Fitness Marketing: 4 Tips For Local Gym Owners

As a small business owner in the fitness industry, there are a million different things on your plate. Staffing, budgets, upkeep of gym facilities and membership numbers are likely some of the biggest items on your agenda. But, in order to ensure you have enough members to make it all worthwhile, you need to market to and convert leads efficiently.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a professional marketer, a gym sales and marketing software system like GymLeads is a great way to set yourself up for lead conversion success, combined with a few other fundamental marketing strategies.

So, here are our top 4 tips for local gym club owners looking to improve their marketing strategy and processes.

1. Invest in gym sales and marketing software

As a smaller, local gym, you cannot underestimate the difference that investing in good sales and marketing software, often referred to as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, will make.

A CRM is a centralised place where all the information about your leads is stored. Rather than having to manually keep track of leads in Excel and then contacting them individually for follow up, a CRM can automatically collate all the different interactions you’ve had with each lead, enabling you to market to them more effectively. Specialised Gym CRM software like GymLeads is designed with industry-specific features that will help you improve your ability to communicate with leads in a way that is most relevant to the fitness industry, which will result in saved time and money per conversion.

2. Communications that are timely and relevant

Emailing and SMSing leads might not be anything new for your club, but your approach to communication can make or break you. The most important questions to ask yourself when sending an email or SMS are, ‘is this communication timely and is it relevant?’.

For example, if a lead has just filled out a form on your website enquiring about doing a trial at your gym, the perfect scenario would be to immediately send them an email or SMS encouraging them to book in an available timeslot. The communication would be both timely and relevant, meaning you’re much more likely to get a positive response from them than if you leave it hours or even days to respond to their request. However, if you’re a small team, responding to every lead individually and consistently in real-time is tricky, which is where marketing software can assist. A CRM will give you the ability to set up auto-responders that are triggered by something a lead does. So, in the previous example, a lead filling out the form would get an automatic email or SMS straight away, encouraging them to take the next step and book in a trial.

A CRM also enables you to use templates and personalisation, so that if you do want to send a manual email or SMS to a group of leads, you can segment out the appropriate group, select a pre-designed message template that is relevant for them and simply use a personalised field to automatically pull in details like their name. It allows your club to have a consistent, quality approach to communication and is a lot quicker than contacting leads one by one!

3. Understand what makes good content

Now, more than ever, people are spending an increasing amount of time online. This means your leads are constantly bombarded with digital advertising and emails, so it’s extremely important that you serve them highly engaging marketing content if you want a chance of cutting through the noise.

According to Hubspot, roughly 80 per cent of marketers have reported an increase in email engagement in the past 12 months, which means people are definitely more willing to read marketing emails than they once were, providing the content is good. Think about what types of messaging will be most relevant for leads at any given time in their journey – if they have not yet been into your club, an email outlining all the different facilities they’ll have available to them may be useful. If they’ve done a trial, some motivational content about the benefits of committing to a fitness journey might be best. You can then use your CRM to build this content into automated email journeys for different segments of your database, removing the manual aspect of distribution.

And, to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck out of the content you create, you can then share this same content more broadly across social media and other paid digital advertising channels, targeting new leads who fit the demographics and interest groups that you think will be most likely to convert into members for you.

4. Speak to your leads in their preferred channel

While marketing used to be a one-way communication stream where an organisation blasted consumers with advertising messages, social media turned all that on its head thanks to two-way comments, live chats and messages.

If you are giving leads an option of where to contact you – website, live chat, social media, email or phone – and then not responding to them in the same channels in a timely manner, it can cause them to feel frustrated and ultimately, you’ll lose leads. If you’re marketing to your audience on Facebook, for example, it’s important that you take the time to respond to any comments or messages you get in this channel. While your instinct may be to pick up the phone and call a lead directly, the safest bet is to continue to communicate with them in their channel of choice until told otherwise.

Summary

You don’t need to be a professional marketer to set up a manageable marketing strategy that improves your lead conversion rate and efficiency. Having a specialised gym CRM software system like GymLeads is a great start, and making sure you’re providing leads with engaging, helpful content in the channels that suits them will ensure your conversion rate soars.

Are you a gym owner looking to streamline your marketing strategy? GymLeads CRM system is an automated sales and marketing pipeline, designed specifically for the fitness industry. Our expertly designed, intuitive software helps you capture, convert and market to your leads and members in the simplest way possible. Find out more or book a demo today.