ignoring or not engaging with trends that can affect or overlap with your part of the market can be a pitfall.

When relevant trends appear, engaging with them and adding a spark of change to your business can be an opportunity. But trends like these can also draw more attention to your portion of the market, potentially bringing competition that can shake up your client lineup, even if short-lived. Therefore, keeping abreast with the industry and trends can be a fun way to spice things up and serve as a defensive tactic for client retention.

5. Relying On Assumptions

Similar to the point made on current member feedback, moving forward on untested or unverified information can be a risky choice. When assumptions aren’t confirmed, it unnecessarily risks your business’s potential success. From assuming people would be willing to pay a price point for your services to making presumptions about the location needs of your services, these types of decisions become gambles that can become an albatross for some fitness businesses. Doing research, market testing, and running surveys or data collection methods to test and verify considerations when possible can aid in the prospect of long-term success.

Final Thoughts

Whether you're brand new to the fitness industry or already established, a good understanding of your target audience can significantly impact your business’s success rate while helping reduce some pain points in operations and marketing. By focusing on getting specific with defining your audience definition, you can have a great start to building a healthy business. Finally, by avoiding these common pitfalls when establishing your target audience, you may find a more precise answer to who your audience is more effectively.