11 Highly Profitable Marketing Ideas for Gyms {Updated}
Do you have a fitness club, a martial arts center, a workout room or a yoga studio?
If so, you’ll definitely need to promote your gym in an efficient way and attract target audience to your business.
After that, you’ll need to take another important step and turn your prospects into real customers who will visit your gym on a regular basis and provide your business with revenue.
It’s important for you to know that attracting new target audiences to a gym is no easy job that requires a meticulous planning and, of course, hard work.
You should definitely have an understanding of how marketing for gyms works if you would like to get the most out of your gym’s marketing strategy.
In this article, we’ll provide you with some insights into marketing a gym.
If at any point you feel the information is too overwhelming, you have questions about something, or just want a professional team to manage the process for you, contact Finepoint Design.
We will be happy to either answer your questions or help get you set up with a marketing plan tailored to your goals.
With either approach, you’ll be able to find the most creative and innovative marketing ideas from this article.
As a result, you’ll find it easy to develop an effective marketing strategy for your gym that works and provides great results.
Offer a Free Training Day to Prospects
Actually, the so called “free training day” is one of marketing techniques that so many gyms choose to use these days.
What is great about this type of marketing technique is that it makes it possible for your prospects to try and test your training programs prior to buying membership.
If you provide your potential clients with a free training day that means that you give them an opportunity to learn more about your gym’s training programs.
And of course, this will help them make a smart decision whether your club’s membership is worth buying or not.
According to the statistics, the vast majority of prospects begin to visit a gym after a free training day.
That’s why “free training day” needs to be a part of your gym’s marketing strategy.
Offer a Free Month to Existi ng Clients Who Refer a Friend
A lot of gym owners and gym marketers prefer to focus on referral marketing.
It’s a great idea to reward members of your gym for referrals and there is no question about that.
So, it would be nice for you to offer a free month to a member each time he/she refers a new person to your gym.
This is something that will probably help you motivate your existing clients to refer friends to your business.
Obviously, your existing customers would be happy to refer new members to your gym.
There is the evidence that such a marketing strategy works well.
Most likely referrals will become your permanent customers who will visit your gym on a regular basis in the future.
Maybe they will refer their friends to your gym too.
That means that the so called “free month” marketing technique is likely to provide you with high return on investment in the long term.
Organize Parties for People Who Have Ever Visited Your Gym
Let’s assume that a person visited your gym in the past and then he/she stopped attending your workouts for some reason later.
Then, he/she forgot about your gym.
If these kinds of things happen, you will lose your revenue.
The reality is oftentimes it’s pretty easy to return clients to a gym.
All that you have to do is to remind people about your business.
One of the best ways to do this is to organize parties for gym’s members from time to time.
Invite anybody, who has ever visited your gym, to a party.
Send invitations to gym’s members by email or call to invite them to a party personally.
A lot of people are likely to resume visiting your gym after such a party.
Create Meal Plans for Your Clients
It’s widely known that healthy eating goes hand in hand with workouts.
It goes without saying that nutrition is incredibly important for people who do workouts.
It’s crucial for them to know which foods to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Unfortunately, a lot of people find it hard to develop a healthy eating plan on their own.
So, it would be great for you to do this for them.
There is no doubt that your gym will stand out from the crowd if you choose to develop healthy eating plans for your members.
There are a lot of great resources out there for this type of thing that you can use like Eat This Much and Every Day Health meal planner.
Provide Your Clients and Prospects with Valuable Content Regularly
You’ll be able to draw the attention of people to your gym if you provide them with interesting content. The question is – what type of content does your target audience need?
Let’s try to get the answer now.
Obviously, your existing customers as well as prospects will have a lot of questions about your training programs.
So, it would be nice for you to provide the answers to frequently asked questions.
The next question is – what is the best way to provide existing clients as well as prospects with content?
In fact, this can be done in two different ways.
Take advantage of blogging
You need to add a blog to your gym’s website and then update it with fresh articles on a regular basis.
Each of your articles should contain the answers to questions which are commonly asked by people who are interested in your training programs.
And of course, you shouldn’t forget about SEO.
It would be great for you to do keyword research and optimize each of your blog posts on the necessary search terms.
By doing so, you’ll be able to make your content SEO friendly and this will help you get the most out of blogging.
If you don’t have the time for writing or don’t consider yourself a good writer, consider outsourcing it.
Finepoint Design has a great in-hour writer, but there are also other services like iWriter, ProBlogger and UpWork where you can find exceptional writers at a fair cost.
Create a Youtube channel
We all know that people would rather choose to watch videos than read texts.
That’s the reason why it makes a lot of sense for gym’s owners to create a Youtube channel and update it with new videos consistently.
If people find your video content interesting, they will most likely decide to subscribe to your Youtube channel.
If you update your Youtube channel on a regular basis, then the number of your subscribers is likely to increase dramatically over the time.
Keep in mind that a certain part of your Youtube channel’s subscribers will certainly become your gym’s members.
That means that the more Youtube channel’s subscribers you have – the better!
Now, let’s try to figure out what type of video content needs to be published on Youtube.
As it was mentioned earlier, your content has to contain answers to the questions which are commonly asked by gym’s members.
So, you should aim to create videos that provide answers to the questions frequently asked by healthy lifestyle enthusiasts.
It’s a good idea to provide training tips as well as healthy eating tips in your Youtube videos.
You can also create videos that show how to do different types of workouts in a gym.
Use the power of social media
No matter whether you have published a new article on your blog or have created a new video on Youtube channel, you should always share your content on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram and others.
Actually, the list of popular social networks where your content can be shared could go on and on.
If you share your content with users of popular social media platforms, you’ll be able to increase your website’s traffic (or views of your Youtube videos) dramatically.
However, the most important thing is that you will be able to land new customers for your business.
Make Use of Storytelling
It’s worth noting that today’s gym marketing is not all about advertising a gym.
The reality is people like interesting stories and, of course, you can make use of storytelling to market your gym effectively.
So, your job is to create an amazing marketing story for your gym and then promote it among your prospects and members.
If your story is a really inspiring, then people are likely to share it with each other.
As a result, a story will have a profound positive impact on your brand and will definitely do great job for your gym marketing campaign.
Now, let’s try to figure out what type of stories gym’s visitors will probably like to hear.
Has one of your gym’s members achieved great weight loss results?
Does a famous person visit your gym regularly?
Or, maybe, the legendary fitness instructor works at your gym?
Obviously, stories like these ones will help you increase your brand awareness significantly, attract new members to your gym and take your business to the next level!
Use Discounts, Coupons and Prom Codes for Marketing your Gym
What is great about discounts is that they help gym owners and gym marketers turn leads into membership successfully.
It’s no surprise that people tend to use discounts, coupons and promo codes when buying different types of products and services.
That’s why it makes sense for you to offer discounts, coupons as well as promo codes to your prospects.
In fact, there are different types of discounts that you can use to market a gym.
Below, we’ll explain to you what types of discounts are likely to work well for a gym marketing campaign.
– You can provide new members with one time discounts (5% off discount, 10% off discount, 25% off discount and even 50% off discount) for limited time.
Discounts of this type will help you attract a lot of new members to your gym within a certain period of time.
After that, your task is to turn your first buyers into permanent customers.
Keep in mind that your success largely depends on customer satisfaction.
If people are satisfied with the quality of your services, they would be happy to visit your gym on a regular basis.
– Or if, for example, your members choose to pay monthly then you can offer them to 1 year subscription at discounted price.
First time buyers, who choose to order an annual subscription, will become your permanent customers at the very beginning.
And of course, it’s a big advantage for your business.
– It’s pretty clear that people, who workout regularly over a long period of time, provide gym owners with good incomes in the long run. And of course, you should value such clients and provide them with good discounts.
Would you like to reward members, who have visited your gym for a long time?
If so, you should offer discounts to those customers who have visited your gym for 2 years, 3 years, 5 years and so on.
Such clients would be a good example for people who have just started visiting your gym.
– The statistics shows that people tend to visit a gym and do workouts in the evening after work.
That means that you can offer discounts for morning classes if you want more people to visit a gym in the morning.
Creating a discount or promo code is only half the battle.
After a discount for a gym has been created, the next thing you need to do is to promote it effectively.
Bear in mind that this can be done in a number of ways.
It would be nice for you to inform your target audience about your gym’s discounts, coupons and promo codes on popular fitness and health related forums, blogs, magazines and social media networks.
And of course, you can benefit from email marketing to keep your target audience up-to-date on your gym’s latest discounts and specials.
Focus on Highly Targeted Ads
Obviously, only people from certain areas will visit your gym.
That’s why only highly-targeted advertising work well for a gym.
Among the most effective advertising solutions for a gym are: Facebook ads, Google Adwords (now just Google Ads) as well as local SEO.
It’s important to note that advertising solutions of this type make it possible for you to target the right people fast and easy.
Creating these types of ads can take some time to understand all of the options each of these platforms offer.
Consider outsourcing your ad creation and setup initially with a reputable digital marketing or online marketing company.
Thank you so much for reading this article.
We’ve just provided you with some of the best gym marketing ideas.
As you can see, a gym can be marketed in many ways.
It’s very important to have certain knowledge as well as experience and skills to market a gym successfully.
That’s why it would be better for you to trust this important task to marketing experts.
Do you need help with marketing a gym?
Contact us today! Our professionals will market your gym in the best possible way and boost your business success!
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