This week Rick hosts Jay Croft, Content Director with Prime Fit Content, to discuss how to market to your target audience with the best ways to identify and speak to the over 50 demographic market. Spoiler alert: don’t use the words “Golden” or “Silver” for the over 50 demographic population.
In the United States, there are more than 100 million over the age of 50 and they account for 70% of disposable income spending. In addition to having higher amounts of disposable income, this demographic has the time to spend on fitness, which is very important for them. These reasons explain why they make great long-term fitness clients.
However, as Jay puts it in this episode, fitness facilities don’t target to the over 50 audience. They don’t know how to market to this demographic. This is very intriguing and something every fitness entrepreneur should think about.
Here at Alloy, the over 50 demographic has been who we target for a long time. Our market research for the Alloy Personal Training Franchise confirms this is an underserved market. People over 50 are the largest growth opportunity for a fitness business and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Why should you market to the over 50 market and how do you market to the over 50 demographic population.
Personal Training can be a service which creates a higher price threshold and makes the 50 demographic market a target audience for personal training services. So the target client for Alloy is the one that has the monetary resources to afford personal training and are still really young at heart and want to stay fit. Let’s say you were active all your life up into your mid 40s, then you get an injury or have an accident. Maybe it’s just a strained back, ski accident, or ankle twisted playing pickup basketball – injuries start to become more of an issue as you as you age. You lose a little mobility or function, which may lead to less exercise and things just snowball. Alloy has a relevant fitness offering for that crowd and we learned how to scale personal training that population in small groups to keep costs down.
Alloy has a seven layer criteria to choosing real estate for franchisees in certain markets. Some of the demographic market data we use starts with age, income and population density. Alloy gets deeper than that with shopping habits of our target audience, like the number of luxury used car dealerships, wine stores, and nice restaurants. Alloy’s target audience is the same crowd, that use those types of services as well as spend money on recreation, shopping, dining, or golf. Many people are surprised to learn that the over 50 demographic population spend three times as much money online and are more digitally savvy than people thing. They also have the financial ability to buy what they want. For brands like Alloy, this is our niche and how we attract the right franchisee and the right end customer and our target market.
Listen in as Rick and Jay give you some tactics to use and also what not to say! When Rick first met Jay Croft, Jay was creating content for the same target audience that Alloy was targeting. Then when Alloy focused on franchising with more demographic studies on marketing to the over 50 demographic population, we learned it is an underserved market with 70% of the nation’s disposable income. With very few brands doing a good job servicing that crowd or speaking to them relevantly, then that is when Rick and Jay thought they would be a great match.
Key Takeaways
- Why does the fitness industry ignore the 50 plus demographic? (02:56)
- How personal training helps serve the older demographic well (05:34)
- How to market to the 50 plus crowd (09:55)
- The different niches among the wider older demographic (10:58)
- Words you should ever use when speaking to an older demographic (13:08)
- How to build your brand around premium servicing to attract
- How to package your brand as a premium service to attract the 50 plus crowd (20:45)
- How to align all your content to be consistent with your target market (28:15)
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Mentioned in this episode
Jay Croft – Content Director, Prime Fit Content
Alloy Personal Training Franchise