TV screens have been popular in gyms and health clubs for a long time…
But many venues are under-utilising the displays they have and missing a huge opportunity for serious business gains. In fact, the health and fitness industry alone is worth over $97 Billion!
Competition has never been fiercer between leisure centres and gyms wanting to sign up new members – but also retain their existing customer base. Gym digital signage takes existing TV screens and creates a dynamic multi-media platform that can be used to engage members, promote services, and advertise products. In this post, we share our favourite ideas for gym digital signage content. Make sure you read up to #12 as we’ll explain how to generate additional revenue.
- Personal trainer profiles
- Class timetables
- Treatment information
- Welcome prospective members
- Share success stories
- Showcase social media
- Play form videos for exercises
- Offer meal prep and nutrition advice
- Interactive learning tool
- Digital hand sanitisers
- Interactive screens for gyms
- Generating sponsorship revenue
- Advertising personal trainers and classes
1. Personal Trainer Profiles
When choosing a gym and staying loyal to it, the quality of personal trainers is an important factor.
A great, in-demand trainer can increase membership numbers all on their own. Creating and displaying personal trainer profiles on your digital signage for gyms is an easy way to promote the calibre of staff you work with. Helping to familiarise gym-goers with trainers can help to upsell their membership too, encouraged to book sessions when they might otherwise continue to go solo.
From a trainer’s perspective, being supported and promoted in this way can be the difference between gyms when choosing a venue. Many will pay to advertise their services as gym digital signage can be an impactful extension of their personal brand.
2. Class Timetables
In addition to promoting personal trainers, digital displays in a gym allow you to better distribute fitness class schedules, and information.
The variety of classes available at gyms nowadays is enormous, from spinning to hula-hooping. When you first sign up for a membership, it can be overwhelming to choose, and then you quickly forget what’s on offer. Using gym digital signage and screens to display class timetables can help members sign up for new classes throughout the year.
If membership is for a particular class or activity, these classes can be promoted with greater prominence and screen-time. Through digital signage software, these timetables can be updated remotely and instantly, making theย life of admin staff easy when it comes to changing time slots and details.
3. Treatment Information
A lot of gyms are associated with a health club or provide health and beauty treatments alongside their facilities. Sometimes members don’t realise this and actually go elsewhere. If not displayed on your gym signage this can be a missed opportunity as treatments can be a great source of income and a real incentive for members to come back and renew their membership.
Gym digital signage located both in reception areas and on the gym floor can be utilised to spread the word about treatments and special offers. Those working up a sweat in the gym are likely to be a target audience for beauty treatments. If members of the gym are entitled to discounts for spa days and sessions, perhaps their friends and family too, it can be a great way to upsell your services.
4. Welcome Prospective Members
Walking into a gym for the first time can be an intimidating experience. This hurdle could be the number one obstacle holding your membership numbers back. To address this, a digital screen in your reception area might be used to welcome prospective members. A simple message highlighting that people of all abilities and ages are welcome can be enough to put someone at ease.
A welcome video might be played on your gym screen, giving a tour of your facilities and explaining the different areas and machines. This would help familiarise people interested in joining and is especially useful if your staff are too busy to give a guided tour when someone walks in. When the video ends, this is a great time to display membership information and pricing. Prospects can then get all the details they would need, pick up a brochure, and leave without having to speak to anyone if they didn’t want to.
5. Share Success Stories
Going to the gym requires real motivation. No matter how much enthusiasm someone joins with, the urge to pack in their membership a few weeks or months later is a real threat to gyms. Everyone of course has bad days and the test is persevering through them.
One of the best ways a gym can encourage its members is through sharing success stories. A success story is an incredibly powerful testimonial because it allows someone to put themselves in another person’s shoes. If you can see the progress of someone else who you might be able to relate to, it gives you hope and encouragement that you might be able to achieve the same.
Digital signage for gyms provides a platform to share success stories in a number of ways. Members willing to get involved might provide before and after pictures that others can admire. Interviews in text or video format could be uploaded. All these types of content recording members’ progress help to create a real sense of community. A screen might even become a digital ‘community board’.
6. Showcase Social Media
Social media has fuelled the explosion of the fitness world online. Health gurus, personal trainers, nutritionists, bloggers and vloggers, have taken over the internet, utilising the likes of Instagram and Facebook to grow huge loyal followings.
Gym digital signage utilises this trend, tapping into an unprecedented source of content and inspiration. Digital signage for gyms can be used to display Instagram and Twitter feeds. If a gym is active on these platforms, it can be a great way to increase engagement offline so to speak, and grow their own following. Once synced up, social media provides fresh regular content without any extra work.
Alternatively, gym digital signage can just as easily embed the social media profiles of others. Sharing content from fitness influencers or local personal trainers can help members get pumped. Reposting members’ own content on the gym’s accounts can be great for interactivity too.
7. Play Form Videos For Exercises
If any type of digital signage content would be a game-changer for your gym and the experience of those using it, it would be displaying how-to form videos on the gym floor. As someone who has recently joined a gym, I know this would really help me start off on the best foot.
TV screens are already scattered around gyms for those on machines to watch while they work out. While music videos and TV shows are fine for entertainment purposes, these same screens might be better utilised with the ability to show best practice form videos for different exercises and machines. This would be a great improvement on the very limited and often unclear instructions displayed on machines themselves, as static images cannot properly convey movement.
Every experienced gym-goer knows the importance of correct form to ensure you are targeting the right muscles and not risking injury. But for beginners, getting exercises wrong can be detrimental to their progress and health. Using digital gym displays to show correct form videos is the most effective way to solve this problem.
Gyms could either create their own content using personal trainers or instead pull how-to videos from YouTube which is a free and bottomless library of videos. Many members will already be using their phones in the gym for exactly this purpose. By playing YouTube videos on larger screens instead, you are recapturing their attention which can be used to advertise services and products, all while making their lives easier.
8. Offer Meal Prep And Nutrition Advice
The other side to working out and going to the gym is of course nutrition and healthy eating. While personal trainers might offer advice in this department, gyms themselves usually don’t get involved beyond perhaps offering a lunchtime menu or snacks.
A gym that goes out of its way to offer meal preparation tips and shares recipes will, therefore, stand out and be appreciated by its members. Those going to the gym are exactly the kind of people that will want to watch what they eat. By putting out content on gym digital signage that appeals to this audience, the whole experience of going to the gym becomes more positive.
As with form videos above, YouTube and the internet more generally is the place to go for an endless supply of this kind of content. Without having to create their own videos or recipes, gyms can curate their favourite videos and share meal prep and food advice easily on their screens. Changing this content on a daily or weekly basis keeps members engaged and coming back. New seasons like the start of summer opens up new opportunities for seasonal eating and fitness regimes.
9. Interactive Learning Tool
When you combine form videos and exercise information with meal preparation and healthy eating advice you have a significant amount of educational material. While this content could be interspersed with the screens playing TV on the gym floor, to make the most of it, sole-purpose gym digital signage displays might be installed to create ‘education stations’.
Taking this to the next level, gyms might opt to deploy touch screens to introduce an interactive learning tool where members can search for different exercises and recipes on screen. This information could then be sent to their phone over email or SMS by scanning a QR code.
Screens or tablets can even be coupled with RFID readers where ‘lift and learn’ objects trigger videos or media on the display. Picking up a dumbbell, for example, could play a video showing different exercises to do with the equipment. This interactivity is great not only for gym members to use themselves but as a sales and educational tool for staff to use when giving inductions or training sessions.
10. Digital Hand Sanitisers
In wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, all kinds of organisations in an array of sectors are looking for ways to remain open whilst keeping employees and customers safe. Gyms are no exception.
Gyms have been mentioned as “high risk” locations for spreading the virus so it is imperative gyms do what they can to stay Covid secure. Many gyms have implemented social distancing rules such as a limited number of members at a time, and around the clock cleaning to do their part. But where does digital signage for gyms fit in?
The pandemic birthed a new member of the digital signage hardware family. The digital hand sanitiser. These digital signage units are essentially a screen with an automatic hand sanitiser function. The screen is perfect for targeting your members with health and safety messages, whether that’s reminding them to wear a mask whilst navigating the gym or reminding members to wipe down their workout equipment. These are popping up in gyms everywhere, so look out for them!
11. Interactive Screens For Gyms
Interactive screens for gyms are another recent development in the fitness sector. Through digital kiosks, gyms can now have their very own information hub, digital wayfinding, or even digital workout assistant. This level of interactivity between your members and gym can help boost your member’s overall gym experience with you.
A popular use case for interactive screens for gyms is displaying workouts. Although we previously mentioned displaying workout videos, digital kiosks take it to the next level. For example, a member new to the gym may need some quick advice on how to complete their workouts properly. A digital kiosk could be placed in a workout room and have a custom touchscreen program where the member can choose, search, and cycle through different workouts. They can choose ‘bicep curls’ and a video can appear on the screen showing the correct form and how many reps they should do etc. You could go a step further and personalise these to individual member’s workout programs.
12. Generating Sponsorship Revenue
We hope you found some inspiration in the above 11 ideas and are glad you have made it to perhaps our ultimate suggestion for 21st-century gyms that want to grow their business. Much like leg day, this one simply cannot be ignored.
Gym digital signage opens up an incredible opportunity to generate additional revenue through advertising and sponsorship. If you don’t have screens for this purpose, you are seriously missing out and leaving money on the table.
The sports and nutrition industry is enormous and only growing with the list of products endless from supplements, ingredients, and sportswear to digital products like apps and plans. With extremely high competition, all these companies pour a lot of money into advertising to their target audience. In addition to using influencers to target nationally, increasingly brands are outreaching locally, especially smaller companies, which makes gyms a prime recipient. Don’t wait for them to come to you, create an attractive proposition, and seek them out.
A network of digital screens, whether within an individual venue or, even better, across a variety of branches, is the ideal platform to show sponsored content and adverts. Images and videos for supplements and clothing can be shown throughout the day to gym members.
The conversion rate and uptake of these products will be a lot higher among users than the general public, given their interest in fitness. This means that sponsors will pay even more for access to your audience. Sponsorship, therefore, can become a great addition to subscription revenue.
Taking into account membership numbers and footfall, gyms can easily put together different tiered sponsorship packages promising varied impressions, screen coverage, and screen time. The larger the gym or brand if it is a chain, the greater you can charge.
If you are interested in advertising, check out our advertising page and ultimate guide for actionable advice on how to generate ad revenue.
13. Advertising Personal Trainers and Classes
Often people go to leisure centres and gyms for one activity. Someone might be an avid badminton player or a swimmer. They might go to the gym just for the treadmill or the spa just for the sauna. A significant aim of gym marketing is to diversify the activity of their customers. Firstly because it allows them to generate more revenue. Secondly, because the more a customer uses a gym for, the more invested they become in their membership.
Gym digital signage is a highly effective way of promoting activities and classes that current customers might not realise are available to them. A screen strategically placed in front of the exercise balls might be used to show videos of a new pilates class. Those working out on a treadmill or exercise bike might be interested in other cardio activities like swimming. Digital screens are also a great way to introduce staff. The profiles of personal trainers might be displayed on screens so gym users can feel familiar with them and potentially make a booking with a trainer of their choice. Safety content can additionally be relayed through a network of screens. Short clips of personal trainers showing best practice when using a piece of equipment would benefit users and reduce accidents
That brings us to the end of our gym digital signage guide. If you want to stand out from the competition and grow your membership with any of these tips, get in contact to discuss a screen project today.
If you have any questions related to gym digital signage, speak to an expert today. Call our friendly team on 02380 981110 or Email info@troudigital.com for a no-obligation consultation. Alternatively, click the button below.
