Fitness marketing: 5 proven strategies for 2025

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Fitness marketing puts gyms, trainers, and wellness companies in front of buying customers and clients. 

The fitness industry is large and competitive, which means you need a solid strategy if you want to thrive in it.

The good news is that there are more ways than ever to reach people interested in fitness — it’s no longer necessary to visit your local gym and hire a personal trainer. Instead, people can find a trainer they like online, follow programs for free, watch videos to learn how to perform exercises, or hire a trainer anywhere in the world.

All of which means you need a strong online presence. To help you do just that, we’re going to look at five proven strategies to help you thrive in fitness marketing in 2025.

What is fitness marketing?

Fitness marketing involves strategies to get fitness products and services in front of the people you can help. For example, a strength coach will appeal to a different audience than a running coach or a trainer who helps people lose weight. Fitness marketing can include free or paid activities that work to connect you with your potential customers, such as creating ads, developing a social media presence, and leveraging channels like email marketing to drive conversions. 

5 best fitness marketing strategies for 2025

1. Email marketing

Email campaigns are one of the most critical and overlooked parts of a solid fitness marketing program. They aren’t as flashy as becoming a fitness influencer but will steadily turn passive visitors into paying customers. Emails can be used to:

• engage with your audience
• convert your audience into customers
• promote your fitness services
• send informational content like free fitness plans or nutritional guidance
• congratulate or motivate your subscribers
• request customer reviews

Basically, fitness email marketing is an effective way to communicate with your whole audience in different ways — including sending targeted messages to individual segments. Gyms and fitness companies can leverage email marketing software to help achieve their marketing goals. The right software gives you the tools to grow your audience, automate important emails, and track the performance of each campaign. Another reason that email marketing is beneficial to the fitness business is its versatility. You can welcome each new subscriber with a consistent message, send promotions, sales, and other upsell messages to previous or future customers, collect reviews, motivate your audience, send free workout and meal plans, and more.

You don’t even need to be a design wiz to send beautiful emails. Using impressive-looking email templates and automation tools will save you time, maximize efficiency, and help you create professional looking emails without needing to be a designer. Omnisend offers a wide range of newsletter templates for the fitness industry as well as features to simplify your email marketing.

If you also run a WooCommerce store to sell things like fitness plans, equipment, or merchandise, Omnisend has a free plugin that seamlessly connects to WooCommerce to help you increase sales and engage with your audience.

2. SEO (Search engine optimization)

SEO helps to put you in front of potential customers who are looking for ways to achieve results that you can help them with.  

Did you know 93% of web visits start with a search? However, most searchers never look past the first page — meaning you want to be as high up as possible in the list of results. A focus on content marketing and site performance will help your visibility and increase your organic traffic.

One benefit of SEO is you can appeal to customers around the world, or your local area. If you work with clients online then you may want to cast a wider net, but local SEO is important if you run a commercial space or only operate in a specific area.

To boost your search engine visibility in 2025, try these ideas:

• Use specific words and phrases that make you unique  “easy HIIT workouts” or “yoga for expecting mothers”
• Utilize fitness content marketing by building articles that answer questions that searchers may have
• Make sure your website loads quickly
• Optimize your Google My Business listing 
• Push for reviews among your current customer base

3. Social media marketing

Social media has proven itself as particularly effective for fitness marketing. Visual-first social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram are particularly good because they allow you to demonstrate exercises, explain various topics, perform follow-along workouts, and show your own fitness levels or physique — which can help people to trust that you’re an authority.

Instagram is hugely popular among fitness enthusiasts, but TikTok also drives huge amounts of engagement. Both platforms see users sharing millions of daily posts about their fitness and gym routines. If you are a fitness business or professional, you cannot ignore these audiences.

While TikTok offers short-form video, YouTube and Facebook offer homes for longer-form videos for an audience that wants to dive deeper, while Instagram offers both short and long-form videos. 

If you aren’t sure which platforms to focus on, it can be worth considering the main audiences of each. With its younger user base, TikTok is probably the place for you if you’re a trainer focused on working with teenage athletes. On the other hand, YouTube and Facebook might be a great fit if you’re focused on middle-aged clientele. 

And if you’re concerned that posting to multiple platforms will take too much time, don’t worry — you can repurpose content to maximize the value from each piece you make. For example you can shoot a longer video for YouTube and then cut it into shorter videos for YouTube Shorts, Instagram stories and reels, and TikTok posts. You can even transcribe the videos to turn them into blog posts and threads for X. 

To do well on social media, try these fitness ideas:

• Show before-and-after pictures 
• Give exercise demonstrations, form tips, and even full exercise videos
• Show how to use different pieces of gym equipment 
• Share stories about members who did well
• Make community challenges or contests to bring your followers together and show what it’s like to work with you

Gym influencers are an extremely active group online. Collaborating with influencers in this space is a great way to get in front of more eyes and leverage another person’s audience to develop trust. 

Jeff Cavaliere, the man behind Athlean-X, takes a comprehensive content approach by using his social media to show off his physique, share exercise tips, form videos, and customer results to promote his programs and supplements. This helps him build an audience of people looking to achieve similar results: 

4. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great way for fitness businesses to drive traffic as a part of their gym marketing strategy. Unlike traditional advertising where you pay upfront, with PPC you only get charged when people click on the advert. This can help you control costs, and use the power of paid marketing to get in front of people specifically searching for solutions that you offer. 

PPC ads can be used at any stage of your business too: if you’re new, you can use them to appear in search results and drive traffic before your site is generating organic traffic, but you can continue to use them as you get more established as well.

Retargeting is another great option. This is when you use website cookies to show ads to people who have already visited your website. It helps you stay visible to these potential customers and increase the chances of them returning to your site. This method can turn casual visitors into paying customers by keeping your brand and offering in front of them until the time to purchase is a fit.

5. Influencer marketing

The fitness industry has witnessed a seismic shift with the rise of social media influencers. 

Don’t think that you need massive budgets and to partner with influencers that have millions of followers, though. Micro-influencers have 10,000 to 100,000 followers and and these audiences are often highly engaged. 

These influencer partnerships can be beneficial for building relationships with potential clients and developing a larger following. By working with an influencer, you get out in front of their audience to help grow yours.

You can achieve more than just new followers too. Collaborating with fitness influencers yields impressive results — there’s an average $5.78 return on investment for every $1 spent with these collaborations. These partnerships can enhance your brand image, target the right audience, and create authentic content that resonates with consumers.

Establishing your fitness store online

Creating an online store is a great way to add additional income streams to a fitness-related business. You can sell digital products like meal plans, fitness routines, and ebooks, or even physical products like supplements, merchandise, and equipment. You can use the five marketing strategies above to promote your online store, and your online store can also support your marketing efforts — for instance, people can join your newsletter from the store, and you can show retargeting ads to your visitors. 

If you’d like to launch a store but aren’t sure which platform to use, WooCommerce is a great option. It’s customizable, robust, and easy to get running.

With Woocommerce your visitors can:

• Virtually book sessions and buy gift packages
• Buy physical items like merchandise and supplements
• Purchase digital products like workout programs and nutritional plans

Ready to launch your online store? Here’s how to set up WooCommerce:

• Install WordPress. This is the platform that Woocommerce runs on. 

• Install Woocommerce

• Follow the on-screen prompts to configure your store

• Configure secure payment gateways like Stripe or PayPal

• If you plan to sell physical items, don’t forget to also set your shipping methods

After setup, it’s time for optimization. Include comprehensive product information and high-quality images that showcase them effectively. If your store is going to sell memberships or products that may run out, remember to include a system that takes recurring payments.

To enhance your online fitness store further, consider these features:

• If you’re going to sell classes, integrate a class booking system
• Implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system to track customer information for personalized communication
• Add a tool for customizable fitness plan services
• Develop a loyalty program to encourage repeat purchases

Measuring the success of fitness marketing efforts 

The biggest benefit of digital marketing for wellness companies over traditional marketing is the ability to effectively measure every data point across multiple channels. Here are some key things to measure for the marketing strategies discussed:

Conversion rate

Think of your conversion rate as a fitness test for your marketing efforts. It tells you how many of your site visitors become leads or customers. If your conversion rate is low, that’s a sign your website needs some optimization.

Whether your conversion is an ecommerce purchase or a session sign up, this is probably the most valuable metric to watch. It’s especially important to break the conversion rate down by channel so you have an accurate overview of your return on investment, i.e., the amount of money you made compared to what you spent on a channel. 

Return on ad spend and cost per lead

To evaluate marketing ROI, businesses analyze Return on Ad Spend and Cost Per Lead. These metrics reveal the profitability of advertising efforts and the cost of generating new leads.

Net promoter score

Net promoter score is a metric that tracks customer loyalty and satisfaction. You can also use email automation to help you keep track of your net promoter scores. Your current customers can be your biggest business driver, and keeping up with how they feel about you can allow you to avoid potential issues that cause you to lose business. 

Open rates

Open rates are the first measurement in email marketing to focus on because if recipients don’t open your email, your content won’t be seen, and no conversion can take place. Once you have good open rates, you can focus on click rates and conversions. 

Social media

You also can’t forget the value of social media as perhaps the biggest marketplace to get your business in front of people. On apps like Instagram, you can see how many people saw and interacted with your posts, and how many people clicked on a link to your website or a certain product/service page. 

All these metrics help health and wellness businesses identify strengths and areas for improvement. It’s like keeping score in a game, but the game is running a successful gym or fitness brand.