Marketing for Gyms: 5 Online Marketing Tips To Get Started

Online marketing for gyms is seeing a resurgence after the COVID pandemic lockdowns and many businesses are launching new campaigns now. One of the most important platforms that gyms are using online is Google Ads.

And many are using social sites like Facebook too, to reach their local audiences and increase registrations and memberships.

And many people looking to book a gym tour can do so through websites and also register to be members and book exercise classes too.

I’ve listed here five online marketing tips to promote your gym and reach your local audiences.

 

1. Invest in Google Ads for your Gym

Google Ads has powerful marketing tools for gyms that want to target their local customers and get more registrations. Getting started with Google Ads is easy and you can visit ads.google.com to create your account if you don’t have one yet.

Next, you should think about the type of campaign you’d like to create. For gyms, a Search Campaign is the best because it gives you powerful advanced tools to help you target people who are actively searching for a gym in your locations on Google and its search partner websites.

However, if you’re still new and want to get started easily with a basic campaign, then a Smart campaign is the way to go. This campaign makes all bidding decisions for you at auction time and saves you a lot of time.

 

2. Review your landing pages

Check that your landing pages are well optimised and engaging for visitors. Make it easy for people looking for information to find it quickly. So, they should be able to contact your gym easily, either through chat, a contact form or booking a tour or registering for classes online.

And they should be able to do that easily on all devices including mobiles.

One of the metrics to check regularly to see how engaged your visitors are is bounce rate. This shows the percentage of visitors that leave without viewing other pages on your website or taking some important action. Try to reduce this below 50% on average for all your traffic sources, by updating your landing pages and making sure they load quickly, have a good call to action and targeted content.

 

3. Conduct market research online

Effective marketing for gyms requires carrying out good keyword and competitor research. For keyword research, this provides you with a good idea of what people are looking for in your locations and also what the potential size of the market is.

One of the best tools to help you with this is the Keyword Planner tool in your Google Ads account. It’s a free tool and you’ll find it in the Tools & Settings section in your account.

For competitor research, a platform I recommend is SERanking. With the tools available here you can see what keywords other gyms rank for in the natural search results. And you will also see what keywords they are appearing for in their pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

 

4. Track your sales or leads

To run successful online marketing campaigns for your gym, you’ll need to set up conversion tracking or goal tracking in Google Analytics. This gives you insight into how your campaigns, adverts, keywords, traffic sources and more are performing for your gym.

You can create this tracking in Google Analytics and track all your traffic sources like social media, ppc, organic, referrals and so on. And you can use one of the templates that are available in there.

 

5. Hire a PPC expert

One of the things to consider as part of your marketing strategy is what help you’ll need. Whether that is in-house or external help will depend on a number of factors like budget and expertise.

This is especially important if you intend to run a PPC campaign for your gym which usually requires specialist knowledge and skills.

Hiring a PPC expert will help you run effective Google Ads campaigns to target the right people. But check that they have experience setting up and managing PPC campaigns for gyms and check their reviews and case studies.

Also, check if they have any certifications, like whether they are a Google Partner or not.

 

Case Study

Stars Gym is one of the highest rated gyms in Battersea. Despite a good reputation and many customers coming to them, they wanted to grow through Google Ads advertising but the campaign they’d set up was not performing. I was able to set up a new Search campaign for them and their CTRs increased to over 7% and they got more visitors to their website and membership signups. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a marketing expert for gyms I’d be happy to help promote your gym. Use the form below to contact me to discuss your requirements.