Gym Marketing for Free

For gym marketing, Facebook is an amazing channel for getting new members for your CrossFit gym. However, I’m hearing that a lot of affiliate owners are paying too much and then giving up on it too soon.

If you set up your Facebook presence the right way you can start building the right target audiences now. Following these three steps (all of which are free) is a great way to not only pay less for advertising but also get better leads who are more likely to become members.

3 … 2 … 1 … Go

1. Set Up / Update your Facebook Page

Most of you should already have this in place for your gym marketing but it still surprises me which gyms do not. Not only is this a great way to engage with your existing members, it is a great way for prospects to find out more about you and to see if they are a fit for your gym.

Generally speaking, the more Likes you have, the better as it boosts your credibility. That said, in the gym business make sure you have lots of Likes from people in your area (more on that later).

Facebook makes it really simple to do this but we also have some content in our Facebook Ad Guide. You can get that free in our Gym Marketing group … click here to join.

2. Get your Facebook Pixel

From your Facebook page, you need to go to Manage Ads. This can be found by going to the drop down menu on the far right side of your Facebook page. Click on “Manage Ads”.

You will then be taken to the Ads Manager where the top left drop down menu will allow you to choose Pixels.

On the far right side of the screen you will now see your Pixel Options. Click on the one that looks like an eye to view your Facebook Pixel code.

From here you can now copy the pixel code. To put it on your site you insert it into the header of each page.

If you first reaction is “What the f…. are you talking about?”, you are not alone. Your options are:

1. Send it to the person managing your site for you and they will know what to do with it.
2. If you are using WordPress, download a WordPress plugin (I use the Insert Headers and Footers plugin which you can find here).

Now, double check that it is working. There is a great Chrome plugin called Facebook Pixel Helper which you can download here. You will see it in the top right corner of your Chrome browser and will turn on when the pixel is working.

Congratulations!       … but you aren’t done yet.

Just one more thing …

3. Create some Custom Audiences

You need to create custom audiences so that Facebook can put a user in a specific custom audience whenever that person visits your marketing website for your gym. While you cannot directly get access to this information, it does allow you to then re-engage with this warm audience later.

Advertising to people who are already interested in what you are doing is much more effective and less costly than to a much larger cold audience.

First, go back to the Ads Manager but this time click on Audiences.

Next, click on the Create Audience and then Custom Audience in the drop down menu.

There are a number of ways to set up Custom Audiences including Video Engagement (something I will cover in a later post) but for now click on Website Traffic.

This will take you to the modal popup screen where you create the Custom Audience. There are a number of things to keep in mind here:

1. You can choose anyone who visits your website or people who visited specific web pages. You can also exclude people who visit certain pages. To keep it simple for your first audience just click on the first option.

2. There is also a setting that allows you to set the duration of the audience. In other words, how recent the person visited your page in order to be a part of that custom audience. Since you are just laying ground work for future ads, I would set it for the longest period possible (180 days).

3. Give it a name and click “Create Audience”.

Once these three things are in place, you will be building warm audiences who are much more likely to convert.

I hope that this will be helpful with your gym marketing. If you want more tips and content, join our Gym Marketing page on Facebook here. If you want to manage all your leads try OnRamp … click here to request to join our Early Access.

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

Thanks,

Mike

ps. One other thing … I mentioned above why Likes are important. You can also target ads towards Fans of Your Page And Their Friends. This is a great way to build leads