If you’re thinking of putting together a Google Ads strategy for your fitness center, the good news is that you’ll be taking advantage of what is arguably the most powerful and far-reaching digital advertising platform on the Internet today.
However, not all ad strategies are created equally. If your aim is to create a campaign that resonates and makes an impression among your target audience, there are a number of critical things you’ll want to keep in mind.
Advertising Trends and Insights
One of the most important trends to pay attention to in the modern era has to do with personalization. Rather than trying to craft one message that appeals equally well to all types of people – something that is difficult if not impossible under most circumstances – you instead need to go in the other direction.
That is to say, speak to the specific pain points that your target audience has. If someone is thinking of joining a fitness center like yours, ask yourself why. Are they trying to lose weight? Are they preparing for a marathon? Do they just want to tone up and look better? What, specifically, has led them down the path that they’re currently on?
Then, you can include specific messaging that speaks to those ideas in a way that helps people understand that you legitimately care about their health and wellness. Not only does this make a connection with people, but it also establishes yours as a voice to be trusted at the same time.
The Benefits of Advertising on Multiple Platforms
Whether you’re talking about Google Ads specifically or another ad network, leveraging this technology for your fitness center brings with it a host of unique advantages, all at the exact same time.
For starters, you’re putting yourself in a position to get far more leads than you’d likely be able to generate with traditional advertising alone. This increases the number of people who, when they decide that they want to join a fitness center, visit your gym as opposed to someone else’s.
Along the same lines, you’re also going a long way towards increasing brand awareness as much as possible. The fact of the matter is that even in smaller cities, there are probably a lot of fitness centers for people to choose from. Therefore, when the time does come that they want to join a new one, they’re going to go with the one that is at the top of their mind. The more often they see your ads as they browse the Internet, the more likely they are to pick you as opposed to a competitor.
Digital advertising platforms like Google Ads are also not just targeted but are granular in nature – both of which are very positive things. You can easily target those who are most likely to be interested in services like yours. Not only that, but you can target people in your area along with people who are actively searching for a new fitness center to go to during your normal business hours.
All told, you have a few different digital advertising channels to choose from depending on your needs. Google’s own ad network is perhaps the most prominent of these, as Google holds a significant market share on web-based search in particular. Other options include Facebook Ads, Microsoft Search, YouTube, and even LinkedIn.
For the best results, you’ll likely want to run ads on multiple networks – not just one. But if you had to pick one, Google Ads would undoubtedly be the way to go for your fitness center.
Crafting a Google Ads Strategy for Fitness Centers
When it comes to crafting the perfect Google Ads strategy for fitness centers in particular, there are a number of important things to keep in mind.
Chief among these is the idea that you must set reasonable, actionable goals prior to the onset of your campaign. Those objectives need to inform a lot of the decisions you’ll be making moving forward.
Are you trying to raise awareness for your fitness center among the general population, for example? Do you want to increase the number of sign-ups that you’re experiencing? Are you trying to reconnect with previous clients who may have lapsed in attendance? All of these are realistic goals, but they would each require their own unique strategy to properly execute when it comes to your campaign.
Next, you’ll want to leverage the full power of Google Ads’ targeting platform to your advantage. Rather than trying to cast the widest net possible when it comes to your ads, you need to fine-tune things and cast a far more specific one. A fitness center is not a digital service, for example, so your clientele will be limited by people who live in the same geographic area that you operate in.
Therefore, don’t waste your time and money creating ads for people who aren’t likely to become an ideal client in the first place. What you need to do is narrow where your ads are shown to only people from the city and the surrounding zip codes where your physical location is and the surrounding areas. You can also use targeting tools to narrow down by gender, income, education level, and other demographics.
For the best results, come up with a fictionalized version of what one of your ideal fitness center customers actually looks like. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to target them with your Google Ads.
This fictionalized version of one of your ideal customers, also commonly referred to as a buyer persona, will also help a great deal when it comes to the messaging you craft, too. Think about the many different types of people who walk into your average fitness center. Some are die-hard exercise aficionados that are looking to build as much muscle as possible. Some might be people who have been away from fitness centers for quite a while and are looking to get back in the game, so to speak.
Others may be looking to lose as much weight as possible and take a new, proactive approach to their health. The point is, that one message isn’t likely to resonate with all three of these types of people at the same time. Therefore, you need to work on your messaging so that you know A) who it is that you’re actually speaking to, and B) so that you can get the right message in front of that person at exactly the right time.
You can even run multiple campaigns with variations on your messaging to attempt to attract the attention of a few of these groups. But never forget, if you want to resonate with an audience, you need to know as much about them as possible.
Once this portion of the work is done for your fitness center’s Google Ads campaign, you can begin to optimize things moving forward. Never forget that a Google Ads campaign is not something that you “do once and forget about.” You’re not done when the campaign finally goes live – if anything, the work is just beginning.
It is critically important for you to track the effectiveness of your ads on an ongoing basis so that you can see what is working and, more importantly, what isn’t. Sometimes, you’ll have a series of ads that are ideal from a creative perspective, but they’re just not getting the attention you’re looking for. Upon further examination, you might find that they’re running in the wrong places – meaning that the fitness center customers who those ads are most likely to appeal to aren’t actually getting a chance to see them.
Regardless, you can’t measure what you’re not tracking, so you need to pay attention to every last aspect of your campaigns. Once you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you can begin to optimize – meaning you double down on the former and get rid of the latter at your earliest opportunity.
Overall, you need to remember the old saying that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” – meaning that your perfect Google Ads campaign for your fitness center won’t be, either. The better you understand your target audience, the easier it will be to create messaging that speaks to their unique needs. The more you’re tracking the effectiveness of your ads, the better chance you’ll have at optimization and improvement.
The more proactive you are about those creative elements that you’re putting out into the world, the more you’ll be able to expand upon them and create something that truly does capture the attention of your target audience members in a way they won’t be able to look away from. It’s an ongoing process, but an important one – and it’s one that you want to make sure you’re paying the appropriate amount of attention to at all times.
If you’d like to find out more information about crafting an effective Google Ads strategy for fitness centers, or if you just have any additional questions that you’d like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.