Whether you are running a gym, personal training studio, dance classes, or boot camp, we all share the same common goal – to grow our profits. While plenty of methods and tactics exist to increase revenue, we will focus on propelling membership sales through gym offers, promotions, and referrals. But before diving in too deep with this topic, ensure you’ve established your fitness facility’s business structure and marketing campaign strategy first. Without these elements, even the best efforts can land flat if there is no specific goal and structure to support it first.
Knowing Your Gym’s Goals and Target Audience
Like working out, going in without a goal is a sure way to get minimal results or growth. Gyms and fitness studios are no different. Before you begin, you need to start with the end in mind and understand where you want your destination to be. This mindset requires setting strategic business growth goals. Like fitness goals, the more precise and focused your personal training facility’s goals are, the better you can chart, track, and achieve your path to success.
Once you establish your goals, identifying your studio’s target audience is the next step. From demographics to interests, a solid understanding of your gym’s core audience based on your business goals and your gym’s strategic points of distinction is imperative. This foundation information guides drafting gym promotions and offers that will resonate with your market and drive sales.
Types of Gym Offers and Promotions
When considering running promotions and offers for your gym, you can choose from a few different categories or types. We will focus on four different types below. However, if none of these promotion or offer types work for your specific gym or business structure, you can always get creative – this is only a partial list.
Membership Discounts and Special Offers
One of the most common promotions we’ve seen gyms offer early on is a limited-time offer on memberships. This time-sensitive cost-savings is usually implemented around the end of the year to target “resolutioners” for a specific event or even for important dates/holidays your facility celebrates, like grand openings or anniversaries. Pairing these offers with gym advertisements, promotional flyers, or even referral campaigns can be beneficial. Further, stacking on additional promotions like sign-up bonuses can help drive additional interest when needed.
These types of promotions can be beneficial for gyms to drive memberships. However, one drawback for potential clients is the apprehension about the high cost. Additionally, this offer structure typically requires a marketing campaign to help promote it outside your facility.
Free Trials, Consultations, and Samples
Depending on your gym’s business structure, presenting a free sampling of your business, services, or products can be an enticing hook. Whether you want to increase memberships, bring in new clients, or increase merchandise sales in your shop, sampling can be a strong marketing tactic for fitness facilities.
Some potential drawbacks of free samples include diminishing perceived value, higher rates of drop-offs, and additional manual labor due to processing. One way to help reduce the pain points associated with free sampling is to have follow-up procedures for people in this campaign. Ensuring touch points, check-ins, and satisfaction levels throughout their experience can help drive higher enjoyment rates and perceived value. Additionally, meeting with them before their trial period expires to smooth a transition into paying for future services is critical to driving home the final conversion.
Value-Added Services
Another excellent option for a potential promotion to run for a gym is including value-added services as an option for new memberships. These additions could include personal training sessions, massage therapy, or a consultation with a nutritionist. Whatever services your fitness facility offers that you want to help promote awareness of, adding in a sample period can drive interest.
These complementary services can also be a helpful long-term solution in two ways. First, by giving new members access to free services for a set period, you are adding organic touch points for your staff with the new member. These touch points can serve as a retention tool, which will help reduce your gym’s churn or attrition rate. Second, these value-added offerings also serve as a sampling period. This span not only drives better awareness but can also serve as its own sales funnel within your business and as a source for additional revenue growth.
Bundle Deals and Packages
Similar to value-added services, bundled packages can serve as a tremendous promotional offering for gyms as they build the value of the service into the cost at a discount. These can be effective because they leverage the pros of multiple gym promotion types while reducing some cons. One of the most significant pain points this type of offering evades is the perception of low value from offering something for free. By bundling services into a membership package at a higher cost (but still lower than buying individually), the customer may better appreciate the value of the add-on and may also invoke a higher utilization of the additional service.
One of the downsides to running a bundle deal can include lower new member utilization. This lower rate can stem from a lack of experience with your fitness facility and services included, which could cause apprehension about investing more initially before interacting with your studio. While some new gym members may still utilize this promotion, better results may be seen from existing members looking to increase their membership level to enjoy these added benefits at a discount.
Creating and Delivering Your Fitness Studio’s Irresistible Message
Once you figure out the type of promotion or offer you plan to run for your gym, you can move on to the messaging and dissemination of your content stage. Content messaging is a craft of its own, but knowing your target audience upfront should help you better understand their values, interests, and drivers for purchasing. With these details in mind, leveraging your offer to capture their interest and get them to click or take action is essential. But how do you find the right message? Testing.
Depending on the channel you are crafting your message for, the words, phrases, and even call-to-actions will vary based on the audience and nuances of each medium. We recommend playing with your content on each channel early on and figuring out the voice and style for each platform through trial and error. As time passes, you will begin to understand what works and what doesn’t for each channel. Then, when it comes time to leverage these nuances for your promotion, you set yourself up for the best chances of successful content penetration.
Additionally, if you plan on running advertisements with these offers and promotions for your gym, we recommend creating multiple versions. Having various forms of headers, body content, call-to-actions, and artwork can allow you to make various versions of advertisements quickly (and cheaply by setting small budget runs) to find the combinations that yield the highest success rate based on your campaign key performance indicators (KPIs).
Tracking, Analyzing, and Optimizing Your Gym Promotions and Offers
Part of the message optimization comes from testing; however, when running these experiments, you must ensure you can track and analyze the results. To assure your gym’s offers and promotions are truly irresistible from a messaging standpoint, you need to hone your copy, imagery, and action request. Therefore, after running your experimental advertisements and marketing pieces, watching your results in real time is pivotal to see what works as soon as possible. But clicks and visits aren’t always the whole story when it comes to optimization.
For a fitness facility’s offer or promotion to succeed in business growth, you need to meet the KPI goals. Clicks and impressions alone don’t add dollars to your business; you need to make sure your messages drive new client conversions, free trial redemptions, consultations booked, or any number of goal completion types you deem a success for your gym’s promotional offer. Keeping tabs on where leads are coming in from, where they interact or fall off, and when they convert is critical to continuously improving your success rate and genuinely making your gym’s promotions tantalizing.
Making A Splash
“It’s not what you say, but how you say it” – a phrase that summarizes the concept of driving successful campaigns for gym promotions or special offers. From understanding your growth goals and knowing your target audience thoroughly to crafting your promotions and messaging, making an irresistible offer is more than a quick-fix trick. Building exceptional offers requires a campaign with clear objectives, tactics, data analysis, and optimization at the forefront. Experimenting and being agile with content helps you quickly navigate the gold from the dirt, bringing you to campaign success faster with more consistency.
