If only yours were the only gym in your local area, how much easier growing your business would be. Of course, life’s not like that and no matter where you’re based, you will have competition from other gyms based in the same area that you cover.
That obviously means that your marketing efforts and branding both matter and that you will need to localize your online marketing tactics to get, and stay, ahead of the competition.
As a small business, you’re not just competing with other gyms, but also with other exercise types that you perhaps don’t offer, such as dance classes, badminton, rowing, volleyball, and more, along with relatively new additions to the health and fitness space, such as the Peloton bike and other pieces of equipment that exercisers can use at home.
You have to find a way to stand out from all that noise and to get people to look at your website and social media presence, and then hopefully visit you and become a member of your gym.
One of the best ways to do that is to focus your marketing efforts on where your business operates from and the area you serve and start by using the local search marketing tactics for gyms we’ll discuss in this article.
Know Your Local Community
Your first step with local marketing is to get to know your local community, and not just your current and potential customers, but your competitors too.
1. Conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” customers are
If you spend a reasonable amount of time at your gym, you’ll know who your regulars are and probably get to know them quite well, but that’s not enough if you want to market new classes and other features to them as well as enticing potential new members to join you.
The only way to be sure you thoroughly understand your best customers and what they really want is to do your research and build solid buyer personas to give you a far better idea of who you are marketing to. That way, you can then tailor your marketing and your content to suit your ideal customers, and hopefully attract far more of them.
Use your social media analytics and your website analytics, along with any data from running paid ads to build up a picture of your keenest customers. If you have a professional marketing platform, such as Surefire Local’s marketing software, you will also find a treasure trove of data, analytics, and statistics to do a deep dive into who your customers are.
But don’t just look at your analytics. Send your keenest members a short survey and find out why they chose your gym over anyone else’s and why they keep coming back. You could also ask them what you can improve and if there are any classes or features that they’d like to see. You can learn so much from simply getting to know your customers, and this can help you market even better to any potential members who are thinking of joining.
2. Identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers
Again, this is something you can do by sending out a short survey. You can ask your members and potential members whatever you want to know, but keep the questions easy to answer and the survey short or you’ll put people off. You could also offer a free month’s membership in exchange for filling in the survey or offer something your members would like as a competition prize to encourage people to participate.
Keep a close eye on your social media comments, your reviews, and any comments you get on your blog posts, if you write a blog. Also, look at what people are searching for to find your website in your web stats, and what keywords they are using. Not only can this information give you insights into the latest trends and people’s interests, but you can, of course, use what you learn to tailor your marketing more and talk to people in the language that they use.
Even something as simple as keeping up with local forums and the local newspapers can help you learn what’s happening in your area, and what people are talking about. Stay on top of your local news and trends, and you’ll be ahead when it comes to generating new ideas and offering more of what your members and potential members want.
3. Understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts
You do follow your competition on social media, right? If not, go check out what they’re posting about. You need to know how your competition is differentiating themselves from you, how they market to their audience, and what they are offering that you don’t. That doesn’t mean copying them or immediately going out and offering the same new class that they just introduced. It means being aware of how they are getting their members but staying true to your own business and how you prefer to market, while learning as much as you can from their marketing efforts.
Check out what they post and on what social platforms, read their blog, and look at their newsletter and see how often they send it out and what they put in it.
Read any comments and feedback they get from their followers and see what you can learn from that and what ideas that feedback sparks for you.
Read their reviews too. You’ll learn what people like and dislike about them and start to understand how you can do better.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP)
It’s quick and easy to claim your Google Business Profile and verify your business on Google. Just go to Google Maps and see if there is already an entry for your business. If there is, you need to claim it before you can edit it. If not, then create an entry for your business and then claim it. You will need to verify that it’s your business, but it’s easy to do, and you can do that via text, phone, email, or video. It may just take some time to do.
However, claiming your profile isn’t enough on its own. You have to fully optimize your profile. That means filling in every possible section of your profile with quality, well-keyworded copy in your brand voice – don’t forget to include local keywords too. Your details must be accurate, and you need to provide everything a potential member could want to know, including your opening hours, address, contact information, and what you offer.
Go back to your buyer personas, if you need to, and look at what your ideal members would want to know.
Make your profile attractive with high-quality images and videos and keep it up to date with posts providing your latest news, info on new classes and equipment, and anything else that will encourage people to keep coming back.
What this does is give you another place on the internet in addition to your social media and your website. It’s another way people can find you and learn more about you. And your GBP is likely to appear higher in the search results than your own website, giving you more of a chance to be found by the right people.
Your GBP is also a great place for current members to leave a review, and it’s a good idea to encourage this. The higher your star rating and the more recent reviews you have on your GBP, the more chance you have of appearing in the Local Map Pack. This would give you even higher visibility as these results appear very near the top of the search results on Google Maps. You can’t buy your way into that listing. The only way you can appear there is with a fully optimized GBP and some excellent, recent reviews.
2. Localized Content Marketing
We all know that quality content can make all the difference to marketing efforts and here you can create location-specific content that resonates with your customers. What you need to do is write as you usually would: naturally and for your audience, but also incorporate local keywords into your website content so that your gym comes up in the local search results.
As for what to write about and what to include, again, it goes back to your buyer personas and the research you did earlier. What do your members and potential members want to see? What do they want to learn? What will attract them to stick around and keep reading your content, and what will then persuade potential members to sign up?
Before and after results are always great posts for gyms, especially with video or images, so encourage your members to post those, and ask permission to share them on your social media, your GBP, and your website. Not only is it content you didn’t have to write, but it’s highly convincing to anyone thinking of joining.
Going back to your earlier research again, you should now be familiar with local events, news, and local trends. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on internet and social media trends. You can then post about these events and trends in your local area and discuss what people are currently talking about, using the appropriate hashtags to join in the conversation. Not only does this give you every chance to use local keywords, but it can also get you attention from people in your local area who are thinking of joining a gym.
3. Local SEO Strategies
Keywords specific to your location are highly important for local SEO and you need to incorporate them wherever you can on your website, GBP, and social media, as long as your copy sounds natural and it doesn’t sound like you’ve forcefully stuffed your keywords in there.
Remember, you write for people first and search engines second.
If you have more than one location for your fitness business, then it’s a good idea to set up individual pages on your website for each location. You can then include specific location keywords on each page to ensure each page comes up in local search for those keywords and for keywords such as “gym,” “fitness,” and others that you’ll want to use in your SEO efforts.
Remember to add your keywords to the URL of the page, the top heading and at least one other subheading, your meta title and description, and your first paragraph. You should also add keywords and alt descriptions to your images because this helps with SEO but also helps with accessibility.
When you did your research on your local area, you’ll no doubt have found other local businesses that you might want to team up with, such as health food stores and gym clothing and footwear stores. You could cross-promote each other and perhaps even offer a joint prize in a competition to build your newsletters and your social presence. Ask for backlinks from other local businesses too and give them in return. Being part of the local community and supporting other businesses is not only great for your image, but great for your bottom line.
You should also join and take part in local directories and community websites to promote your gym.
However, before you do all of that, ensure you’ve optimized your website to be mobile-friendly and fast to load. So many people now shop via their mobile that you can’t ignore that audience. Your website must work beautifully on mobile, or you are definitely losing potential leads. Not to mention that Google is now mobile-first in the search results, and you need to be there! You also can’t afford a slow-loading website. No one has the patience anymore to hang around for more than three seconds to see if your site loads and you will lose visitors because of that if your site is slow.
4. Local Online Advertising
Facebook Ads and Google Ads are great places to advertise your gym as you can highly target your ads to specific locations. If you offer anything like in-house corporate exercise classes, LinkedIn Ads may also be worth trying. You can use the demographics and information you gathered about your audience to tailor your ads and make sure you’re aiming at the right people, and you can set specific parameters to target potential customers within a certain radius of your location.
Set your ads up right, and you won’t be wasting ad spend on advertising to people outside your local area.
Even when your ads are set up, it is vital that you monitor and analyze your ad performance to see how your ads are doing. You may find that one or two ads are bringing in all your leads and that you can switch off unsuccessful ads, so you aren’t wasting money. You can then copy successful ads and tweak them to continually optimize for better results.
5. Local Branding
We touched on this earlier when we talked about local SEO, but joining in with your community and being a leading light really can have a big impact on your business. You have more opportunities to cross-promote with other local businesses, and you can find local charities who would love the support and would be delighted to partner with you, perhaps with events such as fun runs, danceathons, and more. These events would provide you with the opportunity to be center stage, showing people how to train safely for running and exercising, and for your team members to lead events like danceathons – all while wearing your gym-branded t-shirts, naturally.
All of these things will get you attention, support, and a great local reputation, and it’s even better if the events you join have a strong online presence so that you get extra mileage from social sharing.
6. Monitor and Analyze Performance
Your marketing efforts will do far better if you monitor what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments accordingly. Keep a close eye on your analytics and data from social media, paid ads, and your website. You can also use tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into local customer behavior. From this, you’ll be able to find out how people found your business, what content they interacted with, and what actions they took.
Knowledge really is power, and with this knowledge in hand, you can learn even more about your members and leads, and learn to tailor your marketing ever more closely to what they want. You can then make data-driven adjustments to your marketing campaigns based on real performance, not guesswork.
You’ll be able to see what parts of your marketing are making a difference to the bottom line and what you should do more of to get even better results. Tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs) such as your website traffic, conversion rates, your local search rankings, and more will help guide your marketing for the next quarter, the next year, and beyond to keep your gym growing and thriving.
We can’t overstate the importance of localizing your online marketing if you want to gain more visibility online, in your local area, and attract the right local customers. Local search marketing can really draw your ideal customers to you, increase engagement, increase your leads, bring consistent income, and ensure business growth.
With Surefire Local on your side, we can help boost your local online marketing efforts. With our marketing software, it’s far easier to establish and grow your online presence and have potential members come to you.
Surefire Local is an all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses with a range of features, all designed to help you grow your business the easy way. You don’t have to do everything manually, and you can save time and effort with the right help.
Take a look at our professional software with:
- Website / Local SEO optimizations – creating geotagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles
- Online review management – send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers think about your business
- Directories management – claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platform
- Content marketing – tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profile
- Social media management – tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments
- Local online advertising – Ads designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area
- Analytics and reporting – Transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating, with AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements
- Educational resources – webinars and blogs designed to help small businesses learn all things local online marketing
There’s a lot involved in running a successful gym and adding local search marketing tactics for gyms may feel like a step too far, but it really does work, and you can bring in regular leads and delight your potential and current customers, without burning yourself out. Just use the right marketing software and save yourself a whole lot of time and effort.Why not attend a Surefire Local demo today and see how we can help?