“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” - Winston Churchill
Sir. Winston Churchill has a point, especially when applied to marketing. It's great to have a marketing plan, but it's just as important to stay flexible with your marketing initiatives. If you’ve ever planned or organized a marketing campaign for your gym business, you know how quickly it can go from “fun idea” to “help, this is my life now.” So how does a gym or fitness business achieve the marketing results of a highly organized and effective marketing team? Make a robust plan that's broken down by months and weeks, but that also remains easy to read, flexible, and provides actionable insights.
Our Ultimate “Get @#$% Done” Marketing Planner for Gyms and Studios comes from our desire to solve a problem we were having with our own marketing here at Club OS: We simply couldn’t keep track of all the various options we had, campaigns we wanted to try, or when we wanted to try them.
Even with all of our fancy marketing tools, we were still looking for a way to both plan our campaign strategies to meet our desired business goals and remain flexible for new initiatives that would inevitably come along that, of course, required room in an already crowded plan. It's in solving that problem that our custom-made marketing planner was born.
Some gym and fitness businesses believe in the “Field of Dreams” formula of business success: “if you build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, that really is a dream for a modern day fitness business. Even small town gyms have major competition from home-based fitness platforms cropping up on the Apple and Google mobile app platforms.
If you’re ready to cut through the noise and drill down into exactly what marketing activities will get you the business growth you need, you should download our marketing planer right now.
- “If You Build It, They Will Come” - No, they probably won’t, and even if they do they may not stay long.
- “But I’m not a marketer.” - Yes, you are.
Download the plan and map out your membership goals for the rest of the year. There’s no time like the present!
Why you need a marketing plan (and why you shouldn’t get too attached to it)
1. A marketing plan can keep things organized before they spiral into chaos
If you have more than three marketing initiatives happening in a month, you may need to re-title yourself CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) because that’s all you’re going to be doing. However, with the right tools and planning, you will always know you’re doing everything you can to produce the marketing and business results you’re looking for.
2. Planning makes it easy to see everything in your “marketing arsenal”
When it comes to reaching your desired audience, there’s no lack of possible methods of communication. There’s email, texting, phone calls, social media, local paper ads, networking events, farmers markets, direct mail, SEO, search advertising, social media advertising, and more. If you want to employ a complex marketing mix of the various communication methods, you’re going to need to be able to see what part of a campaign requires which type of marketing communication. That’s when having a plan comes in very handy.
What our marketing planner allows you to do is see a one-screen, birds-eye view of every communication option you could potentially have at your fingertips. You’ll be able to easily see a breakdown of every campaign and initiative that’s going on in a particular week, month, or even quarter. (Note: It really is a great way to organize complex marketing campaigns in a broad and flexible manner. We’re offering it to the public because we’ve found it so useful for our own marketing planning.)
3. A plan makes it easy to get your entire staff aiming towards the same business goals
With a marketing plan on (digital) paper - that's also easily shareable across your entire organization - you can ensure that every one of your team members, from the sales people to the personal trainers to the front desk staff, knows that if the goal numbers for the month or quarter are met, everything is cool. 📈😎 This is a great way to remove any ambiguity from your core lead and membership goals.
4. Without planning, it’ll be a lot harder to learn from success and failure
If you don’t keep track of the marketing initiatives you put in place each week, you can’t learn anything. Being able to match your monthly and quarterly goal results to the success or failure of your various campaigns can provide some amazing and actionable insight into what your prospects want to receive from you that will turn them into leads and eventually paying members.
5. The final benefit is that after completing the plan, you get to make the "I Have An Awesome Marketing Plan" face as shown below:
It's free and made just for gyms and fitness businesses. Check it out and see if you find it as valuable as we do.
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