You know when businesses say "we're the best kept secret in town", they're really saying "our marketing team needs to get to work!" Secrecy is NOT good for business. It's critical you cultivate exposure for your fitness club so new prospects can find you and your current members will be proud to be a part of your growing community.

We're breaking down best practices and approaches you can implement to boost your fitness center's visibility with a three-part blog series. Haven't read the other two blogs yet? Read part one and part two. If you have, check out this blog for more visibility-boosting strategies: 

1.) If possible, put your physical address on every single page of your website. This will go a long way with geo-based Google Maps results. The footer is a great option.

2.) Don’t spend all this time and effort promoting your business just to let after-hours calls go to voicemail. Use a service like GymPhone to prevent this. A lead is a lead even if it comes in at 3am.

3.) Google AdWords can be valuable even with a low spend. One tip we’d like to impart is to always have an ad running targeting your own business name. What we mean is that every keyword in that ad should be your business name. The ad copy itself should contain your business name in the title and then something related to what you offer. This ad will have an incredibly high quality score which is important when it comes to how often and where Google AdWords ads show up in search results. Also, there’s always the chance your competitors are already bidding on your name… don’t let them win.

4.) Do you get a lot of unique visitors to your website (i.e. people that haven’t visited previously or in a long time), but people aren’t turning into leads or members? That’s a problem, but one you can isolate and correct. Figure out what page is not converting these people and start adjusting things. Even if you can’t get fancy with A/B testing (when you test and compare two slightly altered versions of the same page), you can still make gradual changes, wait a couple weeks for improvement, and if you don’t get the desired results you can try something else.

5.) Keep. Your. Prospect/Lead/Contact. Forms. Short. Did the dramatic writing of that sentence help get the point across? The shorter the form, the more likely someone will fill it out. Think about the information you actually need in order to contact the person versus the information you can find elsewhere or later without requiring them to provide it. Short form = more forms being filled out.

6.) If you send a promotional email, don’t confuse your recipients by giving them too much information, or information that’s unrelated to the main goal of the email. Keep things focused with a single “call to action” (CTA) button or link.

7.) ...and regarding the aforementioned CTA, it needs to link to a page that’s not your homepage. For example, if you’re running an ad for personal training, your ad or email CTAs should link to a page on your website that talks specifically about your personal training offerings. This type of page is commonly referred to as a “landing page.”

8.) ...and regarding the aforementioned landing page, it should be similar to the email strategy in that you don’t want to put too much information that isn’t relevant to why the person is on the page. Don’t let them get distracted! They’re on the page for a reason, don’t confuse them with irrelevant information.

9.) If you have a limited amount of money to spend on ads, don’t let your daily budget drain too quickly. You can set ads to run only during your business hours. If you’re using Google Analytics you can run through your historical data to see when people usually visit your website which will give you an idea of when to run your ads.

10.) Use Google’s “Sitelink Extensions” which are links that show up in Google search results that give your listing way more screen real estate and allows people to click right to what they’re after without having to first go through your homepage. Find out more about sitelinks here.

11.) Organize and attend community and local events such as farmer’s markets, or even host your own event at your facility. If you want to qualify attendees as much as possible, you can always set an entry fee and donate it to charity, or keep it (hey, this is work!), or apply it to any membership fees if they join your club as a result of the event.

Ready to convert more leads and engage the members you already have? Download our Sales & Retention Handbook for more tips!