How to Market a Fitness App to Expand the User Base?

Author: Team WH

Published On: 12-12-23

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Various channels can tell you how to market a fitness app. However, with the fitness industry growing daily, the secret to being outstanding is to increase your user base organically through effective marketing techniques. 

Offering a high-quality product is no longer sufficient in the age of so many products of the same calibre competing for the users’ attention. To increase the user base and establish your app as the best option in the fitness industry, there are various strategies you must employ.

Through this article, we will explore various strategies that fitness apps can use to increase customer engagement and value proposition and make the app stand out in the competition.

We will also cover the types of fitness apps in the market and how can your fitness apps conform to one of these types to stand out in the crowd.

Types of Fitness Apps You Need to Know

Here are a few types of fitness apps in the market presently:

Personal Training with Workout Plans

Personal training apps provide guidelines to users to help them achieve their dream fitness level at home or in the gym. These apps provide a workout plan varying in forms and types and other features that keep the users hooked.

Additionally, these mobile apps provide customised workout plans and specific exercises, which provide routine sets set by the users. These apps also have a variety of educational content, for example, videos about various types of nutrition and exercise routines followed by celebrities and fitness influencers.

Tracking Activity

These kinds of health and fitness apps track a user’s activities like exercise routine and REM sleep regime. These kinds of apps are used in collaboration with multiple apps to give users a complete overview of their health.

With apps that track activity, users can use a Geolocation feature and view suggestions for better running routes. It also shows the current visualisation of a user’s recent running course on a digital map.

Nutrition Apps

Nutrition apps are based on the principle of diet intake and healthy foods in the right amounts. They help optimise the nutrition of their users. Such apps are combined with Activity Tracking apps for an overview of calories lost in running and exercise and calories gained through each meal. 

MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe are perfect examples of a Diet and Nutrition App. HealthifyMe is also a Personal Training fitness app that helps you track your calorie intake and maintain records of your exercise regime.

It also features videos of famous fitness YouTubers to help you choose a fitness regime for a particular part of your body. For such apps, Gamification is the key to keeping people engaged by setting up rewards after reaching a milestone. HealthifyMe does precisely that.

Other nutrition apps, such as Zombie Run and Men’s Workout, provide gamification rewards. Zombie Run provides users with dynamic narratives and features in-app tips at every milestone. 

Ways of Effective Organic Marketing of Fitness Apps

If you have a well-established fitness app with a few thousand downloads on the Google PlayStore or are just starting to establish one, you need a plan. You must invest a reasonable amount of time in developing a fitness app marketing plan.

A plan such as this can help solidify your fitness app marketing strategy, helping your app stand out in the long game. There are hundreds of online fitness marketing strategies; however, here are a few which can help you start on a grass-root level:

Research Target Audience

If you want to fish for fantastic fitness app marketing ideas, you must also look out for the type of audience you want to cater to. Once you have established the kind of audience you want to cater to, you must thoroughly research multiple parameters to develop a robust fitness app marketing strategy for your app.

You can start your research by taking a look at the demographics. This can include age, sex, income, and geography to identify behaviour and spending patterns. To make your app profitable, you need your audience to buy the premium version of it.

Hence, researching the way your target audience spends is a significant yardstick of your research. Age is also essential because younger users will be drawn to competitive social fitness apps, whereas senior users might like yoga and meditation applications.

You can also conduct polls to learn more about your target audience and their fitness objectives, challenges and motivations.

Personalised Experience

In any business, the key to expanding your user base is personalisation. Personalisation helps foster trust and makes the user feel they are essential among many users. Personalisation is also the key when a business applies a customer-centric marketing approach.

Fitness apps have better engagement rates if they offer personalised experiences tailored to their users’ goals and current fitness levels. Personalised experiences include:

• Tailored workout regimes
• User-generated content
• Progress tracking

Fitbit, MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe are some fitness apps that provide a personalised experience to their users. You do not have to go the extra mile to show your users that you care about their health. A push notification, a festive offer, or a reminder message saying they have achieved a milestone works wonders.

Create an Appealing and Optimized App Store Presence

Creating an appealing Google PlayStore or Apple App Store presence is quintessential for a good fitness app marketing plan. A fitness app’s app store presence is its first touchpoint with any user/customer. Hence, making it appeal to the user/customer significantly boosts its engagement rates. 

Ensuring your app store listing is clean and optimised may directly influence conversions as it is frequently the first point of contact for prospective new users. You can start with an appealing icon and convincing images highlighting your programme’s distinct value, experience, and visual identity.

The second step would be to write a concise and informative description conveying the main advantages of your app. This can include content marketing tactics and user-generated content as well. Include relevant keywords in your title, description, and metadata to appear higher in app store searches.

A link to your website or a video clip can further highlight the app’s benefits. Another way to stand out from the crowd in app stores is to be dynamic, proactively gather user comments and ratings, and appropriately respond to criticism.

Additionally, you must also prominently display positive feedback. Consider doing app store optimisation (ASO) trials with text or graphics to enhance your listing—track data like impressions, clicks, and conversions with app store analytics. Continually improve your online presence to draw in and convert your target audience.

Leverage Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are valuable channels to improve engagement and expand a fitness app’s user base.  Content marketing through social media works also works in favour of fitness apps. You can produce value-centric content such as visuals, bite-sized material like fitness advice, share inspirational quotes, user-generated content and BTS for your audience to enjoy and engage.

You can take the help of paid marketing options as well to reach a bigger populace. Moreover, you can collaborate with fitness social media influencers to establish your brand and improve brand visibility. This is called influencer marketing.

Additionally, sponsored content or giveaways may reach underserved audiences and gain credibility. Social media initiatives like fitness challenges and hashtag campaigns may increase user-generated content.

The secret is figuring out where your audience spends most online and continually showing up with exciting content. You can take fitness marketing examples from your competitors and other big names in the industry, such as FitBit and Zombie Run. 

Golden tip: leverage social media to establish a sense of FOMO in your users. This will create a buzz around your app and improve user engagement.

Email Marketing and Push Notifications

Email marketing and push notifications are the holy grail of re-engaging users. The easiest way to obtain your users’ email addresses is through promoting in-app sign-ups with consent.

After obtaining a user’s email address, you can email them about new features, exercise regimes, or content by segmenting your email lists based on user factors like activity level or hobbies.

Fitness apps can make users happy by emailing personalised training plans and strategies. As a fitness app developer, you can utilise behaviour-based triggers, such as user onboarding, adoption milestones, or inactivity intervals, to entice users with customised push alerts. These alerts can be sent as notifications.

While email marketing can keep your app relevant by sharing news and content, push notifications can stir up an effective CTA to keep your users hooked. Ensure subscribers can opt out and change the frequency of notifications in the app’s settings. Thanks to email and push alerts, your app can stay at the top of your users’ minds.

Engaging Users Through Content Marketing

Content marketing is a valuable asset for user engagement. It can entail practical fitness and health tips for your app, keeping users interested and hooked. Content marketing helps increase your brand’s authority and visibility on multiple channels.

As a part of your content marketing strategy, you can post how-to articles, fitness routines, and suggestions. This type of strategy works on SEO. Hence, you can use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush to improve the quality of your articles by including popular keywords.

YouTube is the pinnacle of content marketing strategy as it helps convey much information through videos. Fitness apps can launch YouTube channels to inspire the masses to achieve a fit body. They can also make videos on fitness instructions.

Short-form videos on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube shorts help increase user engagement as well. 

As with other forms of content marketing, you can start a weekly fitness podcast that includes workout tips, discussions with health professionals, and analysis of current events. In the present world, marketing is also about forming a community.

Therefore, to form a sense of community, offer your users and potential clients live webinars and online gatherings like AMAs, courses or challenges. Utilise content marketing to its fullest potential and track what is not working for you.

Analyse and Refine

Make sure to take constant feedback from your users through polls and one-on-one sessions. This helps them make aware of the fact that you care about them. Analyse this feedback and work on it to improve your app’s features.

You are improvising and refining your app’s content, interface and features to keep your audience loyal and choose you over your competition. User experience is an essential factor determining the success of your fitness app’s online fitness marketing strategies. 

Wrapping Up

Marketing your fitness app in an explosive yet saturated market is Herculean labour. You have to research a ton and try out a bunch of stuff before learning how to market a fitness app effectively.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to market any business. If it seems like something other than your cup of tea, you can hire professionals and agencies to do it for you. It’s a fantastic investment for long-term benefits. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the global market size for health and fitness apps?

The global market size for health and fitness apps is projected to reach $120.37 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 24.3% since 2021.

2. What is the target audience for fitness apps?

Consumers who frequently use sports, athletes, and people aged 25 to 35 who want to get fit are the target audience for fitness apps.

3. Why would someone use a fitness app?

There are various utilities of a fitness app. Fitness apps allow users to track their diet, nutrition, and exercise regime while integrating it with their calorie intake and burn.

4. Why does India provide an excellent market for fitness apps?

As of 2023, there are over 245 million active fitness app users in India. This number shows that India is a booming market for fitness apps with only scopes of growth because of the current world trends to support and sustain fitness and good health. 

5. Why is content marketing a great way to increase the user base of fitness apps?

Content marketing can market fitness apps more effectively because of their vast nature. Through content marketing, fitness app creators can share valuable content with their audience and attract more users with a robust CTA. Also, content marketing is not limited to one thing but is an amalgamation of many things and channels one can tap into to grow one’s business.