How to Increase Gym Revenue with Digital Signage
Like all businesses, gyms need to keep up with the demands and desires of the market and potential gym members.
These needs and desires are often changing, but what is also changing is the technology available to businesses like gyms for increasing members, fostering loyal clients, and ultimately, increasing the gym’s revenue.
One of the most important and useful technologies now available to gyms is digital signage, which can be put to many uses and can have a huge impact on a gym’s revenue in a variety of ways.
In this article, we start off with the basics by explaining what digital signage is and what is needed to integrate a digital signage system into your gym. From there, we go in-depth on a variety of ways that a gym can increase its revenue with digital signage.
What is Digital Signage?
When we talk about digital signage, we are talking about the use of digital displays, such as televisions, LED walls, ipads, smartphones, and interactive touch screens, to display content.
Using digital signage software and hardware (i.e. physical digital signage player), as well as the templates provided by digital signage solutions, a retail store can display interactive apps, animations, videos, social media feeds, customer testimonials, calls to action, digital menu boards, wayfinding information, real-time data analytics, infographics, company performance metrics, and so much more.
In addition to the versatility of content that digital signage solutions provide for businesses, there is also versatility in the size of the digital signage display, which can range from the small screen of an iphone to a billboard, allowing a business to display digital screens strategically throughout the store.
What is Needed for a Digital Signage System?
The first thing that you will need for a digital signage system is one or more digital screens. These can be anything from a tablet, to a flat-screen television, to a huge LED wall.
A gym could benefit from digital displays of many different sizes, each serving a different purpose most suited to their size. In addition to a digital display, you will likely want to get a mounting system for your screen. This will help increase the visibility of the screen, which would be mounted to a wall or a pillar, and it helps to keep floor space open.
As a rule of thumb, a digital sign that is mounted at eye level or above is much more likely to catch the attention of a customer than one that is placed on the ground. Moreover, mounted displays simply look more professional.
The next thing that you will want to do is pick the right digital signage solution for you. You have two options for the types of digital signage solutions available. There are cloud-based digital signage solutions and there are hardware digital signage solutions that come with an in-house digital signage player and digital signage software.
The main difference between these two types of digital signage solutions is that with cloud-based digital signage solutions, you will be doing things like content management and digital signage design on the cloud through a server that is managed by the digital signage solution provider. For these, you will typically pay a monthly fee for the provider’s services.
With a hardware digital signage solution, you will do content management and digital signage design with the pre-downloaded software and templates that come with the physical-digital signage player. With these types of solutions, you are less likely to have to pay monthly fees and will, instead pay a flat fee. Moreover, some high-end digital signage solutions like Loop TV give you everything you need for digital signage for free.
Once you have your digital display screens, your wall mounts, and your digital signage solution (whether it be cloud-based or hardware-based), you will be set to take advantage of the templates and start making eye-catching digital signage content.
How to Use Digital Signage to Increase Gym Revenue
1. Highlight Useful Information
One of the best ways to increase revenue is to foster long-term loyal clients to your gym. Of course, there are always going to be some people who come for a week and decide that working out is not for them, and that's completely fine. However, keeping members informed about what is going on at the gym is essential for improving the gym member experience and increasing the retention rate.
Since digital signage can make it so much easier to catch a member’s eye rather than a static poster, your members are much more likely to see the information that you are trying to convey.
Some examples of the types of information that could be useful would be class schedules, gym hours, and events. Many gyms have so much to offer, and their members simply do not know about it. Digital signage is a way to make sure that your establishment and its members are on the same page. That is the best way to solidify a relationship and foster customer loyalty.
2. Keep Members Entertained
One of the most important tasks of a gym is to make the workout experience enjoyable. While some people may like to listen to their own headphones and work out in a solitary way, others can greatly benefit from visual entertainment, say, while running on the treadmill. In places where people are doing repetitive motions for long periods of time, a few well-placed TVs can be a godsend to those working out at your gym.
Entertainment can distract people from the pain or discomfort they may be experiencing while working out, allowing them to reach their workout goals easier. When people see that they are getting results, you can be almost sure that they will keep coming back to your gym.
3. Increase Member Engagement with Social Media Feeds
One of digital signage’s most important contributions to your gym’s revenue is the functionality it allows for showing social media feeds and posts that people have made at your gym. You can highlight this feed either on a TV or an LED social media wall. As members see that other people are posting about your gym, they will realize that they can do the same thing.
In fact, social media and gyms can be great partners in creating communities, and one of the best ways to keep loyal members is to make them feel like they are part of the gym community. On the social media wall, members can see that their comments are proudly displayed and that their concerns (if there are any) are being taken care of. Customer engagement is key to successful business.
4. Digital Menu Board for Gym Cafe
Digital menu boards have taken all businesses in the food and service industry by storm, and the benefits that these companies get from digital signage are certainly available to gym cafes for the taking.
With digital menu boards, you can display your menu in a visually pleasing way. Along with text, you can show mouthwatering pictures of the food or protein shakes that you can provide to the customer.
Moreover, you have the ability to change the menu easily without having to worry about reprinting paper or static signs. This makes it even easier to change the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People who rise early to go to the gym before work are likely looking for something other than someone who goes to the gym around lunchtime. Depending on the needs of your customers at different points in the day, you can change your menu.
With digital menu boards, you can increase revenue by making more sales, but also by simply providing a better member experience which, as we’ve said before, is great for fostering loyal customers and creating an inviting and enjoyable community.
5. Generate Alternative Revenue Stream with Advertising
Another great way that gyms and fitness centers can up their bottom line is to use digital signage as an advertising space. There are all kinds of businesses and brands that make products targetted to gym-goers, so it is not terribly difficult to make this happen.
On the other hand, if you go with a digital signage solution like that offered by Loop TV, then you will have preloaded advertisements available to intersperse with the rest of the content on your digital signage playlist, for which you can be compensated.
This is really one of the best hidden secrets of digital signage that not a lot of people talk about. But places like a gym are composed by demographics that are highly valued by lots of advertisers, potentially making digital signage advertisements a great alternative source of revenue.
6. Promote Gym Services
Some gyms are the bare bones kind with workout equipment and music without much else. However, many other gyms and fitness centers have begun to expand their facilities and services that they offer to their members. Getting the word out about these facilities and services is made incredibly easy with the eye-catching and visually pleasing graphic displayed on digital signage screens.
There are many examples of how this might take shape. One good example is if your gym offers the services of personal trainers. On your digital sign, you could give a profile of the trainers you have available, their expertise, their training, and much else.
People will be more likely to seek the services of a personal trainer if they already know something about them. Putting faces to the sometimes intimidating title of “personal trainer” will also be very appealing to many who were reluctant to give this service a try.
Another great example is classes. These days gyms have classes ranging from HIIT to yoga and everything in between. In fact, many people go to gyms almost entirely to take advantage of the classes that are offered to members. With digital signage, you could make the process of finding the right casses easier by showing class schedules.
If you have an interactive screen, you could even have the gym member press down on a class that interests them and a page could pop up giving the details of what the class is all about. This is a surefire way to get people interested and informed about classes and also a way to keep members renewing their membership.
Of course, if someone loves a class, they might just post it on social media, which ties back to our previous point about digital signage being a great place to showcase social media and customer engagement. The more people post, the more people will hear about your gym and get interested.
Finally, many fitness centers now offer spa services, and thats a fact that a lot of gym goers often do not know about–even if they have been going to the gym for a long time. Digital signage is the perfect way to entice members into taking a relaxing few hours in your fitness center’s spa.
7. Create a Sense of Community by Highlighting Employee Profiles
These days, more than ever, people are looking for a community of people they can share activities with. If you are someone who has frequented a particular gym, the faces of the staff might be very familiar to you but you msy not even know their name.
With digital signage, you can do staff profiles where they talk a little bit about themselves and what they are interested in. When people feel like they know the staff better they will feel a better sense of community, and they may be more willing to reach out and ask questions, making the gym experience as comfortable as possible.
Revenue Bulking Time
Digital signage truly has the potential to change the way that we interact with the world by a considerable degree, and with the right use of the technology, businesses can see some impressive returns.
A gym is no less a business than a retail store, and what you are selling is an experience. This experience is greatly improved by the various uses of digital signage that we have discussed, and when the member experience is improved, so does the bottom line.