Fitness Studio Marketing

We recently found out very directly how many new customers we were getting from online searchers…..it was an eye opener.  Early in our studio’s history, we deployed a popular, powerful and highly effective business tool called Mindbody Online.  Most people think of Mindbody Online as primarily an online scheduler — which it certainly is, but it also contains a variety of tools to help manage and market your business.  Since we have a small studio and very little staff, we have built a business heavily reliant on our customers interacting through our website. They make 97% of their purchases there, they learn about promotions there and they book classes there……it’s great, because it means we can focus on our classes and events.

Here’s the thing.  Since you MUST create an online account to use our studio, we employ a Mindbody Online feature that REQUIRES new customers to tell us where they heard about us.  That field is the only other required field other than name and email address.  Periodically we create reports.  Here is one that covers 60 days of our business.
Here’s what this report shows.  In a 90 day period, we had just over 150 new customers register online.  The largest single source was of course “word-of-mouth”, but guess what?  Second largest source was “Web/Google search”.  We have been in the same town over 5 years, yet 20% of our new customers found us by searching online.  That is a huge number when you think that these are the new people to incite new “word of mouth”.  Yikes!  After seeing this data, we started thinking long and hard about how to maintain strong visibility online.  You betcha.