As we enter the final months of 2023, ‘tis the season to start advertising your gym and running competitive promotions to catch the wave of incoming demand – right? While we won’t disagree that there certainly is a trend of “resolutioners” or large gyms running holiday special discounts, blindly trying to keep up with competitive offers or joining in the advertising game without a plan can potentially yield negative financial benefits for your business.
Our goal with this guide is to help equip you with a foundation for having a well-thought plan when entering the holiday season with your marketing and advertising initiatives.
Marketing Campaign Development
First things first, if you haven’t visited our marketing campaign development for gyms page yet in our free learning section, give it a read as many of the foundations needed for successful holiday campaigns are built on, you guessed it, solid marketing campaign fundamentals – just applied for the holiday seasons.
Know Your Gym’s Campaign Drivers
As we discussed in the campaign development section, a marketing campaign has three primary drivers for the rest of your efforts. These drivers include budgeting, target audience, and goals.
Looking at your overall marketing program budget, being able to budget early on for heavy end-of-year spend can be beneficial to your overall strategy. However, if you didn’t plan your budget prior or are new to the marketing campaign development initiative, this is a good time to start. Consider how much you can afford to spend before beginning – a good consideration is treating it like betting early on by budgeting for what you can afford to lose.
Once you have a budget set for your studio’s holiday marketing plan, it’s time to define the audience you will be targeting for your initiative. This audience should be a reflection of the target audience and mirror the values your fitness facility projects through its strategic points of distinction in the marketplace.
Finally, setting goals (preferably SMART goals) that you can quantify for campaign success tracking is critical. Similar to training a client, having a well-defined goal helps fill in a lot of journey points on the map of your goal and starting point. Additionally, having a well-thought-out and documented goal allows you to hold yourself accountable in building a proper campaign, tracking success, and (potentially most important) adjusting campaign elements to stay on track – even if it means stopping advertisements that just aren’t performing effectively.
Having the Necessary Content and Processes
When your primary drivers are established for your studio’s holiday marketing plan, it’s time to begin the fun of establishing a plan. Whether you plan to utilize existing content and collateral or plan to create new items for the specific promo, establishing the call-to-actions as well as the appropriate content pieces to go along with those will be critical. Similar to your over-arching marketing campaign plan for your gym, holiday marketing and promotions will serve a similar function – drive interested prospects into your sales funnel.
That said, making sure you not only have appropriate content for holiday campaigns but additional supporting materials to support them as they go along their journey to becoming a new client is imperative to a successful long-term marketing drive. Doing a content gap analysis and confirming your channel messaging is appropriate based on the mediums you are working on will help ensure the best chance of success on both initiating on-brand interest as well as supplying relevant support to their point of signing up.
Testing, Monitoring, and Optimizing
Once your materials are designed, and your campaigns are live, it becomes time to test, monitor, and optimize. Depending on how you are rolling out your campaign (i.e., print, post, email, advertisement, etc.), you may want to consider making multiple variations of the promotional pieces. Set specific landing pages for each piece (especially if in a printed format) or some type of tracking method to be able to see which variations get the best traction with your targeted audience. This is known as A/B testing, which can be a quick (and affordable way) to easily find out which pieces resonate and which fall flat early on in a campaign – before too much time and money get wasted.
When your materials are live, make sure that everything is working as it should be, manually testing links, checking your analytics for your campaigns, and tracking the lead progress through your sales funnel process to make sure there aren’t pain points that cause people to prematurely leave your funnel. These health checks and lead progress monitoring tactics can help you spot broken or underperforming elements in your marketing campaigns before too much damage is done or money is lost.
Finally, as time goes on success of campaigns may become stagnant. Continuously monitoring, tweaking, and improving your materials and resources to best serve your audiences is important. These campaign optimization changes can help keep your gym’s brand feeling fresh to your audience, especially if you plan to run them for a significant period of time where leads might be seeing your messaging multiple times. The goal is to continuously improve campaign effectiveness and efficiency in conversion rates.
Recruiting Help Through Incentivization
As much as we love digital marketing and building out well-integrated campaigns that utilize metrics capturing, there is still something to be said about recruiting some good old-fashioned word-of-mouth promotion and incentivizing recommendations.
If your fitness studio is currently utilizing a referral program, adding some new life and additional incentives during the holiday season can help drive awareness. But, a well-designed referral program is only good if members know about it – designing a mini-campaign around informing people should also be part of your process when building out the plan. A simple rollout structure could include email notifications to members, posts on the social media pages about it, flyers around your facility, as well as small brochures that members can take with them outlining the details and benefits for them.
Aside from member referrals, building out an internal program as well can also yield benefits. Having a program designed for staff members or trainers can also be beneficial. Many times, trainers who are booked out or staff members who are already busy lack drive to help promote your facility’s membership via referral. That being said, giving them monetary benefit potential can be a game changer when it directly affects their paycheck. Taking it further, the holidays can also be a great time to test programs similar to this and, if successful, can be re-implemented throughout the year or established as a more permanent bonus structure for staff.
Making a Splash
Although you may feel the urge to jump in and pay to boost an old successful social media post or throw a quick promo together for some ads, we highly recommend taking some time to structure a marketing campaign to help increase the likelihood of success and profitability of your gym’s promotions. Additionally, learning to utilize your current assets of members and staff to leverage referral marketing is never a bad option!
