Developing Landing Pages and Forms for Your Gym's Website
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You’ve probably heard the term landing page, lead gen page, lead capture page, or even maybe even static page before. You may even have a good enough idea of what one looks like too, having clicked on enough links from social media or QR code ads that bring you to that splash page with a quick blurb and a fillable form. That being said, have you ever made one for your own gym’s website? Do you regularly use, measure, test, and utilize forms on them?
If your gym is currently not utilizing landing pages and forms in your marketing campaigns, don’t fret. Throughout this page, we will cover the following topics to help get you comfortable utilizing these tools:
What are Landing Pages for a Gym Business
From a website sense, landing pages are pages that are not hardcoded into your gym website’s navigation bar – meaning clients and leads wouldn’t be able to find the page casually browsing your website, they would need to have the direct link to the page. These are useful when you want to direct someone to your website and offer them information, deals, or a specific layout/design you don’t want other people visiting your website to access.
When looking at landing pages from a marketing perspective, these can be implemented to enhance your lead generation, sales funnel, and conversion rates through various methods. Most commonly used in marketing as a splash page that you can drop leads to from various marketing channels; these pages can be extremely customized to fit the specific user experience, information type, and interactive capabilities they receive in a quick session.
Why You Want to Implement Static Pages to Your Gym’s Website
There are many reasons as to why you should be utilizing landing pages for your gym’s website, however, the most common being: select information highlighted for specific audiences, limited deals or offers, resource access, or lead information capturing. Of course, some of these reasons can be combined into a multi-purpose utilization, but static pages can be a powerful resource for your marketing toolbox. We will highlight each of these typical implementation purposes further to explain their benefits to your fitness facility better.
Landing Pages Allow Select Information to be Highlighted for Specific Audiences
Of course your website, social media, and online business profile pages should all have your fitness studio’s strategic points of distinction and facility/business highlighted, but what do you do when you want to grow a specific portion of your target audience? For some owners, that might involve building out a separate part of their website dedicated to that specific audience type to highlight the key gym points, specialties, etc., that their facility offers – but that can create more clicking for the user, redundant information, and potential pain points when trying to navigate to the relevant information they are looking for. This is where lead generation pages thrive since they can be built to cater to all the information that an extremely targeted group will see without creating a confusing user experience for the rest of your website visitors. Additionally, these pages have the added benefit of still having all the regular website navigation options; therefore, splash page visitors can browse around the rest of the website if they want additional information that might not be on the landing page.
Running Limited Deals or Offers for Your Gym Through Landing Pages
Sometimes, fitness facility owners will want to run deals on various channels to promote gym memberships, tours, or trials; however, adding promo codes to advertisements or social media pages directly may be too much exposure or concerns that it will get over-utilized by the wrong audience type. Landing pages on your gym’s site can allow facilities to put promotional codes or offers on these static pages. This helps decrease viewership and usage to a more tactical segment you might be trying to build. Additionally, implementing form submissions to receive promotional deals is advised as it becomes an additional filter for non-targeted customer types and can help promote action from the customer end.
Gym Resource Access Through Landing Pages
From eBooks to training programs, there can be a lot of content and resources that your fitness facility develops. These pieces of material can also be used for marketing purposes by giving leads information they might find beneficial. Similar to promotions or deals, these documents can be hosted on your gym’s landing page to help drive interested parties to your website to access the information and promote familiarity with your facility’s services, offerings, and details.
Lead Information Capturing for Your Gym
The step that turns landing pages into lead capture pages is the addition of some kind of form or information submission mechanism. Many times, gym owners will implement a fillable form on their page, highlighting what the visiting person will receive for filling out the form with their information. These forms are then used to deliver the digital goods (promo code, download, alternate page, etc.) while adding the information to your customer relationship management tool (CRM), emailing list, or whatever type of system you use to follow up with contacts in your sales funnel.
How to Add Forms to Your Gym’s Lead Capture Pages
Since forms help get leads to enroll in your marketing activities (via registering them into email lists, adding their information to your CRM, or whatever mechanism you have in place to store their information), they can be a critical step in capturing data points for your sales process. The value of adding forms is obviously huge from a business perspective, but for many gym owners, the real question is “how.”
The “how” of adding forms to static website pages can be a tricky question to answer, not because it’s technically hard but due to the number of variables obscuring the answer. Depending on how your website is built, such as on a platform (like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc.) or coded from the ground up by an agency, your process for building out landing pages may differ, and the addition of forms to said pages may also vary in difficulty.
For Websites Built On a Commonly Used Platform
These tend to be the easiest to build, manage, and add features to for small to medium-sized gym owners. That is because they tend to be built on modular style platforms where you can download templates, widgets, add-ons, and features to help customize your site to best fit your desired look, function, and experience for your visitors. Additionally, some themes or style packs may already come pre-packaged with their own form plug-in that can be as simple as clicking or dragging it into the new webpage you are building.
Depending on your usage for the form, you may opt to go outside of these easy install options and look towards the “how” you plan to use the form information. Again, depending on how your website is built, you may have a CRM, email system, or some other program that you plan to use the information within; however, it is not tied directly to your website. In many of these situations, the platform you are using will have a form builder option where you can make a stylized form and export the line of code to add to the webpage you are building (this may involve having to switch to HTML/code viewer and pasting in the block of code). This would create a form that looks and feels like part of your gym’s website; however, the submitted data would feed directly into your other system, where it will be used.
For More Complex Style Websites or Ones That are Built Out By a Third-Party Agency
In some cases, gym owners may have selected to hire a company or agency to build out their website and maintain all the edits and changes on their end. In these cases, knowing why you want to add forms and what you plan to use the information submitted for is important. Once you have the need for a form, discuss with the agency how you’d like to collect the information and explain where you would like to use it. They may have suggestions for automation, tie in other third-party applications, or even just work with whatever program you plan to use the information in to build out and implement your forms. If you are hands-off with your website’s design and editing, you may want to utilize their expertise on this as well.
Where You Can Improve Your Gym’s Lead Generation Page
Once you have your fitness studio’s landing page(s) built and out in the world, the job is not necessarily done. Tracking the success of each page through the page analytics and form-fill completions becomes an important next step. Testing different layouts, designs, wording, images, and even the number of questions within the forms can all yield different results. The goal is to optimize each page to your target audience’s user experience to maximize your conversions, which in this case is getting them to come to the page and fill out your form.
Like any other website page, ensuring the basics are met is critical. Points to remember when looking at improving your gym’s landing pages can include:
- Is it mobile-friendly?
- Does the layout make sense for someone coming from a specified channel, post, or ad?
- Can a user get the gist of the page in less than 5 seconds?
- Is the content relevant to the target audience?
- Are the images optimized for the web (i.e., webp images)?
- Does the form render correctly and function properly?
While the list of improvement points may not be exhaustive, it’s a great start. Additionally, alternate versions of a page can be made and tested against each other with the same audience to compare data points like form fills, time spent on the page, drop-offs, or even customer conversions – a process known as A/B testing. More information on system/page testing and analytics can be found on our Regular Health Checks and Analytics Tracking page.
Making a Splash
Although landing pages might not feel like the most exciting part of your website (or even your marketing), they play a critical role in the customer journey, which can help drive the success of your overall marketing campaign efforts. While more of the fun advertisements, social media posts, and news pieces might drum up a lot of interest, having appropriate avenues to route and capitalize on that interest properly is crucial to capturing leads outside of the ready-to-buy stage.