When it comes to marketing your gym, the idea of running Instagram or Facebook ads might come to mind first. But for many gym owners, the consideration of taking money out of your already stretched budget can seem like a daunting task. In this blog, we will discuss how gym owners can advertise their facility with six free or low-cost methods to help get their name out there and get new members to sign up.
Below, we will cover the following topics of marketing mediums that you can utilize to help drive business growth by positioning your business in front of your target audience.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
To start strong, we’ll begin with one of the best forms of free marketing for gyms: word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). While you may have heard this term thrown around, and you might even have a solid understanding of what it is, some gym owners might not realize that it is not a passive form of marketing and usually doesn’t “just happen.” What these fitness facility managers miss is the fact that the business needs to be structured in a way that makes them different, distinct, and discussable, which requires work. Additionally, keeping your gym top-of-mind with your audience once they leave your facility is tricky, especially when you want them to bring you up to their social networks but have to fight through the noise of any other business jockeying for this thought-positioning.
To help you get a better understanding of WOMM for your gym, you can read our blog titled Boosting Your Gym with the 5 Ts of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing, which dives more into what WOMM is, the pillars that build it, and how you can help leverage them for your gyms benefit,
Local Networking and Corporate Programs
One often overlooked goldmine for gym management is their local network of businesses and influential contacts. While the typical fitness facility owner may have already tapped into their personal networks heavily, as most entrepreneurs do when establishing their business, they sometimes miss opportunities outside their social networks that are often in their “backyard.”
Utilizing your local market’s networking tools can be extremely beneficial for some fitness businesses. Things like networking events, joining your local chamber of commerce, or even volunteering/attending local events can help introduce you to other business owners, contacts, and opportunities you may have never realized otherwise. Additionally, expanding your network can help increase your business’s message reach or even open up potential cross-promotional opportunities with companies based on goods/services sold or geographic proximity to your business.
Along with networking opportunities, sometimes gym owners forget about the other corporate workers at the businesses near their facility. While they may not live in the area, if they are commuting to work near your gym, some individuals might be interested in attending your fitness facility before work, after work, or even during their lunch break. Therefore, reaching out to business owners, managers, or human resource departments can be a good start to establishing a relationship with these organizations. Offering options like corporate discounts can be a driver of interest in the opportunity as well.
Guerilla Marketing Opportunities
Guerilla, not gorilla, marketing for your gym can be another excellent option for some cheap brand promotion. While there are no concrete details or costs associated with this concept, the more creative you are as an owner and the better you understand your direct audience base, the more opportunities you may come up with to break through the noise in their everyday life and position yourself in a way that catches their attention, interest, and business. And the better your creativity and audience knowledge, the more ideas you may develop, allowing you to think through the best financial, time, and energy investments needed for each devised option.
If you are interested in further diving into the concept of guerilla marketing your gym and ways to implement this type of advertising into your plan, check out our blog Guerilla Marketing for Your Gym for more in-depth information and ideas.
Local News Outlets
Regarding advertising, some gym managers may think of radio, TV, or newspaper ad space, which isn’t always the worst idea; however, it is also not the most economical idea due to the broad audience base and up-front cost associated. That being said, these mediums aren’t a bad platform to keep in mind, though, just from a different angle. If you can position your business in a way that is newsworthy (in a positive way), you can employ this coverage as a marketing resource.
Additional benefits can also come from any form of local news coverage. From being able to repurpose the content and mention it on your other channels (i.e., social media, email, and your website) to having a boosting effect on your local SEO ranking (we will discuss further in the next point), local news and media can be an excellent opportunity for gym owners willing to make their business newsworthy. For additional information about the benefits of local news, review our post titled Local News and Press Releases Can Help Your Fitness Studio.
Local SEO Strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing buzzword that is often thrown around, but sometimes seems like a “big company” thing rather than something a small business owner could achieve; however, this can be no further from the truth. When it comes to small businesses, especially local ones like gyms and fitness studios, SEO can be pivotal to growth and success. From this perspective, we typically look at it from a “local SEO” category, which has differences to general SEO. A significant and typically growth-oriented factor for businesses working on local SEO is the effect it can have on your gym’s search result positioning on local searches like “gyms near me” or “personal training studios in my city.”
As mentioned above, local SEO can be enhanced by boosting your local relevance and authority, so news outlets, local business mentions, and similar types of associations can help strengthen this factor when search engines like Google rank your business. Additionally, ensuring that your search engine business profiles (like the Google Business Profile for your gym) are properly established and reflect the appropriate information about your fitness facility can positively affect those searching for gyms and related services in your area that match your offerings.
Running Advertisements
Finally, let’s discuss running ads. While the idea of this whole post is to cover advertising options for gyms that are free or cheap, advertisements shouldn’t necessarily be excluded from this list. Can advertising be a bottomless pit to throw money into with minimal returns? Absolutely! However, can a strategic advertising program that feeds into a well-crafted marketing campaign and sales funnel deliver exceptional returns on a strategically minimal investment? You bet!
The goal with advertising is to be smart with it and not run ads for the sake of running ads – with this in mind, don’t even consider “boosting a post” as wise advertising if you are just getting into running ads. Like any good campaign, thoroughly understanding your target audience, your gym’s strategic points of distinction, and the overlap in values will be the primary first step in keeping your advertisement costs down since it helps narrow your potential market reach to a very targeted segment. The next step is to find the most effective methods (channels and mediums) of reaching them and then compare the associated costs. Finally, the last step involves building the marketing campaign around this effort to effectively lead the potential members you’re targeting into your sales funnel via the ad/supporting marketing resources and then travel as efficiently as possible through your sales funnel process to convert.
Making A Splash
Marketing and advertising is common advice for someone trying to grow their gym’s business; however, this advice is often shrugged off due to the costs (or assumption of costs) associated with it. For gym owners and managers open to being creative, thinking strategically, and willing to roll up their sleeves to do the work, there are plenty of options to help move your fitness facilities’ marketing and advertising initiatives on a low-to-no-cost basis. For more marketing information, visit our free learning section and read through our other blogs, which cover many helpful topics surrounding gym advertising and marketing.
