New digital marketing tactics are emerging every day, and then there are the tried and tested favorites as well. If you’re feeling stuck in your digital marketing campaign, or if you feel like your reach has hit a wall, it might be time to try one of these strategies.
Remarketing
What is marketing for fitness? It’s pretty simple. You are giving prior first contacts a second chance. Whether it was someone that didn’t click on a banner ad or similar, you’re going to target that same person with new ads through tracking cookies and making new ads for various social networks.
Remarketing helps to continue engagement early in the sales funnel, and it’s proof that you don’t have to give up on everyone who passes on the first chance to buy your product or service. As a bonus, remarketing helps boost brand awareness as you will appear more often for that user in different visual formats.
Video
Content still reigns as King and is personally my favorite 3 marketing strategies you should be Using right now. Video has taken over as the primary medium for reaching your customers. Quality video marketing will be something that your customers want to watch and is packed with valuable information. These two factors lead to a high conversion rate. For example, doTERRA’s YouTube page doesn’t just talk about essential oils they also branch into holistic health and other relevant topics that interest their target audience.
Video is the chance to go beyond the front of an ad. You’re not making a 30-minute sales pitch or creating an infomercial. You’re trying to connect with your target audience in a memorable way. Chirp’s YouTube does this by empathizing with their customers’ back pain while also delivering information and signature cheesy humor.
Local Search Marketing
When it comes to gaining attention from the public, it pays off if you’re generally easy to find. You can’t rely on Google to do all the work anymore as it may take months for “spiders” to crawl through your site and log the info into Google’s massive index.
To start local search marketing for fitness, you will need to begin with Google My Business, a tool that tells Google that you’re a business and you want customers to find you. At first, it might only seem that it’s helping people with directions or if they already know your business. But this tool is how your bakery shop will pop up in a search such as “donuts near me.” Additionally, it will significantly impact your inbound marketing for fitness by attracting new customers as it allows you to increase engagement with your customers directly.
It’s not easy to select your digital marketing techniques with so many options available. By using remarketing, video, and local search marketing, you can boost conversions, grab attention from new customers, cash in on reviews, and build your brand.
Our first three years in existence ProFit was all about Fitness Marketing and how to get leads for your business. One of the core messages we stress is having multiple poles in the water. You need to be catching fish from multiple sources and stop relying on just one single campaign, tactic, thing, to get clients into your facility.
During the early days, we were a little spoiled with Facebook. Someone could accidentally put an ad up, blink, and have 70-80 paid clients. Not just leads, but actually paid clients. You would get so much revenue for pennies!
The times have now changed.
The cost to advertise on Facebook has increased dramatically. For those of you that don’t know, when Facebook first came out it was like the Wild West – there wasn’t much competition. When we first started our ad spend expectations for clients started at $400 for a 3-week advertising period and they would come out of that with 65 clients who paid $97 each. It was crazy.
These expectations are no longer realistic.
Why? Well, let’s talk about supply and demand. Cost per impression is how you’re charged on Facebook. You’re paying for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. For instance, our CPM back in 2015 for a paid ad may have been $10-$15 dollars, but to show your add to that same group today might be $50. When Facebook first came out there weren’t many advertisers. But, you aren’t just competing against other local gyms, you’re competing for placement against the local plumber, large national brands, ecommerce, etc… There’s only so much real estate for ANYONE who is targeting that same audience, and as Facebook became more popular, the demand for that real estate increased.
This causes your costs to increase.
If you were in business three years ago, you were spoiled. Most people went all in on Facebook, which was absolutely what you should have done. It was so great because it was trackable, you can’t see a direct return for fliers. If it didn’t work well, you could just shut it off. If you dropped $5,000 on a bad flier, you can’t just shut that off. You were committed. Facebook also made it incredibly easy for just about anyone with a computer to advertise their business. However, because of this, a lot of people don’t know how else to market their business without Facebook.
Fitness Marketing
That’s a dangerous position to be in.
We want to talk about some other ways that you can advertise
your business that are NOT just Facebook.
The first way to drive in more revenue is your website.
So many people want to say websites are dead but that’s absolutely not true. 66% percent of customers will not do business with someone who doesn’t have a website. 33% of customers will refer back to a website before moving forward with doing business with them even after finding you on Facebook.
So how do you generate leads from your website? First, it’s important to have a great, fast and functional website. It’s not something you want to cut corners on to save some money. SEO is next. We double down on SEO because our BEST clients come from an organic search. I had a gentleman come in a few weeks ago and specifically said he came in because we were number one on Google. This man signed up for our highest package, and if we weren’t there, he wouldn’t have become a client. You also need to look at the content on your website. If you have a gorgeous website but no valuable content on it, it’s useless. Blogs, like you’re reading here, are a great way to present valuable information to the client and show your potential client that you are the expert in your area.
How do you get that content out?
Social media! It’s so important to educate the unaware. Most
of the Fitness Marketing
that’s done in the industry reaches out to the very small percentage of the
population that already know and live the fitness lifestyle. The unaware is the
audience that none of your competitors are going after. So how do you get in
front of those people? This is where you can share your education blogs. You
can also create great video content. Share information that’s going to help
them. Provide them with value. Then you can create custom audiences around
people that watch your videos, or read your blogs, and then retarget
them with an offer. This allows you to give before you take.
The last, and probably least surprising way to generate
leads, is to create a great online review presence.
This is one of the top contributors in a buyer’s decision-making process. Sometimes as business owners, it’s easy to get frustrated with the review platforms because of the negativity that surrounds them. If we think about this from the consumer’s perspective, it’s so much easier to get online when you’re mad and blast a business than it is to take time out of your day to say how much you appreciate the business. It’s your job as the business owner to ask for the referrals. You can’t expect your clients to just leave you 5-start reviews just because they felt like it. Some people might, but most only do it when they’re upset. With that being said, if someone leaves you a negative review, which is bound to happen, it’s imperative you respond. Try to resolve their issue publicly and take it as an opportunity to learn. You could find some issues in your business you were unaware of through these. When you take the time to respond, it becomes apparent you genuinely care about your client’s concerns and want to rectify the situation.
Struggling to find new clients? Do you want to get more new memberships for your gym? Are you looking for new ways in which you can make money with your gym business? Well, fitness marketing is no child’s play. It requires great skills and expertise in the industry. Fitness marketing requires all-in-one digital marketing efforts to help you gain more customers. Using the right tools and tactics, you’ll be able to attract more clients and make more profits for your fitness business.
Here, we’ve listed top 10 strategies that can help you increase brand awareness and make you enjoy the maximum ROI from your fitness marketing efforts:
Use an attractive and eye-catchy signage at prominent place outside your gym. Make sure that you are aware of the legal terms and conditions in your locality while choosing the signage or hoarding outside your gym.
Nobody would like to join an outdated gym. Make sure that you have the most advanced and latest equipment in your gym. You can highlight the major advanced techniques and tools you use in your advertisements also.
Start a newsletter and keep sending informative content to your subscribers.
Be active on social media platforms and spread the word about your business. You can DIY or look for an experienced fitness marketing agency to create an effective online presence over social networks.
It can be a good idea to stay in touch with your old gym members through different channels and reactivate them. Former clients can be a good opportunity for your business.
Encourage referral business as we all are aware of the word-of-mouth-marketing. You can let your existing members know about the referral programs.
Share some moments of the daily activities at your gym and to let the people know what kind of atmosphere the gym has.
Maintain a blog on your website or externally where you can post informative content for the users and help them gain valuable tips and tricks to lose weight or live a healthy lifestyle.
Offer discounts and freebies to the new joiners and you would be surprised to get more customers.
It can be a good idea to organize a free yoga or zumba session for the gym members and you can ask them to bring their family members or friends also. You can collect the contact information of the new people who visit your gym on that day and later on, contact them to see if they are interested to join your gym.
You can use one or two or multiple tactics mentioned above for fitness marketing of your gym. Make sure that you’re aware of your business goals before you start with any marketing campaign. You can seek expert advice first and then choose the best strategy for making your business grow. So, what are you waiting for? Start looking for the best fitness marketing agency to help you achieve your business objectives within a short span of time.
Today, networking is not just about talking to trade groups or creating refer-a-friend programs to gain a foothold in your community. Today’s consumers are a little more savvy, so that means if we want to become the go-to gym in our areas, we need to get creative with how we network and advertise our services.
Here are 5 out-of-the-box ideas you can implement TODAY in your facility for $0 to raise awareness and 1 that costs a little bit, (but even that is negotiable).
Barter Organizations – Look, I know most of you will skip right over this idea due to the fact that you’re not getting actual cash, but please hear me out. I am involved in several groups of business organizations in my area who barter their services for the equivalent in trade dollars for other services. The businesses involved range from printers and security service providers to landscape designers and dentists.
At any rate, I don’t have any need for landscaping at our facility, so I would be given the equivalent amount in barter bucks to use for something else like painting, office supplies, or janitorial services. You are not getting actual cash, but you are also out a lot less money for services you would typically pay for out of pocket. At any given time, I have between $2-$15k in barter bucks to use for those expenses that pop up unexpectedly. I can now save the actual cash for services and use my barter instead. This keeps cash in the bank for operating costs. Think of barter as a separate bank account that can be used for just about anything. It’s a real no-brainer in my opinion, you just have to think outside the box!
What happens in these organizations is that businesses seek out others for services they need and offer to trade with you. If you don’t have a use for their service, you are given an equivalent amount of trade dollars to use with any other business in your organization. For instance, if a landscape designer approaches me with interest in providing his 3-person team with personal training services I would tell him how much that would cost. The key here is that these are new clients that would otherwise NEVER have come in to see us. And from these new clients, I can set them up with paid services such as daily smoothies, supplements or nutrition programs.
Fitness Marketing
There are many barter organizations across the U.S., it just takes a quick Google search and an email or phone call to screen them.
Discounts for Local Businesses – This one isn’t actually that novel, but it’s something that’s often overlooked and for me, has been quite profitable. When we moved into a new business center, I personally visited each and every company in the complex and offered them a great rate for their employees. More than one business took us up on the offer, which is great, but one company purchased memberships for all of their employees. We have continued to show great value to the organization by helping promote a healthy workforce and have now been approached to design a nutrition plan for their company as well.
Joint Venture (JV) with Other Local Businesses– The idea behind this suggestion is to partner with another company who may share a similar client demographics, where you each trade special offers for your clients. Let me explain. Say you share a shopping center with a day spa. You approach the management of the spa and tell them that you would like to offer a discount to their clients for one free week of training. You offer to write the emails from the spa’s point of view, allowing the customer to draw the conclusion that they (the spa owners) care so much about their clients that they “went to bat” for them with the gym to get them a special offer, only available to them. The spa sends out the emails that you wrote to their own list, themselves.
Create a free, private Facebook group such as Healthy Living, Scottsdale, where you are the creator, the administrator and resident expert. Post relevant articles, blogs, recipes and local fitness and outdoor events. Make it a fun place for the community to interact with each other-somewhere they want to comment and learn and ultimately invite others to do the same. But, DO NOT pitch anything in there and do not allow anyone else to do so either. People will eventually figure out who you are and what gym you own and visit you there.
Reciprocally, the spa then creates an offer to extend to your (the gym’s) clients. They will write the emails for you from the gym’s point of view and you send their discount out to your client list, however you can offer to write the emails for them as well. This way, both companies look like they are going above and beyond for their clients AND are able to reach potential customers to whom they previously did not market. Neither partner in the venture compromises their own email list because you don’t hand it over. It’s a value add for both partners, yet it can be potentially difficult to explain to other business owners who may not be savvy marketers like you are. Done correctly, however, this can be a very successful campaign for both you and your partner company.
Community Facebook Page – This suggestion is a straight ninja tactic. You know how I always talk about providing valuable content to your clients and prospects alike? That’s the idea behind creating a community page. It is just is an undercover way of reaching your target demographic without coming straight at them with advertisements or marketing copy.
Grow your followers by running contests – give away shaker bottles when you reach 1000 followers; offer tickets to spring training for getting the most people to follow your page. One of the best things about this is that you can add all of your local friends to the page without them even knowing about it. Then, your content shows up on their feed and they can add their own friends from there. Slam dunk, also a $0 cost play!
Charity Workouts – This is a win-win for everyone. Create a fun charity fundraiser at your gym by offering a paid workout to the community at large. Allow the charity to help market the event, reaching a potential client base that wouldn’t have come in otherwise while also allowing your members to bring in family and friends. Donate all of the proceeds to the charity, but collect the contact information from all participants. Several hours after the event, send an email to the entire list with a note that says “Thank you for coming to support the charity. With your help, we have raised $X to be used toward research for a cure. Here are some pictures and videos from the event today. Please connect with us on Facebook and as a special thank you for coming out today, here is a FREE 7 day pass to come in and give us a try. We would love to see you again.”
Mud Runs – Races of all types are still hot and a great way to build team camaraderie with gym members, their family and friends. We participate in several every year and always have a great turn out. The best ones are when our teams are comprised of even numbers of members and non-members because not only do we have a great time training for and participating in the event itself, there is great word of mouth publicity for us along the way. While there is usually a fee involved to sponsor a team in addition to the nominal participation fees, you may be able to get them to waive it if you bring a large enough team to participate.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of out-of-the-box networking opportunities, but they are all suggestions that you can incorporate easily into your fitness marketing plan and most will not cost you a dime out of pocket. Good luck!
