Marketing Campaign Development for Gyms
Contents
When marketing a gym, fitness studio, or training center, the general process of marketing campaign development can often apply to your specific business. Consider it like a fitness training template where you have a standardized format that you can tweak to fit each client’s particular needs; marketing campaigns work in a similar way to your business’ growth goals.
We will breakdown marketing campaign development for gyms into the following categories:
- Campaign Drivers
- Strategic Points of Distinction
- Content Gap Analysis
- Breaking Down Messaging by Channel
- Developing Multiple Formats and Testing
- Automation and Lead Nurturing
- Regular Health Checks and Analytics Tracking
- Campaign Optimization
Each section has additional information linked to it for a more in-depth review of that portion.
Campaign Drivers
Like any strategic growth process, setting SMART goals is critical to help keep efforts on track and avoid getting derailed at the first shiny object or speed bump you encounter. That being said, these goals need to be tied to what we call Campaign Drivers. These are the factors that really drive the structure of the campaign development process.
Gym Campaign Drivers typically include:
As you begin the foundation work for your campaign drivers, it is good to remember that if you have multiple goals for your business, setting up a marketing campaign for each goal is a smart measure. This knowledge of your goals will allow you to have better control of your messaging, audiences, and tracking of success metrics for each one – which helps drive better budget allocation and optimization.
Strategic Points of Distinction
Once you know your main campaign drivers and where you are specifically heading with your goals, it is time to start figuring out the roadmap to get there. The first step in this process involves looking inward at your business and how it is unique to the market – we call these the Strategic Points of Distinction for your gym. Whether it be a great value, knock-your-socks-off customer service, specific/unique training, or even specialized equipment and features, knowing what makes your gym or studio stand out to someone in your target audience is critical.
These points become your marketing campaign building blocks and sometimes the lead theme since they usually work as the hook that may catch your defined audience’s attention due to the alignment of specific values you cater to.
Content Gap Analysis
After you have set your goals and established the main driving points of distinction to leverage in hitting the goal, the next step is to ensure there are no missing pieces of content in the sales funnel. As you consider your funnel, information pieces and content typically will go from generic to more specific as leads enter and further interact with your business. That being said, looking at collateral, white papers, testimonials, videos, and even the accessibility of web pages and forms is essential. Suppose a potential new customer is looking for information, and there is a content gap that stops their natural flow of interest. In that case, there becomes a natural pain point where leads may fall out, become disinterested, or find what they are looking for elsewhere.
In addition to content gaps, depending on the goals and distinction points, prior marketing materials may be repurposed with a new campaign or focus that allows pieces to have multiple purposes. Doing things like switching out pictures or changing the focus of bullet points in your facility’s overview flyer to a more specific market segment can help drive appeal to a specific audience’s needs and points of interest.
Breaking Down Messaging by Channel
Channel marketing is a concept that involves changing our messaging and marketing strategies to reflect the best practices and norms of the channel in which you are working. While there is no definitive way to do this, staying up-to-date on market trends, competition, and general A/B testing with your audiences in each channel can be an excellent start for what, when, how, and where to go about this.
Some of the more common channels of marketing for gyms and fitness studios include:
- Organic Search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Advertising
- Email Marketing
- Social Media
- Thought Leadership
- Strategic Partnerships
- Conventions/Trade Shows/Conferences
- Podcasts
One point to consider when looking at potential paths is whether the channel makes sense for your goals, messaging, and target audience. If you conclude that your target audience does not subscribe to a certain type, you can avoid that channel and put more time, energy, and resources into other opportunities that properly align.
Developing Multiple Formats and Testing
When it comes to wording, images, voice, deals, and even landing page design, having multiple variations and iterations of each is a great idea. Breaking down your target audiences into groups and doing A/B testing with different layouts, call-to-actions, headers, etc., can help guide your decisions.
By comparing results from impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions based on your different posts, ads, and marketing efforts, you can get a better snapshot of what’s working, not working, or could be better optimized. Additionally, focusing on small test groups within specific channels can allow for fast action on your end to optimize your marketing efforts quickly and even help reduce ad spending on lower-performing messages.
Automation and Lead Nurturing
When it comes to larger-scale marketing efforts, automation quickly becomes a necessity, especially if you do not have a dedicated sales or support staff to follow up with a constant stream of leads at the various levels of your sales funnel. That being said, being smart about what you automate and making sure it feels authentic, on-brand, and helpful are important points to remember.
This situation is probably relatable: you filled out a form or submitted a request for information and were immediately greeted with an automatic email. That message was probably filled with bloated text fields and probably not a lot of information that you found helpful or even relevant. Rather than feeling cared for, you were probably left wondering how many more emails you would receive from this corporate marketing machine a day. Bonus points if your version of the scenario never addressed your initial need that brought you to their site.
These situations give marketing automation a bad name; however, by taking the time upfront and ensuring that your automation is well thought out from a human experience perspective, you will be doing yourself a favor as you move your business forward.
Regular Health Checks and Analytics Tracking
Once you get your marketing campaigns up and running through the previous points, the race is not finished. As time goes on or your marketing efforts increase, you will want to confirm that your campaign elements are still operating correctly. This can be done by manually testing pages, ads, forms, and downloads through your own devices. If anything does not seem to be working as it should or seems clunky, this should give you a cue to look under the hood of your campaign and fix any issues.
In addition to testing the pages, keeping an eye on your campaign’s metrics at various levels will help give you an idea of how leads are progressing, what avenues are successful, and even where some people might be falling out of your funnel. Analytics can be a helpful health check in this way, where if you are seeing a roadblock where leads are not progressing past a certain point or page, there could be a physical issue with your campaign or an indication that the design, wording, or something else is not appropriate for the audience at that point.
Campaign Optimization
Similar to campaign health and analytics monitoring, campaign optimization is an ongoing process that involves taking the analytical data from your gym’s marketing campaign and running tests on various aspects of your efforts. This could include testing two variations of an initial landing page that leads go to and measuring form fills or tracking ad clicks vs conversions on two different digital ads on the same platform with the same audience. The goal is to keep your controls as similar as possible when running tests to avoid too many variables in the mix. This will help give you a clear idea of which way works best for the specific channel and audience.
To build on the idea of testing, these A/B experiments do not need to be extensive with huge sample sizes. Taking a page out of The Lean Startup, you can run lots of small, quick, easy, and (hopefully) inexpensive tests that will help you make more fiscally smart decisions with your advertising plan while enjoying the added benefits that come from a well-tested product that resonates with the target audience.
Making a Splash
Whether you are planning on opening a fitness studio soon or you are a well-seasoned gym owner, taking time to set up a proper marketing campaign for your operation can be extremely beneficial for many reasons. When done correctly, this process will force you to consider, review, and enhance more elements of your marketing (or even your business operations) than just advertising artwork and messaging. With this in mind, making holistic and purposeful changes within your fitness facility to support your campaign development can benefit more areas, especially when everything is smoothly working in conjunction with each other for unified goals.