Running a Gym Marketing Campaign: How is Your Gym Better?
Updated: May 13
Your gym is better, right? Tell your customers! Using these general campaign measures can create a better campaign to generate more memberships, better reviews, and consistent member results.
1) CAPITALIZE on your niche
Not many gyms have the same routine or angle. HIIT can be super engaging to begin with; capitalize on that.
2) Measure with e-Mail Campaigns
Using e-mail campaigns will let you know how many people are even CHECKING out your campaign. This can allow you to retarget and offer discounts or incentives such as trials that will get more people in the door.
3) Nurture Leads
You got people to sign-up with incentives, coupons, free trials. Great. "Now I'm at capacity and haven't made any money!" As with ALL business, conversions take time. We did the hard part. You have a whole bunch of potential clients. You have information. Now the moment of truth. After they visit your gym, are they having a good experience?
This is where we want to set up a follow-up e-mail. It's best to have two conversion paths. One for during their trial, and one for after. You want to get as much engagement as possible and that can come in the form of reviews, referrals, or sign-ups (preferably).
Gone are the days of the sharks at LA Fitness calling 100x to get you to sign up. If you want to be a classy business owner in the 21st Century, you need to get your systems in place to organically grow membership.
One way to do this is to use marketing and salesforce automation.
How Did My Membership Campaign Perform?
One of the things we get a lot: Hey X3, I didn't see as much of an ROI as I would have liked to --- what's the big idea?
The trust is, people are fickle. Often they are going to spend their budget on Starbuck's rather than your membership. The most important thing to remember when running a campaign is TIME VALUE of campaign assets. When creating an e-mail campaign, you aren't putting all your value in the immediate return. You have to look at all the individual elements that perpetually return investment value.
1. Photos -- that value lasts way longer than that first campaign
2. People in your gym - that lasts even longer - they know your business and will remember it
3. E-Mail Leads - this is going to last hopefully the lifetime of your business and all those potentials are possible conversions.
So looking at a ROI based solely on memberships is incorrect. If you're focusing on short term results like that, good luck. The immediate results are indeed important. If you're receiving free trial sign-ups and then no one is coming in, you need to look at your brand integrity.
If you're looking at reviews and most of them are negative, you need to fix your business.
Check out the video of 3 Minute Fitness, a HIIT gym located in Southside Pittsburgh, PA.
Here are some of the elements that denote a successful campaign:
# of people signed up
# of people who completed trial
# of people who opened follow-up emails
# of people who left review
# of referrals
# of communications/e-mail opens
# of membershipsIf you are a gym in the Pittsburgh or Orange County (Irvine) California area and would like help setting up a campaign to increase your membership or reviews, contact us at frank@xthree.co or visit www.xthree.co to see some of our solutions.