It’s easy to overcomplicate marketing.
We see a lot of businesses do a decent job at the ‘front end’ (and all the expense that entails) – but then fail to follow through on their promises (which only serves to undermine the trust of their audience).
Another common mistake is to take a scattergun approach to marketing – inconsistent presence on social channels, randomly boosted Meta ads – coupled with a lack of data tracking or KPIs.
Here are four foundational principles of marketing to keep you focused on what’s important:
- Engaging prospects
- Selling them your low-barrier offer
- Converting them to members
- Keeping them as members for the long-term.
#1 Follow through on your promises
Many gym owners seem to forget the importance of this first principle, but it’s actually at the heart of marketing success. If your service offering isn’t consistently excellent, then any efforts you make to secure clients and keep them will eventually fail (probably sooner rather than later).
More than anything else, this is what we see causing businesses to go under: they have the ability to provide an outstanding service, but they don’t manage to do it consistently, so clients don’t stick around, they don’t refer, and the business’ reputation suffers.
The place, the people, and the product (or service) need to be on point, and no amount of Facebook advertising or fancy websites will ever make up for it if they’re not.
So rather than just being the bit that gets new clients through the door – marketing is a continuous activity that takes place both externally and internally, throughout the member lifecycle.
#2 Build relationships
Marketing is all about relationships. Content marketing is the holy grail for gyms because it creates the foundation of a relationship with a complete stranger.
We start by offering people value, and we do it for free. We provide this value consistently without asking for anything in return, and the audience starts to trust our brand. We nurture the relationship over time with a structured series of offerings; and we ‘turn the gym inside out’ so they get to know us and understand what makes us tick.
This paves the way for us to eventually offer our trial/challenge/low-barrier offer, knowing that we’ve already prepared the ground to plant the seed for sales.
#3 Balance your bank account
Another way of thinking about this process is imagining the client’s engagement as a bank account. Our marketing efforts should be like making deposits in this bank account.
Every useful piece of content, every awesome training session, every excellent piece of customer service – these all add to the amount of credit you have in the account, which basically amounts to the level of trust, loyalty, and willingness to engage the customer has.
This means that when you want to ask for something from them, i.e. when you want to make a sale, you’ve got plenty of credit in the bank to withdraw the amount of money you need.
Marketing is basically balancing the books so you’ll never go overdrawn.
# Drive TOMA
TOMA (top of mind awareness) is about positioning our brand so we’re known, trusted, and prominent in people’s minds.
This way, if the person – or anyone they’re connected to – are looking for the service we provide, we’ll immediately spring to mind. We become the go-to brand.
This doesn’t only apply to new leads. We want to stay top of mind for our broader prospect list once they’ve moved through the lead call pipeline; as well as any lapsed members.
Marketing for the Training Gym isn’t about stacking ‘em high and selling ‘em cheap. In the information-rich, internet-led market that dominates the industry today, this approach just won’t fly.
Instead, we want to provide a consistently outstanding service, build a relationship based on providing value, get a healthy balance in the account, build TOMA, and deliver on our promises.
Looking for in-depth guidance on your marketing and sales strategy?
This post is an excerpt from our Marketing 101 for Training Gyms ebook – check it out here.
