Hello people! Do you know how much the fitness advertising budget is? All over the global city centers, you can find ornate gyms and fitness centers en vogue! By 2023, global gym revenue will top $100 billion, and marketing is good for that, too. With digital ads, influencer partnerships, and community events, the market is only growing from there.
And then so next, so what we wanted to do was look at a few of the larger fitness chains, we’re going to put that in the form of kind of: And so what are they spending their marketing dollars on, what are their marketing efforts, what are they saying, where are they putting their mouth is, what’s the ROI on their marketing efforts, what makes them different than some of these smaller gyms and some of these larger fitness chain??
If you are a gym owner, marketer, or fitness enthusiast, I’m guessing you know at least one way for the amount you should spend on gym marketing.
Let’s discuss it!
The Gym Marketing Landscape
It’s the US $35 billion fitness industry. However, with this kind of competition, gyms have to use different types of marketing to differentiate themselves, attract more members, and keep the members who actually want to leave.
Marketing for Gyms typically falls into several Categories, including:
Traditional Marketing: Back then, I didn’t have much money left over, so instead of paying for advertising, I did one-on-one promotions or crashed public events. I distributed leaflets, billboards, print ads, radio and TV commercials.
Referral Programs and Promotions: Referral discounts, special deals, and seasonal promos are all part of many marketing components.
Influencer and Affiliate Marketing: Building fitness collaborations with local community partnerships and with fitness influencers.
Events and Community Engagement: From hosting fitness challenges, classes, and local charity events.
In any of these, depending on size, target market, location, and business model a Gym will choose to amass its resources. On average, gyms spend 5—15 percent of their revenue on marketing.
How Much does a Gym’s Marketing Cost?
Traditionally, gyms spend a different proportion of their marketing budget depending on how big they are, how much business they’re bringing in, how much competition they’re up against, and whether you’re a boutique gym or mega franchise chain.
Then, let’s go in there and see what the average type of gym tends to devote to marketing.
Small and Independent Gyms
- On average, boutique fitness studios or independent gyms allocate less revenue to marketing than larger chains: around 10% to 15%. Local marketing techniques allow this community to be created, and it does so based on aspirational clients.
- Locations of boutique fitness centers are personal relationships, exceptional offers, and connection with the local community, as well as highly targeted campaigns if the boutique fitness center is located on the local yogis, CrossFit fans, or HIIT fans of the area.
Marketing tactics for smaller gyms often include:
- Advertisers were done on social media advertising (Instagram & Facebook) to local users.
- free fitness classes in the local area or
- Cross-promoting local businesses.
For example, things like blog posts, videos, and social media content.
Small gyms usually make do without a single penny spent on a costly round-the-globe advertising effort (most times) by instead getting on with interesting guerrilla marketing and very targetted (ad campaigns wise) ad campaigns in their local market area.
Mid-Sized Gyms and Chains
- Typically, a mid-size gym with a regional or national footprint will spend between 6 – 10 percent of its revenue on marketing. Since our members are spread across various regions and countries, marketing in this budget will be broad and specific.
- In fact, these gyms usually also run digital advertising campaigns across numerous platforms and use traditional advertising like billboards, direct mail, radio spots, and so on.
Gyms of this size might focus on:
- Leveraging it to get local promotions and discounted memberships to bring in traffic during when it’s New Year’s resolution rush or other high season dates.
- Secondly, third-party digital ad spending uses Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and others to target people near each location.
Here’s a chance for brands to align with fitness influencers (or influencers for short) and leverage the reach and trusting following they’ve built to help a brand.
Instead, invest in SEO and a bit of SEO money in smarter content marketing to position yourself nicely locally for phrases like “gym near me” or “fitness center in [location].”
Franchises and Large Fitness Chains
But if you’re a fitness franchise or a large gym chain, the competition is a lot tougher. Companies, including Planet Fitness, Anytime Fitness, and LA Fitness, all spend a chunk of revenue of *5 to 7 percent, on average.
Bigger brands have a higher turnover rate, while smaller gyms have small customer bases operating to the advantage of scale.
For Large Gym Chains, marketing strategies focus heavily on the following:
- That includes TV commercials, radio spots, and digital content across all national potential customer targets.
- This is, however, sponsorships or partnerships with major sporting events or health and fitness brands.
- It’s yet another New Year’s resolution/summer body challenge to recruit many new board members.
- Or in combination with or as a form of cross-promotion with fitness equipment manufacturers, apparel companies, or health supplements.
- To meet the increased demand for at-home fitness options, app development, and spending on workout tracking, virtual classes, etc.
Brand recognition also translates into profits for big gym chains, which reduces their need to spend proportionate amounts on the same benefits. While always exceptional, advertisers find it exceptionally so for advertising investments.
What is usually true about many of the established ad networks is that their reputation and membership breadth are so evident.
Types of Marketing Gyms Use
Different gyms are fine, and distinct marketing is essential for increasing your marketing reach and growing your membership base. In other words, the precise type of gym, its target audience, and its precise location will dictate the exact allocation of your marketing spend.
Social Media Ads & Digital Marketing
On the flip side of the spectrum, gym owners have used digital marketing as their (or) go-to in the past. Every one of them is on social media, and every single gym should share its gym on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc., to build a brand.
The great news is that these are exactly the kinds of platforms that gyms can use to advertise to very specific ad targets and run targeted ads to people’s demographics, behaviors, and even locations.
- As for the social ads, the best part is they’re a cheap, instant way of achieving new members. In reality, many gyms motivate their learners to share their workouts, transformation stories, or fitness challenges using user-generated content.
- Of course, SEO drives organic traffic. If you can’t beat paid advertising, sign up on the search engines for terms like ‘best gym in [your town]’ or ‘fit and cheap workout classes.’
Influence Marketing and Affiliate Marketing
If you prefer the fitness industry to Instagram or TikTok fitness influencers, then influencer marketing has become natural, and the industry knows that. However, many of these influencers also have huge followings and can give gyms a dedicated patron base.
They can, for example, be paid if they endorse fitness products in their product endorsements, or you can make an affiliate marketing deal with them, meaning you get a commission each time a new member you refer to comes in and signs up through your promoting link.
- Big gyms use big influencers with thousands of followers to hit the mainstream, and small gyms use local micro-influencers to bring awareness and members into the gym.
Event and Community Engagement
They really grow relationships with their potential members. They might have a gym, they might have events, but they really grow relationships with potential members. Hosting fitness challenges, free outdoor fitness classes, or charitable events may look like that.
When the community and trust in a brand’s gym builder via local participant word-of-mouth marketing, we play a game of how likely the community will attend our competition.
- Obviously, this isn’t true for all gyms. Some offer bonus referral pay for current members who refer newbies, others offer painfully over-the-moon deals with no long contracts, and you can get your bottom quads on for much less. While referral programs can be extremely powerful, they cause existing members to become super promoters for the gym.
Traditional Marketing Methods
While this may improve local awareness, gyms still use other traditional media, such as print and radio, as part of their digital marketing to move away from conventional advertising.
Classify your target market into those who use gyms communally and those who don’t, and a strategic online ad in a newspaper or billboard in a place with traffic will attract people who are not surfing gyms.
The following video explains about Types of Marketing Gyms Use:
ROI on Gym Marketing
For that reason, gyms will have to decide whether the return on investment (ROI) is worth their marketing spend or not. If members, retention, revenue, and much of the rest of the marketing strategy machine should be doing the same thing, e.g., More consistent new member flow, improved retention, and enhanced revenue.
- Gyms that rely on tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Manager, and customer relationship management (CRM) software to track the results of marketing programs are considered the most.
- For instance, if a gym runs a $10,000 Facebook ad campaign on a $50 per month per new member basis, it doesn’t need to do any further math.
- ROI doesn’t always happen instantly, even for SEO or influencer marketing. Branding gyms is hard when you already have a ton of awareness and trust. You have to sit in that short-term advertising lane but the long-term series growth lane.
Conclusion
In short, gyms allocate between 5 percent and 15 percent of their revenue to marketing; the smaller, more independent gyms and boutique studios spend more or a higher percentage of income on marketing.
While that’s true, chances have certainly been taken in terms of fitness industry marketing over the years, with digital marketing, influencer collaborations, and community engagement being the norm in attracting and retaining members now.
The right marketing channels will help increase your gym’s membership base and add revenue to your bottom line. Whether you are a small gym owner or one of many franchises, you have to know who you are marketing to and what the cheapest way to reach clients is.
FAQ
1. How much does the average gym spend marketing?
In general, gyms typically spend 5 to 15 percent of their revenue on marketing. Bigger gyms, like near-you gyms, spend between 5 to 7 percent, and smaller gyms, like boutique studios, spend 15 to 10 percent.
2. Why do smaller gyms have more cash on an advertising budget?
Smaller gyms usually use local marketing strategies to build awareness and attract members. Because they face a competitive regional market, they spend more of their budget on hyper-targeted digital ads, community events, and social media promotions.
3. So, if this is the case, then what about a normal gym? What would a typical gym’s marketing strategy be?
Gyms invest in various marketing strategies, including:
- Digital marketing: Email marketing, social media ads, SEO, Google Ads.
- Traditional marketing: Radio, TV, billboards, and flyers.
- Influencer and affiliate marketing: Fitness Influencer collaborations.
- Community engagement: Classes and events, referral programs and programs.
4. Do they even market large gym chains less?
It’s a true story. Big crappy gym chains (Planet Fitness, Anytime Fitness) just don’t throw anything more than 5%-7% of their income into marketing. It gives them the benefit of a brand and a prebuilt customer base so that they can do significant outreach for the same relative marketing cost.
