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Being able to market your own gym successfully requires you, to think outside the box. With over 60% of millennials embracing an active lifestyle through regular workouts, the impetus falls on gym owners to market their business in a way that appeals to their lifestyle. However, the goal here should not be to just get people to pay for a membership, but rather to help them realize how much value your gym will add to their lives. Once you manage to achieve that, you’re sure to keep running out of those membership forms.
There are quite a few ways that you can use to market your gym, and we’ll dive into them in just a moment. But before you start looking at marketing methods, you need to determine your marketing goals. This is important since it lays the foundation for your marketing strategies.
What do you want your marketing campaign to result in? More footfalls? Brand awareness? Increase in membership revenue? Once you decide your marketing goals, devising a plan of action becomes a lot more focused and easier.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 10 effective marketing strategies that you could employ to promote your gym.
Corporate boot camps are an excellent way to promote your gym. This is because they achieve four important things:
You can start off by offering different types of workout and training sessions to corporate offices, in order to get the most number of people to sign up for it. You can even better their experience by offering health drinks post routine. This shows everyone that you care about providing a wholesome experience to your members, and helps in propagating word-of-mouth marketing.
Take a look at Culture Of Fit and Fitspot. They’re great examples of how corporate fitness programs can really benefit your fitness center.
Nothing boosts your authority in any given domain more than innovation. If you’re still not convinced, check out this list of 8 reasons why being innovative is crucial.
But, as a gym owner, how can you innovate?
One of the best ways to showcase innovation and thought leadership is to develop your own unique routines and workout techniques that increase efficiency and provide focused results. For example, you could develop your own variation of any widely-used exercise. Check out T Nation’s variation of the normal leg extension exercise. Coming up with new and innovative methods like this to improve results will definitely get you the attention of the right crowd and increase brand awareness. Just be sure to make it known that it’s your own unique variation.
P.S. Check out these gyms that are taking innovation to the next level.
One of the main obstacles people who want to go to the gym face is taking the first step. As a gym owner, you can help with the cause by offering a free workout/training session. What’s better for someone who’s looking to test the waters than getting a free session?
You can promote these free sessions through your business’ social media profiles, and ask people to sign up with their email IDs in order to avail it. This way, you’ll have their information at hand to send them further promotional material.
Popular gyms like Fitness First have 3-day free trials in order to entice more people to join their membership programmes. But you have to keep in mind that once you get people to sign up, you have to take the effort to make them feel welcome, and make sure that they are aware of all the benefits they’ll receive as a member of your gym. This could mean the difference between them loving your gym and signing up or just utilizing the free sessions and walking away.
Social media sites have snowballed into people’s lives in a big way. With over 30% of all time spent online dedicated to social media sites, it’s time you leverage that to market your gym to a much larger audience.
You can do this by running ads on sites like Facebook and Instagram, where it has the potential to reach a massive audience. You can even boost engagement through online contests and trending hashtags. For example, you could offer a discount to the first 20 people who tweet to your gym’s Twitter account with the hashtag ‘#fitnessforever’.
Another facet of online marketing is to have a website that is both well-designed and updated. Make sure that you constantly churn out informative and relevant content. You can even use your gym’s online outlets to promote your own workout routines and techniques that we spoke about earlier.
Here’s an example of a great Facebook business page for a gym.
Besides this, getting your gym listed in online directories like Google, Bing, and Foursquare are key to your business being discovered through local search. There are plenty of such directories out there that can help you generate leads, but listing all your business information on all those sites can be tedious work. We recommend using a tool like Synup to automate this process for you.
Creating a YouTube channel where you post regular video blogs has been a proven method to establish your authority in any domain. You can start off by creating tutorial clips and informational content for your channel. The YouTube live streaming feature is another thing that you can make full use of. Allot a specific day for each type of class at your gym, and stream it online.
For example, you could live stream yoga sessions on Mondays, strength and core training on Tuesdays, and so on. This will help generate a steady stream of audience and followers that will keep visiting your channel, and benefit from it. Not to mention, this creates a huge avenue for word-of-mouth marketing as well. Use your social media pages and Google business listing to promote your live streaming events.
Check out how FitnessBlender’s YouTube channel keeps their subscribers engaged through informational and diverse videos.
Showcasing the best members of your gym is a great way to let people see how much of a difference it has made in their lives. Be it the fittest person on the floor or someone who has made great progress, they stand out as prime examples of what your gym can help them achieve.
Make a video collage of their transformation, or a masterclass of their workout routine and share it across your social platforms. Apart from motivating prospective members to join your gym, this is also a way to appreciate and reward those who have put in the work and persevered.
Take a look at how World Gym puts the spotlight on its best performing members.
Gym memberships almost always see a spike at the beginning of the year or during the couple of months before summer holidays. As a gym owner, you can make use of this seasonal trend by offering specially structured courses that last three or four months. Such courses have a set of defined goals and a set duration in which to achieve them.
Courses like these will definitely appeal to people who are just looking to tone their bodies for the summer, or ones who are still skeptical of long-term commitment. Statistics point to the fact that 12% of all gym memberships are bought at the beginning of the year, and offering a seasonal fitness course is a great marketing approach towards getting them to sign up.
Consider this statistic: 84% of people trust online reviews, and 74% of them trust local businesses that have positive reviews. With local searches leading the way when it comes to discovering places, it is paramount that your gym has a great star rating and good reviews.
But how do you go about gathering more reviews and ratings? People who actually have good things to say about your gym might not be able to find time in their busy schedules to leave a review online. A great way to make sure that such people voice their opinions online is to incentivize them by offering discounts for reviews and check-ins.
By doing so, you not only help convince prospective local clients to join your gym, but you also help increase brand awareness by expanding your online reach to friends of the members that check in at, and review your gym.
You can make this process even easier by using a tool like Synup to automate your review generation for you.
When it comes to fitness, a lot of people have a number of questions that they might not be willing to ask in public. Hosting a forum on your gym’s website opens a line of communication with them, and develops trust with your brand. Have a specialist answer people’s questions and offer suggestions through your site.
You can host special forum nights where accomplished personalities from different facets of fitness such as bodybuilding, endurance training, etc. can answer any queries that your gym members might have. This also helps build your gym’s reputation and authority in the fitness industry.
The diet that a person follows plays an important role in shaping the outcome of their workout sessions. Unfortunately, a lot of people are left with inadequate information when it comes to the right diet for them.
Having a nutritionist over at your gym once a week to host a free dietary session for your members can make a huge difference to their overall results. It imparts knowledge and helps people maintain a healthy routine, all the while earning your gym a positive public view.
