How to use YouTube for Marketing your Fitness Studio

Online videos are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your fitness business. Fitness is one area where people would probably prefer learning through a video over an article. It’s an opportunity all fitness professionals must seize to connect with a wider audience. And where better to get started than YouTube? It is a powerful platform.

Now the real question is, how do you harness the power of video-based quality content for your fitness business? Just making a workout video and posting it may not be the best way to go about this. With the right set of marketing tips, you can get the best out of every video you produce. When you’re finished with this blog, you will be able to enhance your fitness studio's engagement with your clients or followers and grab fresh eyeballs on YouTube.

Being the second largest search engine and second most visited after Google, YouTube presents itself as an excellent marketing tool to create content for your studio. Believe it or not, over a billion users watch YouTube videos on the site every day, yet just a mere 9% of US small businesses dare to start their channels. Time to start creating videos and make the most out of it!

How to use YouTube for Marketing your Fitness Studio?

1. Set up your YouTube Channel
2. Content Matters
3. Focus on building buyer persona to grow your channel
4. Content Variety and Consistency
5. YouTube Affiliate Marketing
6. Bond with your Audience
7. Content Distribution

Let's deep dive into each of these goals to make your YouTube channel work the best for your fitness business.

1. Set up your YouTube Channel:

The first thing you need to do is create your YouTube account. As you are setting up an account for your fitness training business, it is ideal to use your brand account instead of your personal Google account. You can then customize your own channel with your brand elements. Start with your Channel Icon in the small image that appears next to your channel’s name. Keep your brand logo/studio image as the icon as it helps people decide and connect with your channel.

Next up is the description. It might look trivial, but this is a vital space to fill in. Give a brief yet the exciting outline of your fitness studio, what your brand stands for, and anything that specifically targets your ideal customers. This will help your followers find you easily. Add your contact details, official website, and links to other social media handles you have, and you're ready to roll!

2. Content Matters:

YouTube is a great medium to learn new things and excel in skills and hobbies that interest people. In fact, according to a 2018 Pew Study Research, around 51 percent of Americans use YouTube to learn new things. Additionally, data from Think with Google shows that 79 percent of YouTube has sports and fitness video content that they can't find anywhere else.

Clearly, consuming fitness content on YouTube is a rapidly rising trend. Your fitness audience is waiting for content. All you need to do now is focus on producing high-quality fitness videos and tutorials! 

Along with the content, also focus on its quality. Check out relevant fitness businesses and fitness vloggers and analyze their ways of creating video content. What technology are they using to optimize the video quality? How about using a ring light or a fancy camera to shoot?

The combination of clear visuals and auditory information helps reduce cognitive load and increase information retention.

3. Focus on building Buyer Personas to Grow your Channel

Resorting to the technique of user/buyer persona to design awesome videos is one of the interesting methods to consider. A buyer persona is the representation of your ideal audience. They are the individuals who are most likely to watch your videos till the end, keep coming back to your channels to absorb more information, and finally hit the 'Subscribe' button! 

Buyer personas are fictional but realistic portrayals of a target user and help any business to get into the psyche of their potential customer base and build empathy with the target users. Trying to create buyer personas helps in answering 4 basic questions about a target user-- Who? Why? Where? And How? 

Understanding, learning, and adapting to the personas helps create and plate your fitness videos in such a way that catches the utmost attention!‍

Who- This preliminary part of user research puts emphasis on the demographic profile such as name, age, gender, marital status, etc.‍

Why- It reflects the needs of the customers. What could be the specific needs of a particular user group to watch your videos or opt for your services? It helps strategize your video playlist well, and every fitness video you curate will have the user/viewer in mind.‍

Where- This is identifying the user environment. Knowing the user's behavior patterns, where they spend most of their time, what devices they use, what books they read, social media accounts, and websites that they frequent. This part is crucial as it directs a business to where the most interaction is likely to occur.‍

How- This question addresses the fundamental challenges and pain points that the users or viewers are facing. Anticipating solutions for their problems and designing videos helps get continued engagements and is the best way forward.

As health and fitness matter to everyone, fitness professionals may create videos for different personas with specific needs. A few examples could be a busy office-goer, stay-at-home mom, work-from-home workforce, homemakers, people placed in peripheral locations without access to standard fitness facilities, elderly folks opting for low-impact cardio at home, self-conscious individuals suffering from gymtimidation (fear of working out in front of others may be because of body-types or lower fitness levels), etc. 

Being able to comprehend the personas thereby helps fitness professionals to present video content that is useful, valuable, and relevant to various target audiences; be it for someone who's on a lookout for any variety ranging from HIIT, low-impact, feel-good factor, weight loss, muscle gain, special exercises for expecting women, moderate-intensity aerobic exercises for treating menstrual cramps and so on.

4. Content variety and consistency:

The success of YouTube channels on fitness also depends on how often you offer. Health and wellness is a lifestyle choice and represents a constant journey. It includes maintaining a healthy diet, sleeping patterns, exercises, hobbies, etc. Your fitness content should cover each of these aspects to make your channel a true inspiration for enthusiasts. 

Secondly, people usually rely on brands that emotionally connect with consumers. Therefore, to develop an emotional connection through your videos to communicate with your audience, you need to build a lifestyle around your fitness brand.

Make videos on your diet or nutrition tips, sleep routine, hiking vlogs, how you started your fitness journey, the story behind your inspiration, etc. Your brand will naturally become an inspiration for many - a lifestyle that they would want to experience for themselves. Make your message loud and clear to your viewers, keeping them engaged and wanting more!

You can divide your Content into several types to break the monotony of your usual workout videos. 

A) Regular Content- As the name suggests, regular fitness content can be posted regularly or, say, once or twice a week. It could be anything from simple demo workouts, workout programs, diet for the week to goal-oriented tutorials like how to train for the right kind of abs, how to master a particular yoga pose (asana), etc.

Around 30% of videos searched on YouTube are ‘How to videos that provide short, digestible bites to whoever wants to learn something and get that extra engagement! These videos are also the most shared on social media.

B) Occasional Content- These could be uploaded once or twice a month. Physical trainers could make videos on these subjects -

• Day-to-day routine
• Introduce other physical trainers (anyone that inspires you)
• Vlogs on your weekend hiking trip
• A workout session with your friend coupled with a fun conversation on wellness
• Interviews with nutritionists, physiotherapists, and other health experts‍

C) Special Content can be uploaded once in a while. These could include user-generated content like testimonials where you feature your client’s journey and highlight their side of the struggle story and successful transformation. These testimonial videos are the most relatable emotionally, with high chances of drawing in prospective viewers. 

You could even have contests with fabulous giveaways. You could also share your life experience - like a story on how you embarked on your fitness journey and share what worked for you, what did not, your stumbling blocks, and success mantras.

Read Content Marketing for Fitness Studios‍

5. YouTube Affiliate Marketing

Youtube affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful algorithms to earn bucks by adding affiliate links into the summaries of fitness videos you create and promoting the products and services mentioned inside the video that tracks a purchase. So whenever someone makes a purchase using your affiliate link, you receive a decent amount of commission for the sale. 

A personal trainer or fitness instructor can also use their YouTube channel to reap these benefits of affiliate marketing. For someone in fitness, advertising for products related to fitness makes sense- workout merchandise, gym bags and bottles, some favorite fitness gear or sports equipment, doing a live unboxing, and so on. You could also do an honest review of certain health products. However, it requires an adequate amount of research on the product, a first-hand experience of using it, and it should also reflect that you have read everything in the manual.

Make your videos insightful and educative for the audience. It helps in asserting your authority as more than just a fitness trainer. The links for each product should be shared in the video description box so as and when a purchase is made, it will generate passive income for the channel owner. However, the only concern should be on selecting the right kinds of quality products or brands to promote that don't threaten the reputation of your fitness business or fitness channel at all.

6. Bond with your Audience

Beyond the kind of content you share with your audience, viewer engagement is super important. It's like getting feedback from your viewers! It helps you understand how your audience likes your videos or what more they want from you. YouTube provides various buttons for uploaders to engage with their viewers.

• Thumbs Up (Like)
• Thumbs Down (Dislike)
• Share 
• Subscribe 
• Bell Icon (for updates on new videos)
• Comments Section
• Live chat (allows YouTube community to interact with the creators directly from a chat window) 

Make the most of these features to keep your channel active. Urge your viewers to hit the 'Like' button if they enjoy watching your videos, asking them to leave comments on what they liked and any fitness trend they would want to learn from you. Ask them to share the videos with their friends or any fitness enthusiast who would enjoy videos like these and share them across different social media channels. 

Host Q&As, AMA's (Ask Me Anything), fitness contests, giveaways, etc., to boost engagement. Also, encourage more people to 'Subscribe' to your channel. More subscribers lead to YouTube Partnership Programs that help video content creators earn through various revenue streams, including advertisements and Google AdSense. The more subscribers, the more it translates into people's trust in your fitness channel, thereby getting translated as a reputed fitness brand.

7. Content Distribution

Ultimately, it takes significant effort behind the scenes to produce any video. Even if it is a short video, the quality is highly crucial to its appeal and the kind of traction you want for your YouTube fitness channel.

While fitness videos are fun, fitness professionals put videos on YouTube to monetize their skills. Hence, better organic distribution of YouTube content is crucial. That starts right from managing the catchy video thumbnails and descriptions according to smart SEO norms and focusing on keyword research. YouTube allows the use of 5000 characters in the description of a video. While editing your videos, add your brand logo as a watermark and share it across different social media platforms. It will boost visibility for your brand as well.

These are just a few tips and tricks on marketing on YouTube that could work wonders for your fitness business. As you go on, you will discover a host of other trends that will work best for you. Keep your competitors' work in mind and give it your best shot! You will go viral!

If you would like to optimize your operations and devote your energy to expanding your fitness business, Omnify has the tools to help you out! From helping you with online classes, scheduling your services to manage your members effectively, your business can be automated and simplified, allowing you to manage your resources in the best way possible. Find out how Omnify can fulfill your business needs, sign up for a FREE TRIAL and get started today!

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