We're having a hard time marketing the app after trying several things on our own, so now we're really in need of suggestions! How would you get the word out in a saturated market such as Health and Fitness about an app like this?
You have the customer segment nailed down and that allows you to build a marketing strategy around the target audience their behaviours.
I am close enough to your target audience to comment, I do not measure my gym performance though. I can see the value to optimise for ease of data-entry and it is a clear differentiator.
Observations from my gym experience:
- the guys who do free weights seem to know each other and some only train in groups
- lots of couples go together to the gym
- personal trainers know a lot of gym members but they also market themselves to them
- I know of several running apps because friends of mine shared their highs on Facebook
- many apps use "races" or compare yourself with others as a way to get through to your users' friends.
- my gym holds "challenges" where you can grab one of the trainers to time you on e.g. plank and then they have a public board.
There are often 20+ participants per challenge but I don't think there's a reward for it so I have not participated so far.
--> people are curious to see how they compare to others in the same gym.
Suggestions:
1. How did you find out about the other fitness apps you know of?
-> I think I only know apps of Facebook and Apple store search
2. leverage the competitive aspect, e.g. allow people to become the king of leg press for their gym and brag about it on social media.
There are several ways you can slice who they compare themselves with
- people in their gym
- their friends
- everybody else in the world
3. find a way to reach active gym members (aka, define which channel you want to work with)
I can think of three obvious channels
- gyms themselves (B2B sales)
- personal trainers
- social media (sharing)
4. ranking good on the apple store search is dependent on a lot of good reviews I think, you can look up what the ranking factors are for the app store (if they are known)
5. mobile advertising to get more installs targeting keywords that your target market would use
Other observations:
1. your business model requires a lot of volume to work, why not build something for personal trainers and charge a monthly fee?
2. Gyms can use some relationship management tools actually, the only time I talked to employees of my current gym was when I joined or when I forgot something.We realize a lot of volume is needed to make this work with the current setup, but at the moment we are thinking to build interest in tracking through our application amongst regular gymgoers, build momentum this way, and then go after a trainer-to-gymgoer benefit, if this is something that's found to be needed.
Relationship management seems to be a hole in the gym system at the moment, but I don't believe there's an easy fit-all solution to that problem, so we're not pursuing it here.
1. Without budget, the best approach to bringing this to market will be good old fashioned hustle. You should consider the power of leveraging gyms and trying to convert the existing clientele. That's a truly hustle hack and one that will be tough to scale without a lot of creativity. You could sell the technology to the various gyms or personal trainers, let them skin it to their own liking and use that as your business model. Or, you could get them to push it on their social channels and link it to an affiliate marketing service - There's all kinds of different approaches in that regard... 2. On the flipside, you could take the traditional healthcare route and build (1) a following and (2) relationships. You can do this in a few ways - Creating quality content that people who are health conscious would care about is step one. Distribute that content in channels and networks where these individuals spend time. (eg. BodyBuilding.com, Reddit and other site that are focused on fitness) The more quality content you create, the more interest you'll generate from the individuals looking for this info. From there, use this content when building relationships - Send it in emails and tell VIPs you just wanted their opinion on the content. 3. You could run adwords campaigns. 4. Create YouTube videos about fitness - The market is becoming saturated but if you get creative with it, you can definitely still capture the attention of the right audience.
We designed it based on personal needs and the requirements we saw from people dissatisfied with their workout apps (on reddit, through personal connections, etc). We even wrote up a design breakdown for those choices: https://medium.com/@dannyyaroslavski/outdo-design-breakdown-....
We've tested it on ourselves and with a few regular gym-goers, implemented suggestions, and have received generally positive responses and very active usage from testers (who still use it, some who've even switched from bulkier competitors like fitocracy).
Let the product do the marketing for you. Of course you need to do a little marketing yourself, but the more unique the product, the more your marketing efforts will scale it. In turn, I think with your product you can do a looot of marketing and nothing will come out of it, because the product isn't unique enough.
Not many products can do the marketin for you from the getgo- the advice isnt really concrete- anything particular?
Reach out to relevant bloggers to offer to do a guest blog post and to relevant podcasters to get interviewed. Some podcasters will charge you to be interviewed.
Consider starting your own podcast about working out. It's actually not much harder than recording MP3s, publishing a RSS feed, and applying to iTunes.
It takes a certain amount of money and effort to evaluate the effectiveness of an ad channel. Most of the people I know who make money with PPC spent probably $1000, $2000 or more before they developed a campaign that really makes money.
When it comes to online ads it really is you spend $X to get $Y of revenue and if you don't get to a place where $Y>$X fast, it doesn't make sense to spend more.
It makes more sense to develop organic traffic and that comes through mechanisms like you befriend a fitness blogger and if he likes the app he blogs about it. Another logical thing is to make your own blog about fitness where you can work something about your app into the posts.
It takes a huge amount of time and effort to do the above but not a lot of money, but the results are a lot more enduring. If you do want to spend money on it, pay a PR agency or a writer, a "growth hacker" or somebody who can do that kind of work.