Optimizing Marketing Campaigns For Gyms
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Once your gym’s marketing campaign is up and running, leads are coming in through your sales funnel, and you are starting to get a healthy flow of clients coming from the marketing system you’ve designed for yourself, the work is not necessarily done yet. While many may consider this the point of success, we like to keep an eye on the horizon to remain forward-thinking, reminding ourselves of the high turnover rates in this industry. With this mindset, you will enable yourself to constantly be looking at your system, metrics, and costs for areas to enhance – a continuous improvement mindset.
This continuous improvement that we like to focus on is the optimization of your gym’s marketing campaign. In this section, we will cover the following aspects of marketing optimization for your fitness facility:
Campaign Optimization for Fitness Businesses
When we talk about optimizing your gym’s marketing campaign, we really are looking to enhance key performance indicators (KPIs) while decreasing costs. Of course, the common overall goal of a campaign is to consistently increase the total number of high quality new clients. Realistically, this is only one of the KPIs traditionally used in business analysis, there are still plenty of other performance indicators along the different stages of your sales funnel. These other KPIs are equally important as they play into keeping a healthy pipeline of leads at any given time and emphasizing the quality of the leads coming through.
As you track your metrics and perform your data analysis based on your set standards of success, you may notice that some aspects of your campaigns might be underperforming while others remain steady or explode with success. When you get into the optimization phase of your gym’s marketing campaign plan, you will want to recreate those explosions of success while minimizing the underperformance.
How To Optimize Your Gym’s Marketing Campaigns
Although it may sound simple, “do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t,” there is a little more to that statement than meets the eye. As we’ve been pulling back the curtain, you may be realizing that there is a sort of science and methodology that goes into designing a smooth-running campaign. But like any good machine, it requires maintenance and care; otherwise, it is prone to stop working properly or totally break down. So, where do you begin with optimizing your campaign?
Start with your messaging and make sure that it resonates with your target audience by surveying people in this group (you can even start with current applicable clients you trust). Once you feel your messaging is on base, if it wasn’t already, you can move into the testing phase.
The testing phase is similar to the analytics tracking and content adjusting processes in that you will be doing A/B testing. In our opinion, the best approach for this is to create a lot of variations of your ads and content with overlapping elements. Doing this creates a series of tests that manipulate specific control and variable groups. Doing things like coming up with 3-5 variations of images, 3-5 variations of subject lines, 3-5 variations of body text, and finally, 3-5 variations of call-to-actions, you can make A LOT of ad variations by mixing these variables amongst each other.
Now, the goal isn’t to waste all your money running all these ads simultaneously and drowning a few people in these test versions. The real plan here is to set up your budget to be strategically low for each variation set you want to test and ensure that individuals in your targeted audience only see the ads a few times each. By doing these small and hopefully budget-friendly tests, you get feedback extremely quickly about what ads are working. More specifically, you are also gaining insights into the variables of the ads that are making the dial move with your audience.
Once you obtain this information, you can begin to funnel your funds more appropriately toward the ads that work and focus your future content and advertisement development on the elements that work with your unique audience types on each specific channel.
A/B Testing and Strategic Ad Programming for Your Gym’s Campaign
As we mentioned in the optimization section above, one large and quick-to-implement tactic is to include rapid A/B testing in your advertisement programming. At its core, A/B testing on ads is literally comparing the results of two versions (or more) of an advertisement and figuring out which one performed better. Again, looking at performance from a marketing perspective, you will need to know your KPIs to gauge success accurately. This is exemplified by the fact that an ad that delivers excellent views and low clicks vs one that brings in low views and high clicks will have different degrees of success based on perspective.
Once you know the KPI metric you are targeting for each ad group, you can rapidly deploy multiple variations to small test groups within your targeted audience base. Again, the goal here is to not ‘go for broke’ with your advertising budget but to get quick and dirty feedback on the metrics you care about in real-time, minimize the lifespan of underperforming ad variations, and maximize the value of the star performers. Going forward, you will be enabled to make smarter and more effective ads for these targeted markets based on your documented notes of success. One thing to note: results may vary (sometimes greatly) from audience to audience and channel to channel. It’s best to run separate ad tests on each factor to ensure you are leading with your best materials.
Common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Used for Optimization of Marketing Campaigns
If you’re a gym owner trying to figure out what performance indicators to care about and when, well, look no further. We will break down some of the more common metrics and how they would apply to a marketing campaign within a fitness business.
Views
This is probably the most basic metric you will see and is essentially the baseline number that many of the percentage stats for each ad will be based off of. Things like a Click Through Rate (CTR) is just the percentage of people that clicked on the ad/element based on the total number of people who saw the ad (views). This is a nice metric to have, but it can be a fluffy vanity metric at the end of the day. Many times, gym owners shouldn’t really worry too much about how many views their ads are getting – brand recognition does exist; however, with the flood of information on the average user, it is harder than ever to stick out in their memory based on impressions or views alone. The real goal with this number is to have high percentage rates built off of the total views because that is what will show how efficient the ad is at getting people in your targeted audience to engage with it in a manner that fulfills a goal for you.
Likes/Shares
Similar to views, these typically fall into vanity metric territory when considering the business growth goal aspect of a piece of marketing material. Unless your goal is to increase engagement with your audience or build more social aspects of your business, these are not the best metrics to go off of for something more concrete, like business development potential.
Clicks
This is where the metrics start to become more relevant to the average gym owner. This data point shows that you’ve managed to capture the audience’s attention and had enough interest or value built into the various elements to drive them to click on the call-to-action. If the goal is to increase the click-through rate on ads, this is the metric to be looking at.
Downloads, Promos, and Form Completions
Depending on your call-to-action type, a click might be interpreted differently than downloads, promotions, and form completions. We separate this category because these elements typically require an additional step to just clicking on a call-to-action that sometimes makes users drop off. This drop-off can be due to a lack of actual interest, not wanting to leave the page they were on, landing pages/forms/parts not loading correctly, or various other reasons. Typically, this is considered a strong KPI since it requires a lead to enter your sales funnel by giving you their information in some way, which boils down to a warm lead for your client-making potential.
Client Conversion
This is the ultimate goal for a gym, as it is the point where a lead decides that they want to give you their hard-earned money to access your facility and services. The conversion is the success point of many moving parts geared towards bringing in the ideal customer built on a mixture of overlapping values, budget alignments, and specialization that meets their needs. The natural increase in this metric helps reinforce positive changes made in your business that more accurately align with your targeted audiences’ wants, needs, and values. This is the metric that also helps grow your bottom line and can help predict the trajectory of your business going forward.
Continuous Development and Improvement for Ultimate Optimization
As time goes on and your ad sets are well-honed for each channel and group, your work is still not done. The unfortunate truth is that ad content can become stale after a while, especially if you are running ads to the same group type for a significant amount of time. In addition to stale ads, market shifts may happen where customer interests, values, or perspectives change, that may require you to shift your messaging to fit the new norms. Therefore, continuously working to keep new and fresh ads or materials for your campaign efforts should be an ongoing priority. Again, these new variations can be tested against prior sets to see what variables helped things improve over time as well.
Making a Splash
If you are in the business of turning your marketing efforts into an effective lead producing machine, you need to invest time into the planning of proper campaigns, money into testing ad variations to find what actually works, and continuous efforts to keep content and messaging resonating with your target audience(s). And since lead generation is more of a long-distance race rather than a sprint in regards to time, taking the extra effort to make sure systems are properly set up, messaging is relevant, and campaigns are optimized will help your marketing dollars work more efficiently – helping to keep the cost per new lead/client low and your profits high.