Coming up with gym marketing ideas to make your fitness business stand out in a crowded market is the name of the game these days. Whether you’re a fitness facility owner or running an online coaching business, the landscape of capturing attention and interest is everchanging. Therefore, we will discuss our ten considerations for marketing your gym to grow the membership base and fill your sales funnel with a steady flow of leads.
Gym Referral Programs
When it comes to well-known methods of growing a fitness-based business, gym referral programs are among the most steadfast strategies. Referral programs utilize word-of-mouth marketing to build upon a client’s success or positive experience, leverage their social network, and reward their recommendation efforts.
Implementing a referral program into your fitness business requires accounting for a few factors before getting too ahead of yourself. First and foremost, you must ensure that you deliver a product worth recommending. If you consistently have issues with client retention, staff turnover, or members leaving less-than-ideal reviews for your business, consider fixing these aspects as soon as possible. Second, having a lead cultivation process or sales funnel helps prospective customers engage with your business in a way that directs them toward converting into clients or members.
With your lead cultivation machine in place, initiating a referral program involves outlining a preferred way for current customers to present your business to their friends and family in a convenient, top-of-mind, and beneficial way. Therefore, setting up a system that is low effort on the client’s end is imperative to adoption and success. Further, having clear and accessible instructions, consistent reminders, direct “asks” to your clients, and built-in opportunities to promote the referral program will help keep it top-of-mind. Finally, incentivizing the program through rewards, acknowledgment, or even prestige/status can be the final driver to keeping the gears moving in your referral machine.
Search Engine Optimization & Local SEO
When talking about getting found online, people often assume you are talking about it through a search engine. Therefore, leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) to your advantage can be a strategic gym marketing idea for facilities looking to get to the top of the results. But what goes into getting to those top-ranking spots is a craft in itself and general SEO vs local SEO can have some distinct differences that we will also quickly cover to get you going.
For online fitness coaches, multiple-location facilities/franchises, or other online fitness-based businesses, general SEO will be a primary focus for organic growth. Understanding your target audience and their search terms (keywords and phrases) will be pivotal to a successful growth campaign.
Once your keywords are designated, learning the landscape, competition, and difficulty ranking for these words will help you form an action plan to build relevancy. This keyword relevancy can come from optimized headers, titles, keyword density of content, etc.
Aside from building relevancy, the next part is getting your page to rank high on the results page. It’s heavily speculated that domain/page authority plays a prominent role in the overall ranking of content based on the query and your keyword relevancy. And authority is strengthened through high-quality backlinks from other credible websites.
For single-location or regional-based fitness facilities, gyms, and personal training studios, local SEO will be the focus for organic growth. Luckily, it is easier to implement as your completion is more limited to your region. Therefore, establishing your niche, unique selling proposition (USP), or strategic points of distinction can help you differentiate yourself in the local market. This is critical when positioning your business in front of your target audience online by understanding the keywords they would search for to find your facility effectively.
Local SEO is similar to general SEO in that keyword relevancy and website domain/page authority will be the primary driving factors. As we mentioned above, though, locality is on your side in the sense that it reduces the amount of competition based on local search questions (i.e., “gyms near me” or “personal training facilities in my area”). Therefore, emphasizing the location of your business on your website is critical. To do this, confirm your address is prominently on your website’s home page, header, footer, contact page, or any combination of the above.
Additionally, mentioning local landmarks and linking to other nearby or popular local businesses can help website indexers understand that you’re a local business and your location. Getting other local companies to link to your website (via sponsorship, partnerships, guest posts, or even news links) can help establish your business’s regionality and even boost your domain authority.
One final gym marketing idea focusing on local SEO is establishing or claiming your Google Business Profile. When this profile is appropriately set up under the correct categories and filled out with all the proper information, it can be a game-changing move for your local listing rank position, especially in the map feature. Further optimization and fine-tuning can help your business gain additional benefits regarding position and user experience.
Fitness Facility Community Events
Growing your client list or membership numbers should never be a single-path process*. Therefore, planning and running community events for a gym is a fairly common marketing tactic for owners.
From cookouts and open-house-style parties to putt-putt and beach days, opportunities to get your members together and invite their friends or family can be great community-building opportunities within your business. Additionally, building a sales and marketing element into these upfront is key to maximizing the ROI benefits for owners.
When hosting an event, it is crucial to ensure that you and your staff have a clear plan for interacting with guests brought by members. Selecting function types facilitating natural conversations and mingling is essential for community development among members and enabling organic opportunities to converse and market your facility to the prospects attending.
Other gym marketing opportunities related to this topic include a blog recap of the event, email drip campaigns for guests attending, social media tagging/posting at the event, and even videos from the event for advertising or marketing materials.
*If your sales funnel depends on one entry path, consider implementing a more robust marketing campaign to diversify your client acquisition stream.
Cross-Promoting a Gym with Other Businesses
Sometimes, it’s not what you know but who you know when taking your fitness business to the next level. Whether you’re an online coach or brick-and-mortar fitness studio, working with other companies in your area, overlapping audiences, or even an add-on product/service, cross-promoting each other’s businesses can be mutually beneficial.
From offering discounts to each other’s facilities to sending leads based on client needs, promoting other businesses can have multiple benefits. First, from a customer’s perspective, receiving a referral for another business can hold more mental real estate and interest. Additionally, it can help build trust and loyalty with that customer as they view recommendations as taking additional care of them, even if there is no immediate monetary incentive for you to do so.
Another benefit of cross-promotional business programs is having links to each other’s websites. This call-out can help build each other’s backlink profiles, and if they are both local businesses to a specific region, it carries additional local SEO value.
The final advantage we will cover on this topic is the value you can add to your current membership base by offering gym partner discounts via this cross-promotion. While members may or may not use these discounts, having these value-added opportunities for your members can show that you care for them and help promote client retention rates.
Advertisements for Gyms and Online Trainers
Growing a fitness business, whether online or in a physical location, typically involves running ads at some point. Advertisements may be a viable gym marketing idea depending on your business’s development stage, growth plan, or budget.
Before jumping into running ads for gyms, we typically recommend having an established gym marketing campaign in place first that supports the leads generated from it. Additionally, a proper campaign assumes that you’ve established your target audience, budget, and fitness business growth goals, which will not only help the performance of your advertisements but also promote better lead quality.
Once you’ve established your campaign drivers, focusing on where to reach your target audience most effectively is the next smart move. Rather than just launching ads on Facebook or Instagram because someone said to, focus on where your target client profile would ideally find your business. If that happens to be either of those prominent programs above or another, like a specific search engine, concentrate your efforts there.
Additionally, once you run ads, making adjustments and running tests over time can help get better results or even promote lower cost-per-click/conversion metrics. For example, optimizing Google ads for gyms to maximize ROI is a great gym marketing idea for more budget-friendly marketing.
Finally, focusing on making multiple impressions to your audience can be a successful tactic when working with leads in the early stages of the buyer journey (i.e., Awareness). Implementing programs like re-targeting ads or setting the advertising program goals within a system to be impressions can help drive additional touch points quickly to promote brand recognition and interest.
Social Media Push
Social media is a fantastic tool when leveraged as a gym marketing idea. From an additional accessible business profile linking to your website to targeting potential leads with organic content and ads, social platforms allow owners to diversify their lead acquisition potential through additional paths.
When establishing your profiles, it’s essential to correctly list all the relevant information, like your website, phone number, address, and email. Additionally, write your description or overview in a way that clearly identifies what type of business you are and highlights many of the features or points of distinction that your target audience would find appealing. Also, ensuring the profile images, logos, and colors align with your branding is critical to keeping up a consistent image for your business.
Once you establish your profiles, it helps to connect them to your website (i.e., adding social media feeds, profile links, or even popular posts). This association can help drive additional followers and engagement from your website and act as a self-servicing content mechanism for leads entering your site looking for more information about your culture, community, or other social-based aspects of your facility.
Finally, you should view posting on your pages as marketing and community cultivation. Whether you plan to post on the fly, pre-scheduled, or a combination of the two, understanding what your audience is interested in, what is on-brand for your business, and building a consistent voice can be imperative to growing a solid following. Content from other marketing initiatives can also be repurposed or reposted to your pages to get additional activity for your profiles.
Thought Leadership Development
Many times, when trainers want to learn how to open a gym or become an online coach, it’s because they’ve developed a unique specialty or honed a specific skill over the years and believe that they can better serve their clients (as well as their pay rate) by going independent. One gym marketing idea that sometimes gets overlooked in these situations is learning into education as part of your marketing process.
This tactic, also known as thought leadership, serves multiple purposes. In a world where almost any information is available at your fingertips online, not sharing information because you don’t want to “give it away for free” can backfire for many specialists. Understanding that someone looking for specific information online can be the starting point for your sales funnel may be a game changer. Answering people’s unique questions or offering in-depth and helpful information, you can capture people’s interest organically and establish yourself as the answer (or at least a very beneficial resource) to their pain points at a potentially valuable time in their information hunt portion of their buyer’s journey.
Therefore, establishing well-written, unique, helpful, and fact-based content targeted toward your ideal client base can be a great source of organic leads. Further, leveraging this information into your marketing campaigns, advertisements, and social media posts can help spread your message and drive additional impression potential from the same content development.
Flyers, Brochures, and Business Cards for Fitness Businesses
No “marketing ideas for gyms list” is complete without the trusty, tried-and-true printed collateral recommendation. While it’s often referenced, many may consider these options outdated. However, we obviously disagree (with stipulations, of course).
When building marketing materials for your business, it’s necessary to understand “why” you are doing it or what purpose it will serve. While some owners may just chalk their answer up as generally informing people about their business, they would be missing the mark.
By starting with “why” when building these materials, you will begin to realize the goal they are trying to achieve. Flyers with punchy bullet points that call out impressive points (especially for your target audience) that distinguish you from other gyms in the area carry much more sales potential than a generic “24-hour gym” and “2,000 sq ft facility” do. Additionally, making them visually appealing and memorable (again, for your target audience) can help make even a business card a successful piece of marketing material when put into the right person’s hand.
Our final point about the printed medium is that as more things go digital, breaking through the noise becomes harder and harder. Going against the grain and differentiating your methods from those heavily used in your corner of the marketplace (even if they are old ones) can help garner the attention of those you seek out.
Open Competitions
Similar to hosting community-based events, open competitions can work in the same manner, allowing you to get prospects into your facility and talk to them directly. However, they can differ depending on the type of event you are hosting.
Opening up your facility or online coaching business to a competition where people joining don’t have to be full-on members can be a great way to get people interacting with your business with either no or low monetary commitment. While these could also be used as potential revenue streams, focusing on using them as a lead cultivation tool can be especially helpful when you have more expensive or premium programs that you can offer to them for a better long-term ROI.
Getting interested people into these programs gives them a sneak peek into your training/coaching style. It also gives them an opportunity to interact with other members and experience the community and culture surrounding your business. This can be a great tool (assuming your culture and community are strong) for getting people in the door and converting them into long-term paying customers who truly benefit and enjoy your fitness facility.
Fitness Email Marketing
The last idea for marketing a gym we want to cover is email. Leveraging email as a marketing tool rather than just a business operation function to send receipts or confirmations can be a potentially untapped resource for client retention, community development, and lead cultivation.
Our four-blog post series discusses various ways to use email marketing for a gym or online fitness program. The first of the series, Gym Email Marketing Ideas for Fitness Studios, covers the topic of gym lead nurturing thoroughly and links to the other three blog resources. The others dive into member engagement, client retention, and boosting referrals through email.
What we like about email is that most businesses already have this tool semi-established within their facility and a steady stream of leads and members joining that you can build into a marketing list. The other aspect of this application is that it can be as simple as drafting individual emails to send or building out a completely automated system – and everything in between. If you find that it works for your gym’s marketing processes, you can invest more time, energy, and resources into cultivating it further to unlock better business efficiencies.
Making A Splash
Operating a fitness studio or online coaching system is a lot of work by itself. Still, growing clients or members requires a consistent and fresh flow of gym marketing ideas that you can wield in ways that make your business shine in the eyes of the right people. By thoroughly understanding your business goals, target audience, and budget, you can give yourself better support when determining the optimal avenues for building your customer numbers. Finally, understanding how your gym’s unique points of distinction align with your audience and leveraging those details in your materials can help establish interest, display credibility, and even drive membership conversion rates.
