Blog / Club Owners

Fitness Marketing: 11
Strategies on How to
Market Your Gym
Posted on 27/06/2018 in Club Owners

With the numerous amount of

marketing channels available for
fitness businesses, you can
leverage your members, budget
and success across all of them
to raise awareness for your club
and bring in new members.

Whether you’re a small gym or a large chain of

gyms, marketing your fitness club is one of the
most important parts of running your business.

In some situations, word-of-mouth marketing

can make up most of your member acquisition.
However, in more competetive markets, word-
of-mouth sometimes isn't enough.

Fitness clubs are local businesses, meaning that

they have to compete in a very
competitive local market for clients.

So how do fitness clubs compete in such

crowded markets?

Here we’ll go over 11 fitness marketing

strategies and on how to promote your fitness
club effectively to drive new customer
acquisition.

1. Create a User Friendly

Website
It’s no secret that roughly 54% of people look
online for a business as their first or second
contact point That’s over half of your potential
audience!

This is where your website can help. In order to

attract clients online, you’ll need a website that
is:

simple to navigate
informative about club location, hours,
facilities, etc.
present in the search engines

It may seem like a tough job to create a website

from scratch, and paying someone to do it for
you can be costly. Luckily, there are a few digital
tools you can use to create a version of your
website that will stand-in as your gym’s digital
marketing touch point such as:

Wix
Wordpress
Squarespace

Once you’ve built and designed a working

website, you can link to or attach an API to an
existing client portal for your club for new and
existing gym members to sign-up, make
payments, and book personal trainings, classes
or facilities.

When creating your gym’s promotional

marketing campaigns, you can direct users here
directly with a link or from your website for a
quick sign-up to get them into your club quickly
and painlessly.

Once that’s all set up, you’ll need to get users to

your website. This is where the search engines
come into play.

2. Local SEO for Gyms

Local SEO is one of the most cost-effective
forms of fitness marketing as it’s free and can
have huge returns on investment if you’re
ranking highly for local searches.

Whether you’ve got one fitness club or several,

people need to find them easily enough and
most of the time turn to local search.

They’ll use phrases like “gyms near me”, “fitness

clubs near me”, or “gyms in [city name]”.

These are very competitive keywords so you’re

not going to rank highly for just these keywords
automatically no matter what you do. You'll
need to work on your local SEO to rank highly
for the keywords so that you can appear in
Local Packs like the one below.

To optimize your website to rank locally, you'll

need to:

use local keywords in your content

have consistent NAP (name, address and
phone number) across your website and
citations
create lots of local citations
get a Google My Business page

Google My Business
Google is the most widely used search engine in
every country except for China, Hong Kong,
Japan, Russia, Czech Republic and South Korea.

In every other country Google is the most

widely used search engine. If you’re in one of the
countries not listed above, it’s a good idea to
create a Google My Business (GMB) page so
that:

you can appear in local packs

people can find your address, hours and
phone number easily
potential clients can see your facilities in
images
existing or past users can review your
business

A complete Google My Business page will result

in your brand showing up in the search engines
like this when people search for your brand:

People can easily see your fitness center’s

information on the right hand side and choose
to visit your website to get additional details.

Just be sure that all club information is updated

and you choose the category of your business
correctly. If you’re managing multiple locations,
you can create multiple entries under one
account.

Keywords
Keywords are the terms that people type into
search engines to find your club. 72% of the time
when users search for a business online they will
visit that business within 24 hours.

Coincidentally, if someone already knows about

your gym, they will search for your brand name.

Other times, they’ll use local keywords to find

your gym like the ones described above.

Whatever the case, be sure to always be as

specific as possible when marketing your gym in
local search.

If you have one fitness club in a city, then

include the city name in your home page and in
your meta description as it is in the example
below.

If you have multiple clubs, create a dedicated

page for each club on your website with the city
name or neighborhood in the title of that page,
as it is below.

Each example has the city in the title and meta

description and in the case of the Glasgow gym,
it’s included in the URL as well.

You can even go deeper in your descriptions on

your websites with multiple locations. An
example of this might be:

“Located just off the 405 freeway in the Brentwood

neighborhood of West Los Angeles, Gym 123’s
members enjoy taking a stroll down to the Santa
Monica Pier after their workouts or grabbing a quick
coffee at the [Local Shopping Mall Name] before
their morning routine.”

This description uses multiple landmarks to

identify the gym's surrounding areas, which
helps its visibility in the search engines and its
overall search marketability.

Your descriptions are not only a good

opportunity to advertise your fitness business
effectively, but also a surefire way to help your
search rankings if written well.

Citations
Perhaps one of the most important local SEO
factors for fitness clubs are citations. Citations
are online references to your business that don’t
necessarily need to link to your website.

All they need to do is have the same NAP (name,

address and phone number) as your Google My
Business page and Google will automatically
know to attribute the reference to your
business.

These citations carry authority as the more

authoritative the citation is for your business on
that site, the more weight it will carry when
Google needs to rank your website for
searches.

The most common local listing sites are:

Yelp
Facebook
Trip Advisor
Yellowpages

There are a ton more, but some are very

location dependent, so make sure you find as
many as possible that are locally relevant to
your business.

For example, if I have a fitness club in Los

Angeles, I will want to look for Los Angeles local
listings to list my business in.

Furthermore, these listings often have ratings

and reviews and the higher your ratings and
reviews are, the more weight they’ll carry in the
search engines. In most cases, you can view the
ratings from other local listings on the business’
GMB card in the search results.

Some citations will cost money, but if they’re

from reputable local listing sites, they are worth
it.

3. Track Your Club's

Marketing Campaigns
As we’ve noted above, a lot of client acquisition
happens online. When you’re trying to drive
users to your website or client portal, it’s
important to know which marketing channels
are the most effective for your gym.

That’s why you should always set up goal

tracking in Google Analytics to monitor the
success of each campaign. You may need some
assistance from a developer to do this, but it’s
definitely worth it to know which campaigns are
bringing you the most leads.

Once you set up goals, you’ll need to attach utm

tags to each link you send out on social media,
newsletters, etc. You can build utm tags here by
simply naming each campaign, the medium, and
the source.

Once you send out the link and someone clicks

it and reaches the goal you’ve set up on your
website, it will be reflected in Google Analytics.

This will come in handy whenever you send a

link out or come up with any other digital
marketing ideas for your gym and want to know
what the return-on-investment (ROI) is.

If you want to take it a step further, you can

integrate your Google Analytics tracking with a
fitness CRM in your club's management
system that you know from the beginning which
leads have become paying club members.

Even if most fitness club marketing results are

handled in-person, it will always be of benefit
for fitness clubs to understand the success or
failures of any digital campaign when assessing
how to spend your gym’s marketing budget next
time around.

Data-Driven Member
Acquisition
The best way to leverage your data to acquire
new members is to understand who your best
performing members are.

With Perfect Gym's business intelligence

module powered by machine learning, you can
understand which members are likely to leave
your club and which members are likely to stay.

The likelihood a member with leave is shown as

a percentage. The higher the percentage, the
more likely they are to leave and the lower it is
means they're more likely to stay.

However, when you have members that are less

likely to leave, then you know they're your
best performing members and you should
acquire more like them them.

What you can do is export the data of your best

members and then use their email address in
lookalike campaigns on Facebook or Google
Display Network.

Not only will you get members that are similar to

your best members, but you'll have ones that are
more likely to convert and have longer tenured
memberships.

4. Written Fitness Content

Marketing
While it’s always a good practice for gyms to do
content marketing, you should be aware that in
the world of search engine marketing for fitness
brands, fitness related keywords are extremely
competitive.

And they should be. Ranking for a keyword like

“how to do a pushup” isn’t going to bring you a
lot of targeted results as people coming to your
website for that keyword 99% of the time won’t
be local users.

However, ranking for keywords that are fitness

and local oriented, can help you.

For example, locally oriented content as listed

below has local targeting built into it:

best outdoor workouts in [city name]

best hikes in [city name]
where to buy cheap supplements in [city
name]

Simply create a blog and start writing about

fitness in your area.

These results will bring website visitors that use

your city’s name in the searches, meaning they
are more than likely residing there.

You can also craft content that is more tailored

to widespread audiences if you’re intention is to
market it on different channels other than
search engines.

You can share it on your social media accounts,

local forums, or send it out to churned clients
who may need inspiration to get back into the
gym.

5. Video Content Marketing

With social media outlets all promoting video
content, it’s a definite no-brainer to join the
frenzy to promote your fitness club.

Video content allows prospective clients to see

what workouts are like in your gym, your club’s
facilities and how much fun your clients are
having!

You can use things like Facebook’s live-stream

to show people who have liked your page
what’s going on in your club in real-time.

Instagram is also a great outlet for marketing

your gym’s video content. It can help when
people search via location and/or hashtags to
find workout plans, classes or personal trainers
in their areas.

It’s a great way to engage with your existing club

members and market your gym to prospective
clients browsing through social media.

6. Post on Social Media

After looking at over 100 fitness brands’ social
media profiles, we found that 82% of them
post daily on either Facebook or
Instagram
Instagram. And that’s no accident.

Gym social media marketing has been around

since the social media platforms became
universally used, as they have the added
benefits of engaging your current clients and
showing potential customers what workouts
and life is like in your club in general.

Social media has become one of the most

widely used channels embedded into any
fitness marketing strategy.

Just remember to attach utm tags if you want to

measure how many people specifically signed-
up for your club from any post or campaign you
market on social media.

If you want to streamline your social media

posts, you can use a free tool like buffer to
schedule posts ahead of time, cross-post
between different social media platforms,
measure engagement and track your results.

It’s a great tool for keeping your gym’s social

media marketing on track and up-to-date.

7. Start a Referral Program

Sometimes the best marketers for your gym can
be your members. If you provide excellent
services and facilities and incentivize your
members, you can create a gym referral
program to get them to invite their family and
friends.

When your members refer a friend or family

member to your gym and that new prospect
becomes a member, you can reward them both
so that they’re both more likely to keep referring
people.

All at little to no cost!

There are several ways to implement a referral

program:

Have it built into your club’s mobile app

Referral cards
Emails

The most important part about starting a referral

program for your club is making sure your
members are aware you have one.

You can post on social media, send them emails,

put up posters in your club or, as mentioned
above, have a module in your mobile app.

The second most important aspect is to ensure

that claiming ownership of a referral for your
members is easy enough. This is why I would
suggest doing it digitally with your app so that
when a prospect or lead uses a guest pass, the