The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 3
The Eight Biggest Mistakes Gym Owners Make – Part 3
5. Marketing
How to get an a number of qualified leads through the door. Marketing is hit or miss in every industry. The difference in ours is that we usually don’t have an enormous budget like others. If we market, we must get a response. You need to develop a 12-month marketing campaign that is based on tracking response rates and the marketing mediums that are getting a response today. Right now, social media has been giving us the largest response that we’ve had in years. However, the new algorythm changes that Facebook has been making has been making it harder to reach our target markets and the cost is going up. There will be a point where the return on investment from social media marketing will drop low enough where it will not be getting enough response for the money. So, what then and what next? And, if you are believing the ads posted by a guy with no gym business background and appears to be 15 years old pitching you the “perfect funnel to fill your gym” then you have missed the boat already.
It never was about the Perfect Funnel. It was about the crazy response rate that we were getting from social media in general and hitting the right audience with the right budget. What do you think is going to happen to all these guys, when Facebook marketing goes down hill?
Your 12-month marketing campaign must be planned in advance with a variety of prongs of attack. Some will cost money and some will be more guerilla in-house and it must rotate. You have to spend enough money to make it worthwhile and it must be calculated based on the overall ROI. Sure, take advantage of what is hot at the moment but don’t neglect the other stuff either.
6. Profit Centers
You must get a higher return-per-member. My town is different, my members are cheap, that doesn’t work here… we’ve heard them all. You need to start making money from other areas besides memberships and training. Juice bar and supplements are the two keys. Maybe some small aparrel but unless you have a traditional gym with a large amount of traffic, you don’t see much here. Planning ahead and adding some square footage or utilizing dead space to charge rent is another long-term plan.
The general response that I get here is the cost to get started. It is a valid concern however, the key here is in the financial planning. The cost of starting these endeavors wouldn’t be from your cash flow and wouldn’t be added into your profit and loss statement. You would carry some short-term debt to get started and then the monthly payment on that debt would be worked into you monthly P & L.
Then your ROI would be (Monthly Income – Cost of Goods Sold) divided by your New Monthly Payment. The ROI on this is substantial. Massively bigger than putting that money in any other investment.
