Marketing a Health Club 6 Ideas for Free Publicity

Health club marketing opportunities are everywhere and are only limited by your own creativity. Your small club is definitely newsworthy, whether you believe it or not. Your health club will always is rewarded when doing something to help others

1. Establish a food drive

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The trick is to partner with a homeless shelter of food pantry and tell all of your local newspapers and tv stations about the charitable arrangement you established. With all the bad news permeating the airwaves, your positive news will be a welcome addition. You can promote your offer with a headline such as "1/2 off enrollment when you donate 5 cans of food!"

2. Submit articles to your local newspaper

If your town's newspaper doesn't have a weekly fitness write up, volunteer to write for them. Try to find other types of print media, smaller papers, community newsletters, etc that you can contribute to. There might also be local websites that are specific to your area that you could contribute to. If by chance you are not much of a writer, pay a staff member or use a service like Elance to find someone who will write for cheap.

3. Run a contest with a local radio station

You can run a contest among the listeners of the radio station to see who can lose the most weight. The contest can run for 8-12 weeks. Give the DJ's free memberships to your health club and have them promote the contest, get lots of people to apply to be in the contest, and provide you contact information for all applicants. If there are two DJ's it can be a lot of fun for them to form two separate teams and compete. It makes for an exciting contest for listeners of the radio station and great free marketing for your health club.

4. Run a contest for charity

Your members can get people to pledge money for the amount of exercising that you do. I.e. A dollar for every step you take on a stairclimber. You may not even have many people take part in the program, but it really doesn't make a difference. The radio station will still make a story out of it. Anything that puts some good news on the air is always welcome in our times of gloom and doom typical of media these days.

5. Host fitness seminars

Go to your local chamber and they will have a huge list of people in the area who present on a large variety of topics. There will be topics ranging from financial planning to scrapbooking. See if they already have someone who presents fitness. If not, see if they'll schedule you. If they do already have someone presenting a fitness topic, find a different fitness topic to talk about. They do all of the promotions for the events, but you should do some promotion on your own as well.

6. Promote one of your members as local hero

Give the media what they want…Positive stories! Ask your members to submit applications to be in the "Local Hero" contest. They can discuss how your health club has provided the support to help them reach their goals and be a local hero. Once a winner is selected, write a press release and send it to all local media groups. It can say "Local citizen earns hero recognition", or something similar. Don't forget to give a prize to all applicants, and maybe even put their success stories on a "Wall of Fame" to show prospects when the visit your health club. This is a very powerful health club marketing strategy!

Of course, these 7 strategies only scratch the surface of how you can get free publicity in your fitness facility. Be creative and you will see your club become more popular the more proactive you are in your PR efforts.