Gym sales are rarely constant. Seasonality, competition, the economy, and countless other factors can play a role in how many new members your gym can attain. But one thing is constant for gym owners: no matter how many members you have, you always feel like you could be doing more to increase bottom line sales.
Even the most successful gym businesses have potential to increase sales. In the past, gym owners have believed word-of-mouth and organic reach through focusing solely on member experience was the best route to increasing revenue.
While this is a must-have that has the potential to expose your brand to the public at little to no cost, it’s also a time-consuming venture that many gym owners just don’t have the luxury of patiently waiting for. Many are at risk or are not being paid adequately by their business despite having made lengthy efforts to boost virility in their market.
If you’re looking to increase your gym’s bottom-line, try investing your time and money in these ideas for more personalized, effective and modern ways to increase bottom-line sales.
1) Define and Be Aware of Your Avatar and Make Sure Your Core Offer and Message is Pointed at Them
The first rule of marketing is to define your avatar client, not the client you WANT, but the client who is a market fit for your gym. Maybe you want 22 year old athletes but over the last year you’ve made far more money servicing 36 year old stay at home moms. Maybe you didn’t get into the biz to service this avatar but it may be the path of least resistance to having baseline success so you can target your niche “dream client” down the road.
It’s time to sit down with a sheet of paper and draw out your avatar. This is a result of your gyms location and the demographics surrounding your gym, usually you can look at your current member-base to get an idea of your avatar.
Maybe you target young students but they never want to pay full price and always leave town for the summer. Meanwhile, your soccer-moms pay top-dollar and take it seriously, then maybe it’s a sign that you need to hone-in on the right avatar. Then, make sure the message on your marketing channels is appealing to them.
2) Work With Local Influencers
You’ve heard of influencer marketing, and are wondering what all the hype is about. Influencer marketing is such a popular marketing tool because it works. Instagram and Annalect found that almost 40% of IG users felt compelled to make a purchase after seeing an influencer’s post or story.
The study also found that the amount of trust people place in influencers is comparable to the trust placed in their friends. This simply goes to show that promoting your gym and local brand through local influencers is very likely to drive prospects to your gym.
If you want to get more members through social media, you need to utilize the power of local influencers. Get them to strategically feature your product in their photos or videos, or have them come in for a few workouts in exchange for sharing your unique story about why your opened your gym and your mission.
You can also work with influencers who will give honest reviews about your gym and share them, and/or share a special offer to come try your gym.
3) Turn Loyal Customers into Brand Advocates
Focus inward if you want to promote your products using real people, you don’t necessarily have to always rely on influencers. Your existing customers can become effective advocates if you can entice them to promote their experience using member challenges or rewards for making posts or stories where they tag you on social media.
One of the easiest ways to get your members to become advocates is to give them public widespread recognition for their accomplishments. The most powerful forms would be before-and-after photo of transformations showcasing the hard work they’ve put in. These almost always get shared and gain local viral attention.
Also, create a unique hashtag for them to share, for example, my gym is called Spark CrossFit and we have out members share hashtags like #SparkYourLife and #Sparkler. Then conducting keyword and hashtag searches on social media will help you find see who is seeing and engaging with these shares.
4) Share Member-Generated Content
Before buying something, consumers tend to read several reviews to make sure the brand and service are trustworthy. These types of reviews ease the anxiety about committing to a membership that a customer barely knows, or about investing time and money in to something they’re not familiar with.
When these reviews are the opinions and experiences of other consumers just like themselves, then they feel a kind of honesty that they can connect with.
When it comes to marketing, you need to make the most out of the content created by other consumers to drive more sales.
According to an Olapic study, 70% of U.S.-based respondents are more likely to buy products after being exposed to a relatable or positive image created by other consumers.
Another way you can drive more sales through social media is by encouraging your customers to share their photos online. Also, be sure to go one step further by sharing unprompted user-generated photos on your own social media profiles.
This is an easy way to increase loyalty with your existing customers, and to add credibility to your local brand whenever potential prospects visit your social media channels. This also shows that you celebrate and recognize your members to onlookers and everyone wants a piece of that!
5) PUBLISH MORE… Generate Content Daily to Educate and Entice Your Audience
Possibly the easiest way to increase awareness for your gym locally that most gym owners avoid is just publishing consistently EVERYDAY. Not only daily, but consistently deliver content around the same time each day.
Establish a cadence and make it part of your job to publish daily. This content should be engaging to your audience, and compelling enough to entice them into making a purchase.
In addition to member recognition, you can also create bite-sized informational content that will provide value to your audience.
Ideally, you should provide freebies, like guides and how-to content on a landing page where they can get it in trade for contact information that gets added to a high value follow up sequence. The goal is to provide customers with the kind of information that will entice them to sign up to find out more.
The easiest way to do this is to create a weekly content calendar that has different topics each day that you can create bulk content to satisfy well in advance.
Don’t record your “Member of the Week” and “Meet the Staff” videos each week, instead do 10 at once and set them up to deliver each week with a short blurb on all channels at the same time each week. Be sure to tag those members as well!
6) Make More Offers
This one piggy-backs off of the previous topic of publishing more. Quite often when we review gym’s marketing effort we find that they simply don’t ask viewers to take action or often at all.
If you’re publishing great content and they’re engaged that means you have warmed them up as a lead and sometimes all they need is an invite to take the next step!
At the end of every video and every post you should make an offer.
Now, it doesn’t always have to be a pitch to sign up as a member or for a no-sweat intro, you should mix in offers to just take another step of action in that direction like “follow us here to get more updates on awesome posts like this!” or “Tune back in to our IG feed every Tuesday for our Tactical Tuesday tip of the Day!”
At the end of every great piece of content should be instructions to take action, that the exchange of energy we are asking for by giving away such valuable info for free. Further, it’s familiar for the brain, when we are hooked by something that has our attention our brain is subconsciously waiting to be told what to do next.
Eventually you will make direct offers to join your and those that are used to taking action per your request are far more likely and far happier to take action then as well.
7) Leverage Periodic Targeted Direct Marketing Campaigns
One way to accelerate traffic and results is to run an enticing offer through targeted direct-marketing campaigns. Direct marketing campaigns leverage the power of social media audiences usually through paid traffic.
Social media platforms have millions of users. Even when you’ve found the perfect social media platform to engage your target audience, your marketing efforts may not be effective if none of them have heard of you before. You can make sure that they take notice your by investing in social media advertising.
Every social media platform has an option to either create ads or promote your content. This will ensure higher visibility for your gym among a relevant target audience. Increased visibility will further improve your chances of driving revenue through prospecting.
Paid traffic has a huge range of possibilities and it’s not as simple as just run a brand-awareness campaign with a simple statement of “Hey, we do fitness here”. Usually these types of efforts flop for local businesses and paid ads can become a never-ending money pit.
Ad campaigns with the right combination of ad copy, offer, campaign structure, along with data collection and proper retargeting can easily 10-20x returns on the dollar spent and are a great way to generate revenue and new membership quickly.
Having great systems in place to convert these hyper-sensitive action takers in to long-term memberships is the next step and really where the magic happens.
Build a business that makes your competitors and area take notice
We have all been there, we understand what it is like to throw away money only to see no return. Whether you spend money on Facebook ad’s, Google, print or radio, how well do your effort convert prospects to new members? How do you really know?
3 CRITICAL QUESTIONS
(1) How many people visited your gyms various channels in the last 30 Days?
(2) How many new members did you acquire?
(3) How long do they stay members for on average?
WHY ARE THESE NUMBERS IMPORTANT?
These numbers tell us your conversion rate and client lifetime value, we use them to measure the success of your growth strategies. We have helped businesses just like yours to increase their conversion rate by helping them to clarify their growth strategy with plug-n-play tools through the Big Little Gyms Framework. We’d love to guide you with the BLG Fundamentals Framework Coaching Program
What can you expect in the BLG Fundamentals Coaching?
Finally get the support and accountability you deserve.
Simply tell your coach what you want to accomplish and they’ll create an action and mentoring plan to get you there. They’ll help you stay consistent and hold you to your commitment to do the work and build the systems your business needs no matter what life throws at you.
Actionable Next Steps and Plug-n-Play Systems.
“Enough theory! Just tell me how to do it already!” Let us give you the exact systems, automations and tools then integrate them into your gyms protocols. How about a hands-off, fully automated system complete with the exact ads that are tested and running along with a CRM and system that follows up with leads and gets No-Intro Bookings while you sleep?
Make progress even when life gets busy.
No more treading water, and no more hacking other people’s stuff trying to find the magical combination of tools. Instead, we’ll give you the exact tools and best practices that will lead to BIG results. Where will your gym be a year from now? Let’s find out.
100% guaranteed – it works or it’s free.
Bring your commitment, work hard, and implement the systems. If after the intensive, you don’t get the results you want, we’ll refund every penny you invested in the program. No risk. No joke.
The lowest price we will ever have.
We absolutely love coaching clients who are ready, willing, and able to change. So we wanted to remove money as an obstacle for those who want coaching but can’t afford a higher price. With Beta Foundations, not only is it incredibly affordable but it WILL pay for itself within the first 3 weeks of going live guaranteed.
We’re accepting new client application and if history is any guide, the program will sell out within hours. Seriously, our founding Beta sold out our cap of 40 gyms in less than one week. This will probably do the same thing
However, if you apply and get on the presale list now, you can register full week early. Plus you’ll save up to 54% off the general price of the program — and get our best price.
Click below to learn more and add your name to the presale list.
APPLY and Join the presale list for early registration & best price:
After we accept clients next week, we won’t reopen until October 2019. So if you’re considering working with us — and you don’t want to wait 4 more months — we recommend you add your name to the list now.
Until next time,
– The BLG Team
