If you are running a fitness-based facility in these current times and don’t have a website established for your business, it might be time to seriously consider making the investment. You may be apprehensive for several reasons, such as uncertainty about your website-building skills or concerns about overall cost, to name a few; however, we will want to drive home the “why” a website is needed, and you can decide for yourself on the “how” to implement it later. From better organic search to general potential customer experience, we will cover five reasons why a website can be a game changer for your gym.
Marketing Campaigns and Data Capturing
Many studio and gym owners currently run their businesses without a website. Fitness facilities doing this typically lean on Facebook, Instagram, and their membership platform as the primary drivers of their business system. While these options can obviously be used, they aren’t the right tool for the job in the long term, especially if you plan to grow. We say this because there are significant customer engagement and behavior knowledge gaps. Look at the platforms themselves; they are designed to be an advertising vehicle that drives engagement. Outside of “likes,” “clicks,” and “shares,” you typically don’t get too much worthwhile information.
So, how can a website help? Websites allow you to establish an information hub that also has the ability, if designed right, to close the sales loop on potential clients visiting. Once set up with proper tacking, sales platform integration, and business information, you can design marketing campaigns for your fitness facility that not only link back to your website (which allows a lot more visitor behavior and engagement data capturing), but it can also allow you to get them into your sales funnel through these campaigns.
Getting Your Gym Into Organic Search Results
From a pure marketing perspective, this is the leading point. If you want your fitness business to get found in the sea of searches and local competitors, you need to make your business known in more locations other than social media. That said, once you have your website up and running, there are many things you can do on your site (and off it as well) to help promote your ranking in related searches – especially if you are in a niche market!
Insights About Your Business, Marketing, and Brand
When trying to grow your gym’s business and brand, many times, the words “marketing” and “advertising” get thrown around as a universal fix-all. This is not entirely incorrect; however, there are better things to propose, like defining the target audience for your gym’s niche and properly leveraging data to best position your brand and craft your messaging to resonate with them.
Websites can help in this area by the data you can collect. When running campaigns and ads or directing traffic from specific sources to your website, you can track what they do, how long they do it, and where they drop off or lose interest. This type of information can be utilized by identifying pages that don’t fit the user’s needs/interests or, conversely, what content got them to engage and stick around.
More Control of Your Assets
Running the marketing portion of your business solely off of another person’s platform puts you at their mercy. Not in the sense that they would just shut you down (which they easily can/will if you violate their Terms of Service), but more so in the sense that platform updates and changes to a search algorithm can make growing a business that much harder. By building a website and establishing a presence outside of these platforms, you create an opportunity to draw more people in while still utilizing these other platforms as they were intended, making them additional tools in your toolbox rather than the only tools.
Better Lead Experience
Finally, having a website gives potential clients looking at your business a more traditional experience for receiving information. When considering the journey an inquisitive prospect has, owners and managers of studios sometimes forget that their facility is still a small business and need to play by the rules of making information easily accessible for the average shopper – aka clients. By creating a website, you establish a familiar setting where they can instinctively find information to questions they may have. Additionally, if you have your sales functionality set up correctly, you might even be able to capitalize on some easy organic leads if you’re lucky.
When comparing the cost of building, maintaining, and operating a website against the benefits it brings to your business, it is a simple conclusion that they are necessary for most gyms and studios. If you have any questions about where to start with getting a website, visit our Free Learning section of the website as well as other blogs for additional information. You can also reach out to us as well with additional questions on our social media pages below.
