Gym Marketing Toolkit: Battle-Tested Strategies for Growing Your Gym

Consistent, strategic marketing can elevate your gym business to new heights. But where do you start?

With this ultimate guide to marketing for gym owners!

The right marketing strategies will attract new members while helping you to control your cost of acquisition. It will keep those members engaged to ensure they renew their memberships. It will allow you to better understand and target your ideal audience, to optimize your marketing activities and maximize your return on investment.

But how do you do all this? Read on to find out.

Step 1: Understand your audience

Before you market to an audience, you first need to understand who that audience is. Different demographic groups have different needs, wants, fears and desires, and will therefore respond to different positioning and messaging.

By gaining a deep understanding of the specific groups you’re trying to attract, you’ll be able to develop marketing campaigns and content that speak directly to them, which will help you to attract more members, and bring down the cost of acquisition for each one.

Audiences can be segmented by key attributes, including:

• Age
• Sex
• Income
• Gym experience
• Fitness goals and preferences

There are a few ways in which a gym can gain a deeper understanding of their audience in order to better market to them:

• Surveys and feedback forms: Create questionnaires that ask members a little bit about themselves, their fitness goals and their exercise preferences.
• Use website and social media analytics: Use analytics tools to understand the type of people who are visiting your website and who follow you on social media.
• Implement a CRM: A client relationship management (CRM) system, or a tool like the GymMaster Membership Management feature, helps you to gather and analyze data on your members.
• Create member personas: Use the information you’ve collected to create ‘buyer personas’ – profiles of your ideal members, based on common traits and motivations, that you can market and advertise to.

Useful tools

• Surveys: Google Forms, SurveyMonkey
• Analytics: Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite
• CRM: GymMaster Membership Management
• Buyer personas: HubSpot, Userforge

Step 2: Build a strong online presence

Your website is the hub of your gym’s online presence: what all your marketing and advertising efforts link back to. You should invest in a site that is user-friendly, easy to navigate, responsive to different devices, and offers all the functionality that members expect.

Once your website is set up, you can solidify your online presence through:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) - Optimize your website and online presence for Google by creating compelling content, inserting relevant keywords, running backlink campaigns and establishing a Google Business Profile. Better yet, hand these tasks to an SEO expert.
• Content marketing - Write blogs and create social media posts that answer the questions that your target customers are asking, that offer tips and advice, and that showcase customer success stories.
• Offer a mobile app: Let members sign up, pause or cancel a membership quickly through a dedicated app. You can also use your app to facilitate 24-hour access, encourage group class sign-ups, and incorporate social elements to promote social bonds between your members - a key factor in member retention.

Useful tools

• SEO: Ahrefs, Semrush
• Content marketing: ChatGPT, Canva
• Custom apps: GymMaster Gym Member App

Step 3: Leverage social media

Gym businesses are almost built for social media, because platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are becoming more and more visual. The human focus of gym content makes it more shareable, particularly when you tag your members in each post, which can see you gain an incredible amount of exposure online..
Dedicate time to growing and engaging with your audience by replying to comments, tagging members and sharing posts.

Social media management tools can make this process far simpler, allowing you to do everything through one screen rather than navigating to all the different platforms. These tools can also help you track metrics relating to your audience, like levels of engagement and rates of conversion.

A recent case study from Contra detailed how a gym’s social media strategy drove a 172% increase in followers, a 26% increase in footfall and a 19% boost in revenue within just six months. The diverse strategy included designing engaging visual content, launching an educational exercise series, and implementing a content calendar.

Useful tools

• Social media: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok
• Content creation: Capcut, Opus
• Social management: Buffer, Hootsuite

Step 4: Capitalize on email marketing

• No marketing channel can compete with email in terms of ROI: for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect $38 back. And you can increase this return even more by being strategic in how you approach email marketing strategy:
• Segment your email list into different demographic groups/buyer personas, to send more targeted communications that resonate with each individual.
• Personalize subject lines by including the member’s name, and use A/B testing to find the most attention-grabbing subject line.
• Consider starting an email newsletter to help members feel like part of a community. Offer updates, give a shout-out to top performing members, and provide fitness tips and guidance to build trust and loyalty.

Email marketing tools can automate a lot of the work, helping you to save time while growing levels of member engagement. Gym management software like GymMaster can also use email to bring lost or latent members back into the fold, by automatically sending them a gentle reminder of your gym, or enticing them back with a special deal.

Useful tools

• Email marketing: MailChimp, Aweber
• Gym management: GymMaster

Step 5: Host events to engage with your community

To build a successful gym, your members need to feel like they are part of a community. In-person events are key, as they bring members together and get them engaging with one another more than they otherwise might, which helps to form social bonds and create a sense of belonging.

These events can also form fantastic opportunities to capture marketing content. It could even be worth hiring professional photographers and videographers who can stock you up with months’ worth of social media material at a single event.

Event ideas include:

• Fitness challenges
• Group classes
• Meet and greet events
• Free trial days
• Key business anniversaries
• Celebrations of member achievements

And while the events themselves might be analog, digital technology can make them far easier to manage.

Useful tools

• Event management: Eventbrite, Cvent

Step 6: Implement referral programmes

Word-of-mouth marketing remains one of the most powerful channels because people trust other people. You can capitalize on this, and turn happy members into salespeople, by offering rewards to those who refer your gym to family and friends. Referral benefits could include:

• Discounted memberships
• Free personal training sessions
• Free gym merchandise
• Free access to a higher tier of membership

Once again, there are a range of tools that can help your gym to create and manage a referral program.

Useful tools

• Referral tools: ReferralCandy, Referral Factory
• Gym sign ups: GymMaster Member Portal

Step 7: Invest in paid advertising and retargeting

Utilizing paid ads on social media and Google can be an effective way to reach audiences who you might struggle to get in front of through other marketing means. You can also pay to retarget people who have visited your website before, usually in the form of display ads that remind them of your business, products or services.

Digital advertising can be far more effective than traditional advertising (print, broadcast, outdoor), because it allows you to track key metrics and tweak your campaign based on these insights, setting parameters based on demographics, interests, and previous behaviors. You can also spend as little or as much as you want..

Craft compelling creative and engaging copy for your ads that will appeal to your target audience. Run A/B tests to compare different ad options, then monitor the results carefully, adjusting where necessary to boost your ROI.

Useful tools

• Online advertising/retargeting: Google Ads
• Social advertising: Meta Business Suite, TikTok Business Center

Step 8: Analyze and adjust your strategies

Marketing is never ‘set and forget’. Your competitors will always be looking to improve, so you need to as well, or you’ll be left in the dust.

To effectively analyze and improve your marketing, you need to track the right numbers. The data you focus on will depend on the strategies you’ve implemented and the goals you’re aiming for. A professional marketing partner can help you to identify and track the metrics that matter to you.

Making data-driven decisions will allow you to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing, and access to analytics will ensure you’re up to date on the latest trends and changes, so you can better service your members..

Useful tools

• Analytics: Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite

Start your gym journey right: invest in the best gym management software

Strategically marketing your gym is absolutely key to its ongoing success: building brand awareness, reaching the most relevant eyes, and developing a reputation as the obvious choice within your target market. Hopefully this guide has given you an idea of what a successful gym marketing strategy might involve.

But in order to successfully market your gym online, you need to begin with a solid technological foundation: a gym management solution that can form the hub of your marketing efforts.

A solution like GymMaster.

From built-in member management and online signups, to endless marketing integrations, we’re confident that we offer the very best gym management solution for any ambitious fitness business – and thousands of gyms across 110+ countries agree.

But you don’t need to take our word for it - test us out for yourself with a GymMaster demo and free trial today.