Running a gym and managing your online and offline marketing isn’t easy. But it can be made far easier by using marketing automation.
With the right marketing platform in place, you can manage your marketing all in one place, save time and effort, and allocate your budget more efficiently.
Marketing automation has come a long way, and it’s far more than just being able to schedule your emails and blog posts in advance.
If you want to market your gym more efficiently while maintaining a great work-life balance, then marketing automation for gyms is what you need.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation allows you to save time by handling and scheduling repetitive tasks so you don’t have to do them anymore. Specialist software can schedule and automate different parts of your marketing, allowing you to free up time and make room for the more creative tasks that only humans can do.
You may already use software to automatically send emails or post to your social media, for example, but you can do far more with marketing automation. You can manage your paid ads, content marketing creation and scheduling, automatically remind customers to write reviews, keep track of your customers and where they are in the buying cycle, analyze your data, and more.
Why is marketing automation important?
Here are just a couple of marketing automation statistics showing what companies currently think of it and why they use it:
- “Marketing automation is the number one most effective digital marketing technique after content marketing according to global marketing professionals.” – Statista
- “The biggest benefits of marketing automation are saving time on repetitive tasks and facilitating personalized customer communications, according to 49% of companies.” – Pedalix
If you think about it, few of us are dealing with an easy economic situation right now. Some gyms are still recovering from the pandemic and still trying to entice new and existing customers to come back and start using their facilities again. So many people have gotten used to working out at home that it can still have a real impact even now.
Not to mention, there’s always competition. There’s always a new gym or the latest exercise craze to contend with.
And marketing itself is ever-changing and developing. We’ve got the advent of AI, with ChatGPT, and it seems like a constant list of the newest and trendiest “must have” marketing tools and buzzwords.
Following the pandemic, customers increasingly expect top quality and efficiency, and a superior customer experience too.
There’s so much involved in running any business that it really can create overwhelm and frustration and massive amounts of stress for any local business owner.
But marketing automation can make a huge difference to your marketing efforts, saving you time, helping you reach and convert your potential members, and ensuring you focus on the right things that really do work.
Benefits of marketing automation
Here’s where you can see how marketing automation can go beyond simply sending emails or posting to your social platforms. Below are just some of the benefits of marketing automation for gyms:
1) Improved efficiency
No doubt you already schedule your emails and use autoresponders. You perhaps even use software to schedule ahead on social media and regularly post both new and evergreen content on social platforms. If not, those are a good start when getting into marketing automation.
No doubt you can already imagine how much time you can save if you don’t have to be there every time you want to send a marketing email or post something new on social media. You can batch create your content and then schedule it ahead, and it’s basically set it and forget it.
However, marketing automation can help you with lead generation and conversion too, and with collecting and analyzing your data for better results.
If you’ve never looked at marketing automation before, it really is worth taking some time to go through what it can do and think about how you can apply it to marketing your gym.
You can save time and reduce costs, and possibly even reduce the number of staff you need in your marketing team. It’s also far more efficient when all you need to do is log into one straightforward dashboard to manage every aspect of your marketing.
With that extra time, you can plan ahead in your business, look at new opportunities, and use your time to be more creative.
2) Enhanced targeting and personalization
With full analysis of your data, you can get to know your audience far better and learn how best to target them. The better you know your audience, the more you can give them what they want. It’s also increasingly easy to segment your mailing lists and to send highly targeted and personalized content to specific people and parts of your mailing list.
That gives you so many options. You can send a campaign on protein powders specifically to those on your list who are interested in nutrition and supplements to support their workouts and enhance their results. You can send details of your new advanced Zumba class to those who already attend your current Zumba classes… the possibilities really are endless.
This is great for you from the point of view of targeting, but it’s also an excellent customer experience for those on your list. They get the exact content they want instead of having to wade through emails that won’t help them advance their fitness in the ways that they want. And it even feels personalized, almost as if you’re reading their minds.
It’s not just emailing that benefits from this approach. When you’re aiming to convert people into members, and guide them through your sales funnel, it’s important that you provide them with the right content at each stage of the funnel. Using marketing automation can help you work out where people are in your funnel and what content they would like to consume next to move them toward a buying decision.
Not only is everything more efficient with automation, but because you have access to so much data, you can more easily learn about your customers and what they want and need. That has a compounding effect on every area of your marketing as you can ensure you only send out what your customers want when doing everything from writing your blog posts to creating paid ads.
3) Better measurement and analytics
Marketing automation software doesn’t just look at one or two areas of your marketing. With this software, you can get a full picture of every part of your marketing. The software will analyze your data and produce reports on anything you want, from the tiniest details to the broadest overview.
This is rapid analysis that gives you the most amazingly clear picture of how your marketing is really doing. There’s no more guessing or wondering if something worked. You have the data in hand to prove it either way.
You can then see areas for improvement and areas where doubling down will pay dividends. You’ll find out what content is falling flat and which you need to create more of. You’ll know what makes your audience walk away and what brings them closer. You’ll be able to see any areas of friction that prevent people from moving smoothly through your marketing funnel.
Really, anything you need to know is up for grabs with marketing automation.
The more you use it and the more you run useful analyzes, the more you can refine your marketing activities and improve your efficiency. It really is a virtuous circle.
4) Greater reach and visibility
Greater efficiency and ease of delivering the right content to the right people will give you greater reach and visibility. Every time you create new, even more targeted content or reach back to improve and rewrite previous content, you’re getting closer and closer to knowing exactly the right things to do in your marketing to please your audience.
You’ll be sure that you’re on the right social platforms and confident in what you’re saying on each platform to suit your different audiences. Everyone will get content that feels increasingly tailored to them.
The more you provide what people want, the more they’ll keep coming back and the more they’ll trust you. Then the more they’ll tell other people and recommend you. You will naturally grow your audience and your reach by building your reputation by delivering the right information in the right format. The bigger your reach, the higher your visibility.
And again, this has a compounding effect across your whole online presence. You can use what you learn from your data to improve your business directory listings, including your Google Business Profile. You can focus on refining your website and your whole sales funnel to completely optimize everything you’re doing with your marketing online.
5) Improved integration and collaboration
We’ve all heard of siloed marketing and sales teams where neither one knows what the other is doing and nor do they communicate well. This is highly damaging to any gym. You need your people to work smoothly together and to communicate what they’re doing. You need sharing of ideas and full collaboration.
That all becomes far easier when everyone is using the same marketing dashboard and they all have access to all the data they need to do their jobs. You can bring everyone together so much more easily when everyone isn’t using separate pieces of software that don’t talk to each other.
With incredibly detailed reports and analytics, it’s so much easier for sales and marketing people to look at each other’s ideas and current results and bring fresh ideas and insights to the table.
That’s exactly what you want. You need everyone to coordinate and collaborate, to share ideas and to work together, not against each other.
Marketing automation software really can create a team of people that respect each other and understand each other out of siloed teams where it previously felt like never the twain should meet.
That’s priceless all on its own.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
If you want to dive into marketing automation and take your gym’s marketing efforts to the next level, then look no further than Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software.
We’ve talked above about many of the things you’d expect it to do, including email marketing automation, managing and posting your content, and social media marketing. But there’s far more to this platform.
In addition, you can enjoy a piece of software that helps you manage the most important online marketing activities within one platform. Manage and reply to your reviews, update over 80 business directory listings at once, including your Google Business Profile, manage your paid ads, keep track of your members and your current leads, and so much more.
As for analytics and reports, enjoy highly detailed reports showing you exactly how you’re doing with your marketing and where you can improve.
Why not book a demo today and see how we can help?