How to Out beat your nearest fitness competitor
In this episode of the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast, the host explains why fitness studios, gyms, and personal trainers should stop trying to appeal to everyone and instead "nichе down to scale up." He argues that competitors are inevitable, but by defining a razor‑sharp target demographic (age, gender, life‑stage, personality) and aligning every aspect of the business – branding, copy, imagery, testimonials, program names, and ad targeting – to that niche, a small facility can become the go‑to provider for that specific audience. The host walks through a step‑by‑step framework: (1) decide exactly who you want to work with; (2) decide how you’ll deliver services (group, small‑group, online); (3) curate niche‑specific testimonials and case studies; (4) adjust website copy, social media bios, images, and ad creatives to match; (5) use hyper‑targeted Facebook ads and live sessions to reach the defined demographic. He illustrates the process with real client examples (e.g., Kylie’s Recreate rebrand from blue to purple for a female audience, an online trainer refocused on women aged 25‑35 who are engaged). The episode concludes with a call‑to‑action to book a “Marketing Muscle Up” session with ComMarketing for personalized help.
Chapters
really being clear of who you open the door for, because the only person that can beat you then is somebody who's doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same niche, attracting the same type of clientele. Now you might say, I attract females. Yeah, but what type of female? Do you attract someone who's 20 to 25, or do you attract someone who's 20 to 60? 20 to 60 is a whole different killer fish. So really understand the market that you're going for. And don't just go broad. I just do females. I just do males. Understand what the outcome they want. What are the challenges they're facing? Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. Good to have you here. When I think about studios or gyms, and I think the challenge at the moment for a lot of people is the fact that there is always a gym studio, personal training center. We have online training facility just around the corner or just on someone's phone. And I don't think there's a— I don't think we can be naive now to say, hey, we're not gonna have any competitors near us. We're the only person that does what we do. If we think like that, I think it's— I don't think it's the right attitude to have. I think we need to understand that there are people around us because you're going to hear this every day. But I think what we want to do is we don't want to treat them as competitors. We just want to treat them as other businesses. Now we know there's a couple of things. Number one, we know that we overall have done a really poor job of getting unhealthy people, right, in fitness facilities, in studios. Over the last 10, 20 years, we've done a great job of getting fit people fitter. And so that begs the question, there's a lot of people still not in a fitness program, and there's a lot of people out there to work with. And so when we think about competitors, Yes, there is people that are doing fitness services. I mean, heck, everybody, everybody can walk around the block. Yes, they can watch a YouTube video. There is heaps of online, very successful, very good online programs that people are purchasing, doing in their, their lounge room. And you wouldn't even know there's a competitor right around the corner. Like, there's— your clients are probably doing it as well. But I want you to think about not as competitors and, you know, it's how to outbeat your nearest facility, your online training facility. And really what we're going to do to outbeat anybody is there's a concept of niching down to scale up. And I love this concept because whenever you think that you're clogged, you're congested, there's no way that I can get the clients that the big gym's coming in town and they're gonna take 5,000 of my clients. I've, I've seen this over the years that yes, it adjusts, meaning that if you, if you're going after the same market, there's always gonna be a, a few people that will move across that probably wasn't suited for what you're trying to get to. And I'll say that again, there's gonna be a few people that move across. Let's say someone new is in town, they're gonna move across and they're gonna go there. However, What it does, it makes us better business owners. Okay? Because we know that we need to figure out who we are going to attract into our business. And it's a great lesson. It's a great lesson to go through. It's a great process to go through it. It's, it's not great when you're going through it and you're unprepared. And that's what I wanna talk about today. So the concept of niching down to scale up is Is not a new one, but it's one that we must use to move ahead. If you are struggling with how do I, how do I become the best gym? Because the best gym has all this new equipment. I've got all these old equipment. How can I do that? You're not always— you can't compete sometimes. You just certainly can't compete. There's always gonna be somebody with more money. There's always gonna be someone that's smarter than you. There's always gonna be somebody that is gonna outwork you. Right? It's just what's gonna happen. And if it's not happening and you're number one in every category, well done. Congratulations. But it's very rare that I've seen this because I believe everybody can be number one if we choose to have the concept of niching down and really getting clear of who we want in our business who we want to work with. You know what it's like? It's like, I want to work with that client. I love those good clients, right? But then we work with the clients we don't love. So number one is we want to figure out who we want to work with. We want to niche down, meaning we want to choose who we want to work with. Now, this is really hard for anybody who's never done this before. Like, I'm marketing to everybody. Everybody's my client. Well, they can be, but if your facility doesn't cater for everybody to be your client, there are now other places they can go to. So what you need to do is you need to get a little bit sharper on who are you trying to attract and go after those and be the number one, be the number one in your area for that type of clientele. So there's a couple of things you can do to make this process seamless and fast. Number one, is you want to decide who you want to work with. And you're not just gonna say males or females, but there's a type of male, there's a type of female, there's a type of personality that you want to work with. And when you're clear on that, it makes it really, really easy. So back when we started ComMarketing, we were marketing for everybody. We narrowed it down to real estate agents, and dentists at the time and fitness. And working with 3 types of industries, we then narrowed it down again and we said, right, we only want to work with fitness and wellness professionals. And we can even narrow it down even further. And once we did that, there was a few things that we did. And this is what I would recommend you guys to do is you want to, number 2, you want to think, how do you want to work with them? A group environment, a small group environment, a large group environment online? How do you wanna work with them? So even that in itself can be a point of difference that you do that nobody else does. Number 3, you wanna choose testimonials that represents that audience. Okay? So you might have, you might have, and this is sort of point number 4, you might have other testimonials on your website, other case studies, other success stories. And you wanna remove them and just focus on the case studies and testimonials that you wanna be working with more, the people that you wanna work with. So I'd actually remove any case studies and testimonials that don't fit that criteria of a person. Just take them off the website, take them off social media, take them off Facebook. You then wanna go adjust the copy. So if you got copy on your website, go and adjust it, make differences there, right? Adjust. If you're doing a Facebook Live, make sure the right people are in the Facebook Live. Make sure it's not everybody. I've got a few examples to share with you. Number one, I've got a client called Kylie. She's actually been on the podcast before. She has a business called Recreate. When we first met her, she was blue. Her logo was blue. Now, I like blue. She likes blue, but her target market were females. Now, not to be biased or sexist or like just saying, oh, females are pink, but at the end of the day, Facebook ads, when we put ads out for a different shade, we got better results. So we actually rebranded to purple based on recommendations and her business, 3, I think 3 or 4x'd, you know, just from that moment of really deciding and sharpening our sort of who we're going to try to market for. Okay? So it's, it's being really clear in your brand, even your name. You might have to go and rechange your name if that's the case, or your subname is an easy one to do, but really being clear of who you open the door for because the only person that can beat you then is somebody who's doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same niche, attracting the same type of clientele. Now you might say, I attract females. Yeah, but what type of female do you attract? Someone who's 20 to 25, or do you attract someone who's 20 to 60? 20 to 60 is a whole different kettle of fish, right? 2 different brackets. Now you can do that, but if you wanna triple down your results, you might wanna go from, I attract people 18 to 29, and you wanna master that. You wanna design case studies, success stories, testimonials, have all those people based on the language they're gonna use, you know, everything based on that person. Then somebody from 30 to 40 is a different type of person. Someone who's 50 to 60 is a different type of person. So really understand the market that you're going for and don't just go broad. I just do females. I just do males. Understand what the outcome they want. What are the challenges they're facing? You know, a lot of the time, and People say, I'm targeting anybody who's a mom. And I go, well, that's a really broad point. Is it targeting new moms and how new? And with the advertising, let's say for example, you're targeting a new mom and to target a new mom, they're not Their words that they're going for is not like, "I want to get my my baby body back." I don't think we should be using those words. You know what they want to do is they want to sleep more. They want to have more rest. They want to have more energy. What is their eyes? When when they see anything advertisement photos, what are they going to be attracted to straight away? I can tell you what they're going to be attracted to straight away in their world. New mom, they're going to be attracted to. Dummies. So if you show a photo of a dummy, nappies, anything baby orientated, their mind is like focused on those images now because they weren't before. So they're tightly focused on that. So there's no point having an image of someone who's super fit, super running. They go, oh, I'm so far away from that. What we wanna do is we wanna attract them, get attention. So I'd put a, I'd get a picture of like a dummy, right? And say, Like, have some copy that's based around that. Do you wanna have a break from this for 60 minutes or something? Like, be clever with the content and the images that you use to attract the type of clientele that you do. We have another client of ours who wanted to go online training. They were going— they were a fitness-first trainer, and they said, I just wanna purely go online. And so what we did, we, we called all their All their programs' names based on their type of clientele. And all the type of clientele we realized was, was, uh, were women who were in the ages of 25 to 35. And they were all either— they were all getting— they were in that period, they were getting engaged. So they'll— they were, they were getting engaged or they were dating. And, and everything was based around these 2 worlds. So the language that we used was around that. The social media we used was around that. And that totally transformed the business that she became this superior online training program for that niche. And she did it really, really well. And this all comes down to not looking at competitor and going, oh my gosh, another one. We want to change that mindset. We're gonna go, right, this is gonna make us better. It's gonna make us better marketers, a more sustainable business. And you might be sitting here going, well, but I had it before until this person came up. Yes, but that's just life and that's just the way things work right now. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna drop revenue. It actually means that you'll make more, you'll attract more, you'll retain more because you need to decide who you're gonna work with in this kind of world. Or if you don't wanna do that, you're gonna have to put services If you're a larger gym, you're gonna have to go, okay, I'm gonna have a wellness hub here for this type of personality. I'm gonna have an amazing studio, spin cycle studio, and really go deep in that. So you, you're having a lot of different rooms and venues if you're a larger facility. But if you're a smaller facility like a studio or a trainer, get really deep in what you wanna do there. Guys, I hope that's helped. These are some quick tips. Number 1, Decide who you're gonna work with. Number 2, how you wanna work with them. Number 3, is there testimonials from these people, case studies, videos? We call them hero videos. Remove any other testimonials and copy that don't relate to that person. Adjust image, all images to suit that type of clientele. Change the copy on your website, social media, Instagram bios, the full works. Delete any images that you need to on Instagram, for example, if that's confusing. Adjust all your Facebook ads and any Facebook Lives that— and when you do Facebook ads, it's, by the way, it's awesome because you can actually then target a certain age demographic. I mean, a big hack here is like, you know, if you're going for males and females, just go for females and just that splits your budget in half and it gets really hyper-focused on that type of audience and your ads can be really around that type of audience. And then Facebook Lives, any kind of ad hoc marketing you're doing, just again ensure the right person's in that image. And then straight away you'll be the one to go to to get that type of clientele and grow and scale your fitness business. I hope that's helped, team. I love this conversation because it, it just makes us better in business. We understand marketing more, and that's exactly what a lot of our clients do in our, in our Marketing Ninja program. They scale down They niche down to scale up, and you know what? They love their business even more. So if this is something that you are going through, and if you need some help with that, reach out, go to our website, commarketing.com.au. You can book a Marketing Muscle Up. That's a conversation around how you can scale up, how you can grow with marketing, and we can take you through the step-by-step process just for your business. I'll catch you next time on the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. Bye for now.
