Editor’s note: The author of this blog post, Dan Farnbach, is a consultant in the field of data-driven marketing and customer journeys. Dan has been working with zingfit for the last year to improve data-driven insights through Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and paid media. His approach can also help studios with their own digital acquisition efforts to grow their fitness brands.

How Can Data-Driven Marketing Grow Your Studio?

Data-driven marketing is the practice of getting customers with the help of website-related data. When I say “getting” customers, I mean it in both senses of the word. Yes, you want to acquire customers as quickly as possible, but you also want to understand them better.

What are potential customers looking for?

What are their specific needs, when it comes to fitness?

What do they like and dislike?

Where do they hang out, online and offline?

By gaining a deep understanding of your customer through these types of questions, you will not only be able to seek and acquire new customers more effectively but also hold on to the people you already have in your studio community.

So, how do you gather that data? (It won’t just magically appear from Google Analytics!)

Options include:

  • Interview your existing customers
  • Find out where your potential customers hang out and start conversations with them
  • Create online surveys and compile the answers
  • Use your website data in a smart way

Interviews and hangouts are great, but they take a lot of time. Surveys are not a bad idea, although you have to be careful about all the data that can get misreported, or go completely unreported, with poorly designed questions.

In my opinion, using website data in a smart way is essential. You can gather a lot of information about the journeys your customers are following on the path to signup, and beyond, without taking extra time out of their day. Customers are already online looking for answers and services anyway. Once on your site, the actions customers take — and the order they take them in — provide insights on how to serve them better.

How To Set Up Your Data-Driven Marketing Efforts

There are 3 steps to setting up a functional data-driven marketing system:

  1. Get good, clean data
  2. Get good, clean data
  3. Get good, clean data

No matter what you intend to do with customer data, you have to make sure it’s of good quality. Otherwise, you’ll just end up in the weeds with a lot of incomplete and confusing information.

OK, and there’s probably a 4th and a 5th step, beyond getting good data: Learn to visualize and act on your insights, as a team, with smart messaging. But these steps are bespoke for every business, and a little beyond the scope of this post!

Tips for Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool that has pretty much everything you need for getting started with quality data. But there are a few things you can do to make it work better.

  • Make a practice of using UTM parameters to tag all your inbound links to the site from sources like email and social media
  • Set up your GA goals and filters properly, and get help from an expert if you don’t have someone on staff
  • Consider using Google Tag Manager in combination with GA to enhance the elements, events, and logged-in user data you are able to track

zingfit Ensures You Own Your Journey Data

zingfit offers its client studios resources for all the above. Unlike some of the other scheduling software companies, you have the ability with the zingfit platform to get good, clean data and track your customers throughout their journeys. It’s really a powerful way to do things!

Want to learn more about this whole topic and how zingfit helps you get at the data? Drop the zingfit team a line here to learn more and to be intro’d to Dan Farnbach.

CLICK HERE to book a zingfit demo!