Finding the right marketing strategy for your gym or health club is a case of testing and measuring what works and what doesn't. There’s no one-size solution. You may find that your particular gym is suited to a specific kind of marketing. You may also find that your personal skill set makes one form of marketing more powerful than the others.
For example, business owners who are also good writers tend to get good results from blogging. Analytical types gravitate toward more measurable channels, such as pay-per-click marketing. The point of this article isn’t to convince you of which strategy is best, it’s to give you the facts so you can identify marketing strategies for gyms that are a good fit for you and your business.
So let’s explore your options.
Arguably the best sales force for any gym or fitness club is the existing membership. These are your boots on the ground. Incentivize these people to advocate for you and you could see high impact results quite quickly.
UK budget gym chain PureGym are masters of this approach, referral schemes being their most common approach. But they keep it exciting. Instead of uninspiring offers like “get 10% off your renewal by referring a friend”, they think big. Trips to New York, customized training programmes and tropical holidays are on offer for members who bring in new customers.
Get it right and you’ll have a motivated and engaged salesforce working for free.
You need to hit a critical mass of membership for this sort of thing to have a real impact.
Anyone can set up a blog, but not everyone’s a great blogger. Using a blog as a means to market your gym can reap huge reputational rewards and drive new business, but you need a strategy and you need to be dedicated to creating original content at least every other day.
One of the most celebrated fitness industry blogs is Nerd Fitness, written by founder Steve Kamb and his team. They do much more than promote offers and talk about products, they provide genuinely useful, expert-level content that you simply can’t get anywhere else.
Although Nerd Fitness is an online fitness club only, we believe this example is entirely worthy of inclusion here due to the sheer depth and quality of their content.
An authoritative and well written blog can have lasting value, from enhancing your reputation to improving your performance on Google.
Blogging can be time consuming and it takes practice to get good at it.
Find a podcast with a good sized audience, interested in fitness and training, and sponsorship could be a great means to market your gym or fitness club. Perhaps one of the best examples of this approach is the Onnit Academy in Austin, TX.
Ever-present during the intro to hugely popular Joe Rogan podcast, this gym is now a tourist spot for fitness enthusiasts travelling to the area. They use sponsored spots on locally-themed podcasts as well as global reach to drive memberships.
Potential to communicate with huge audiences.
Often expensive.
Google is the first place most people go when they want to find something out or buy something new. Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is the process of making your website outperform the competition in Google (and other search engines) for target search terms, such as ‘gyms in East L.A’ or ‘crossfit gyms near me.’
It’s a combination of technical (ensuring page load speeds, meta descriptions and user experience are on-point) and creative (producing great content that attracts coverage and links). It doesn’t have an impact over night, but over time, the effort you invest in optimising your website for the right search terms will pay for itself and then some.
A well optimised website that your customers discover naturally will attract visitors all the time, even when you sleep. Just make sure your website delivers a good experience when they arrive.
It can take a while for the results to kick in.
So when you do a Google search for ‘gyms near me’, you’ll see a set of adverts at the top, and a list of ‘organic’ results below. The gyms occupying the ad space at the top of the page have bid on the search term you typed in.
The result is similar to SEO in that the goal is to appear as high in the search results as possible, but the approach is different. Pay-per-click advertising requires ongoing investment. With some campaigns, you can also include a ‘call us now’ button, which you can track to see which campaign results in the most enquiries. And, according to this report into PPC for the fitness industry, almost half of people can’t tell the difference between an organic search result and a paid ad, but we’d take that with a pinch of salt.
You can get your website in front of qualified leads quickly and you can use small budgets to test different website landing pages. Also PPC is very easy to track so you can see where to invest your budget in future.
Ongoing investment required. Once you stop spending on pay-per-click advertising, your website traffic will drop off.
If you’re lucky enough to have a large gym marketing budget, you may want to go the integrated marketing route. Integrated marketing refers to a mix of SEO, paid and social media marketing. PureGym launched with an award-winning integrated campaign in 2011 and haven’t looked back.
With an integrated campaign, you can cover a lot of ground and the result is often greater than the value of the parts. Being visible across a range of channels dramatically improves perceptions of your business.
Integrated campaigns can be quite costly.
YouTube has 1.3 billion users and YouTube advertising is very similar to pay-per-click on Google (which owns YouTube), but you only bid to advertise on video content, rather than search results. You have some degree of choice over where your advert appears and which type of content it appears next to, but you can’t select specific videos to advertise alongside. You only get to choose user interest, demographics, age group and location.
YouTube users are highly engaged and spend more time on there than most other social media channels. If your ad has a ‘skip’ option, you get the first five seconds for free, so you don’t pay for ads people didn’t watch.
Targeting can be a little hit and miss as you don’t get to be as specific about the content next to which your ad is displayed.
Facebook has 1.28 billion active users. That’s people who log in every day, rather than just people who happen to have an account. So of course Facebook has a marketing platform to help you access some of those people. Facebook marketing comes in the form of adverts, sponsored posts, video, pictures and more.
Facebook marketing, like most other platforms, allows you to set your budget, target your audience and track your results. According to this WordStream study, the average cost-per-click on a Facebook ad in the gym and fitness club industry is just $1.09 and according to Entrepreneur.com, Facebook has the highest conversion rate of any social media ecommerce platform.
These campaigns are cheap and easy to set up. In some cases, you won’t even need a website. You can also use a Facebook business page to promote your business for free.
Because of its accessibility, you’ll find a lot of your competitors are also using Facebook marketing for their gyms and fitness clubs.
In the old days before social media, you may have dreamed of getting an Olympic sprinter like Carl Lewis or a swimming hero like Michael Phelps to endorse your product or service, only to realise that only the likes of Nike and Adidas could afford such big names.
Social media has turned that paradigm on its head. Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have produced a new category of celebrity - the influencer. These people may not be on primetime TV or on magazine covers, but they have millions of dedicated followers, eager to see their next update. And the good news is, this approach is ideally suited to the fitness industry. In fact, fitness was the first industry to unlock the power of the influencer. One tweet or mention of your gym or fitness club on Instagram from the right influencer could be all it takes to super-charge your business.
Potentially huge impact.
Potentially expensive.
It may seem counter-intuitive to rely on email as a marketing channel. Surely only members are willing to hand over their email address? Not quite. If you dedicated some resource to collecting email addresses, you could nurture them as leads slowly, over time.
Every person that enquires at the desk, comes for a free trial, reads your blog or calls you up for more information should be put on your email list. Most email marketing software lets you segment addresses, so you can target them based on how they came to be on your list, location, age, likelihood of converting and a whole host of other variables.
Marketing emails should add value as well as communicate your service benefits. Sending out free training advice, nutrition plans and equipment reviews rather than just telling people about your latest offer will result in a more positive perception of you as a brand. And when those people ready to join a gym or fitness club, they’ll think of you first.
Cheap to run and not time intensive. Email is also a really powerful membership retention tool.
It can take a while to hit on the right formula. You’ll need to test messaging, time of distribution and a range of other factors.
The most important thing to keep in mind with marketing your gym or fitness club is test and measure everything. Send emails at different times of day, on different days. Try different coloured buttons on your website landing pages, use different versions of your sales copy in Google ads. Don’t make assumptions and always be willing to be proved wrong.
If you are interested in Gym Marketing then you might like our article outlining 5 Steps to Setting a Gym Budget.