Setting the Drivers for Your Gym’s Marketing Campaign
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Considering your primary drivers before you even think about setting up a marketing campaign is a good start for your gym’s marketing efforts. Setting, understanding, and building around your campaign drivers is critical to a smart campaign, which will (if all goes well) yield more effective results as opposed to just throwing things out there and hoping it works.
Hope is NOT a Plan.
So, let’s break down what typically goes into the main drivers for gym marketing campaign development:
While these three points might seem straightforward, they are each larger projects in their own ways. By making focused efforts to have these three primary points down for your business, you will also do yourself favors in other aspects of your business other than campaign development – such as maintaining profitability, strategic growth markets, and building a brand around a profitable market segment.
Business Growth Goals For A Gym
Let’s start with a shake-up; Forbes covers a critical fact that 20%, or 1 in 5, businesses fail within their first year of operation; further, 50% of businesses don’t make it past the fifth year. Let that sink in. You are already in a market with high turnover, tight profit margins, and an ever-changing market. So how do you keep up? You set goals and make a plan.
If you own a gym, fitness studio, or club, you are probably familiar with the concept of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). When working on your business, going in with a goal-setting mindset is critical to help with the daily decision-making, marketing efforts, and facility enhancements since these small things are all driving forces that help get you to your end (goal) destination. Without a goal, you are leaving a lot up to hope, and as we said earlier, hope is not a plan.
When you set up a series of SMART goals for your business, you shift your mindset from hopes and dreams to product- and process-based values. This change is critical if you are the go-getter type who would rather jump into something before doing too much planning. The importance comes from the cost associated with the lack of planning. This cost can come from potentially inefficient funds spent on location, equipment, marketing/advertising, hiring, or even lousy timing and circumstances that happen. And, when big decisions are made up-front without some planning, you are setting yourself to play catch-up and trying to stay out of the red rather than focusing on working on your business, enjoying appropriate profits, and growing your brand in a healthy/planned manner.
Jump to our Establishing Growth Goals for Your Gym page below, which gives more in-depth coverage on setting goals for your fitness business or gym.
Budgeting For Your Fitness Business
The word budgeting shouldn’t scare you or send you running to call your accountant (if you use one). Realistically, budgeting does not even need to be a super formal process for a lot of your marketing campaign efforts; however, the better hold you have on the financial health of your business, the better off you will be in the long run.
When we talk about budgeting, we are breaking things down into large categories that you can essentially manage from an Excel or Google Sheets page if you prefer. The primary areas of focus are total operational costs (rent, insurance, utilities, salaries/commissions, etc.) and revenue (memberships, training fees, classes, merchandise, etc.). These two pillars are the “make or break” points of your business, and if you cannot pay your rent or trainers, things will go south quickly.
Once your predictable costs and revenues are established for your business, you can start looking into the future by reinvesting (or taking on a loan) to grow your business via capital assets (such as new machines or equipment) and investing in marketing efforts.
Head over to our Building A Budget for Your Gym page below, which dives further into getting a hold on your gym business finances and how to begin thinking about allocating funds to expand your business further through assets and marketing.
Knowing Your Gym’s Target Audience
Who is your gym for, really? This is your target audience. While it might seem like a straightforward topic, it can quickly get very granular when you begin to look at it more specifically. Also, if you started reading this paragraph with the answer “people with a credit card,” you are going to need to roll up your sleeves and work a little harder.
In a world with endless options, thanks to the internet, you really need to know the splash your business makes in this vast sea of possibilities and hone in on that niche. With this in mind, it does not mean that you ONLY cater to the people that fall into your target audience. But, it does mean that you focus your strategic growth goals around them, especially when it is financially backed with a marketing campaign. You want to invest appropriately into the core group that builds your business. Any additional memberships that fall outside this scope are a welcome benefit that helps diversify your memberships. Still, depending on the percentage breakdown of these types of people, it typically is not as advantageous to try to market to the general population as much as it is to your specific niche’s customer base.
If you want to learn more about finding your niche and the associated customer base, visit our Defining Your Gym’s Target Audience page below, which dives more in-depth into this topic.
Making a Splash
While all of this can seem like a lot, especially if you have neglected some of these areas earlier on, there is always time to start making progress in the right direction for your business. Additionally, all of the work done in these steps has significant carry-over benefits to the overall health of your fitness business and the everyday success of managing your gym.