Essential Marketing for Gym Owners

When you open your gym, you know getting the word out is essential. So you set up a website, start posting on Instagram, and drop a few flyers in local letterboxes. With your fresh branding and new signage, you’re all set, right?

Then, you notice other gym owners sharing freebies (or “lead magnets”), someone mentions SEO, and you start wondering if you need to do it too and if you should be running ads. 

The world of marketing can feel overwhelming, but don’t worry—we’re here to break down the most important steps you need to take to get people walking through your door.

Build Your Brand Foundations

Before diving into marketing tactics, it’s important to take a step back and make sure you have solid foundations for your brand. This includes:

With these core elements sorted, it’s time to create a Marketing Strategy and a Marketing Plan. But what’s the difference?
Your strategy is a broad view of what you want from your marketing and your plan is the details of who, what, where, when and how you’ll get there.

Learn from Your Current & Past Marketing

Everything in marketing is a best guess – there are no guarantees. Even big fitness brands make marketing mistakes sometimes! Because we can’t be 100% certain of what will or won’t work, review your current and past marketing activities to help guide you.

Assess your marketing by: 

By digging into your current and past marketing, you’ll find out what attracts potential members and where you’ve gained sign-ups. With this valuable data in hand, you can design new marketing campaigns to tap into your brand’s strengths and address current weaknesses.

How to Market Your Gym on Different Channels

There are many ways to market your gym, with each channel offering unique benefits to your overall marketing plan. Think of your marketing channels as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—each one plays a vital role, and when they fit together seamlessly, they create a journey that guides potential members from awareness to sign-up. 

Here’s a quick summary of the most common marketing channels and how to use them effectively

SOCIAL MEDIA

Use your social content to educate and inspire your audience. Promote your memberships, special deals and programs regularly on social media too.

Share:

Social media marketing can target a mix of people who’ve never heard of your brand (cold audience) right through to people ready to sign up (hot audience).

EMAIL MARKETING

Turn social media followers and website visitors into subscribers by offering something valuable in exchange for their email address—a freebie, a guide, or an exclusive offer. From there, you can nurture their interest and build trust, moving them from curiosity to commitment with targeted email sequences.

Email marketing is ideal for a warm audience – people who have heard of or seen your brand and want to know more about you.

WEBSITE

Your website is the core of your online presence. It needs to be not just visually appealing but also easy to navigate. Make sure your site answers the essential questions:

Choose words to describe your services and gym that your target audience would use to find you in Google (and other search engines). This improves your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help you get more website traffic.

Also, ensure your website loads quickly and is optimised for mobile devices.

ADS

Many gym owners view paid ads as a quick-fix solution. But throwing money into ads without building up high-performing organic content is an expensive experiment and can be a waste of time too.

Ads have a much bigger potential to grow awareness of your gym and attract larger numbers.

Once you know what content your ideal clients love (thanks to your organic content), turn it into ads to boost engagement and get more sales.

PROMOTIONS & EVENTS

Your gym attracts a certain type of people which builds a culture. Running promotions and events helps to show your community the vibe you’re creating in your gym.

Short-term promotions such as New Year’s deals or 6-week challenges are excellent for boosting membership growth during slow periods.

You can also tap into local events by running fitness activities to showcase your expertise and fitness focus to your community.

Make Their Journey a Breeze!

Tip

Ensure your marketing channels work together seamlessly. Use your email content to pique interest and guide potential members directly to your website. When your messaging flows smoothly, you keep their attention and make it easy for them to join your gym!

Hack Your Gym Marketing

Many marketing successes are a slow burn. SEO improvements to your website can take 3-6 months to show any benefit. Try these highly effective marketing tactics to get some quick wins with your marketing.

Wrap Up

There’s so much to do to promote your gym but remember – slow progress is still progress and you have to start somewhere. By thoughtfully planning your marketing and tapping into quick wins, you’ll soon have a high-impact marketing strategy working for your gym!

Need more marketing help? Get your FREE copy of The Ultimate Marketing Bundle for Gym Owners.

This bundle has everything you need to market you gym starting with the Ultimate Marketing Guide for Gym Owners PLUS a bonus pull out on optimising each marketing channel AND and fillable workbook so you can create (or update) your marketing strategy, your marketing plan and your branding guidelines!!