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Identify Your Gym’s Exact Marketing Persona in 3 Minutes (Part 1)

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Can you describe your gym’s most valuable member? Is it a 36 year old female from a specific part of the city who loves movies and buys apparel and accessories online? Or, is it a 54 year old male who is a cooking enthusiast and searches for real estate investing opportunities? This is where your marketing persona comes in.

As a gym owner, I bet you’ve wondered how to identify your most profitable or best converting member. But what you might not know is that you can do it yourself… in about 3 minutes… without an IT guy or an analyst.

And, it all starts by connecting your website to Google Analytics.

Then, after reading this guided post, you’ll be able to dig out the most valuable data about your gym and transform it into a super marketing tool that will help you focus on the right customers.

Install the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-On

First things first, you need to install Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-On to your Google docs. Check out instructions here. It’s pretty simple – you can trust me on this, I’m a non-techy guy.

This will help you track and create your marketing persona.

Create a New Report

Create a report using metrics and dimensions.

Metrics and Dimensions

The metrics tab is where you choose what kind of data you’d like to see for the selected dimensions. I like to see the number of sessions, transactions, and revenue. The transaction and revenue data are generated through the eCommerce feature of Google Analytics.

The dimensions are the slices by which you’d like the data to be presented to you. The max is 7 dimensions with the add-on, while on Google Analytic’s interface you can only use 2.

What I want to get for my marketing persona in this report is: country of the user, region of the user (state in US), age of the user, gender of the user, and the In-market segment of the user.

Right now you might be asking yourself… “What is he talking about with that in-market segment?” Let’s take a look at the definition of In-market segment audience:

Users in these segments are more likely to be ready to purchase products or services in the specified category. These are users lower in the purchase funnel, near the end of the process. – Google Analytics

In other words, Google is able to define whether a user is interested in purchasing a product of a specific market, so that he is in this market.

This gives you an idea of your members’ interests and what they are into in terms of buying or researching online. Another major fact is that this is the same in-market designation that AdWords uses.

In other words, you can create an AdWords display campaign that will target only the In-market segments that you see a good enough on-site performance from.

Marketing Persona: 2 Other User Segment Categories: Affinity & Other

Here is how they are defined by Google Analytics:

  • Affinity Category: Users in these segments are more likely to be ready to purchase products or services in the specified category. These are users lower in the purchase funnel, near the end of the process.
  • Other Category: These are more granular categories than Affinity or In-market, and let you identify users who are not in those other categories.

Those two dimensions are meant to describe “who your audience is interested in online” (Affinity + Other) versus “what your audience is searching to buy online” (In-market).

All categories are eligible to target with AdWords display campaigns, including the new Gmail Ads.

As the Google Analytics spreadsheet add-on allows you to run up to 7 metrics, you should decide what other metrics are relevant for you to create your marketing persona and prioritize the ones that you enter.

Choosing Marketing Persona Categories

I’d include the In-market segment with at least one of the Affinity or Other categories to get a better description of the audience.

A small/medium gym will get a lot of valuable information from these 7 metrics. For example, “Mobile device branding” is a dimension you can add to differentiate Apple and Non-Apple users.

After creating the report, there are 3 more things you should add to the report before you generate it:

  1. The max results this query can generate is 10,000 rows of data. But the default max is 1,000. So, set the Max Result line to 10,000.
  2. This query will also report to you about all the sessions that ended with zero conversions (or transactions). This is something you won’t need in that kind of analysis. So set the Filters to >1.
  3. Another default this report has is the Last N Days, which is set to 7; update it with the number of days you’d wish to analyze your data. The max is 180.

Good?

Good!

Let’s get that marketing persona going.

Now you’ll get what might be the most valuable data about your gym that you’ve ever received. And that all builds your marketing persona. But the real magic is still a few steps away… and I cover that in Part 2.

Loud Rumor
Loud Rumor

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