Complete Digital Strategy for Gym Owners

Is your gym doing what it needs to have a complete digital strategy in place to attract customers and maximize profitability?
The goal of this is blog is to give you a quick run down on what needs to be in place for your marketing strategy as a gym owner.
I will rank them in priority starting with the most important.
- Market Research
You need to do extensive market research into your market to see who you want to target as your ideal client. You want to know who your competitors are and what they are doing to snag these people’s attention.
From extensive market research, you will know your target audience (age, gender, interest, behaviors, location, etc.), your competition, and what is the most successful strategy in your market.
By doing market research, you can figure out how you can position your services that make you stand out from your competition.
2. Plan and Strategy
Now that you know your market, target audience, competition, and most successful strategies, you need to set objectives.
What does a successful campaign look like?
How many leads do you expect this month? How much should they cost?
How many members do you expect? What’s the cost per acquisition?
After establishing goals, you need a plan to target them. What channels should be used to target them? What offer or call-to-action (CTA) do you want them to take? How will you position landing pages and ads to grab your ideal customers’ attention?
By answering these questions, you will have a road map for your digital strategy that sets the bar and guidelines for the rest.
3. Paid Advertisement
This is an absolute must in our day and age as paid advertisement can explode a gym over night. It is not uncommon to get 30+ new leads over night or over 150 new leads in 1 month.
Facebook advertising contributes to the feasibility of this feat. The targeting features are incredible as you can target by location, gender, age, interests, and behaviors.
As a result, you will be able to position your gym in front of thousands of potential customers.
In addition, you can use pull marketing in the form of Google Adwords to target highly targeted and motivated people ready to buy your gym services based on keyword searches.
Combining Google Adwords and Facebook advertising can lead to extremely powerful results.
4. Retargeting
Using paid advertisement allows you to send web traffic to a form, landing page, or blog.
Whatever the case may be, you need to implement a Facebook Pixel and/or Google Analytics code on the page to track the traffic.
If you set up the campaign correctly, you give web traffic two options:
a. Take CTA
b. Leave page without taking CTA
If they take it, awesome! You just got yourself a lead. If not, you need to retarget them until they do take your offer.
5. Social Media
You want to sell the results of your services not your studio. Too many times I see gyms or fitness studios having banner photos of a picture of their gym, and you know what? They are wasting valuable online real estate. The banner photo should be before and after photos of past and current clients.
Also, you should be posting regularly (especially on Facebook) to make visitors see that your page is “alive.” For Instagram, choose to post quality over quantity.
Social media is a great way to highlight awesome members and build an online community. You can use social media to generate referrals by showing appreciation to your most loyal clients.
6. Email Marketing
Emails are crucial in the follow up process of a fitness lead generation campaign. If you do not follow up with a lead within 15 minutes, good luck.
That’s how quickly you need to act. Not only do you need email marketing to get leads into the door, but you need to use email marketing to current members.
By reaching out to current members, you can generate referrals, upsell merchandise, and offer them an opportunity to purchase a special one time workout.
With that being said, it is important to find ways to continue building your email list so you can be able to generate new leads and increase profitability with current members.
P.S. Follow up text messages are a effective as well.
7. Content Marketing
Just like I said before, retargeting can be paired nicely with blogs and content. Address common questions and concerns for your customers through the creation of blogs, Facebook live videos, podcasts, infographics, and so on.
Make you are tailoring the copy to speak to your target audience and that you are tracking the results. Enhance content marketing by choosing keywords that are related to your company, brand, and specialization to increase your SEO rankings.
By doing this, you can do some pretty cool stuff with the Facebook Pixel by retargeting viewers of content with specific ads related to the content.
8. Website
Your website needs to be mobile responsive, have a CTA with an effective lead magnet, and be optimized on Google using SEO.
If your website is not mobile optimized, you need to change this because your consumer is most likely checking it out in the bathroom on their iPhone.
Your CTA needs to collect their email, name, and phone number (at least email) in exchange for something of value. The piece of value is a lead magnet which could be a free trial pass, 5 tips to lose belly fat, or a discounted PT session.
Lastly, your website needs to rank highly on Google so more people can find your gym and so you can position your brand better in regards to competition.
I hope this helps and inspires you to evaluate your current strategy and determine areas of where you can improve.
