Boost Fitness Marketing Blog

Last Updated on Mar 20, 2019

Summer is nearly upon us, and with that comes the need to get in shape for swimsuit season. The cold winter months have helped all of us (me included) put on some winter weight. Now it’s time to slim down and get ready for summer BBQs and beach parties. If you’re a gym owner that has an outdoor fitness bootcamp offering at your business, you’re probably thinking, how can I get more people in my bootcamp this summer? Well, you’re in the right place. Below are four easy ways you can increase your fitness bootcamp membership. 1. Plaster Your City with FitnessTexter Marketing Flyers One of the easiest ways to get more people into your summer bootcamp is to do some good old fashioned flyer marketing. If you’re a FitnessTexter client, you can print out some of the marketing flyers we provide and put them up around your city. With your texting slogan nice and visible, you’ll generate a handful of new leads every week and you’ll hopefully get more people working out. Make sure to put your flyers up in popular areas like local dog parks, coffee shops, community centers, etc. The more places you get your flyers up, the more leads you’ll generate. 2. Launch a Localized Social Media Marketing Campaign If you’re social media savvy (and you should be if you’re a gym owner), you can set up a localized marketing campaign using either Facebook or Google AdWords Local. Set up a geofence of the area that you want to advertise in. If you’re located in the north Chicago, you don’t want to be spending your advertising dollars on people in south Chicago. Use zip codes or other localizing features to make sure that your ads are only getting shown to people in the right spots. 3. Create a Partnership with Local Weight Loss Businesses If there are some weight loss studios in your area, it might be a worthwhile effort to set up some partnerships. Their members will get access to your fitness bootcamps, and your current gym members can get access to their weight loss products. This partnership idea also works well with yoga studios or any other type of business that caters to...

Last Updated on Feb 28, 2019

If you’re the manager of a yoga studio or pilate studio and you’re thinking about using SMS marketing, you’re in the right place. Text message marketing has been around since the late 2000s and it’s still as powerful as it used to be then. Using SMS marketing at your yoga studio is a great way to generate more new member leads and hopefully get some more members. 1. Makes Your Print Marketing More Actionable Adding a text message marketing slogan to your marketing materials instantly makes them more actionable. If your business is sending out 1000 flyers and you only have your website on them, then you’re not going to be able to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. However, if you add your “Text YOGA to 95577 for a Free Week Pass at Chicago Yoga….” slogan to your marketing materials, you can now see if you have an increase in sms leads after you send out your marketing materials. 2. SMS Marketing is Truly Set It and Forget It One of the reasons that yoga businesses like using FitnessTexter so much is because once it’s up and running on your website, there’s not much else you have to do. FitnessTexter leverages the website traffic that your website currently has, so as long as you’re pushing traffic to your website, you’re going to be getting more and more leads from FitnessTexter on your website. The best FitnessTexter clients are the ones that get it up on their website, near their logo, and then on their Facebook background image. This way, you can just sit back and let the leads roll in. You don’t need to constantly push your marketing message, it’s there for everyone to see. 3. Your Social Media Marketing now Textable Last but not least, if you’re doing any type of social media advertising at your yoga studio, adding your texting slogan increases the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Here’s what we mean. If you have a Pay-Per-Click campaign on Facebook, you don’t want that many people to click your ad, since the more clicks you get, the faster your budget gets used up. If you add your texting information to your Facebook ad and someone...

Last Updated on Jan 17, 2019

Using text message marketing for fitness businesses is nothing new. We here at FitnessTexter have been in business since 2011, so that’s at least 8 years of text message marketing for gyms. Anyways, the other day, I was trying to answer a customer’s question about why FitnessTexter worked as well as it did, as opposed to just putting up a 555-555-5555 phone number on your website and having people text you there. After doing some brainstorming, I’ve come up with the three main reasons why SMS marketing works so well for fitness businesses. 1. People Are More Comfortable Texting Short Codes. 10 years ago, short codes were not that popular in the marketing world. Many of them were connected with shady businesses that were trying to sell used cars. That said, they kind of tainted the market for short code marketing and for a long time, people were nervous to text short codes likes 95577. They thought they would get spammed with promos and have no way to get out. That’s actually the opposite of how short codes work. They make it extremely easy to get opt-out. Well, it’s 2019 and people are no longer worried about short code texting. People knows that it doesn’t cost anything extra, and that they can opt-out whenever. 2. They’re Not Worried About Getting a High Pressure Sales Call. If you put up “Text Josh at 555-555-5555 for a free week pass” on your website, you might get some leads. However, you’ll also scare a lot of people away because they know that as soon as they text “Josh” about the free trial, he’s most likely going to launch into a sales spiel trying to get them to sign up for something more than the free week. With a short code like 95577, people know that it’s connected to a computer and not a human. They’re more comfortable texting it, knowing they’re just going to get a coupon text message back in return. 3. People HATE Talking to Strangers. They’d Much Rather Send a Text. Last but not least, let’s not forget that it’s 2019 and people truly hate talking to one another these days. When was the last time you saw people...

Last Updated on Dec 10, 2018

There’s been a surge in swimming lately. The medical benefits have always been well-known, but people are starting to ditch jogging in favor of a easier-on-the-joints activity like swimming. This blog post is focused at those businesses that are lucky enough to have an installed pool. If your fitness center hasn’t seen an increase in the amount of members that are coming to take advantage of your facility’s swimming pool, here are three easy ways to get more swimmers to show up. 1. Start a Discount Swimming Punch-Card Program Most fitness businesses, in my experience, don’t allow all their members to use the pool. Usually there is a tiered-program for pool users at the gym. This might work if you have a lot of dedicated swimmers, but if you don’t, you’re going to have an empty pool that isn’t bringing you any business. That said, you can easily create some discounted punch-cards for your current non-pool members. If your current gym member doesn’t want to use the pool all the time, they can use one of these punch cards to use it on certain days that they want to. You’ll increase your revenue on the sale of punch cards, and you’ll also, perhaps, encourage some of these non-pool members to upgrade their memberships to the pool version. 2. Create a Swimmer’s Only Membership Level On the contrary to the previous tip, instead of trying to get your gym members to upgrade to a gym+pool membership, you could also create a pool-only membership for the people in your community that have no interest in lifting weights and doing fitness classes, but that would be more than happy to go swim laps a new nights a week. This membership would come with a healthy discount from the gym+pool membership, but you’d once again see a boost a revenue when you started increasing your pool-only memberships. 3. Create a Partnership with a Local Yoga Studio to Increase Cross-Pollination Last but not least, go out and create a partnership with a local yoga studio in your town. Tell then that you’re willing to offer their members a discount on your pool-only membership if they’d be willing to offer your members a discount at...

Last Updated on Dec 7, 2018

Print advertising isn’t dead. In fact, some sources that that print advertising is actually making a comeback and more and more people are disconnecting from social media and the internet. If you’re looking for fun ways to advertise your gym or fitness center, print advertising might be exactly what you’re looking for. Below are three surefire hits for advertising your gym using print media. Let’s get this party started. 1. Take Out an Ad in Your Local City Newspaper Local newspapers are on the comeback and they’re a great way to both support a local business as well as to get your business in front of some eyes. There’s nothing more localized than a newspaper, even Facebook’s localization isn’t as exact as the old fashioned newspaper. Call up your local publisher and see how much it would cost to have a weekly ad for the course of the month. You’ll probably be surprised at how reasonable the prices are. Make sure you make your advertising trackable so that you know if new clients are coming in from your advertising or from somewhere else. 2. Invest in a Small Billboard on the Nearest Highway Billboards have been a foundation of the advertising world since the early 20th century. There’s no better way to get your company in front of fresh eyes than using a billboard. In our home state, billboards don’t cost too much and there’s a lot of stock out there. The two largest billboard companies are Lamar and Clear Channel. Contact your the rep of your choice and figure out how much it would cost to get your gym’s marketing material up on the billboard. Make sure you work with a graphic designer that understand billboard creation because you don’t want to have a billboard design failure. 3. Do a Mass Mailing using the Postal Service’s Mailing Feature Did you know that the United States Postal Service can send marketing mail to specific zip codes for you? If you didn’t, now you do. Head on over to their website and see if you can’t get a little print flyer campaign set up. Plan to send out a flyer at the start of the month. Start with a couple...

Last Updated on Dec 3, 2018

It’s a well known fact that the new year is on its way, and with the new year comes the onslaught of new years resolution gym members. As a gym owner, you can’t complain about the foot traffic. It’s been shown that the influx of money from NYE gym members is rather substantial. Yes, it’s true, some of your current members will get a little pissed off that they have to deal with all these new “fake” members, but so be it. So the question is, how do you, as a gym owner, get these people to stay at your facility once they lose interest? Below are three surefire tips of get your new years members to commit to longterm memberships. 1. Don’t Give Out New Years Eve Membership Discounts Giving our huge discounts is one of the worst ways to attract bad members. When you give someone a 75% discount for one or two months, they’re going to come in as much as possible. However, once that discount expires, you’re going to have a very hard time getting them to sign up for become a long term member. You’ve already devalued your service too much to expect them to want to maybe hundreds of dollars extra for the normal membership. That said, quit giving out discounts and make your members pay FULL PRICE instead. That might sound shocking, but these new members, if you make them pay full price, they’re going to be more wiling to stick it out since they’re not getting a huge discount. 2. Encourage New Members to Start Participating in Classes Physical fitness classes are a great way to get people excited about fitness. If you haven’t added a class schedule to your gym, you need to get on it. Classes are the most popular part of fitness these days and if you’re not offering classes, people are going to get very bored of your basic equipment layout and most likely leave after a couple months. However, if you get someone addicted to their twice-weekly zumba classes, you better believe that they’re going to be coming back for more. Starting a weekly fitness class isn’t that difficult either. Sit down with your marketing team...