You need a plan.
Not an idea. Not a new “bullet.” A plan.
A marketing plan will save you time. It will save you a ton of money. It will be more effective than any single strategy. You’ll stop chasing clients and start chasing excellence.
First, you need to market your gym.
Being the best coach in town is great. But the second-best coach can have a more successful gym if they’re better at business.
Second, you need to market with excellence.
This means tracking results and doing things consistently well. It DOESN’T mean grasping every marketing straw, copying everything you see online or throwing up “hail mary” passes.
Third, you don’t need every client.
Your marketing should appeal to *perfect* clients: happy folks who can afford your service. Not people looking for a discount; not people who fit the “average” demographic profile for your area. If you think “more clients makes a better business,” you’re probably falling into a trap of
market->enroll->lose->market.
You’ll spend all your time marketing and not enough coaching!
Email marketing campaigns produce the highest risk of falling into that cycle. While automated campaigns have their place–maybe 10% of your total marketing plan–few campaigns show the retention rate we want in our gyms (over 80% year-over-year.)
Most of your marketing should revolve around in-person conversation. This means conversation with you (best) or your coaches (good) or your members (pretty good.)
Your plan should address all four stages of consumer relationships:
Awareness – Interest – Integration – Retention.
It should cover two main strategies: tell the story of your members, and establish your authority.
And it should be executed almost the same way every month. Keep 90% of your plan consistent, and play with a different 10% every month.
For example, in the plan below, 9 of 10 marketing strategies would be kept the same, with one changing depending on the season. A gym might try “Fit It Forward” right after the Open.
You can download a sample Brand Action Chart here.
More important than the plan (almost) is how you track results.
What’s working? What’s NOT working? Are you spending all your time working on “Awareness” when people see your brand–and decide not to call–every day?
You can download a sample Onboarding Tracking Sheet here.
We teach gym owners how to build a marketing plan that is highly effective, can be passed off to a staff member, and executable in 3-4 hours per month in our RampUp Program.
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