Fitness Challenges for Lead Gen & Client Retention

Are you ready to head into Q4 of 2022? Still looking to get more clients and expand your fitness business this year? Fitness challenges are a great way to do that and, on top of that, Seasonal and Holiday challenges can be a wildly effective tool for your business.

So if you’ve never run a fitness challenge before or if you’ve run a few without the results you hoped for - we’re here to help.

Why even do a fitness challenge?

Fitness is a multi-dimensional industry and your reasons for offering a challenge are equally diverse. You ultimately want to build a fitness challenge surrounding the most common goals of your clients.

A few examples of those goals may be:

• Weight loss
• Strength training
• Building healthier habits
• Tracking consistent workouts/ progress
• Mental health

This list could go on and on but, ultimately, we suggest you list out 3-5 goals your specific clientele would identify with and investigate how you might use upcoming Seasons and/or Holidays to help encourage participation.

How do you build participant motivation?

Full transparency, this is a challenging one. But, a lot of this work will be covered if you spend time intentionally thinking about what types of challenges would appeal to your client base.

One thing to keep in mind, all “challenges” naturally share one thing - accountability. So, don’t forget that no matter how you structure your challenges and/or what goals they target you need to step up to the plate to be the group cheerleader.

If you have run challenges in the past for your studio or gym, did your team participate? Did you hype your challengers up on social media? Did you highlight the journey of participating in the challenge itself? These are all very important when building the human connection and ultimately, building motivation to keep going.

Do challenges help with client retention?

Well, here’s a similar question - would you eat at the same restaurant every single day? Probably not because although you may love that restaurant and their menu, you would get exhausted by the redundancy.

Same principle applies to fitness studios.

By creating challenges you are spicing things up with your current client base and keeping them excited for what you bring to the table. Keep in mind, challenges are meant to be a marketing, retention, and lead generation tool.

When thinking about how challenges could be used to retain clients, you can also use them to see if a new class or services is well received by your audience. A great example: you want to see if a new HIIT style workout class would do well for you. Make it a challenge where clients have to participate in X number of new HIIT classes in 30 days. When the challenge concludes, measure the response to that new offer and not only have you potentially added variety immediately but you have also tested the waters and may have found your next new offering.

Wait, challenges can help with leads and sales?

Absolutely! Challenges are also a great lead generation and marketing tool because most challenges have a clear start time and end time, costs a set amount, and has a specific goal. Sound familiar to an Intro Offer? Well, that’s because they are wildly similar in this way. A challenge however is something that you use strategically throughout the year whereas an Intro Offer is typically perennial.

All that being said, challenges can expose you to new clients who have wanted to try your business but maybe haven’t had the extra push to do so. Of course make sure you’re marketing these challenges on all the channels you regularly use to communicate with clients: email, SMS, social media, website, etc.

Do challenges increase client engagement?

If planned well, the general answer to this is yes. If the challenge connects with your audience, they are finding value in this work, and they also know that this activity is only happening for a certain period of time, they are more likely to engage with your business and other clients.

Keep in mind that if certain types of engagement are important to your business to validate even offering a challenge, make sure you outline that as a business goal from the start. So, if you are only interested in challenges that increase in-person client engagement with other clients then you would most likely want to look at a team focused program.

Looking for some challenge ideas? We’ve got you covered:

• In-person challenges: challenge clients to attend 1x of each class in a 1 week period, etc.
• Boot camp style: invite a limited number of clients to participate in a hyper-focused series of workouts that are usually more frequent than offered normally. So, if you offer a “sculpt” class 1x a week that is popular maybe you build out a “sculpt” boot camp where that style of workout is offered 2-3x per week for a period of time to just those participants.
• Bingo style: offer incentives for completing certain classes, activities, etc. that fill up a branded bingo scoreboard.
• Checklist style: create a list of things for your audience to work through consistently (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) and reward the most consistent participants at the end.
• “Streak” oriented: create a challenge with the goal of trying to have clients accomplish certain things every day for a specific period of time. Something like a walking challenge where clients try to walk every day for 20 minutes outside for 14 days straight (aka a 14-day streak).
• Team-focused: challenges that require participants to meet goals as a team and/or have them compete to accomplish goals against other teams.
• Individual focused: these types of challenges are usually oriented towards one person accomplishing a goal. A great example we see in the Fall each year might be a “Turkey Challenge” where you want to avoid gaining more than 5lbs. during specific dates and participants complete a weigh-in.

Of course these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg but hopefully they provide you with a good starting point to let your creativity flourish.

What’s the take-home message?

Fitness challenges are a useful lead generation and retention tool for your fitness business. By spending a little extra time thinking about your clients and what goals they might require added accountability with, you can “spice-up” existing client routines and attract new participants. As a helpful tip, with the fourth quarter of 2022 coming up, we heavily encourage you to think about any upcoming challenges you might want to offer and start organizing those processes now for seamless implementation during a busy end-of-year rush.