How can I successfully market my online fitness business?

There is a growing interest in health and well being in recent times and so an online fitness business has a good chance of being successful, but what is the best way of marketing your business so that the maximum potential client base is reached?

A website which is optimised to produce a high ranking on search engines is certainly going to be beneficial to the business and can be designed and built to your specifications. Your website should provide visiting clients with details about the business and the services that you can offer with prices if appropriate. It will be advantageous to do some research on other similar business sites to see what is offered and whether there is a gap in the market that you could fill.

Video and image content would be an effective way of demonstrating some of the fitness techniques that you would offer and can be edited and uploaded quite easily.

If you are able to share tutorials so that clients can access them and complete their fitness exercises at a convenient time for them it will be a valuable element of the site. Customer reviews will be an essential feature of a fitness website and can promote the business effectively.

Marketing your online tutoring business

Many parents who are concerned about their child’s progress at school turn to a tutor for help and advice. If you run a tutoring business for primary and or secondary aged children, it is essential to market your business as effectively as you can so that you reach as many people as possible.

The most straightforward way to market your business initially is to set up a social media business page. This should give potential clients an idea of the services you can provide such as the age group you can work to support, the curriculum subjects you could offer and the method you will use to deliver your services whether by one to one tutoring or by online tutorials.

It will be necessary to reassure your potential clients that you hold relevant qualifications and if you are tutoring children on a one to one basis that you ideally have a DBS certificate although this is not a legal requirement as often parents will be present or nearby during tutoring sessions.

Contact details and a guide to costs should be clearly visible so that parents can decide whether to use your services and how to make contact with you. If possible, ask current clients to leave reviews as this is a good way to promote your business.

How to convert traffic into sales

When marketing companies talk about websites, you may hear them say about traffic vs conversions. This basically means the number of visitors to your site versus the conversions (a conversion can be anything from an enquiry through to a sale online) and is vital in establishing how well your website is performing.  

If you find that you are getting a lot of traffic through to the site, but not many of these are turning in to enquiries or sales, then you need to establish why that is.

There is no point having a thousand visitors to your site every day but not having any conversions, so it is worth investing a proportion of your marketing budget in to investigating this and monitoring conversion rates.  To find out the conversion rate of your website, you first need to find out how many visitors you have to your site in a set time period. This may require a bit of in depth research as some statistics packages give you different results so you will need to compare them and find to get as accurate result as possible.

Google Analytics is a widely used statistics package which also allows you to set up goals. These goals can be tailored to track conversions in a number of ways such as how many people complete an enquiry form or adding an item to the basket / checking out. It can even set to show a conversion when someone has been on your site for a number of minutes. Using this data will allow you to see your conversion rate and will also allow you to track where a conversion has come from such as an organic search, referral from another website or paid for ad. 

Improving conversions on your website

When it comes to websites the first goal is getting people to your site whether that be through organic search, paid for listings or referrals from other sites. But once you start receiving traffic to your site you need to ensure that a large percentage of it is converting to sales or enquiries.

When analysing your website statistics, be sure to check your bounce rate, this is often shown as a percentage and reflects the number of people that have left the site prior to interacting with it.

You need to drill down a bit deeper into this to find out if there is a reason why. Look at the pages that people are leaving on. If one page has a really high bounce rate, then it may suggest that something is wrong with that page. If the page is linked to from paid for adverts, then maybe your ads are not relevant to the content on the page and make people leave.  

A high bounce rate can also be caused by your site taking too long to load, navigating round it is hard or that you are not offering what they are looking for. 

All pages should have clear call to actions, this may be a banner or link that prompts the visitor to do something i.e. request a sample, buy a product or enquire.

How to target your clients in the 21st century

Over the last 20 years a lot has changed in the marketing industry. Years ago, if a company wanted to drum up more business they would often try and do a lot of cold calling on the phone or door to door sales. This was not only very time consuming but also often had low conversion rates. You often need to call a lot of people who simply were not interested to be able to find that one that was. Doing marketing this way also meant that if you did win a sale or a contract for work you simply did not have the time to carry on with your marketing at the same time, so the flow of work was often very slow.

As the internet grew in popularity and SEO, paid for ads and social media became more popular, it was easier and quicker to be able to target people. Rather than making the same call time and time again, you could draft one email and send it out to thousands of people in the touch of a button. The conversion rates could also be improved by spending s a little bit of time to personalise the mailings that you were sending out and by tailoring them to be more specific to that group of people. Marketing is all about finding out your target audience and ensuring you are communicating with them using the correct channels.