It’s rare that a new customer will come in off of the street and decide to sign up for a Pilates class on the spot without having heard about your studio or thought about Pilates before. Customer conversion happens when a Pilates studio owner implements a strategic marketing plan that actually works. 

As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, it is essential to carefully examine your current marketing efforts, define your target audience, and set clear and attainable marketing objectives for yourself. Now we’re going to take a dive into the fun part: the implementation of your strategy. 

Take a deep breath as you prepare to set up or upgrade your marketing efforts for your Pilates studio!

Choose the Right Marketing Channels

First, consider the marketing channels that you will use. A few examples include: 

• Social Media – The average American spends 2 hours and 25 minutes a day on social media websites according to Forbes. It’s clear…social media is the best place to focus most of your marketing efforts! Your potential customers are on social media looking for the right accounts to follow and engage with. So which channel is right for you? 
  • Instagram is a great place to feature images and videos of your studio and talk about your offering.
  • Facebook is continuing to grow. No matter what, cross-posting to both Instagram and Facebook is easy and lets you reach a broader audience.
  • TikTok is a great opportunity to reach a younger audience. Remember that TikTok is all about video content, so make sure you’re comfortable with video before deciding to spend time there. 
• Email Marketing – Email marketing is an excellent way to inform prospective clients about your offerings as well as any specials or discounts that you can offer them. Consider offering an incentive to get people onto your email list, like a discount or free intro class.
• Community Events – Get out there and meet your potential clients! When you get out and about in the community, you can start to get some extra face time with the people who will ultimately make a difference in the success or failure of your business. 

Focus on allocating your limited budget towards the marketing channels that will provide the highest return on investment (ROI) for you. Monitor the progress of these various channels to see which ones ultimately produce the most results for you. If you’re not sure where to start, pay attention to your current customers. Where do they go online? What do they like or dislike about what you’re posting (or what your competitors are posting)? Try a few tactics and analyze what works before for you.

Create a Content and Marketing Calendar

Organization is the name of the game when it comes to effective marketing. With so many marketing channels and strategies to select from, it’s imperative that you maintain a marketing calendar to manage it all. This is a calendar where you will set up a schedule of the various posts and other marketing efforts that you will ultimately put out into the world. Using a calendar will allow you to ensure that you have the appropriate posts going out at just the right time. 

Check out different services that let you schedule and post your content at specific times. Platforms like Later and Tailwind let you plan your posts ahead of time and automatically post them for you.

There are certain events that you don’t want to miss when it comes to posting content, like holidays and events that tie into the offerings that you provide at your pilates studio. Remember, National Pilates Day is the first Saturday of May every year, and a great time to offer special events for both new and current clients! 

Keep up the consistency so your followers and those that you still need to reach are kept informed about everything that you have going on. Social media platforms will push your content to more new people when they see you posting regularly and getting good engagement.

Implement and Monitor Your Plan 

Creating your marketing plan is one thing, but keeping tabs on how it’s going is a different kind of challenge! When you monitor the results of your marketing plan, you can quickly identify if there are any issues lurking out there and what you need to do about them to get them straightened out. 

So how do you monitor the performance of your marketing strategy? The answer lies in defining and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). These measurements provide the data that you need to see how well your marketing strategy is working. Examples of KPIs that are relevant to marketing performance include: 

• Social media engagement
• Social media followers
• Website traffic
• Conversion rates
• Bounce rates

These are just a few of the many KPIs that you should consider monitoring. Keep tabs on that data so that you can continuously improve your marketing efforts. Make adjustments as necessary based on the data and feedback that you receive from customers.

Time to Get Started

There is no time like the present to build and implement your marketing plan. Meanwhile, send us a note! We would love to hear from you if you have questions or want to share something you’ve learned.