Gyms and fitness studio owners can increase their gym memberships and their profits with Facebook marketing strategies. Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, and creating and launching high-converting Facebook ads can help gym owners reach new, potential members in a targeted geographic area.
Although Facebook advertising can be incredibly effective for growing your business, both offline and online, it’s not easy. What makes Facebook ads difficult for a lot of business owners, regardless of their industry, is that it’s tough to stand out on Facebook. People’s newsfeeds are often crowded with all sorts of posts and images from family and friends, and also other businesses. Also, people don’t really go to Facebook to shop or view ads from brands that may interest them. People go on Facebook to scroll their feed for entertainment and interact with family and friends. It is, after all, a SOCIAL network.
For fitness studio owners, getting the attention of your target audience comes down to creating a strategy that’s going to work for your campaign objectives, and that’s going to delight the ideal viewer and get them to take action. On average, a Facebook ad will give you a 9% conversion rate. But, research has indicated that conversion rates on Facebook are the highest for the fitness industry and education. Read on for inspiration on how you can use Facebook ads as a lead generation strategy for your gym.
Why should gym owners use Facebook ads?
Many brick-and-mortar business owners mistakenly believe that social media marketing is only for online companies. But digital advertising is an excellent way to increase in-store foot traffic. For gym owners especially, an optimised, a professional Facebook ad can help them increase membership sales online and therefore, compel people to visit their fitness studio.
For example, you can use a Facebook ad campaign to entice people to use your gym with a free trial. Millions of people log on to Facebook every day, so the chances that your ideal customer is on the social media network are high. Create a Facebook ad, and you can get your fitness studio and your unique offerings in front of your ideal customer. With an enticing offer and a compelling call-to-action, you can use your Facebook ad to increase your gym memberships and ultimately, your profits.
What’s the first step gym owners need to take before getting started with Facebook ads?
The first thing you need to do to generate leads on Facebook for your fitness studio is to know exactly who to target, and how. At the core of your Facebook advertising strategy, you need to know what types of offers you can show in your ad that are going to resonate the most with your target customer. Increasing gym memberships with Facebook ads comes down to two, crucial things:
- An offer that is irresistible to your targeted customer
- A service (or product) that your target customer will think is super high value, but you’re offering it for free or low-cost
For fitness studio owners, you probably have a lot of different customers that you can target. You might want to increase gym memberships from gym and fitness enthusiasts, college athletes, or young families.
The key here is that each of your Facebook ads needs to target just one of your ideal customers with copy and images or videos that will most resonate with them. You don’t want a “blanket” ad with generic copy. It won’t give you the conversion rates you want. Once you determine who you want to target with your Facebook ad, then you need to figure out the offering that is the most irresistible to those people. Then, craft your ad language and images you want to use around the offering.
Facebook gives you a lot of options when it comes to your ad formats. You can use image and video ads. However, video ads tend to get the highest engagement and conversion rates on average.
What should your funnel look like?
Fortunately, this part of the process doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple, four-part funnel should do for gym owners advertising on Facebook. Your funnel should look like this:
- An optimised, targeted Facebook ad that offers viewers a free trial or low-cost gym membership
- An opt-in, or landing page with compelling copy and clear CTAs designed to capture an email address and contact information
- A “thank you” page
- A brief follow-up email sequence designed to keep the audience engaged and to offer possible upsells
What’s an easy way to get started creating a Facebook ad?
The ad itself is where your offer will be on full display for your target audience to see and interact with. In the Facebook ads manager, you want to create an image or video ad with “traffic” as the primary objective. When you select “traffic” as your main objective in the ads manager, Facebook shows your ads to people who are then directed to a website off Facebook for lead generation purposes. The next thing you need to do is start targeting people on Facebook.
You can do this in several different ways. If you already have a Facebook page for your fitness studio and you have likes and follows, you can get Facebook to show your ads to people who fit the profiles and interests of your current followers and fans. If you don’t have many Facebook fans, or you don’t have a page at all, you can still advertise on Facebook. You might need to create a lookalike audience in the ads manager with a list of email addresses you’ve already collected from your customers. Facebook uses this information to show ads to people you specifically target.
Facebook is one of the largest digital advertising platforms in the world. They make it easy for businesses of all types and industries to get started with an advertising campaign. But just because it’s easy to get started, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily simple to get those clicks and conversions that you want for your business.
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Here at Australian Internet Advertising, we’ve helped fitness studio owners generate leads and increase their membership numbers with air-tight Facebook marketing campaigns. Please contact our team of digital marketing gurus online today to see what we can do for your gym.
