The success of your gym is largely dependent on two key areas - Acquiring members and retaining members.
Let's talk about acquiring members and how to maximise our membership sales.
Member acquisition is made up of two elements - Traffic (getting leads) and conversion.
Traffic is critical to any business, without leads or without enough leads, it's hard to make a profit no matter how strong your conversion rate.
In terms of lead generation, Jay Abraham talks about the concept of power Parthenon. This is related to the Parthenon, which is a structure that has survived thousands of years. Jay recommends that you build pillars and pillars into your marketing (like the Parthenon from ancient Greece). Having multiple pillars makes your marketing structure strong.
Relying on one single traffic source to generate leads is dangerous and limits your growth potential. If one of those lead sources suddenly dries up; for example, your Facebook ad account gets shut down or stops producing leads, you are left in a precarious position. It's kind of like having a one-legged chair, not very stable.
So let's explore how you can maximise your lead generation efforts.
Here are 7 must-have marketing channels that you should develop and optimise in your gym.
- Google ads
- Where do many people start when they are considering joining a gym? Often by googling "gyms in their suburb". It is important that you have ads that relate to those search terms. Ideally, you should be listed first for these key searches, if not first, you want to be in the top 3. Competitors can always increase their bids for these searches, so it's important to keep an eye on where your ads place in the search.
- Facebook/Instagram ads
- Where do most people spend their spare time? On Social media of course. (Perhaps unfortunately but we will leave that discussion for another day). Lead generation through social media advertising is a strong medium that every gym should have in play. Be sure to target your local and surrounding area in your advertising tightly. The best advertising has a clear call to action, and you should attempt to capture the leads contact information. (More on this later). You can do this by offering a bribe such as downloading a free pass or trial membership.
- Email marketing
- Some people have said email is dead, but they are wrong. When done right email is perhaps the most powerful tool you have at your disposal to generate interest and stimulate action. The key to good email marketing is giving value. You must provide value in the form of good and engaging content. Many gym owners make the mistake of only using email to promote a special offer or sale. People quickly turn off to this type of messaging and unsubscribe from your list. However, if your email content is engaging and useful, then people will be more likely to read it. The right balance for your email marketing should be around 80% valuable content with 20% promotion/offers.
- Remarketing
- Have you ever been in the middle of something and then got distracted and completely forget about what you were originally doing? This happens to me all the time. We live in an interruption society. Our phones and notifications are always going off, which can be a great distraction. This happens to your leads as well. They may be on your website and considering signing up for a free trial, and an important email pops up on their screen or their phone rings. Luckily there is a way to re-engage leads who have been on your website without taking action. By installing a remarketing pixel (a little bit of code) on your website, you can show ads to people who have visited your website in Facebook and other ad platforms, including Googles Display network. This is a powerful way of marketing because you are targeting those who have already engaged with you in some way. You can even remarket to people who visited specific pages.
- Affiliates
- Affiliate marketing has been around for ages, and that's because it works. Affiliate marketing is where you team up with other complementary local business to work together to share leads or promote each other. For example, you might team up with a local sports store who can put a send out a special promotion to their member database, and you can assist them by including a special offer for their store in your member welcome packs. This is a simple example, but when done right affiliate marketing can be very powerful.
The biggest mistake people make with affiliate marketing is that they are too focused on themselves. You need to create value for the other side. If you create a heap of value for affiliate partner, they will feel a sense of reciprocity and work harder to promote your business.
The best way to leverage affiliates is to think about who else has your customers and who else might have an email database of those customers. Then come up with a special promotion or a special piece of content that your affiliate can email out to their list.
- Referrals
- Referrals are an underutilised medium when it comes to marketing a gym. Research shows that people are more likely to stay a member longer when they join and go to the gym with a friend or family member. Tell this to your members when they join. Say, did you know people that go to the gym with their friends or family members are much more likely to reach their goals? Do you have anyone who might be interested in joining with you? We have created two special guest passes which you can pass on to two of your close friends or family who might be interested in joining. This is just one way you can boost your referral numbers. The key is to ASK - If you wait in the hope you won't generate nearly as many referrals are you can.
- Past members
- When we look at our client's data in terms of lead sources, it's always interesting to see that a large percentage of leads are past members returning. People can fall off their routine and decide to cancel only to re-appear again six months down the track. A lot of gyms do not have any formalised marketing systems or processes for past members. Do you have a "re-activation campaign" do you stay in front of your past members and maintain top of mind awareness. An easy way to do this is via a newsletter. You can easily create a monthly e-newsletter which contains health tips, nutritional guidelines, recipes etc. This can help you stay in front of your past customers and continue to build value and goodwill. Then when you do present an offer to them to re-join they will be more receptive and more likely to take action.
If you master the 7 areas of the lead generation above the engine of your customer acquisition process will be strong and robust.
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