As a gym owner you must be aware that success won’t come knocking on your door by itself. You need to guide it all the way to your home and then warmly greet it when it knocks. Simply put, you need to toil hard while planning, monitoring and executing without compromising on your standards. In a way, running a gym is similar to working on your body to stay fit. You can’t achieve fitness in a single day, it is a lifestyle change that you need to adapt to. The same principle applies to your fitness business. Success doesn’t happen overnight and you have to consistently work in order to make your business grow.
Just like you need to stick to certain principles when targeting physical fitness, there are some basics of your fitness plan that you need to adhere to. Once you have done all that was jotted down in your marketing plan, it’s time to reflect what worked for your business and what didn’t. Without evaluating the success of your marketing plan, your need to continue on with the business becomes purposeless. To figure out which strategy works best for your gym and which doesn’t shouldn’t be much of an effort. Rather, you should incorporate this procedure as an integral step of your marketing strategy. Ideally, you should run an evaluation at the start of year so that you can look into the mistakes that you made in the previous year while capitalizing on the positives.
Following are the best strategies that you can use to configure the success of your marketing plans.
Customer Feedback
The easiest way to gauge the success of your marketing plan is to take into consideration customer feedback. Begin with asking yourself this important question “What do your clients think of your business?” There are plenty of ways that you can get insight from your customers. You can look for online reviews, look up your company’s name on Google or ask your customers to fill up survey forms. You should not form an opinion on outliers, rather look for a common trend in the feedback. A single negative review shouldn’t be alarming for you, however, if you see many dissatisfied customers, it’s time to re-assess your strategy.
Return On Investment
Return on Investment or ROI is clear indicator whether your business is doing good or not. The simplest way to determine whether your marketing plan has generated revenue is to compare the amount that you spent on executing your plan against the revenue it generated. Comparing how much you spent on each campaign to the return can help you pinpoint the most suitable marketing plan for your business. Greater the ROI, more successful is your plan.
Sales In Numbers
Another easy method to measure the success rate of your business operations in a year is to take into account your sales numbers. Though they may provide you with a quick analysis of your overall business standing, the procedure is quite vague when it comes to determining the effectiveness of your marketing plan. While considering sales numbers, it is also important to bear into mind other factors such as increased prices and business expansion.
Analyzing Metrics
There is a lot of effort that goes into every aspect of a business including portraying a positive image in a digital world. Therefore, it is very important for you to analyze your online metrics such as:
- Unique Visitors: Reflects your site’s overall traffic
- Search Engine Traffic: Reflects how effective your SEO strategies are
- Bounce Rate: Reflects that your customers are not interested in what you are offering them on your website
- Inbound Links: Reflects that readers consider your content useful and add their links to it
Competitor’s Reactions
The easiest of all methods to decipher the success of your marketing plan is to notice your competitor’s reactions. If your competitors are rushing everywhere in an attempt to adopt your strategies or are trying to sell similar products or services, then it’s a thumbs up sign that your strategy has hit the sweet spot. If you see that your competitors are not budged at all by all the pains that you have taken to alter your marketing plan, know that it’s time to consider something else.
End Note
Considering all these five factors will help you paint a clear picture of whether your marketing plan is working for you or not. Even if your plan has encouraging results for now, be ready to embrace change as new year brings along new tools and trends.