Digital Marketing for Gyms: Best Practices

So, you’ve opened a gym and are ready to start getting your name out there. And, while you may have signs, posters, and flyers advertising your fitness facility, you also know you need to use digital marketing to promote your gym. But how?

While direct mail marketing and other traditional tactics may be easy to execute initially, digital marketing allows you to grow your brand organically, with little-to-no cost.

In this blog, we overview some best practices that can help your gym establish and expand its online presence.

Using a CRM to Keep Up With Members and Leads: 

One of the first steps to growing your gym is setting up your CRM (customer relationship management software). While there are many options, make sure to invest in a CRM that’s flexible enough to grow with your business and is easy to use and learn.

You’ll use your CRM to keep track of communications between leads and members, including calls, texts, and emails. Some CRMs, like HubSpot, even enable you to track how your leads and members got to your website and where on it they visited.

Having this data enables you to nurture the relationships you build with your existing customers, while approaching leads with educated tactics to convert them into members as well.

Using Your Website to Aquire & Qualify Leads

Once you have an effective CRM system in place, it’s important to create a way for website visitors to easily be qualified and convert into leads.

It is far more likely that someone will see your website before they visit your gym, so make sure to have enough assets on your site (pictures, FAQs, class information, etc.) for them to get a feel of what your facilities feel like in person. Your website needs to offer enough excitement and information that visitors are willing to give up their contact information.

Once visitors have been educated, it’s time to offer them the opportunity to become a lead. The most common way of doing this in the health and fitness industry is to offer an initial free trial. This is a great way to spark interest with potential members, allowing them to try out your equipment and speak with staff about further membership information. 

By providing all this information on your website, you don’t have to wait for people to come by your fitness center for them to get interested in becoming a member. By providing a contact form on your website, they can get educated and signed up before ever touching a weight.

Using Social Media to Promote Your Gym

Another great way to use digital marketing to grow your gym is through social media. While this may seem like an elementary tactic, there is a specific way to use social media to grow your gym. 

The key is to use an inbound approach with the content you’re posting about your gym. This entails using your knowledge about fitness to attract individuals towards your gym. 

Related Reading – How to Use Hashtags Effectively in Your Social Media Posts

This method can be implemented with any knowledge about health and fitness using the following model. 

• Determine a problem the viewer may encounter regarding fitness
• Provide a solution to their problem
• Provide a call-to-action (CTA)

By providing valuable solutions to the problems your followers are experiencing, your gym will gain credibility, attracting customers who already have a sense of trust in your product.

In the fitness industry, this can be as simple as posting videos on proper exercise form, reviews of athletic clothing, tips on pain management, and more.

Using Community Boards for More Reach 

As you’re posting content on your social media pages, you may be faced with a common problem – Your posts will usually only be visible to your followers. This makes it difficult for social media pages to generate business as, often, your followers are already members. 

You can solve this problem by posting your content on community boards. Community boards are spaces on social media platforms that allow communities to exclusively interact with each other. These are crucial in gaining reach for your gym's content. 

Generally, community boards are strict in who they allow to join the group. So, you can avoid complications in joining by applying to the group with your personal social media account. Once you’ve been granted access to the community board, you can post your gym’s content to the group with your personal account.

Open Path: A Marketing Agency for Gyms

These steps will provide you with a foundation for digital marketing for your gym. Here at Open Path, we take steps similar to these and optimize them to their full potential. If you're looking for help marketing your fitness center, whether that be with a new website, CRM onboarding and implementation, or just getting a little help with your messaging, we're here to help.