Digital Marketing for Gyms: first steps

Digital Marketing Mindset

The digital marketing strategy in your gym starts in a change of mindset. The digital marketing mindset means that, above all, you need to be quite analytic when you start designing your first strategies. Otherwise, you risk wearing yourself out and wasting time on actions that don’t bring in more clients and sales.

Start by doing an in-depth analysis of your business. Where are you located and what is the social and economic situation of your target audience, who are your current clients and what kind of clients do you want to attract to your gym. These are some of the questions you need to answer clearly at an early stage. Then you can focus on other aspects, such as pricing, strategies that work with the competition and how your offer differs from others. Here we can include various aspects such as the variety of classes, quality and training of the staff, facilities, among others.

To begin with and even before you start investing in digital marketing, consider the following aspects:

• The tangible value people experience when training at the gym
• The specific problems your offer solves
• The way your service is part of the solution in someone’s life

From this base, you can now work in a more strategic and creative way on all tools you have at your disposal to achieve the goals outlined in the early stage, for example:

• Attract new clients to the gym
• Promote the brand using various communication channels
• Finding potential partners
• Promote the website

 

Take into consideration that most gyms attract people who live or work in the geographical area in which they are located. Of course, unless your gym is highly specialised and offers a service that people are willing to travel to get. However, in general, local marketing strategies show good results. Facebook and Instagram ads, organic content for social media, email marketing campaigns and SEO are some of the digital marketing tactics to focus on, especially when they target the geographical area you want to impact.

In addition to digital marketing itself, you may need more traditional methods to reach people locally. From offering discounts to new members or advertising in local media such as posters. Word of mouth is also key to bringing in new clients. If your first clients feel fully satisfied training at the gym, others will follow!

As the gym takes its first steps, keep an eye out for reviews on Google. If you don’t already have a Google My Business page, it’s time to create one. Ask your more satisfied clients to write a review. When undecided people see a positive review, the closer they will be to wanting to check out your gym.

Finally, take into consideration that digital marketing is much more than spending a lot of money on paid advertising or posting content all the time on Instagram and TikTok. As we said at the beginning of this text, digital marketing has a lot to do with mindset. Look at the market from the perspective of your clients, potential clients and competition. That is the key to standing out from others and find new opportunities to compete and meet what people are looking for.