Looking for Cost Effective Promotions for your Fitness Business? Here are the 5 Best Returns on Investment

Find the best value for your marketing dollars, especially for the small gym owner without a large advertising budget is a great challenge.  I know because I owned two medium sized gyms in South Carolina for a number of years. Below are five ways that I found  that will prove to be cost effective and effectively promote your gym business.

1. Get to know your local newspaper. If you are just opening your business, go and introduce yourself to a reporter.  Depending on the size of the newspaper, you may even meet the editor.  Talk with the local business reporter and let them know you are opening a new business and ask them to do a piece on your business.  They are usually searching for ideas to do articles.  If you are an established business, go back and reintroduce yourself.  Ask the reporters if they would be interested in news releases you may send them about member accomplishments, such as: weight loss, strength competitions, or race results.  Send them these press releases as often as you can to keep your name and business in front of them and their readers.  Press releases cost you nothing.  They are free advertisements so build good relationships with your local press.
2. Not only do people love free stuff but they really love to feel like they are getting a value added experience.  You need to show your members that you are genuinely concerned about their health and fitness.  In today’s super competitive market you have to separate yourself from the competition.  This is a great way to build solid customer relationships which, in turn, builds customer loyalty.  So when your newest competitor moves in, you don't lose your client base.  You can offer free personal training sessions to help the novice gym member feel comfortable in this new environment.  The more comfortable they feel, the more loyal they become.  Nutritional counseling is a great value-added service.  These two services pave the way for you to introduce them to paid personal training sessions.  The old standby remains strong – the free t-shirt or, as I like to say, the walking, talking billboard for your business.  
3. An inexpensive but time consuming enterprise is the flyer campaign. I personally put out over 10,000 flyers in the community in which one of my gyms was located.  I drove around on four consecutive Sunday afternoons with my son and put them in all of the individual home paper boxes we could find.  We did this every 3 months for the first two years we were open.  Make sure that the flyers have a catchy picture and phrase on them with an incentive to join with a deadline.  Make sure all of the essentials are on the flyer, name, address, phone number, time staffed and a map of your location.
4. Social media is growing in importance each day, probably better stated by the minute. Establish profiles, pages, and feeds to help build your brand online.  It is mostly free and yes, time consuming, but well worth your efforts.  To be blunt, your business will not make it without a strong social media program.  Websites, Facebook, blogs, newsletters, twitter, whatever is next; you need to be on it. This is how new members will be looking for you.
5. Look for the WOW! You have to find a way to give your members a WOW experience.  It begins with a real, caring customer experience.  Let the gym down the street treat their members as a number, but you make sure that you and your employees never do.  Go out of your way to help them, whether it is answering a question about a workout program, how to use a machine, showing them a new way to use a piece of equipment or helping them get their keys out of the car they just locked them in.  You may be asking: what am I going to get out of all this bending over backwards for my clients? The answer is: the best advertisement you can get the entire time you are in business and one that no amount of advertising dollars will ever get for you.  It is golden.  It is called Word of Mouth.  It is the most potent form of advertising known.  Going above and beyond what is required will not only separate you from your competition but it will earn you the trust and loyalty of your clients.  They in turn will reward you with the best advertisement known in the industry.