Gyms and fitness businesses find themselves in a very competitive industry. It’s not enough to just market your business to potential members - you need to do it better than all of your competitors.

The secret: using the advanced marketing and membership strategies that your main rivals are failing to use.

You’re a gym owner or manager, not a professional marketer. But there’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of ‘advanced’ strategies. In this context ‘advanced’ simply means clever and different. Sure, you might choose to get professional marketing assistance, but if you’ve got the time and motivation, you could also implement a number of advanced strategies yourself.

What do advanced marketing and membership strategies look like for a gym? That’s the question that this guide is designed to answer.

We’ll walk you through a range of sophisticated (yet surprisingly simple) marketing and membership tactics, and tell you how to combine them into a broader strategy that will increase the number of members you attract and retain.

Understanding Advanced Gym Marketing

How does advanced fitness marketing differ from standard fitness marketing? In short, an advanced marketing campaign simply has more thought put into it.

Advanced gym marketing strategies are built on a foundation of data. You conduct research to identify exactly who you’re targeting, how best to reach them, and the marketing materials that will resonate most with them.

Gyms can often take a scattergun approach to marketing. Some social posts, a few emails and maybe a Google Ads campaign; just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Advanced gym marketing techniques remove the guesswork. You do your homework on the most effective forms of marketing, implement campaigns strategically, then optimize each by analyzing performance data.

How? Read on to find out.

Developing a Comprehensive Marketing Plan

Effective marketing strategies begin with a solid plan. You need to know where you want to go, and the best way to get there.

Developing a comprehensive marketing plan can be an illuminating exercise. It can reveal marketing channels you’ve never tested and target markets you’ve never considered. It also avoids pure trial and error, helping to direct your investment to where it will generate the greatest return.

Setting Clear Marketing Objectives

The first step to developing an advanced marketing plan is to establish clear objectives, aka SMART goals. By ‘SMART’ we mean:

• Specific: Clearly define the goals you want to achieve with your marketing, e.g. “Increase member sign-ups by targeting young professionals through a social media campaign focused on fitness transformation stories.”
• Measurable: Set clear metrics to track progress, e.g. “Generate 100 new memberships over the next eight weeks, via a dedicated landing page.”
• Achievable: Ensure the goal is realistic given your resources and capabilities, e.g. “$1500 will be allocated to a targeted Instagram and Facebook ad campaign using short member success videos, which has historically achieved a 3% conversion rate.”
• Relevant: Align the goal with your overall business strategy, e.g. “Increasing memberships among young professionals will grow our morning and lunchtime class attendance, driving revenue during slower times of the day.”
• Time-bound: Set a clear deadline to create urgency and track results, e.g. “Starting 1 September, this campaign will run for eight weeks, and will be analyzed and adjusted every week to optimize performance.”

SMART goals are the destination that your marketing efforts work towards. They ensure that your marketing is hyper-targeted and geared toward results, and that those results drive your gym business forward.

Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience

Who exactly are you targeting? This can be a more complicated question to answer than it might initially seem. But you’ll need to find that answer if you are to maximize the opportunities that good marketing can present.

The most obvious target audience is the type of member you currently attract. You should analyze membership data in terms of:

• Demographics: The age, gender, location and income level of current members.
• Usage patterns: The facilities, classes, trainers and equipment that are most popular with your members.

A good CRM/member management system will allow you to segment this data to create groups that you can customize your marketing to. It can help to create a few ‘buyer personas’ - fictional people who are amalgamations of your typical members, with names, interests and backstories, who you can develop targeted marketing ideas for.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Gyms

What does effective digital marketing look like for gyms? Once you’ve done the homework above, it’s time to leverage social media, email marketing, SEO and other digital marketing channels.

Social Media for Member Engagement

The fitness industry is almost built for social media. This marketing tool is very visual and very human, and your gym or fitness club is a treasure trove of potential content.

Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook reward consistency, so aim to post at least 3-4 times per week. You can check out our list of 101 social media post ideas here, but a few of the best ideas include:

• Member transformations: Showcase before-and-after photos (with permission).
• Workout of the day (WOD): Post daily exercises or short routines.
• Nutrition tips: Share quick, healthy recipes or snack ideas.
• Live Q&A sessions: Answer followers’ fitness or nutrition questions.
• Fitness challenges: Start a push-up or step-count challenge.
• Testimonials: Post quotes or videos from satisfied members.
• Themed content: Tie posts to holidays, e.g. a “Christmas core workout.”
• User-generated content: Repost members’ photos or videos from your gym.
• Inspiring quotes: Pair motivational quotes with workout imagery.
• Polls and quizzes: Create interactive stories to engage your audience.
• Technique tips: Highlight proper form or ways to prevent injuries.
• Collaborations: Team up with influencers or complementary businesses.

When done well, social media marketing can be the most effective way to attract new gym members, and to convince potential customers to join your gym through the power of social proof.

You might also consider paid advertising as part of your fitness marketing campaign, to increase brand awareness and get in front of potential clients that you wouldn’t otherwise reach.

Email Marketing Campaigns That Convert

While social media is a great way to get in front of new members, email marketing is a great way to maximize the value of your current members and rekindle relationships with lapsed members, or people who had seriously considered becoming members.

The ROI of email marketing is stunning: an average of $36 for every $1 spent - as long as you craft strategic email campaigns, segmenting your audience, customizing each email to those segments, and A/B testing to optimize the content.

Take a deeper dive into effective email marketing by checking out our complete guide.

Membership Strategies to Drive Growth and Retention

The Venn diagram of fitness marketing strategies and gym membership strategies has plenty of crossover. But there are a few ways to attract members that sit a little outside traditional marketing techniques, such as referral programs, free trials and community events.

There are also a few non-marketing strategies that can help you to retain more members, including:

Implementing Tiered Membership Plans

Offering different fitness memberships can encourage members to remain with your gym or fitness studio when they might otherwise cancel their memberships, because they can downgrade to a cheaper, more basic plan instead.

Tiered memberships also help you to maximize the value of every member: a premium membership might include classes and personal training sessions that can help members more efficiently reach their fitness goals, just by paying a little more.

Enhancing Member Experience for Better Retention

The experience you offer your members can determine how effectively you retain those members. The ‘membership experience’ encompasses every interaction that a customer has with your fitness brand: the emails they receive, how easy it is to find a park, whether you offer their preferred classes or have the fitness equipment they want to use.

So, do your members enjoy the gym experience you offer? There are a number of ways to find out - check out our guide to measuring the member experience here. You can also check out our list of common mistakes that you should work to avoid.

How do you improve the member experience? Tips include:

• Maintaining a spotless facility and keeping your equipment in perfect condition.
• Offering 24/7 member access so people can train whenever they choose.
• Hosting events like member socials, group challenges or themed workout days to create a sense of community.
• Ensuring trainers are approachable and always ready to offer guidance for your members' fitness journeys.
• Offering occasional free classes, merchandise and other surprise perks.

Utilizing Technology to Enhance Marketing and Membership

Another way to attract and retain more members - and make life easier for you and your staff - is by implementing smart technology.

The best gym tech will automate admin and other laborious tasks, give members control over their gym experience, help you manage and convert leads, and give you 24/7 control over who accesses your facility.

Let’s dive into a couple of more specific ways that technology can help you to enhance your gym marketing and membership efforts.

Implementing CRM Systems for Better Member Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are critical for gym businesses. As the name suggests, the primary aim of these tools is to help you manage member relationships. In the process a CRM helps you to:

• Get to know your members on a deeper, more meaningful level - both as individuals and as a group.
• Monitor how engaged your members are and identify how that engagement can be improved.
• Work out which times, classes and trainers are the most popular to better cater to your members.

CRMs give you the data and insights you need to craft effective gym marketing campaigns and membership strategies. You just need to choose the right one: ideally a tool built specifically for gyms, and that integrates seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack.

Data Analytics for Informed Decision Making

Speaking of data, your CRM is a significant source of information about your members, but it forms just one of many data sources that you should use to enhance your marketing and membership efforts:

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics tracks who visits your website, and where they come from, which gives you a clear idea of who your marketing efforts resonate with, and how effective those methods are, particularly in terms of SEO and Google Ads.
• Meta Business Suite: This tool allows you to analyze the people who follow and engage with your social media profiles. Facebook and Instagram have deep data on every one of their users, so analyzing your followers can be very enlightening!
• Member surveys: If you’ve got specific things you want to know about your members, just ask! Member surveys are a quick and easy way for you to get the precise answers you’re looking for. You can incentivize responses with deals, discounts and freebies.

Facebook data might indicate that a certain type of social media content resonates more deeply with your audience. A member survey might suggest that your class times aren’t ideal for a majority of members. The insights you can generate are essentially endless!

Advanced Marketing Techniques

Looking for difference-making marketing tactics that go beyond what most of your competitors are trying? Perfect - that’s exactly what you should be doing! Great gym marketing starts with a willingness to try new things, so here are a couple of advanced marketing techniques that you could employ in your fitness business.

Partnering with Fitness Influencers

It makes sense that fitness influencers are so popular on social media: there’s nothing the algorithms like more than beautiful people doing impressive things. Your gym can use this fact to its advantage by collaborating with influencers who your members resonate with.

The first step in influencer marketing is to identify the right one. Local influencers will generally have smaller, more targeted audiences, so will be cheaper to partner with and will drive a greater return on investment.

Depending on the influencer, you could either offer a barter deal, where they enjoy a free membership or classes in return for regular shout-outs, or you could pay them to tag you in their posts. If you choose the latter it makes it that much more important to track performance metrics to understand exactly how much interest and business the influencer is generating for you.

Professional-Level Content Marketing

Lo-fi content - think live streams from your front-facing camera - can be super effective, as it offers your audience an authentic view of your gym. But there are certain platforms, most notably Instagram and YouTube, where professionally shot content can make all the difference in terms of reach and engagement. As such it’s wise to invest in professional photography and videography from time to time.

Get a few of your favorite members together and shoot a professional-quality workout video that you can upload to YouTube as a taster of what a potential member can expect from a class at your gym.

When you host an event, whether a fitness challenge or a social occasion, hire a professional photographer to capture the fun. You can then use that high quality imagery on your socials for months to come!

Advanced Gym Strategies: Simpler to Implement than You Might Think

‘Advanced’ marketing and membership strategies aren’t necessarily about spending big or working with the most elite marketing experts. They’re simply about securing a competitive advantage by doing things different to and better than other fitness businesses.

From understanding your audience and setting clear goals, to forming a plan that you continually test and optimize, marketing and membership strategies certainly demand effort and attention, but the work itself can be undertaken by any gym willing to demonstrate the necessary commitment.

Using the right tools is also key. Take GymMaster’s Marketing and Retention Tools, which allow you to:

• Accept new sign-ups directly through your gym’s website.
• Send automated, personalized email and SMS messages to members.
• Monitor member visitation patterns to identify and engage with members who are at risk of cancelling.
• Track and guide leads through your sales funnel.
• Monitor email open, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and track social media performance with the Facebook pixel.
• Create discounted memberships or concession passes in seconds.

By implementing the advanced fitness marketing plans outlined above, you can attract new members, you can make your current members more engaged, and you can drive serious, sustained growth for your gym.

Ready to enhance your marketing and membership game? Let’s get to it.