Easy Ways To Market Your Gym

It is vital to market your fitness club, regardless of whether you have a small gym or a large chain.

Word-of-mouth marketing can account for most of your member acquisition and gym business growth in certain situations. However, word-of-mouth can sometimes be insufficient in competitive markets. A fitness club is a local business, and it can be a competitive market out there with everyone fighting for a piece of the same audience.

Where do fitness clubs stand in a market where there is such a lot of competition? Several marketing strategies can be implemented as part of your gym business plan. This list will help you understand how to get more gym members, leverage your members, budget, and obtain success across multiple marketing channels to raise awareness and enrol new members. Let’s dive right in.

Make A Good First Impression

A user-friendly website is the best way to leave a lasting impression on people who turn online as a first or second contact point. Your website simply has to make sense from a user experience point of view and must contain your unique selling points (USP). This will help you illustrate the following points to potential members:

• Who you are as a brand
• The specific (or special) services you provide
• How you do fitness and health BETTER
• And why you’re in business

Your website must contain these USP’s to increase gym members online. Apart from that, your website will have to function seamlessly with the help of these points:

• Simple, streamlined navigation
• Information about gym location, hours of operation, facilities and any bonus information
• Relevant keywords that relate to your industry may help you show up on search engine results

The MOST important point on any website though must be the ease at which a prospect can get in contact with you. Make sure you encourage them to call, email, text…and bonus points if you incentivise that enquiry with something of value to the prospect. Don’t forget to ask for name, email and phone upfront and add that to your prospecting list.

Website creation seems difficult from scratch, and paying someone to do it for you may be expensive. To create a digital marketing touchpoint for your gym, you can use digital tools such as:

• Wix
• WordPress
• Squarespace

You can create a functioning website and then link to or attach an API to a club’s existing client portal, which will let new and old members sign up, pay, and book classes, personal training, and facilities.

Utilise Google My Business

In addition to the most widely used search engine, Google My Business (GMB) pages serve as the most effective way to:

• Appear in local packs
• Make it easy for people to find your address, hours and phone number easily
• Allow potential clients to view your facilities in images
• Open up a narrative that allows users to review your business

When people search for your brand using Google My Business, your brand will appear in search results.
On the right-hand side of the page, people can find information about your fitness centre and choose to visit your website for more information.

Don’t forget to update all club information and select the correct business category. Creating multiple entries under your account is possible if you manage multiple locations.

Run Recurring Competitions And Promotions

Check with your existing suppliers for freebies you can use as prize giveaways such as free training courses. After that, distribute the competition via social media channels and collect emails from all the contestants.

Following up with them about joining your facility becomes easier this way. Contests can be run and emails collected using social media software like Hootsuite and Rafflecopter.

Usually, gyms reward people who join within a certain period after the new year begins with massive discounts on membership prices. Essentially, you should always be offering promotions, but make sure you take advantage of the “scarcity” effect, which means that people will purchase something if it is only available for a short time.

Since the discounted prices can become accepted as normal prices if the promotion continues year-round, it is important not to run them year-round otherwise the value of the rare scarcity is greatly reduced.

Explore Fitness Challenges

Fitness challenges are a great way to promote your health club. You can build a sense of community through them, as well as get people on the right track for changing their lifestyles.

The pack could include a 10-day plank challenge, a 7-day smoothie challenge, or different rep-count challenges (like 100 sumo squats). If you want new members to join, align your fitness challenge to their common goal.

Showcase Your Members As A Form Of Case Studies

Many of your gym members work hard each time they come to help them achieve their health and fitness goals. By highlighting them on social media and in your gym, you will both attract prospective members and show them how much you value them.

Feature a shareable graphic of the member’s picture and name on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. Personalised shirts, water bottles, or other products with your gym’s name can be offered to your featured member for free or near-free advertising.

Make The Most Of Social Media

Customer relationships require more than email and blogs. Your members need to hear from you both on a two-way basis to build a relationship. Digital marketing for gyms, such as blog posts or emails, only allow one member to be reached at a time. Social media is a great way to enlarge your network of contacts.

You can share news and updates with followers on Facebook and Twitter, but you can also receive feedback from them and solve their problems. Moreover, you can pin healthy recipes or workout gear you like on Pinterest to create an inspiring visual collection. You can also post pictures of your gym on Instagram or even highlight special members!

Continue adding new content to all of these sites, but also take time to respond to questions. Engaging with members regularly makes them more likely to keep coming back.

Get In On The Newsletter Action

Your business and your fitness sales can benefit from sending emails to the people who matter most to you. You can use it with other lead generation methods as well, so it is a very useful tool for you.

Regularly send a newsletter to your gym’s members and prospective members to keep them informed. Write an email that features stories, photos, and videos that interest your readers every week or every month. In your emails, you should incorporate topics related to health and fitness and your gym in particular.

What can you do to get more people to subscribe to your email list? Your website can be set up with a small, easy-to-complete signup form, which is one of the best options. Alternatively, you can collect email addresses on-site—for example, at the registration counter, have your staff ask “would you like us to send emails?” Easy and effective.

Speaking Of Blogs…

Small gyms can accomplish great results with marketing ideas that are not too expensive. An effective and affordable marketing idea is to start a blog.

Blogs are beneficial on many levels. You can share fitness-related advice with members, promote gym events, and stay informed about prospects. Although you may not see a lot of revenue as a result of your blog posts at first, with time and dedication you can develop a reputation as a health and fitness expert. Your followers… and your revenue… can be long-term as a result.

Your gym doesn’t always have to be the subject of your writing – nor should it. You should instead focus on topics your members or potential members are interested in.

Balance your posts with text, photos, and videos. Adding photos or embedding videos in your blog posts isn’t required, but they can keep your readers engaged for longer, and break up large blocks of text.

Blogs also increase your search ranking in google if you optimise them correctly with keywords that prospects may use when finding a gym.

The Power Of Video Content

Joining the frenzy to promote your fitness club on social media is a no-brainer with so many outlets offering video content. Video content demonstrates how much fun your clients are having while working out in the gym and using your club’s facilities, which could be very helpful to prospective members.

Live streaming on Facebook, for example, lets you show what’s happening in your club in real-time to people who like your page. Your gym’s video content can also be promoted on Instagram with Stories. Finding workout plans, classes and personal trainers in your area can be found by searching via location and/or hashtags.

Incentivise Those Referrals

In order to build loyalty among existing members and recruit new ones, you should emphasise your marketing efforts if you operate a gym. A few campaigns accomplish both goals as effectively as offering incentives for gym members who refer new members.

In contrast to other incentives, a referral program may be appropriate at any time of the year. If you are an experienced gym owner, it is a fantastic way to show your members that you care about them.

What would be the process? You might consider a program for lowering your monthly fee or upgrading your fitness package when friends and family become members. You can refer members by sending them a sign-up invite via email.

Consider this one of your more effective marketing strategies for gym memberships. Whenever you are uncertain about something, you can always try it for a short period and see what happens. Consider permanent implementation if it proves successful.

Expand Your Reach With Fitness Webinars

Multimedia is one of the most powerful tools for online marketing. It’s also a fantastic way to advertise your gym online. How can you better demonstrate the results of your gym than showcase members at work and in shape?

You might want to consider hosting an audio and video web conference related to fitness. How should you structure this webinar? In this case, you can both promote your gym and talk about fitness or health.

A new workout regime might be something to show off. It may also be a good idea to recruit your trainers or members to talk about fitness. If you want to discuss something or do something, make sure you do it right after your workout. With your body and equipment, you can demonstrate your fitness expertise all at once.

Numerous fitness marketing strategies exist. Your club management software should allow you to measure the success of all campaigns. You can decide to do a few different ones or all of them.

A fitness club will very often market to everyone without looking at how each campaign will impact its budget.

You should establish systematic checkpoints both digitally and with your staff to ask: “How did you learn about us?”.

It usually does the trick.