Establishing, building, and enhancing a community for your fitness facility can be a massive benefit to your gym’s marketing initiatives and branding. But can running community events have additional value besides some temporary local attention? In this article, we will splash around the topic of executing strategic community events that help your gym marketing initiatives and establish branding, community vibes, and lead generation.
What are Common Community Events for Fitness Facilities
When running events for fitness studios, community events are a marketing tactic that has been around for a while. From holiday-themed parties to open-house style events to engage your neighborhood, these programs usually have a goal of engagement, awareness, or growth in mind when planning them. While these are generally successful in gathering a crowd and catching some attention, many owners typically need to catch up when getting the most out of their time and energy investment from a gym marketing and sales potential standpoint.
Many gym and studio owners tend to leave value on the table by not approaching their event like a sales function with a marketing campaign. By leading their planning, promoting, execution, and follow-up duties with a proper foundation to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion, they can help set themselves up for not only a successful event but also a higher potential return on investment (ROI) from a business standpoint.
The Strategic Playbook for Community Events
Focusing on building a holistic event from a sales and marketing perspective can definitely drive potential ROI with your efforts. So, let’s break down some of the elements to ensure you consider when planning events so you can go in with confidence rather than hope.
Focus On Your Target Audience
When discussing gym marketing, we always discuss the target audience because you need to understand who you are trying to appeal to to do an adequate job. As mentioned earlier, approaching an event like a marketing campaign requires identifying your target audience.
With this in mind, it is critical to direct your initial efforts to ensure they align with your target audience’s interests, values, or pain points. A misalignment early on can result in a lot of wasted time, energy, and money invested later if not properly addressed.
Construct Community Into the Core of the Event
The concept of a community in the fitness studio setting is a popular theme. However, many people get it wrong by only using the idea of community as a sales or marketing tactic on paper rather than focusing on actually building one. The biggest difference between claiming a community and building a proper one is that one boils down to a sales bullet point on paper (or website), while the other will drive organic leads, engagement, and sales.
So, how do you build events with community building in mind? Again, focus on your target audience and facilitate ways to build bonds among them. Whether the bonds come from food, team-building exercises, or the opportunity to converse, knowing what commonalities your target audience shares can help you foster an atmosphere where you cultivate community. While it isn’t always possible to set up the perfect atmosphere or have people interact the way you anticipate, leading with the idea of driving a community feeling should help keep that theme going.
Building Brand Vales Into the Theme
Once the idea of running an event is established as a good idea, a natural next thought becomes, “What type of event should we run?” We emphasize focusing on the one that makes the most sense for your facility type and the unique audience type it caters to. Where value can be forgotten, though, is by not building brand value elements into the theme.
We say brand “value” elements rather than just branding since most owners remember to slap their logo everywhere or have their brand colors very present in the marketing. However, for an event to sell a brand exceptionally, you must build in your values. Having an event that displays what your facility is about from the ground up can do a fantastic job of “showing” rather than “telling” the audience that you practice what you preach. This brand value marketing can help foster community as well as establish an organic form of marketing for your business.
Welcome Friends, Families, and Prospects
Events can be like parties in some aspects, and depending on the event’s goal, that might be exactly the vibe you need. However, when planning for these events, especially from a sales and marketing standpoint, it’s important to involve family and friends of your clients and members. People often feel more comfortable when they have someone they know at an event, especially if your members are still early in the community-building side of things. The other reason why it is critical to welcome guests is that it serves as a natural opportunity to drive referral-based marketing. By allowing guests, you bring in potential clients to get a first-hand look and experience of your facility, brand, community, and values.
Going one step further, inviting prospects and leads to events where it makes sense can be another fantastic opportunity for growth. Getting in-person and organic interactions with your leads and your business can help develop more emotional buy-in, especially if you tie it into your sales funnel.
Tie In the Community
The word community can have two meanings when we are discussing gym marketing. First, as we’ve been primarily discussing here, it involves the community within your gym. That sense of belonging and mutual interest/investment is something that many strive to build within their facility. The other meaning we must remember to incorporate is the community in which the gym is based. This version of community can refer to your direct neighborhood or region, which we will focus on at this point.
The local community is important to factor in when hosting events, as it can directly affect your bottom line. From additional members to partnership marketing opportunities, including those within your service area is a great way to get your name out there and drive awareness about what makes your fitness facility unique and awesome.
There are two other ways that local community focus can help with your gym marketing. The first is from an awareness standpoint. When running local events, informing the neighborhood press, bloggers, or event-listing sites can help drive additional impressions to your regional market (typically for free). Although there is a drawback that many of these impressions may not be people in your target audience, it doesn’t hurt to have locals aware of your business and understand its unique value proposition. The second marketing benefit comes from leveraging your event from a local SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint. By incorporating blogs, pages, or write-ups before and after the event on your website and mentioning local spots and businesses, you can help drive your local relevancy for your gym on search engines.
Utilize Social Media
Modern gym marketing typically involves a social media element at some point. Therefore, when planning your events, make sure to factor in the social media aspect to help drive engagement and interaction not only on your pages but also get your guests to post about you.
Tips to include:
- Pre-plan when you will go live (and advertise that) and have a rough idea of what you will say, talk about, or do while broadcasting—this will help your content be interesting enough for people to stay watching rather than joining and quickly leaving.
- Incorporate hashtags for your gym, event, or branding into your content
- Plan to make posts before, during, and after (automate some of these to ensure they don’t get forgotten, but live-action photos are always best for these events)
- Tag your people! That’s right, if you are taking group photos, videos, or candid shots, make sure you tag your members individually. Tagging will give them an organic cue to share, re-post, like, or comment on your content.
- Enable others to post about you—have desired hashtags called out at your event at strategic places (like tables, counters, or mirrors). Get a specific filter for the event. Have a photo area that includes your facility’s branding and fun accessories.
Marketing Materials
Once your event is complete, your marketing efforts are not over. Assuming everyone at the event signed a photo release (you got those printed, signed, and collected – right?!), find the pictures that stand out and save a high-resolution copy to your marketing materials folder. You can use these photos for various purposes in the future, such as social posts, event recap write-ups, emails, future event promotions, gym literature, etc. While this won’t be your whole marketing resource material, it will help give you some materials to show the fun side of the gym or give a visual representation of “community” in your marketing collateral.
Solicit Feedback and Start Planning the Next Event
Throughout the event and as things wrap up, it never hurts to talk to your guests and find out if they are having fun, what’s working, what could be better, and what isn’t working. Additionally, having a formal feedback request or survey post-event that is emailed, texted, messaged, or even mailed out is a great way to get responses from your clients and prospects.
Further, as you collect feedback and wrap things up from the event, that is also the best time to start planning the next event. You can leverage the steam from this event to schedule a date, theme, or location for the next event. This initiative can help drive early interest and sign-ups while also holding you accountable for making it happen and continuing to drive things that promote community, referrals, and conversions within your facility.
Making A Splash
Gym marketing can come in many shapes, sizes, and formats, and running community events is just one of your tools. Putting on these types of affairs can help drive client retention and engagement, and you can also utilize them as a gym lead generation opportunity by including family and friends of clients and leveraging the concept of referrals. You can also benefit from better engagement within your sales funnel as it is a great conversion driver for leads and prospects to interact directly with your facility and the community within it. Finally, your event planning efforts can also yield marketing content in the form of social media, collateral, and written content and even help drive local SEO.
