Building Customer Profiles
Know Your Customers – How Fitness Professionals Can Create Customer Profiles
Building a strong relationship with your customers is a basic rule for every type of business, including fitness and gym businesses. And the best way to build a relationship with anyone requires – above everything else – knowing them, understanding their likes and dislikes, how they prefer to be addressed and when the best time of the day or the week to interact with them is.
In terms of business and marketing, this is called customer profiling. Now, don’t get panicked, this has nothing to do with the criminal profiling you see on TV shows. First and foremost, creating customer profiles helps you understand:
Who your most loyal customers are,
What kind of people are most likely to join your fitness programme,
Why some people drop out from your programme, and
What type of tone of voice works best to attract new customers
Customer profiles also help you put order in your marketing and advertising efforts, by spending the right amount of money for the right group of customers at the right moment in time. So, how do you build your customer profiles? Here are some ideas:
1. Understand Why They Joined Your Programme
Research has already identified a few types of customers that join gyms or fitness programmes. They are:
The sports-savvy client,
The health-oriented client,
The athletic client, and
The pressured client.
Each of these types of people has a specific goal in mind and a specific set of reasons for choosing one fitness programme over another. To identify to which group most of your customers belong to, you can organise a simple poll. To make things more interesting, create a quiz with 4 or 5 questions (but no more than 10, because it gets boring) and offer the customer the answer at the end of the quiz. This works great for undecided potential customers, who are not sure whether they should join your gym.
2. Use the Demographic Data to Tell a Story
One of the most efficient ways of creating customer profiles is to tell a story about them. Give them a name and use the demographic data you have on your customers to build a likely scenario. For instance: Jim is 41, has a wife and two children, holds a demanding position in a company and is worried that he doesn’t have enough time to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Jim needs a fitness programme that can fit in with his strict schedule, offers visible results in a short time and also includes a healthy diet plan which he can follow.
Go on, look at your customers’ demographic data and discover who they are, what their pain points are and how you can offer a solution to them.
3. Use Website Data to Define New Profiles
There are a lot of people who keep checking out your website but do not find sufficient motivation to join your fitness programme. Using a tool such as Alexa.com, you can find out a detailed presentation of your website audience. By comparing this data to your existing customer profiles, you can identify those people who need one extra reason to become clients and you can build a marketing campaign to target them.
4. Never Underestimate the Power of Facebook
With all the privacy worries, people still share a lot of personal information publicly. They will let anyone know what type of food they like, what books they read and what movies they watch. They will share their successes and disappointments with a new diet or fitness programme.
When you start planning a Facebook ad campaign, you will automatically obtain a list of common interests for people who would be interested in your fitness business. By changing the demographic criteria in the audience builder, you can identify a lot of common interests for a large number of people who are likely to become customers with a common profile.
Building and managing customer profiles is not an easy task – but it is manageable, especially if you seek a specialist’s help. You are not alone in the fitness business, and there are a lot of resources and specialised services to help you keep track of your customers.
Dave Hare