Breaking Down Your Gym’s Messaging By Channel
Contents
In the ever-changing world of channel marketing, there are norms and best practices that you will need to stay abreast of to not only stay relevant with your audiences but also break through the noise and make a splash in those spaces. Before jumping too far down this rabbit hole, let’s start by defining what channel marketing actually is. Channel marketing is essentially marketing tactics applied to specific mediums or platforms in an effort to reach your target audience to drive brand awareness, leads, and, ultimately, conversions through well-crafted marketing campaigns and utilization of a sales funnel process.
Below, we will break down tactics and messaging through channel marketing for you gym by:
Exploring Marketing Channels Commonly Used By Gyms
When first considering channel marketing for your gym, social media and advertising might be some of the first things to come to mind. While this is a correct answer, it is only partially correct since it is only part of the full list of channels your fitness facility can be in. Here is a non-comprehensive list of typical channels that gyms can utilize:
Organic Search (and SEO)
Organic search is the channel that gets leveraged when someone finds your gym’s information through the use of a search engine. While Google is typically the most common place to be found, it is not the only option (and many popular applications can run off of other search engine’s results, such as Bing). Results can include everything from your website, blog posts tied to similar search queries, online business profiles, and much more.
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a massive part in being found on search engines as it helps website indexers and crawlers (the robots that scan your site and content and factor in the ranking when a search is submitted) better understand your industry, expertise, authority, relevancy, etc. against competing websites’ information based on the query searched. Many factors (both onsite and offsite) go into your website’s ranking based on the specific search engine’s algorithm, so we highly recommend reading more about it to avoid missing some easy opportunities to enhance your business’ score easily.
Paid Advertising
Advertising tends to be a general term that people use when discussing growing their business. Can advertising help grow business? Sure, sometimes it does, but it is only part of the puzzle and typically is nothing more than the attention-grabbing piece of a larger process. Advertising for the sake of advertising (especially for a smaller gym) can be similar to throwing money out of the window if it is not structured around a strategic marketing campaign. The goal of an advertisement is to capture your target audience’s attention with a call-to-action to join your sales funnel and ultimately convert to a client.
Where you advertise is also an important factor. Knowing where your target audience spends their time online (or offline) is critical for efficiently and effectively growing your advertising success rate and return on investment (ROI) by reaching them more directly. Advertising can be done on search engines and social media platforms, as well as re-targeted with other websites, local newspapers, flyers, or even mailers, to name a few. Knowing the best places to focus on to better capture your desired audience becomes key to honing your advertising budgets on worthwhile ad spots.
Email Marketing
There are two ways to think about email marketing, and both can be done simultaneously: third-party emails and marketing emails from your business. Third-party email campaigns typically involve buying an ad space or sponsored email blast through another organization that is somehow tied to your industry. For local gyms and fitness studios, third-party email ad programs might be through local deal groups, related businesses (like local health food stores or smoothie shops), or really anything you can find that fits the ability to reach your target audience better.
Marketing emails coming directly from your business is the other option. This method might not help you reach out to new people in your target audience; however, it can be a critical cog in your sales funnel machine. By setting up an option for people (members and non-members) to sign up for your gym’s email list, newsletter, or notifications, you generate an opportunity to do dual marketing. You essentially give leads (people interested in your gym but not ready to convert to become a paying member yet) a peek behind the curtain of your business and see some of the inner workings, news, and fun things happening on a more personable level. Additionally, you get to reach out to your current members and highlight some of the changes, accomplishments, and news happening with the facility that they may not have noticed – which enables them to see the continuous improvement and value developing in their investment, which can help improve satisfaction and retention rates.
Social Media
Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and even Pinterest all have accounts that include gyms, training studios, and fitness-based facilities. These websites/apps give owners a solid opportunity to have a separate digital footprint for their business information to get hosted as well as a great space to connect, engage, and interact with their community members. Additionally, your social media page will often pop up in search engine results, so these pages can become a mini-website with information or a more intimate view of your fitness facilities community and vibe.
Posting on social media can become cumbersome, so we advise (similar to advertising) knowing where your target audience spends their time and investing in those sites/apps more so than others since it allows you to put more genuine energy into your engagement, posts, and overall page experience. Additionally, you want to keep your content relevant to your users and focus on quality rather than quantity (but you also don’t want to post infrequently enough that people wonder if you are still open). The other thing you want to remember is that these pages can serve as an alternate website for some people, so making sure that your business information is accurate by verifying the address, phone number, website link, hours of operation, and description is important for the customer experience side of things with leads.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership involves expressing your expertise in a specific field or topic in a manner where you are giving away well-thought-out and expressed content that may be more in-depth or involved than many of the other options currently available in your market segment. Although this topic may not be a channel per se, this type of content is typically leveraged heavily within channel marketing. Things like eBooks, blogs, guest blogs, speaker engagements, and even demonstrations can all be considered pieces of thought leadership when done correctly.
The marketing idea behind this concept is that you are not just giving away information for free out of the kindness in your heart; you are using it as a self-serving hook. By giving people (in your audience pool) valuable pieces of information that they are seeking out, you verify your abilities and knowledge with your target audience. You become the reliable source they can trust to answer their problem. By giving them a clear path to reach out for follow-up, you engage them into your sales funnel process of becoming a member of your facility.
Strategic Partnerships
Whether it be working with local stores and restaurants, building relationships with larger corporate groups, or even signing a distribution deal with a supplement company, strategic partnerships can play an important role in your gym’s marketing efforts.
Utilizing co-marketing strategies, you can leverage both business entity’s networks to cross-promote and become mutually beneficial. Things like running special promotions, group deals, or even just getting your business information in front of their people can help drum up additional attention to your business. You can utilize group emails, website mentions, shared pamphlets, or really any other method that may fit well based on the audience and nature of the relationship.
Conventions, Trade Shows, and Conferences
Every niche seems to have its own conventions and trade shows these days, and the fitness industry is no different. Joining conferences and conventions to grow your business from a professional standpoint can be a great initiative. Focusing on local events or ones directly touching your target audience is also a great source of marketing potential. Knowing your target audience is key for this to work effectively since it relies on knowing what and where your ideal members can be found.
These types of events typically allow you to buy a booth or even become a speaker/instructor where you can engage, market, and inform a large group of potential leads in one go. Making sure to have your marketing collateral and sales funnel pieces in place first is a smart move as it streamlines the information-gathering process for the interested leads in a more automated fashion rather than the potential spike in customer inquiries falling onto your shoulders to follow-up with manually.
Podcasts and Video
The final channel we will discuss is more of the long/short form of informational media, typically made up of Podcasts and videos. While each of these can really be their own write-up on how to make a channel or series and how to differentiate your brand, the key we want to focus on here is the fact that they can be a great tool to utilize depending on your target audience and their needs.
From a marketing perspective, these channels allow you to engage with your audience in a fantastic form of self-serving information. This means that current members or potential leads can access your resources (similar to thought leadership pieces) and engage with the consistent quality information or entertainment you are putting out that aligns with the values and needs of your desired clients.
Something to keep in mind when utilizing these channels is connecting the materials to your sales funnel by driving people to visit your facility or website, reserve a guest pass, fill out a form, or any number of call-to-action options you have at your disposal to help drive engagement with them and lead them down the path of lead conversion.
Crafting Messages by Channel
Messaging is pivotal when it comes to the success of a marketing initiative. If you miss your mark with tone, intrigue, information, and relevancy, you risk blending into the noise surrounding your target audience. Unfortunately, crafting successful messaging that resonates with your people is easier said than done, but we have some tips, notes, and ways to test your messaging to find your groove in each of your channels.
To start let’s talk about how many channels to start with. While locking down email addresses, social media pages, website URLs, and anything else related to the branding of your fitness business is important in the early days of staking your claims and establishing your gym, your focus going forward shouldn’t be to equally populate and maintain each of those channels. Honing in your efforts on one or two of the most fruitful channels (in regards to lead potential density based on your target audience) initially and harvesting those lands is a smart strategy for those just starting. As time goes on and lead generation begins to plateau on those focused channels, you can add additional engagement points to your focus.
The goal is not to be a “jack of all trades” but a master of the ones yielding returns. Additionally, focusing the majority of your efforts on the proper channels does not mean all of your energy. You should still pepper in some life to the other channels you have reserved and make sure they still function as a marketing tool. The resulting maintenance content might not be as polished as the other primary channels; however, you should utilize automation with social post schedulers and multiple-page management software, which can help reduce the feeling of burnout when managing multiple channels at once.
While building out your branding, you will need to find a rhythm of what works and what doesn’t with your target audience. Using the basic metrics provided by the platform as a starting point, you can mimic what topics work and how your target audience converses on each unique channel, add in and adjust image themes and styles, or even try running special deals for each segment to see what gets more opens, likes, reshares, etc. As time goes on and you build your brand personality on each channel, you may notice that your message tone and style may differ from channel to channel. Knowing these differences and staying consistent with them will ultimately help keep your page and brand identity consistent and healthy with each platform.
Note: As you begin to build out your focused channels, taking time to document the nuances of the persona, tone, writing style, imagery, and even company branding of each channel into a document can be extremely beneficial for you, as the gym owner. This documentation can serve as a guideline document as it allows for a more seamless pass-off of duties to employees or third-party agencies that you entrust to carry on your efforts effectively.
When it comes to actually drafting your messages, remember engagement is the key – putting out messages for the sake of making noise becomes just that, noise. To help keep your content engaging, don’t just post generic communications all the time. The occasional “Happy Friday” is fine, however, by making it more personal or more about your gym, you can help squeeze even more engagement with your materials when you break out of the cookie-cutter content mold.
Another approach to message creation is building on the concept that people like seeing real people and people they know. Stock images can help add a visual element and appeal to your marketing pieces on various channels; however, focusing on real members can have an added effect of relatability for people when consuming your messaging. Additionally, familiar faces tend to have a social benefit as people tend to “like,” share, or read materials in which they recognize someone.
Finally, not everything has to be a sales pitch, but sales funnel based options should be at least a click away. Starting with informing, relating to, or benefiting your target audience as the foundation of your message creation process can help make more organic material that shouldn’t feel as processed or sales pitchy as something started with a call-to-action in mind. That said, strategically blending calls-to-action into your materials is critical to giving people next-step directions and getting your leads to convert.
Driving Channel Leads to Your Sales Funnel
While getting your messaging down can be a project on its own, learning the art of finessing appropriate call-to-action steps into your content becomes a delicate dance. From not wanting to come across as too corporate or disingenuous, but also wanting to attract new members to your business and welcome them in, you are tasked with what seems like the impossible. However, we are here to help!
When we discuss call-to-action, what comes to mind might be a giant button that says “buy now” or “give us your email here so we can harass you for eternity.” We hope to provide some relief when we say that is not entirely what it is. Call-to-actions are just that: you are calling your audience to do an action, and your goal as the gym’s newly appointed ‘Channel Marketing Guru’ is to curate that action to be appropriate to your messaging.
Actions can include clicking a link to view an article on the company website that dives deeper into a topic discussed, signing up for an email list to keep up-to-date on facility hours during inclement weather, and so much more. While some action callouts might be more direct depending on the message, such as a “sign-up now” call out for a holiday special you are running, the whole focus is to get potential clients to enter and interact with your sales funnel through one of the many entry points you build leading into it.
The example above describes having a link to an article on your website further discussing a topic mentioned in your channel messaging. However, this might not seem like a direct call to action that would get someone into your sales funnel. However, when you look at it in the light of it being a top-of-the-funnel message with light engagement, the perspective changes. Once that potential client clicks the link to your website’s blog/page for the additional information they desire, more company information is available on the page as well as a built-in form they can fill out for additional information about a topic at hand, your facility, or anything else relevant. By supplying them with the information they were seeking initially and tying in multiple interaction points with your business and entry points to your sales funnel, you help blend thought leadership and call-to-action marketing tactics.
Making a Splash
Unfortunately, there is no straightforward guide to tell you exactly how to craft every message for your business. Learning your brand’s voice on each channel can be a learning process but should ultimately help yield a healthy flow of clients to your business over time. Early on, The main focus should be on which channels to focus your energy on to hone your methods and learn to drive your leads to appropriate portions of your sales funnel via strategic call-to-action strategies.