You’ve built your corporate onsite fitness facility, filled it with the finest exercise equipment, and even hired a coach for onsite classes (a good decision for so many reasons). Success!

So, why isn’t anybody using it?

Sure, you’ve got a few diehards in there, the gym bros who were deadlifting cases of copy paper behind the soda machine during their lunch break. Once you installed your onsite fitness facility, they were the first employees through the door. But where is everyone else? Don’t the rest of the employees understand the amazing resource you’ve just provided them?

Getting people into the gym is a perennial problem. Despite physical fitness having a plethora of well-known health and wellness benefits, under 25% of the U.S. population attends the gym.

Onsite fitness, like any other internal corporate program, needs marketing to succeed. Below are three tips to get employees through the door and into your onsite fitness facility:

1. Conduct an Information Campaign

It doesn’t have to be fancy. It certainly doesn’t have to be expensive. Meet your employees where they are with simple fliers and email reminders about your onsite fitness facility. Fliers take minutes to make on Canva or PowerPoint. Sometimes a simple information campaign is enough to get folks interested. Give them the open hours and available classes. Remind them that it’s a free resource. Perhaps mention a benefit or two of daily exercise.

Simple, easy, and informative: that’s what you want.

2. Start a Fitness Challenge

Everybody likes a good challenge (okay, perhaps not everybody, but research shows that competition directly increases motivation and effort). Providing a fitness challenge might be just the motivation folks need to cross that threshold and exercise.

When you’re planning your challenge, don’t forget the prize! For a zero-cost budget, simple recognition will go a long way. Give a winner’s certificate to the individual or group that achieved the highest score and a shoutout in the company newsletter. If you have money to spend, prizes could include gift cards, catered lunch, or even time off. People LOVE getting time off.

Challenges should be simple and fun. Some challenge ideas:

– Go the Distance! — Log miles on the bike/rower/treadmill.
– Join In! — Attend X number of fitness classes in the month, get a prize!
– Push It! — Who can log the most pushups in a week or month?

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination (and possibly by your available equipment). It should be a challenge, but an achievable one by the majority of your employee population.

3. Develop a Referral Culture

Current fitness center attendees are your best advertising. In fact, a recent study by Harvard Business Review suggests that customer referrals are even more valuable than once believed. People place greater weight on a referral than on any advertising you might use … which makes sense. How many restaurants have you chosen because someone gushed about how good the food was? And after you enjoyed the food, you probably referred someone else.

That’s a referral culture: word of mouth brings people through the door. Developing a referral culture doesn’t have to be hard. Sometimes it’s as simple as the onsite trainer saying, ‘Tell your friends,’ when someone exclaims how much they enjoyed the class. People want to share the things they enjoy.

Reward referral behavior. People will work hard for a prize, remember? And all they have to do for their prize is to bring their friend to the gym? Easy!

Off-site gyms often offer membership discounts for referrals, both for the referrer and the new attendee. For an onsite fitness facility that is free for your employees, that’s not really an option, so consider rewarding referrers with time or money.

Maybe you give a discount card for the lunch cantina. Perhaps they get a comp time hour on Friday afternoon. Or you could even give a small gift card for that charming coffee shop around the corner. Partner with outside businesses, referring your employees to them, and they’ll do the same, referring customers back to you. In the end, everybody wins from referrals.

Before long, you’ll have a thriving population in your onsite fitness facility. All it takes is a little internal marketing.

 

---

MC Corporate Wellness provides onsite fitness classes to companies in and around the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois (Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa; Moline and Rock Island, Illinois). Our flexible-schedule classes focus on your employees’ fitness goals, regardless of where they are on their fitness journey.

Schedule a consultation today to learn how MC Corporate Wellness can help your business meet its wellness goals through fitness.