When it comes to leveraging your website as a business tool, making sure that the main sales purpose is established early on can be critical to the long-term success of future marketing campaigns and the overall online growth potential of your gym.
In this blog, we will go over what a call-to-action (CTA) is, what types you can leverage, and ultimately how to implement the one that may work best with your training center’s sales process.
What is a Call-To-Action for Gyms
To begin, let’s discuss what a call-to-action even is. Aside from being a marketing buzzword, CTAs are exactly what they say they are: a callout for action. It is part of your fitness facility’s marketing that helps drive your viewer into making an action you’ve determined as the appropriate next step in the sales funnel journey.
The next steps that a CTA can drive client leads to could include leaving a business review, joining a mailing list, signing up for a membership, or even following your studio’s social media pages – to list a few. The goal of a CTA is to keep your leads’ attention and gently nudge them along with action points that help them naturally flow through your sales funnel process.
While CTAs can sometimes show up as buttons on a page that state “Sign Up” or “Review Us”, they don’t always need to necessarily be that punchy or obvious. Just adding additional links to logical next pages of your website to help create a good flow of information can be viewed as a call-to-action. Additionally, CTAs can come in the presence of on-page forms, various types of pop-ups, or even page images/banners. The form may vary, but the goal is to continuously feed your prospects with more information or marketing information to help drive them to an ultimate conversion point.
What Types of Call-To-Action Goals to Leverage with Your Fitness Facility’s Website
Depending on your business structure and fitness facility type, your sales goal and conversion point might look different. This is because not every fitness business has the goal to sign new members up online. In this section, we will look at various fitness business structure types and what their potential conversion goal call-to-action may look like.
Personal Training Studio
When it comes to personal training studios, many times your website is going to showcase your market specialty, testimonials, and your facility, equipment, and amenities. While this might not seem too different from what many other fitness training centers or gyms do, the focus is not to sell memberships most times. For a good portion of facility owners with this business structure, their primary goal tends to be driving consultative visits with interested individuals. Due to their sales process and lead qualification needs, many times an automated membership signup program is not necessarily the right tool as personal training studios tend to be focused on their client’s unique and individualized needs, they commonly prefer to manage that portion of the sales process to ensure a right fit on both sides of the relationship.
While these types of businesses may not be pushing to go fully automated with their sales process, utilizing their website to automate part of the prospective client’s sales journey can help both sides reduce friction in moving forward with a potential business relationship. It’s not uncommon to see CTAs on websites of personal training studios that include buttons like “Book a Free Consultation Here” or a page dedicated to explaining the process of becoming a member and then including a form to book a session (these forms can also be further automated to tie into your work calendar, allowing prospective clients to schedule a time that works for them and has been pre-determined as an available time for you as well).
Niche Based Studio
From group-based classes and specialty programs to yoga and dance-centric exercises, niche studios have grown in popularity in recent years. When looking at their sales goals, it’s not uncommon to see two different aspects in play. First, and usually the front-runner, is the class schedule and availability structure. This essentially outlines the upcoming classes that include descriptions, availability, and price – and the call-to-action is usually “Sign Up” or “Book Now.” Once the CTA is clicked, it will take them to the automated bookings page, where they will log in or create a profile, load a payment method, and book their spot by checking out
The second factor at play with studios and CTAs, though, is the pricing structure. It’s typical to offer membership types, package discounts, or drop-in rates for the various types of members you have. That said, CTAs for this may show up in the form of call-outs saying “save more when you buy class bundles,” “But 2 Get 1 Free,” or even “Sign-Up for an Unlimited Class Monthly Membership”. Additionally, various entry points to pricing information and class credit/membership purchase pages may be available for those looking to buy for others, review pricing before committing to a class, or even current members looking to restock their credits.
Keeping payment and class schedules automatically updated is critical for studios that employ this structure. Therefore, automating sign-ups, calendars, schedules, and payments (along with memberships) is critical for long-term success and efficient operations.
General Training Center or Franchise
For many general training centers or franchise-based business structures, a more traditional “sign up now” call-to-action can be expected. These types of CTAs are very straightforward, especially if you are not too niche based or offering services that require a lot of individualized interaction with your customers. Making sure that your website answers many of the common questions early on in the customer journey of navigating your website, and peppering in CTAs that lead to your membership page throughout the site is a smart tactic to help drive the conversion.
Many times, this fitness business structure appeals to the masses via cost (price competitive), hours of availability (24/7 access), or convenience (centrally/ideally located or multiple sites), so ensuring that positioning of these factors are properly leveraged with your call-to-action can help drive more effective growth campaigns.
Niche Training Centers
Similar to general training centers or franchises, niche training centers typically have similar sales points to the audience they are after. However, the given nature of a niche gym, it drives more appeal to a subset of the larger audience base. This smaller market size is then typically catered to with specialty equipment, trainers with specific certifications or credentials, and any other assortment of unique offerings not typically found at “big-name gyms.”
From a marketing perspective, many times establishing your audience and clearly identifying your niche is important early on since it drives the up value (and typically the price as well). With these factors in mind, call-to-actions for these gyms typically want to drive to membership paves, but the journey may include more self-serving information stops that may include testimonials, equipment pages, gym/member accomplishments (specifically related to the niche), or even additional services relevant to the niche. Again, building the site around answering the questions your target audience has in a self-serving manner that progressively and consistently nudges them to your membership sign-up CTA page is the name of the game most times for this group.
Making a Splash
While the specific CTAs may vary from business type to type or even gym to gym, knowing your target audience and the sales process is the best start to optimizing your sales funnel and building automation. Focusing on removing unnecessary touch points through self-serving information, forms, and easy navigation can not only help drive better conversion rates but also emphasize your ideal client type within your facility.
