Marketing is more than Meta and the odd flier drop every few months.
To make your business resilient in the face of a changing market, you need to create a marketing infrastructure that’s built across channels – so that if one of your funnels stops giving results, you have other strategies in your toolbox to generate leads.
To create this agile marketing ecosystem, we split marketing into four ‘buckets’: internal, external, online, and offline. We need to have initiatives in each of these four areas to create a broad foundation for brand awareness, credibility, lead generation, and client engagement (for detailed guidance, check out our Marketing 101 for Training Gyms ebook).
Internal marketing
A common mistake for gym owners is to put all their effort into their external marketing – and forget that the best brands are built from the inside out. Every time someone walks into the gym (from a new prospect to a founding member) we should see it as an opportunity to sell the business to them. We need to treat each coaching session as if it’s the client’s first – and could be their last. Here are some channels to consider when developing your internal marketing approach.
Internal online marketing
- Member management/booking software
- Text and WhatsApp
- CRM and member journey automations
- Member portal or customer app
- Internal social media
Internal offline marketing
- Coaching quality and client experience
- Events and socials
- Wraparound wellbeing support – nutrition, sleep, mental wellbeing
- Retail, apparel, supplements and the point of sale system you use to deliver them
- Brand partnerships and sponsorships
- Chill out and social spaces in the gym
- Internal branding – decor, physical storytelling, facility standards
- Progress tracking and client check-ins
- Competitions and ‘extracurricular’ activities
- Referrals, upsells, cross sells, and lapsed member sales
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.
External marketing
When it comes to external marketing, it’s tempting to pick one funnel (often Facebook/Meta) and hammer it hard – because it works. This is fine, but in addition to your immediate lead generation strategy, you should be building awareness, credibility, and connections across a wide range of platforms – both online and offline. Here are some ideas.
External online marketing
- Meta
- Other social channels – TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter etc
- Text and WhatsApp
- YouTube and other video content
- Podcasts
- Google Ads
- SEO and organic search
- Blogging
- Google maps and reviews
- Influencers and micro influencers
- Testimonials and social proof
- PR
External offline marketing
- Leafleting and flier drops
- Community and corporate outreach
- External events
- Print advertising – magazines, newspapers, circulars
- Press releases
- PR
- Trade shows
- Social enterprise, sustainability, and environmental initiatives
- Partnerships
- Billboards and A-boards
It goes without saying that no business can be active across all these channels simultaneously – nor should they be. With an overview of all the options open to us, the task is to choose which avenues will give us the biggest return on our effort – and which are a good match for our target market (based on who they are, where they spend time/attention, and how we can best engage them). From there, we can build a broad marketing framework that spreads our results (and risk) to give the best outcomes over the long term.
Looking for the next step in marketing your training gym?
The JCV Marketing 101 Ebook gives you:
- Step-by-step instructions on creating a remarkable brand
- A simple, proven method for defining your target market – and engaging them
- A guide for collecting marketing data that will supercharge your results
- A 360-degree marketing infrastructure to create an agile multi-channel approach