The Ultimate Playbook: How to Market a New Gym

Establishing a new fitness business is no mean feat. Finding a space, investing in equipment, hiring workers, setting up systems and processes; there’s a lot to plan for and do, and each of these early decisions can have a big impact on the success of your gym in the future.

With so much on your plate, marketing is often pushed down the priority list. Sure, you know it’s important, but you really need to set up your point of sale system, your member fitness app, your online booking portal. You’ll get to the ads and promos later.

But the most successful gym owners know that the only way to truly succeed in the fitness industry is by investing time, money and effort into marketing.

Marketing needs to be both an early priority and a constant focus through your gym journey. It ensures your new business hits the ground running and carries that momentum forward, giving you the best chance to succeed in the highly competitive fitness industry.

This playbook forms a complete guide to new gym marketing strategies. From understanding your audience, to implementation, to measuring success, we’ll reveal all that a gym owner needs to know about putting their new business up in lights and attracting members.

Understanding your target audience

Before developing any sort of marketing strategy, you first need to understand precisely who you’re marketing to.

The ultimate aim of gym marketing is to attract new members and win more business. But how you sell your gym will depend on who you’re selling it to.

How do you identify your ideal type of member? A great starting point is to analyze a few key factors:

• The age profile of your members will define the classes, equipment and services you offer. It will also direct your marketing efforts towards specific channels, where you’ll need to use age-appropriate communication styles. A gym targeting a younger audience would be wise to prioritize gym tech, TikTok and modern slang, while an older audience will value low-impact classes, and will be more likely to be found on Facebook.
• Fitness goals are another filter; would your typical member be focused on losing weight, building muscle, rehabilitating from injury or achieving peak performance? Different objectives demand different training programs and marketing messages.
• Perhaps the most critical consideration is location. Most people want a gym that’s close by, so understanding the demographics of your area, and your local competition, can help to guide your service offerings and marketing materials.

Use these insights to develop ‘buyer personas’: fictional profiles of people who represent your ideal clients. These can help you to target your marketing efforts to a representation of the members you’re seeking to attract.

If you identify that your ideal audience values affordability, you should highlight cost-effective memberships and transparent pricing. If a sense of community is a priority, marketing can showcase group classes, social events and member success stories. If your ideal clients want premium experiences, you should emphasize advanced equipment, expert trainers and exclusive facilities.

Aligning your marketing ideas with the expectations of your audience helps to maximize the return on your marketing spend, by attracting members who are more likely to stay long-term.

Local SEO: The foundation of gym marketing

As a brick and mortar business targeting local customers, your gym doesn’t need a huge online footprint - you just need to get in front of relevant audiences in your area.

You need to focus on local search engine optimization (SEO).

Local SEO is a form of digital marketing that seeks to optimize your online presence to target your area and the potential members who live there. Key strategies include:

Optimizing your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile literally puts you on the (Google) map. It ensures you come up on Maps, as well as in rich results on the search engine results page (SERP), whenever someone types terms like “gym near me” or “gym [LOCATION]” into the search bar.

To secure your Google Business Profile, you first need to claim and verify your listing, a process that includes filling out basic details like your business name, address, phone number, website and opening hours.

You should then work to optimize your listing. Add high-quality photos of the facilities, staff and classes to make the profile engaging. Use the ‘posts’ feature to share updates, events and offers.

The most powerful feature on your Google Business Profile? Reviews. 95% of consumers read online reviews before making decisions, and 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Ask satisfied members to leave reviews on your Google Business Profile. Use review responses to demonstrate the values of your gym. Responses to any negative reviews can be particularly revealing, so avoid clapping back in the heat of the moment - take a breath, then write a considered, fair and balanced response.

Targeting local keywords

Your other major consideration is the use of local keywords. By sprinkling location-specific terms and phrases throughout your website, your social media content and your marketing materials, you tell Google that you’re a relevant result to search queries such as “gym in [SUBURB]” or “personal training sessions near [AREA]”.

Keywords should be inserted in website titles, meta descriptions, service pages and blog posts. You should consider creating dedicated location pages to speak to potential members in different suburbs and areas, particularly if you’re opening multiple branches. You should also show off your local knowledge, and reference nearby landmarks or neighborhoods to strengthen the relevance of your website in the eyes of Google.

All that said, keyword optimization can be a tricky undertaking, because if Google senses that you’re engaging in ‘keyword stuffing’ - inserting keywords and phrases wherever you can - your website can be punished with a lower ranking.

That’s why most gyms will partner with an SEO provider who can develop and implement SEO and digital marketing strategies for them.

Content marketing for gyms

Content marketing is the process of creating blogs, videos and social media posts that speak to potential members. This content offers the audience education and entertainment, while subtly framing your fitness business as the go-to option for anyone who might be considering joining a gym.

Blogging for SEO and engagement

At the risk of breaking the fourth wall, the blog you’re reading right now is content marketing. We’re offering you our marketing expertise in exchange for your attention, with the aim of building a bit of trust and familiarity in the process. When the time comes to choose your gym management system, GymMaster will (hopefully) be top of mind.

As a gym, your blogs can offer info on whatever topics are most relevant to your audience: workout tips, nutrition guides, injury prevention advice. These educational offerings position your gym as knowledgeable and supportive, attract more potential members to your website, and help you to climb up the SERP through the inclusion of keywords.

Video content strategies

From a half hour class on YouTube to a five second gym meme on TikTok, videos are an effective way to get your gym in front of a huge audience, and position you as a fun, experienced and trustworthy fitness brand.

Content ideas are limited only by your imagination: member success stories, fitness challenges, healthy recipes, technique tips, recreating the latest memes, busting workout myths. Have fun with it to ensure content creation doesn’t feel like a chore.

Social media marketing for gyms

Fitness and social media is a match made in heaven. People naturally want to see beautiful people doing impressive things, so your gym can be an absolute gold mine of social media content.

Social media also represents an unmatched opportunity to connect and engage directly with your community by interacting with current and potential members, and showing off a bit of your brand personality to make your gym more relatable. Strategically partnering with local fitness influencers can also instantly expose your gym to a large and especially relevant audience.

The most important element of your social media strategy? Consistency. It’s easy to make a few posts. The challenge is to do so every week for months and years on end, as social media platforms reward consistent effort, and you never know which post could become a viral hit.

Paid advertising and retargeting

So far we’ve focused on organic, unpaid marketing strategies. But there’s certainly still a place for paid advertising that puts your business in front of the right audience, at the right time, for the right price.

Your paid ad options are many and varied:

• Google Ads: Pay per click (PPC) campaigns place your gym at the top of the SERP for your chosen search terms, like “gym [CITY]”. As the name suggests, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
• Social media: Sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and even LinkedIn can place your most compelling content in front of highly targeted audiences based on location and other demographic information.
• Retargeting: When someone visits your site, it’s a fair indication that they’re interested in what you’re offering. Retargeting is the process of strategically advertising to these past visitors, to build the trust and familiarity needed to ultimately secure that new member.

A major benefit of paid ads is the clear ROI. You can spend as much as you’re comfortable with on a given campaign - though the larger the investment, the more chance of success - then gain a clear idea of the return you generated.

Building backlinks and authority

Google ranks results based on four key factors: experience, expertise, authority and trust (E-E-A-T). One of the original ways the search engine measured these factors was through backlinks. If a website was authoritative and trustworthy, the thinking went, plenty of other websites would link to it as a source of information.

You can build backlinks - and your E-E-A-T - using a number of proven strategies, including:

1. Partnering with local businesses: Create promotions or referral programs with complementary local businesses, such as supplement stores, physios, recovery centers, sports retailers and juice bars, then link to each other’s sites.
2. Get listed in local directories: Ensure your gym is in relevant online directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages and local/fitness-specific platforms.
3. Offer expert contributions: Write guest articles for local news sites, influencer blogs or sports clubs that showcase your expertise and link back to your own site.
4. Sponsor community events: When you support local events or sports teams you’ll often earn a backlink from the organizer’s website.
5. Create shareable resources: Develop content that other sites will want to reference. These could be workout plans, infographics or custom surveys that generate fresh fitness industry data and insights.
6. Leverage fitness influencers: Invite micro-influencers for a free trial or event, and encourage them to post about it. Add influencers as collaborators on social media posts and encourage them to link back to your site from their own.

Measuring success and adjusting strategies

Digital marketing is a living, breathing thing, particularly for gyms and fitness studios that find themselves in a particularly competitive industry. Finding success is a matter of constantly analyzing and adjusting your approach to find the optimal way to reach your target audience.

A few strategies to do exactly that include:

Campaign optimization: It’s critical that you continually optimize your digital marketing campaigns, whether Google Ads, social media or email marketing. A strategy like A/B testing, for example, sees you create two different versions of the same ad or email to see which performs better. Do this over and over again, and you gradually iterate to an ever more effective piece of content.

Site traffic and conversions: A tool like Google Analytics allows you to closely track your website visitors as they arrive at and move around your site. You can use visitor data to understand how effective your marketing efforts are, and conversion data to understand how effective your website is at generating sales.

Social engagement and reach: Track likes, shares, comments and follower growth across social media platforms to gauge how well your content resonates with your target audience. A sudden spike or drop can guide future posts by revealing what works and what doesn’t.

Local SEO tracking: Use tools like Google Search Console or a rank tracker to monitor how your gym appears in local search results for key phrases. If rankings improve, your SEO efforts are paying off; if not, you may need to refine keywords or further optimize your Google Business Profile.

Customer feedback and reviews: Monitor online reviews, surveys and direct member feedback to understand how your brand is perceived by the people you’re trying to sell memberships to. Positive feedback suggests that your messaging aligns with the expectations of your audience, while negative reviews can reveal pressing issues that you need to fix.

New gym marketing strategies: the secret to fitness business success

When you start strong, you set yourself up for success: it’s as true in business as it is in training.

Effective gym marketing can be transformative for your fitness business. By implementing the fitness marketing plans discussed above, you can attract members to your new gym.

You can then build on this foundation, creating a positive energy around your brand, delivering an unforgettable member experience, and offering the latest and greatest services and tech to continually bring in new customers and drive serious, sustained growth for your gym.

As any fitness fan knows, you don’t see results unless you put in the work. The best time to start marketing your new gym is now. Let’s get to it.