Finding the best combination to use for your fitness club online marketing campaigns is extremely important. Doing so can boost membership numbers and offer your club an attractive return on investment. There’s a plethora of digital marketing channels where fitness clubs can acquire easy traffic to their website through:
Social Media Channels
Social media is a common channel for fitness clubs to gain website traffic. Gyms can build a sizeable following on many platforms in a number of ways. The tried and true method is including a combination of regular posts, engaging with members and sharing interesting content. Two social platforms which tend to do particularly well for the fitness industry are Instagram and YouTube.
The visual element of these platforms resonates well with individuals in the market for fitness clubs. The reason for this is likely due to the core aspect motivating their usage of these facilities being improving their physical appearance.
Referrals
Referrals are a solid source for traffic to a fitness club. Word of mouth is one of the most trusted sources of information and is a powerful tool for any business. Partnerships built between your club and other businesses/individuals can be extremely beneficial to influencing the preferences of potential members.
There’s a bunch of websites to facilitate these relationships with online influencers. These platforms you can get links to your club from someone you think might have sway with your audience. With regard to other business referrals you might need to look a little closer to home.
Make a list of complementary businesses. These can be smoothie bars, supplements, bodybuilding forums - pretty much anyone in the fitness industry outside of competition. Think of companies interested in a partnership and start dialling. Businesses are usually welcoming to mutually beneficial relationships, propositions of link-swapping deals are generally well accepted.
One referral source which you should take with a grain of salt are paying for a thing called “backlinks”. Embedded links offered by digital marketing companies are essentially links from external domains to your site. This is supposedly for improving the page rank and SEO of your site and referring visitors to your site. The problem is, many of these links are of low quality or are from unrelated sites. Providing little to no benefit to your fitness club online marketing efforts or your website. If you’re considering this for your site, look into where these links are coming from and ensure visitors from them are going to be beneficial.
Search Channels
This section refers to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Search platforms are used by hundreds of millions of users, facilitating billions of visits to websites every day.
There are two main ways which your website can effectively utilize search platforms - Through SEO to increase organic (essentially free) traffic, and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads.
One of which is adding Search Engine Optimised (SEO) content tailored to suit the search habits of your audiences as well as the algorithms used by the engines. The more good quality content you have optimised for search engines through incorporating common keywords which your audience search for online, the better your page will rank. For example if you have lots of content utilizing keywords such as “Best Fitness Club in the US” you will be more likely to be closer to the top of the Google search for this term. Which is why many fitness clubs utilize blogs on their website.
It takes considerable work and time to improve your search rank through SEO to generate a viable amount of traffic for running your club on. If you need eyes on your site sooner rather than later, paid search ads are a great filler.
Google AdWords and Bing Ads are a couple of the most popular for paid search ads. Essentially, these are a paid substitute to putting the hours of work into improving your club’s website search position. Clicks can cost you anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, which doesn’t take long to add up if you’re hoping for hundreds of visitors per week. Which is why most clubs use a combination fo the two, working on their SEO content while running paid ads - especially if they’re just getting started and their site is brand new.
Here’s some reputable tutorials/online courses for starting your fitness club online marketing efforts
GymMaster can be used to gather the leads attributed from your fitness club online marketing campaigns. Check out benefits of the GymMaster members portal here, or book a demo to find out more.