Opening A Gym Requirement #6) Marketing
The final step to opening a gym is marketing. Once you’ve obtained your licensees, lined up the equipment, and hired the staff – it’s time to bring in the customers!
There are dozens of local and digital marketing strategies to bring in new customers, and the best way to start is to test them all and focus on the channel and strategy that delivers the most results.
Note: Marketing is a slow, time-consuming process. Even if you do everything right, your first month might be slow because it takes time to establish yourself among the local community.
As a long-term measurement, the best thing a gym owner can do is interview clients and ask them the magical words: “Where did you hear about us?“.
Once you ask 20-30 people for an answer, you’ll find the most common way people learn about your gym. Use that information to double down or triple down on that marketing strategy.
Example: If people learned about your gym through Instagram influencers, hire more of them and make them run even more promotions. If flyers got the job done, go print 5000 more flyers and disperse them everywhere in a 10-mile radius.
Both digital and offline marketing strategies work, the main difference is finding out what works for your gym. The following are the best ways to fill up a gym once you’re starting:
1) Make Your Location Visible
Location, location, location. When you’re looking for a gym, the first thing you want to know is how close to home it is.
If you’re driving by the nearest mall to your home and you notice a giant “Gym” sign, this will stick in your head even if you’re not looking for a gym.
Once it’s time for you to join the gym, you’ll remember that it’s the nearest gym. The owners of that gym did their job right because they made themselves visible without running any digital marketing or trying to reach out to clients directly. Their location did the marketing for them.
Start by making yourself visible. No marketing strategy is as effective as being close to people. People want to know their gym is right by their home, and no one wants to commute 30 minutes only to exercise.
You can tackle the visibility criteria even before you lease a space. Look for an area that is high-traffic and very open, ideally located in a central location.
Hang signs that are easy to understand and make your tagline simple – this way, people will remember it. Put lights around your sign and light it up at night.
If your gym is near a shopping plaza or an office building, it will get recognition by merely existing. But if your gym is in the back of a basement, you’ll have to run aggressive marketing campaigns and word of mouth to make yourself known.
2) Build An Online Presence
The first step to a digital marketing strategy is to build an online website or get a Member Management Software to take bookings and payments online.
You need a website that connects all the dots and makes everything available to customers in 2-3 clicks. The site has to be clean and easy to navigate, presenting all the core information about your business.
If you want to develop your online presence successfully, your website needs to have the following:
About Us. Showcasing the history of the gym and the profile of the owners/fitness instructors.
Equipment. You should prominently display all the equipment at the gym. Ideally, you should have pictures and videos of people using the machines at your gym.
Directions. People want a Google Map showing the location of your gym, as well as the opening/closing hours.
Facilities. This page should show what facilities you have in your gym, such as locker rooms, showers, etc.
Prices/Membership. List how much it costs to join your gym by the day, week, or month. Also, mention any promos you’re running. Offer people the ability to sign-up online to facilitate sales.
3) Create a Google Maps Listing
Once you’ve established an online presence, the first step towards successful online marketing is to build a presence on Google Maps. This presence is going to be the main thing people see once they look up the name of your gym.
Your Google Maps listing will contain your address (including a pin on the map), website, phone, and opening/closing hours. Once you’re listed as a gym in the city when people look up “Gym + x city” or “Gym near me,” they will find your listing among the top results.
This process is known as “local SEO,” as it optimizes your business for local search listings. It can provide significant ROI for your business as you’ll retain a presence among all the top gyms in your city for free.
We recommend combining that with an SEO strategy for keywords that attract all the attention of people looking for gyms in your city. If you hire an SEO agency, they can develop a content strategy based on keyword research and publish articles on your website that attract new customers.
Getting a Google “My Business” listing is one of the first steps to successfully optimizing your online presence.
Additionally, Google offers customer reviews that could impact your business based on the star ratings you receive. Google any gym in your area, and you’ll notice many of them have reviews and ratings.
4) Give Free Merchandise
Most gyms sell merchandise – it’s easy to print t-shirts in bulk and sell them. However, a better marketing strategy when you’re starting is to give the merchandise for free.
How does this help you? One answer: Instagram influencers. Many people think that Instagram influencers only work by paying people to market your gym in the post description.
However, there are people with tens of thousands of followers who can indirectly market your gym by wearing your merchandise and tagging themselves on social media in your gym.
Example: If one person has 5000 followers, each post gets tens of thousands of views. Instagram calls this “reach.” In this case, a shirt you paid $5 to print could bring you hundreds or thousands of dollars in free marketing.
Think about the upside of getting exposure on social media and real life, when people wear your shirts. Find a deal with a local printing company that can print 500-1000 shirts with your logo. Make the design memorable and easy to remember. Include your website and other contact information on the back of the shirt.
Hand them out for free for each new member and give more once they renew their membership to let them know they’re appreciated. This process is one of the fastest ways to make the word go out about your gym. The only thing better than Influencer marketing is getting influencers to promote you without knowing it!
Also, consider upgrading your merchandise by offering other forms of clothing such as hoodies or jackets for more dedicated members. You can also customize snacks and drinks with your logo and sell them or give them away for free. The initial investment will be worth it because the shirts will give you free marketing without much effort.
5) Run Special Offers
Special offers entice new members similar to offering free merchandise. The fitness industry is a large, high-growth industry with an average growth rate of 4% a year. This growth means you’re competing with dozens or hundreds of other gyms in your area who might offer better promos than you do.
However, this begs the question: How do you stand out without giving away your gym?
The answer is to run creative promos. It doesn’t mean making giving away a t-shirt, the central point of your giveaway strategy. The shirts are only a tiny bonus. What you need is a serious attention-grabber, something that entices new members without making them think that they can get classes for free.
The “Special Offer” could be anything from a free hour with a personal trainer, a week of free access to the gym, discount for first month’s membership, or a combination of all those. It has to be good enough to make you appealing to the crowded gym industry. People still have to know you’re a for-profit gym and that they’re not getting it for free.
The gym can run events that attract people from other gyms and let them get a taste for your gym.
6) Get More Testimonials
The first thing people do once they’re on the brink of signing up for a gym membership is binge-reading all the reviews.
Your business will have a Google My Business listing that accumulates reviews from past members, which new members will read. Customer reviews will expose the weak points of your gym, such as the customer service, the cleanliness, and other aspects you might have overlooked.
If your gym is in top shape with friendly staff, it will make it that much better for new customers who will get reaffirmation that signing up is the right thing to do.
Joining a gym is a financial commitment because people can easily spend $1000+ a year for membership at your gym, without even a customized workout program or personal training.
Pro Tip: Ask for reviews on Google Business, Yelp, and Facebook. Doing this is one of the best ways to bring in new customers without spending money on a marketing budget.
You can also keep track of your member’s gym progress. If one of your members makes astronomical progress and drops 100 lbs over a year, ask them for before/after pictures and display them on your social media accounts. Doing this can give you massive influence over the fitness market in your area, as you’ll become known as the gym that gets results.
7) Run Facebook And Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram ads are the most effective way to get new customers for a gym. However, they can be highly expensive.
If the gym is in a bad location, and your promotions are failing, Instagram ads are not a magic pill that will automatically make you successful.
However, allocating a budget such as $1000/month on ads can significantly boost your membership over a few months. It can also increase your exposure to new influencers and people who can spread the word.
Placing Instagram and Facebook ads is easy. All you have to do is sign up for Facebook Business Manager, which is a platform that allows you to develop and publish advertisements on both Facebook and Instagram. They let you narrow your audience down to people interested in fitness in your area, as well as their age/education/gender/income level and more.
Pro-tip: Run video promotions to get the attention of social media users. Make sure you have subtitles under your videos because most videos auto-play without sound.
Because of these ads, many potential clients will start following your gym on social media. Once they watch your stories and follow your timeline posts, they become progressively interested until they make the final decision to sign up.
8) Print Old-Fashioned Flyers
The last marketing strategy, once you’ve established a digital presence, is to go old-school and start printing ads and handing them out to people or mailing them. Print marketing is cheap, and it’s possible to print thousands of flyers for only a few hundred dollars.
Local business owners who complain that flyers don’t work anymore, have not run a campaign at scale. Distributing 100 flyers is not the ideal way to test the success of the channel. Go for a few 1000 flyers to determine if this campaign is successful for your gym.
Once you have those flyers, you can distribute them to people in your vicinity by leaving them in their mailboxes. It should only take you a day or two to cover a few miles’ radius around your gym, and this can get you a dozen new members within the week.
Pro Tip: Distribute your promotional flyers to nearby businesses. If your gym is in a commercial area such as an office building, mall, or shopping plaza, you should go to nearby shops and leave flyers for their customers. Offer the same in return to spread the word and form partnerships.