The top 8 must-have pieces of equipment for independent Gyms and Fitness Clubs to appeal to all age ranges, including the increasingly valuable 50+ demographic!

 

Are you a forward-thinking independent gym or fitness club owner? Do you pride yourself in always considering what steps are necessary to ensure the growth of your facility, the happiness of your members, and the future of your business?

Then our blog today is for you! 

Today we will be going over one of the fundamentals of any independent gym or fitness club operation, equipment!

But we will be viewing equipment, something often taken for granted and viewed too simplistically, and examining it through a new lens! 

And that lens is to focus on the demographics that will be using your equipment. Specifically, we will be focusing on what will appeal to the more low-intensity workout-oriented older demographics. 

While there are obviously many factors (some of which we have already explored!) that help determine whether a gym or fitness club will appeal to certain demographics, one that is oft overlooked is the actual equipment within a gym. There is a habit of viewing gym equipment as a relatively static entity within a gym or fitness club. One that requires repair, updating, and occasionally replacing, but rarely anything else.

As such, we’ve put together this list of must-have equipment that favours older potential members, as well as those interested in more Recovery-based or low-intensity workouts. 

 

Just want to see the list of our must-have equipment. We won’t keep you waiting any longer!

Type 1! Step Machine & Pedal Exercisers

Type 2! Stationary Bicycle

Type 3! Rowing Machine

Type 4! Balance Trainer & Resistance Bands

Type 5! Pressurised or Low-Impact Treadmill

Type 6! Appropriate Dumbbell Sets

Type 7! Cross Trainer/Elliptical Machines

Type 8! Training Bench

Type 1! Step Machine & Pedal Exercisers

The key strength of the Step Machine has always been twofold.

First, it is a surprisingly effective, relatively low-impact workout that can be utilised at the pace the user desires. 

The second? Equally as important but just as overlooked. Nearly everyone knows how to take a step and is capable and confident of taking one. It is a satisfying and safe piece of equipment that people can easily operate while listening to whatever they want.

When someone who is interested in low-intensity exercise walks into a gym or fitness club for the first time, this is one of the pieces of equipment they will be looking for.

 

The same is true of pedal exercisers. They are a piece of equipment sometimes more commonly associated with private use than gyms or fitness clubs, but we have found they make a great addition to a low-intensity workout area.

 

 

Type 2! Stationary Bicycle

There is a similar logic that can be applied to our second piece of equipment. The Stationary bicycle!

Low impact, eminently popular, simple and safe to use. 

Cycling is becoming an increasingly popular method of transport for older people the world over, and stationary cycling offers all the benefits with none of the risk (or actually going anywhere!). 

While it is, of course, a staple of gyms and fitness clubs. When it comes to Stationary bicycles it is about asking two key questions.

1. Does a gym or fitness club have enough stationary bicycles?

2. Are they being marketed and associated with low-intensity workouts through social media, classes, and posters?

 

Type 3! Rowing Machine

While more of a surprise hit, you only need to ask a gym regular to get confirmation that the venerable rowing machine is a hit amongst the venerable demographics.

When viewed through our existing criteria though, the appeal is not surprising. Once again it is a relatively simple and safe exercise machine that can be operated at the pace of the user. After an explosion in popularity due to technological advances in the 1980s, it would seem that many from that era are still using the noble rowing machine to this day!

 

 

Type 4! Balance Trainers and Resistance Bands

Our next one is not even traditionally thought of as gym or fitness club equipment, even less so than the pedal exerciser. Some would argue that would mean exclusion from the list. However, we would argue that this makes its inclusion all the more important.

Though not exactly machines, balance trainers and resistance bands have become a hit among beginners and upwards when it comes to low-intensity and recovery workouts.

Resistance bands have many positives. They are simple, portable, and lightweight. Perfect for more senior members. 

They also focus on areas that many older gym members are very interested in. Muscular health, blood flow, and most importantly (and perhaps obviously, given the name) balance! 

Given their relatively inexpensive nature compared to other, heavyweight gym equipment. We think that these should be high on the list of purchases for any low-intensity push a gym or fitness club attempts!

 

 

Type 5! Pressurised or Low-Impact Treadmill

From one end of the spectrum to the other, this next piece of equipment certainly isn’t inexpensive but it will certainly be impactful! 

Or should that be not impactful? The goal of the Pressurised, anti-gravity, or low-impact treadmill is to reduce the impact that running or walking on a treadmill has on the body. 

While this may seem of trifling concern to some, for those with injuries or impediments such a treadmill can be a massive selling point. 

The quality of life improvement that such a piece of equipment can bring to certain demographics and gym members is so potent. For that reason alone it made it on the list!

 

 

Type 6! Appropriate Dumbbell Sets

Much like the stationary bicycles, this tip isn’t so much about getting dumbbells, or a perceived lack of them. 

Once again the focus is more on their availability within any given gym or fitness club, and how they are being utilised, marketed, and promoted within that fitness environment. 

The availability of lighter weight dumbbells is often not sufficient. Some gyms we’ve worked with have addressed this by having dedicated dumbbell racks within their lower-intensity area with specifically lighter weights. 

This is a fantastic idea! As it helps set the tone for the area as well as providing plenty of additional weights of an appropriate weight. This makes it easier to incorporate them into classes, promotional material, and events.

How the equipment is presented is half the battle!

 

Type 7! Cross Trainer/Elliptical Machines

Another modern classic that needs little introduction. The cross-trainer, also known as an elliptical trainer has the potential to be the poster child for low-impact exercise. Designed and released in the 1990s, it doesn’t have the same pedigree as the rowing machine or the treadmill, but it is ready to be introduced to a new (or rather, old) generation. 

 

Designed to fulfill the role of a treadmill but without the repetitive leg/foot impact or noise, the cross-trainer is a perfect piece of equipment to advertise low-intensity, life-improving exercise regimes and training classes.

While, to the uninitiated, it can initially look like a mass of moving parts, we all know that the cross-trainer is easy to teach and operate.

It is becoming more common that cross-trainers are just purchased and deployed within a gym or fitness club because it is ‘the type of equipment all gyms have’. This is done without reflection on why it should be purchased and how it should be promoted.

If we do actions simply because it is what ‘all gyms do’, we risk missing the reasoning that this equipment caught on in the first place. Perhaps more importantly still, we risk not being able to correctly message and promote that equipment quickly to members.

 

 

Type 8! Training Bench

The last piece of equipment on our list isn’t a new innovation like the pressurised/anti-gravity treadmills, nor is it a classic fitness machine like the stationary bicycle or rowing machine. In fact, it isn’t a machine at all.

You know already because it is the section title, it is the noble training bench. 

If not saving the best until last, what we did was save perhaps the most overlooked until last.

Training benches often get forgotten, they become part of the furniture.

Which is almost forgivable…After all, they are furniture.

But as anyone who has spent time in a gym (or more vexingly, trying to work out at home without one) knows, they are incredibly useful. The Swiss-army knife of gym equipment.

They might not do everything for you, but they provide an incredible amount of versatility and support. With a bit of training or instruction, these can become a staple of low-impact workouts, allowing older members to access and train muscles that would otherwise take significant strain to train. 

 

Interested in how to innovate and grow your independent Gym or Fitness Club?

 

If our article has got you questioning and reflecting on parts of independent gym and fitness club management that sometimes go unchallenged, you are in the right place! 

The latest Gym Owner’s Workshop conference will be covering equipment, where to purchase it, why to purchase it and how we promote it for independent gym owners across Ireland and the United Kingdom! 

 

Taking place at The Talbot Hotel Stillorgan, Dublin The Gym Owners Workshop is a focal point for fitness industry knowledge, specialising in techniques and knowledge for independent gym and fitness club owners. 

Building on the momentum of the Gym Owners Workshop 2022, the 2023 event is promising to be even better, with more talks and more sponsors!

Our partners for the event over at Balance Leisure will be giving an event-leading talk entitled “How to Navigate Suppliers and Contracts To Get The Best Deal On Your Gym Equipment”

If our article has convinced you that a re-examination of how your business approaches gym equipment then don’t delay, tickets are live now!

 

Many gym and club owners are unaware, but emails are still the number one way to secure new members.That’s right, it’s not social media or even on-site sales, but emails which convert the most prospects into paying members.

In this podcast, we’re joined by The Fit Club Redditch owners Grant and Toby, as well as Ashbourne Membership Management marketer Harvey; to show you how you can make the most of your email database during lockdown.

We’ll walk through how you can continue to grow your database, clean it up so you are always targeting the right members for your club, and finally, we’ll help you come up with fresh ideas for what emails you should be sending in the first place.

This is the perfect podcast for any gyms or health clubs who are still using gmail and outlook as their primary email systems.

It’s time to get a proper CRM, customer relationship manager, and truly start to target the right members who are actually going to be sold a membership to your club.

In this episode, we’ll help you discover:

• What emails you should be sending to keep your members engaged
• Why you should cut out your gmail/outlook and earn more money with a pro CRM system
• How you should split up your email database to accurately rarget the right customers for your club
• Methods to keep your email database growing even during COVID
• The importance of cleaning up your emails and why this is the perfect time

 

Remember to join The Gym Owner’s Forum facebook group for even more support from gym owners across the UK and Ireland.

If you’re interested in more direct help for your club, collecting your direct debits, to handling your marketing, then get in touch with Ashbourne today for a free demo and discussion. You can also find loads of helpful free resources on our site.

 

Listen To The Gym Owner’s Forum Podcast

You can listen to the podcast here, or find it on your favourite podcast host. We’re available on everything from Google Podcasts, to Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

 

 

The Podcast Transcript

 

Grant:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the next episode of The Gym Owners Forum podcast. I’m Grant Harrison from Ashbourne Membership Management and The Fit Club. Joining me again is Toby and Harvey.

How are you doing guys? Alright?

 

Toby:

Pleasure to be here, thanks Grant.

 

Harvey:

I’m very well. I’m very well. I’m very excited for this episode. This is the data management episode, I’ve wanted to from the start.

 

Toby:

Playing to your strengths. You have to say.

 

Harvey:

Indeed.

 

Grant:

So today we’re talking about managing your membership and taking, taking charge of your database. We’ve got obviously plans to do other podcasts involving getting new members, keeping them, but while we were in lockdown, people have renovated the club.

People have put in different things, new bought new equipment painted, but some clubs have neglected the fundamentals of getting their database cleaned up so they can target certain groups of members. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. How to make the most of your database, manage your membership better and move the club forward.

So we’re going to break down today’s episode into three main parts. Firstly, we’re going to talk about what kind of content you should be sending to your members. Secondly, how to keep your database growing.

Obviously, even though the clubs are closed, what you can be doing to generate leads, getting more people into that database, and then thirdly, tidying up your database and how to keep it clean, moving forward. Okay. So let’s get straight into it.

So what sort of content have we been sending out from the fit club, Toby?

 

Toby:

We’ve been automating a lot, throughout the first lockdown and in the one in November, we create a lot of content. We bang on all the time about scheduling and the importance of scheduling.

So, most stuff you can imagine is relevant to gym members. You know, you’ve got your workouts, your recipes, updates with the club, anything you’re doing, they’re interested in, it’s all good stuff, but it’s about setting it up. So it’s easy for you. So, spend a day, scheduling your content, spend a day filming and then send that out to your members in a staggered way.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, Toby is spot on with scheduling. So I primarily as we’ve talked about it in a previous podcast, but a lot of the Fit Clubs plan was to just basically continue doing as many live classes as possible and opening up to everyone, which was great for, for tax reasons, as you mentioned in a previous episode, but it’s also just a great way to market the club because we were going to keep some personal trainers on and it makes sense that if they’re going to do a workout class, we may as well basically just use it as a free advert for the club.

So, well, the good thing about that is though that we could schedule that, basically, as locked started and then I went through and just wrote like 50 emails, one reminding everybody each day that workout classes were going to happen and that’s just a great way to keep people in your database coming back and keeping the gym in mind, whether or not they’re a member, whether they’re a member or they’re just someone whose kind of signed up for your newsletter in the past and hasn’t really thought about you in a few months and now obviously during a lockdown, they’re getting blasted with you and they’re like, wow, that’s a great gym. Maybe I should join that when lock downs over.

Another thing we’ve tried is actually we’ve been doing like some pre-sales it’s, we found personally that we’ve been selling three month contracts and three month, sort of vouchers pretty well, which has been a good way to go because we found that people weren’t really interested in signing up for year long contracts right now, because things are a bit unstable. So once again we’ve been giving a lot of free things away, but we’ve also been using our database to actually make pre-sales by the time the gym opens and then of course we’ve had loads of Facebook groups going where we’ve been showing live classes and doing sort of a bit more, one-to-one sort of talking to people who are members.

So we’ve been trying to get people into that because at the moment we’ve got loads of people in our database who have never touched our social media and the other way round, we’ve got loads of people on our social media, who’ve never been in our email database. So we’re just kind of using this to try and get as many people into one place as possible and connect them into the fit club ecosystem. I guess you could call it. So I would say those are the three main things we’ve been doing and as you can tell, we’ve scheduled a lot of it ahead, so you can really get a lot of work done. If you just spend a day just writing emails, as long as you plan ahead,

 

Toby:

The prepaid stuff’s very good. I mean, you give someone a promise of something when they get back for a good price and you’re generally going to be able to create some revenue now, which is really good. One thing I’ve seen from not so many gyms, but I think it could be applied to a gym is like a sweepstakes on your social media channels, where you have 50 numbers say, and 10 pounds buys you a number.

And then you add to enter the sweepstakes and if your number selected, you win years free membership. You can do that, you know, you can scale it up however you want, but it’s a quick way of earning some revenue for your club. I don’t know how dire your situation is, but you know, you can reapply this stuff and play with it, tinker with it as much as you want.

 

Harvey:

I agree as well. It’s a great way of getting people from your emailing system back onto your social media. If you say, come and join the Facebook page because we’ve got loads of exciting stuff going on.

 

Grant:

If you, if, if you’re struggling for things to put on and what content, there’s so many videos already out there. So if you’re looking at workout videos rather than having to come up with your own stuff, just use one of the millions of videos that’s, on YouTube and look at how many views, look how successful their videos are and then I won’t say copy the video, but if you can make your own interpretation of it, then you, haven’t got to come up with another 50 exercises and another 20 things to do at home. You’ve already got that content there and you’re just essentially rebranding it.

 

Toby:

It’s true and a lot of the time you are the expert and stuff that you might not think is that interesting or that special, your warmup stretch, your finisher when you’re doing exercise and stuff like that. It’s actually very interesting to someone at home. That’s not been at the gym for a while. So it’s worth recording this stuff and you know, just almost a life for the gym user, kind of a take on it, where everything you do is filmed and updated to your social media, to your email channels. It’s all good stuff.

 

Harvey:

Well, I think the thing about, cause what we’ll, I think we’ll move on to the other database bits in a moment, but it’s really the like the kind of content and kind of emails that you should be sending people.

I find that I’m sure you do Toby that there’s just, there’s so many people who are worried about sending emails because they feel like if you send an email that somebody might unsubscribe and I think a lot of gyms kind of, I think a lot of the gyms and businesses in general have to get over that because the first thing is that if somebody hates your email so much that you send two and they go, Oh, I can’t bear standing. These people, they’re a bad email person anyway.

But on top of that, it’s more, it’s more about what you’re sending them. I think most people unsubscribed when they receive loads of sales emails. Like if you just sent loads of pre-sales email saying sign up for three months, sign up for three months. People are going to get rid of you. But if somebody is receiving a free workout class every day, I cannot imagine anyone except for someone who really despises receiving emails going-

 

Grant:

But they’re not going to, but they’re not going to become a member anyway. So what does it.

 

Harvey:

Precisely, but anybody’s not going to be like, oh, I hate all this free content or somebody who stop sending me all these free things.

 

Toby:

And after the lockdown as well. What we’ve been through, anyone on your live member list knows about that. That knows that they’re paying for the gym at the moment. Yeah, there is. There’s no hidden members. There’s no sleeping members anymore. Like if you think there are, then you’re just wrong. Unfortunately, absolutely. That is a thing of the past. Now-

 

Grant:

Sending an email, that was always a worry to a club to that database because they’re worried that they’re going to send out an email, 200 people aren’t using the club and they will then cancel because it reminds them that they’ve still got that gym membership. So it wakes up the sleepers. What we’ve noticed that Ashbourne is that clubs just don’t have any sleepers anymore.

Everyone’s been contacted about their membership and the payments and how it’s going to. So any sleepers that were there are now gone. So you know that your database, your database, you can send emails to and they’re not going to council because they already have. So it’s use it now.

 

Toby:

And that brings us, brings us nicely on to the point about the high quality members on your database. So those who are still paying or had frozen their membership are committed members. These are your superstar members. You know, they’re not going to leave you in a global pandemic. They’re never going to leave you really.

So now it’s the time to recognize them, to reward them and what we did in the first lockdown, which has gone down a massively well was change or the status of all members that carried on paying to foundation members and they got a series of perks, like a discount in our store and a few other bits. And it’s just gone down massively well, I don’t think we’ve lost any of those members. There’s and there’s about 500 of them.

It’s not a small group of people. We’ve not lost any of those members and it’s just recognizing those on your database that are very loyal to the club.

 

Grant:

Yeah, and let them know this stuff and let them know more than once because they might miss the first email.

 

Harvey:

I missed the first email as well. Yeah,

 

Grant:

And let them know that. Yeah, absolutely. Let them know that they are the foundation members and we, we valued them in the first lock down. We value them moving forward. And these are the privileges that they get by, by, by supporting us through it.

So obviously that’s also bringing on to keeping the database growing. So although the club is closed, there’s still things that we can do to, to, to increase our database, to generate leads, essentially prospects into the come. Yes, we can’t do a tour round, but we can prime them ready. So prime them ready for when we do reopen to get them to join. So things like just lead magnets and things like that on a landing page, let’s get them get that data in so that when the club does open, you are the first club on their list.

They don’t go, we’ve got 20 gyms to choose from. Which one? No, no. I’ve been receiving stuff from the Fit Club all the way through. They’ve looked after me, even though I’m not even a member, I need to join a gym. The first one off the top of my head here, is the fit club. Make it obvious for them. So there are other things. What other things Harvey have we ever been doing to, to grow our database and our prospect list?

 

Toby:

It’s a good point about staying on people’s good sides. I mean, we’re still receiving Google reviews about how good the gym is. Even though the gym is closed because you know, people just made it a part of their lives and now that they have a bit of time off, they’re like, oh, this gym’s still giving me loads of stuff. Now I’ll actually review it. So you’ve, you know, that that goodwill stays and sometimes can actually be amplified by the fact that you’re giving more when you don’t have to.

 

Grant:

And show when you get a good or not a good Google review, but when you get in the good Google reviews, share it. Talk about Google, Google as a mouthful with it, share it, explain, tell your prospects what your members think of your club and they can feel part of that community too.

 

Toby:

Absolutely. So yeah, in terms of, in terms of ways to keep growing, it will. So there’s some, as a ways there’s free and paid and everybody prefers free, but there are still some paid ways to get leads. Once again, this is kind of based on your gym’s budget. It’s, you know, how, how much is a customer worth to you and this is dependent on how much you charge per year. Obviously if your gym costs a thousand pounds to be part of, then each lead is worth about a thousand pounds to you, if you can convert them.

So, but what we’ve been doing is we’ve been all of this free stuff. All of these live classes, we’ve actually been running some pretty low cost, social media ads on Facebook and Instagram, which is basically just aimed at the reddish area. Obviously we don’t want people finding us in sort of Edinburgh, because then when the gym reopens, they’re pretty useless to us.

 

Harvey:

In terms of the community.

 

Toby:

Exactly and unless we open a digital platform, they’re pretty much useless for now. So we’re aiming it at the Reddit area, people who probably would never have heard of us and we’re offering these free services and it’s not for a price that literally says these are some free at home workouts from your local area, because I feel like the local element kind of, I think it resonates with people a bit more than say Fitbit or something saying, hi, we’re a massive conglomerate, come and look at some free.

 

Harvey:

We’ll harvest your data.

 

Toby:

Exactly. So like play on that edge. And then you simply ask, even if it’s in a Facebook group to get access to these live classes, you can get them onto the website, get them signing up for something you’ve got their email and your database and then they can enjoy all the content from you.

And then of course, there’s, there’s pre-sales. Once again, you can same sort of Facebook ad, but focused on selling three months when the gym opens and then on top of that as well, I’m sure you guys have got some, some other things to say about this. It’s not just about coming up with ideas. It’s also going back and just sort of seeing how you get people’s emails in the first place.

Like, cause you know, we have sort of email captures all over our website. So if somebody goes on a certain page, it pops up saying, hey, do you want to be part of our newsletter? Here’s a promotion for you and I go on a lot of gym websites and we make a lot of gym websites for people and so many people don’t have these, so this is a good time to review your website and just be like, how am I actually getting emails? Because your website existing, doesn’t give you emails.

People need a place to actually put that email in and they need a reason to, not just, Oh, could you send me some spam, please? I love spam.

 

Grant:

But the easiest way is, as you say, here’s, here’s some lockdown workouts or tips for fit nutritional tips to lock down or recipes to try during locked down, get them, have a landing page, get their email address and then ping them the goods, ping them the goods.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, I mean obviously growing your database, one thing, but the social media following is also now part of that database, or there’ll be Facebook and Instagram, whatever own the data, which is annoying me, is what it is. But a couple of ways to grow that, I think I do bang on a lot about giving away stuff free, but it does tend to work.

 

Grant:

It’s modern marketing.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, absolutely. So your Instagram competition, you just giving away a year’s membership again or something that you have in stock that you really need to get rid of. It’s all good stuff. Tag, every, each friend you tag in the comments, counts as an entry, powerful again, and they have to, they can enter, but they have to follow the page.

Instant new followers, instant new likes, instant engagement and then one that Harvey showed me yesterday is a website called viral, which is worth checking out. It’s you like set up competitions where members earn points, which are configured by you towards prizes. Again, picks by you by sharing content on social media. So like if you share something on Facebook, then you get one point and it automatically tallies it up and I can earn towards rewards. So it’s all automated and it’s very good. It takes, it takes it.

 

Toby:

Yeah. I mean, until we took him out, it like that, it’s an extension of your database, your social media is, but E but also that kind of things like up viral, you can say to people on social media, put in your email, into our website in order to get access to the rules of the competition, because it’s, you know, it’s just a great way to sort of make everything, just basically get as much data from any names, you know, as possible.

 

Grant:

When, when you’ve got that email address from the members, well, you’ve got to cultivate that relationship. You can’t just send them one thing and then wait till you reopen. And then you’ve got to keep sending them stuff all the way, and it can take a lot of work to send them an email a couple of days later, send them another email. So what we do is we use our prospect management and lead generation module. So the landing page is built within the software. The lead goes straight in and then a series of automations just trigger automatically. So we’ve set up about 10, 15 emails in this prospect management. So once the lead goes in, they receive the, the first email with the diet advice or the new, the workouts.

Couple of days later, they automatically then send, receive the, the next email, a bit more new information a couple of days later, again, more information and so on and so on, but I don’t have to sit at the computer and send that information out. It’s all done automatically. And that saves us so much time, especially when we’ve got leads coming in one, coming in at three o’clock in the morning and another one coming in at seven o’clock in the morning, another one coming in at two in the afternoon to sit there and be on the ball with it just takes too much time. So it’s all automated. As a matter of what time somebody enters the lead generation module, the automation just kicks in and kicks in and kicks in.

 

Harvey:

Absolutely. And the good thing about our prospect management system as well is, is yeah, we, we, we have a system where we just have automatic emails going out and we set it so that different automatic emails go out based on sort of how far through people are in the chain. So if somebody signs up a week ago, they would get an automatic email saying, here’s all the classes we’ve done up until now. If they sign up, now they get even more of a less. So it’s just an instant way of, you know, you don’t have to wait until you send that next email blast. You can instantly give someone like a reason start visiting your website and seeing how you add value. And also just, just

 

Grant:

The dividing it up. If somebody comes in, because they’ve completed the landing page that says they’re interested in nutritional tips, you can target the email, the follow-up emails after that, based on nutritional advice, if somebody has said workouts from home, their emails, their subsequent emails will be about different exercises. They can do, you know, you, haven’t got to just send the same bulk emails to each group.

 

Toby:

It goes, yeah, it goes into how much do you know how well do you know your members? So, you know, if you use a profit management system like that, you can create a, a fact finding campaign where you ask them a series of questions. And then depending on their answers, they get certain tags as grant says. So, you know, you’re not sending kids swimming class information to a 60 year old bloke. You only attend six spinning classes, you know? Yeah.

 

Grant:

So, so essentially segmenting your database and sending targeted messages to targeted groups,

 

Harvey:

Which I think brings us very nicely onto the part three, clean up your database and segment your database.

 

Grant:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Cause it’s like, if you don’t know these people who come from this landing page and these people are come from this landing page, how do you know what information you’re going to send them? So that’s all part of the, the, the cleaning up the database

 

Harvey:

Completely. And as Toby says, if you’re concerned about sending too many emails to someone, then segmenting the database is even better because it means you can actually send more emails without annoying everyone. Like, as you say, 60 year old, Bob Hawkins, doesn’t want to hear about, sort of kids swimming classes that happen every Friday and that might be a reason why he ends subscribes. So it’s yeah, it’s cause cleaning up the database. We’re going to talk about more about who you should, moving people around and deleting people.

Deleting people’s a pretty good way of cleaning up your database. Especially if you have like user limits. If you have like a limit to how many emails you can have in your database, it’s pointless you sending thousands of emails out to people that are costing you money, who aren’t responding at all. But on top of that, like cleaning up the database also involves segmenting people, knowing what people are actually using your gym for and what they’re finding interesting about it.

 

Toby:

For sure. I agree.

 

Harvey:

And another great one as well as to another great way to clean up the database is to actually stop the members receiving emails for people who aren’t members. So you can have people, you have your sales emails and then you have emails for your members. So great time to just stop members, receiving sales emails.

 

Toby:

The way we do it is we have a clear line between our prospects. We have the prospect management system, and then as soon as they are a member, they’re live members. So they move into that system, which is our live database. And then we obviously hit them with the relevant stuff, more salesy nurture type stuff for the prospects and then club information, secondary spend, and just nurturing in a kind of different way to help maintain them as members once they are signed up. So there’s a clear split, which is crucial.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, completely. I mean, we’ve got this kind of set up automatically because we use the Ashbourne system, but on your end you can, I mean, you can do a manual reviews. You can cobble something together, which is the problem with not having a unified system, but, but yeah, like this is the perfect time to do it because, I’m plus as well as, you know, always good to not send the members, the really great deal that the gym memberships were actually 50% off the next week. Cause that’s a good way to upset people that lose money.

 

Grant:

I think, I think in the next couple of episodes, we’re going to talk about the member’s journey, but we’ll also talk about the prospect’s journey as well. So today is more about cleaning up that database and being ready to send stuff to the right people. But we’ll also talk about in future episodes, the prospect journey, how a member comes in and then how you can nurture them and other things that you can do as well.

 

Harvey:

Make the whole thing watertight from start to finish.

 

Grant:

I think obviously all these things you can do manually yourself. So you can get the email address and go into your outlook and send that person an email, but it’s, it’s time consuming and hard work. So obviously using the Ashbourne system will make your life a lot easier. So we’re not here to bang on about use Ashbourne, use Ashbourne, use Ashbourne, but use Ashbourne.

 

Harvey:

Well, think, just think about yourself and put a value on your time as what I’d say, make life as easy as possible and to fill out you do need as a unified system.

 

Grant:

Absolutely. If you want to scale your, if you’ve got a club, we have a hundred members and you get in one prospect a month, then of course you could probably just automate, you could manually send out that email, but if you want to scale your club up to become a successful club where you’ve got seven, eight, nine, a thousand plus members, you cannot possibly manually send out emails all the time to your prospects. You have to have a system in place which draws the prospect in automatically then sends the emails out because you can then go on holiday. You can go away for a couple of, obviously you can’t go on holiday at the minute, but you can go. You can spend take a week off you’re off of the business and the emails will still go through and the process is automated. You lose a member of staff. A next one comes in. The process is exactly the same.

 

Harvey:

Absolutely. I mean, I think even more extreme, like if you don’t, there are a lot of gyms who are still using G-mail and Outlook and just kind of have an Excel spreadsheet of all their members. Like if you, if you still at that point and you haven’t got like an automated system, then even more seriously learn how this stuff works because if you’re not using a system like this, it is the equivalent of still using a horse and plow now when we have tractors, like just, there really is no excuse for it. And yeah it might take a couple of weeks to learn and sort out, but over time you just save yourself dozens of hours and at the end of the day, like this is, this stuff makes more money. If you can contact more people with more deals and more promotions, you, you will see an increase in your memberships.

 

Toby:

Is this a bad time to say that I use, G-mail still, alongside the prospect management system?

 

Harvey:

Yes

 

Toby:

Of course, of course.

 

Grant:

Great. Well, thanks for that guys. Appreciate your time on that and hopefully you’ve gained a bit of an insight of what you can do with your databases and cleaning it up. But let’s say for more information about how Ashbourne can help your club and help you to scale it up and improve your time management and everything like that. Just visit us at the website, which is Ashbourne High For Memberships.com or get in touch through the comments page on the forum and we’ll get in touch to show you how our systems can help your gym and we’ll, we’ll see what we can do to improve it.

 

Toby:

And if you want more consistent gym owners, forum, content, then look for gym owners, forum, on Facebook and you’ll find our Facebook group where we only let you in if you’re an actual gym owner, which makes the conversation a lot more focused, qualified.

 

Grant:

Absolutely good. Okay. Cheers guys. See you soon.

 

Harvey:

Cheers guys.

 

Toby:

See you later.

Keeping a social media page alive with content is tough for any gym or health club, especially during a lockdown.

Fitness is one of the most popular categories of social media that people engage with, and while there’s an infinite amount of content to post, nutritional advice to offer, exercise regimes to recommend and fitness memes to post; so many health clubs and gyms are failing when it comes to keeping their gym social media active and content rich.

While there are many things to be posted, as a health club owner, it can be hard to find the time to come up with ideas and even harder to find the time to schedule your social media posts to your members.

In this podcast, we’re joined by Ashbourne marketing manager Harvey, and The Fit Club Redditch gym co-owners Grant and Toby, to discuss gym social media and give you some tips and hints about how you can keep your social media fresh and earning you members throughout lockdown and beyond.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Fresh content ideas for you to put on your club’s social media
• The numbers you actually need to track to see if your content is working
• How you can easily recycle content to triple the amount of social media you can post
• Which social media platforms you should be using
• How you can schedule your posts so you can front load all of your content

 

Remember to join The Gym Owner’s Forum facebook group for even more support from gym owners across the UK and Ireland.

If you’re interested in more direct help for your club, collecting your direct debits, to handling your marketing, then get in touch with Ashbourne today for a free demo and discussion. You can also find loads of helpful free resources on our site.

 

Listen To The Gym Owner’s Forum Podcast

You can listen to the podcast here, or find it on your favourite podcast host. We’re available on everything from Google Podcasts, to Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

 

 

The Podcast Transcript

 

Grant:

Okay. Hi everyone. Welcome to the third episode of The Gym Owners Forum Podcast. We did have plans to do a podcast relating to attracting more members, retaining the members, increasing the yield per member, but as we’re into our third lockdown, it’s not really relevant at the moment.

So, we thought we’d do an episode on social media and things that we are doing at The Fit Club, to engage our members and keep them active, keep them engaged, keep them paying. So, we just thought we’d share some of our ideas. Joining me again today, is Toby Wassell, fellow gym owner with me at The Fit Club and Ashbourne product development manager. And Harvey, our resident marketing expert.

How you doing guys? All right?

 

Toby:

Very well. Thanks Grant.

 

Harvey:

Good to be here, as ever. Thanks for the invite Grant.

 

Grant:

It’s a pleasure. You’ve made it to episode three, Harvey. Well done.

 

Toby:

Still on probation though. Don’t get too excited.

 

Grant:

Make sure you keep coming up with these new ideas.

Okay. So, we just thought we’d share what we’re doing on social media with The Fit Club. So again, it’s things that you can put into your club and hopefully engage the members a little bit more, keep them active. I know it’s hard going into the third lockdown to do it over and over and over, the same thing.

So, we just thought we’d try and spice it up, do a few new things, and just keep the members as active as we can. So, typically we’ve been doing a few new things on Zoom, haven’t we? For instance, we’ve been using all the platforms that we’ve-

 

Harvey:

Yeah, absolutely. So, talking about social media, it’s obviously the only link that a lot of your members have to the club during this time. It’s the only bit they’re going to see of you. So, it’s important that you do take control of it and make sure that you are using it regularly.

Yeah. So, you talking about Zoom, we’ve got obviously all the live stream stuff. Thought I’d start with just the actual social media platforms, your Facebooks, Instagrams, Twitters, and stuff like that. So, it’s important to use them all or as many as you can, but it’s important to strike a balance between reaching a wide audience across multiple channels, but also not overstretching yourself.

I know that we found that it’s difficult to keep up regular posting, if you’re using too many. So, with Ashbourne we used to have a Twitter, and it never got updated, it never got maintained, and it was just a waste of time. It just turned into an extra cost and extra things to look out. So, it’s important to make sure that you’re just doing the bare minimum to hit as many people as possible.

 

Toby:

On that note, I think, do two, well.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the main thing for me is, Facebook and Instagram are obviously connected. So, anything you post on Facebook, provided you’ve got it linked to your Instagram, will be posted on the other channel. So, that’s easy and they’re the most two popular things.

You’re hitting for me, an older audience with Facebook and then a younger one with Instagram, both are very popular amongst gyms and fitness people.

So, I think they’re the two absolute, bread-and-butter, have to do them channels. Email hits a different group again, a lot of the same people, but a lot of other people only look at their email. So, they’re the three that are absolute for me, essential, that you need to be updating all the time and sharing consistent messages. And through our view-

 

Grant:

I think what you’re saying is, do a few things really well rather than do lots of things badly. If you can really hammer the point on the main platforms and make it a good production, it’s better than doing an average production, across lots of channels.

 

Harvey:

Completely, I think one of the strengths, as well as which… Because the big issue that I see with people that are running multiple social medias, is they want to schedule stuff. And what that used to entail, is you’d have to use stuff like Hootsuite and all these extra third parties to schedule stuff. And usually you don’t want to pay for that. So, you hit your limit and then you have to start paying for it.

So, as Toby mentioned, because Facebook and Instagram are now linked, if you Google, Facebook Creator Studio, it takes you to an area of Facebook where you can now just schedule all of your Facebook and Instagram posts from the same database, from the same dashboard. And it’s all connected!

So, especially if you choose Facebook and Instagram as your two big ones, you’re hitting both of those different audiences, but at the same time, you can now just schedule everything in one place without having to go to Hootsuite to do your LinkedIn or your Twitter stuff.

 

Grant:

You’ve been scheduling everything on Zoom, haven’t you Toby?

 

Toby:

Yeah. So, this is what I’ve been using. So, Facebook just added this and it is really useful for the Zoom links, which we started doing our live classes on. We’ll go into why we’ve started using zoom later. But yeah, just getting all the links for your recurring Zoom classes set up on a schedule on Facebook, to be posted 15 minutes before the class is due to start. And then, I set them up for the week and it’s just good to go. It just runs itself, which just… Yeah. Obviously, requires no management and I can do it at my own leisure.

 

Grant:

So, when you actually then go and film the class, it’s already done for you. You just click one button.

 

Toby:

Yeah, exactly. And also what’s really useful, I don’t have to be at the club anymore. We didn’t really want to give everyone access to the Facebook page. So, we used to have to go down to the club, set up the Facebook live stream and be there. Now that it’s on Zoom, we can just have someone else host the meeting. And yeah, they just go down to the club or in that front room and just film it, yeah.

 

Grant:

And they only need access to Zoom, not the entire-

 

Toby:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Grant:

Yeah. We don’t want to be giving all of our instructors access to all the Facebook pages and everything like that. Who knows what will be posted on there? So, you said about having that plan and the schedule of your classes. So, it’s also really important to have that plan and timetable for your members, so they know what’s coming up. If you’re doing it ad hoc, right? At some point this week, we’ll be doing a video of something. Then the members are going to be, “Well, we’ll see.” But, if they know that Monday at 9:00, they get Zumba, Tuesday at 5:00, they get legs, bums and Tums. I think that’s that’s important. So, they know where they stand.

 

Toby:

Exactly. We run it just like a normal class timetable. Send it out at the start of the week. And then, they know where to go for the classes.

 

Grant:

You said, we put a live… So, we do the live classes, don’t we? But then, for those that have missed it, then the recording goes out as well, so people can catch up at their leisure.

 

Toby:

Yeah, the recordings were a difficult one with this because, the reason we moved to Zoom was because Facebook was… It was good, it posted the recordings on Facebook, but it would mute certain parts, the problem was with the music copyright, it’s got a very good algorithm for picking that stuff up on Facebook. So, it’ll automatically mute parts of the video.

And actually with Zoom, what we started to do was download the video and post on Facebook. But then, again, the problem was it mutes certain parts of the video.

So, now what we’ve done is either post the Zoom link to the recording on Facebook so that the member can just click on it and watch on Zoom’s platform on their browser. And then, also we’ve set up a YouTube channel. YouTube has much more relaxed attitudes towards copyright.

You will get little notifications coming up saying that this might be copyrighted, but I mean, we’ve had videos banned in North Korea and Syria, which we don’t have any members there at the moment. And if we do have to apologize to them now, but yeah, it’s a lot more relaxed and yeah, it’s been a lot more hassle-free so far, touch wood.

 

Grant:

Yeah. Yeah. The last thing you want is to put all that effort in only for halfway through the video, it’ll be muted out and nobody can understand what they’re supposed to be doing next. So, yeah. Good. So, we’ve done it for our members that are continuing to pay and are frozen, but we’ve also opened it up to use this to attract new members and potential clients.

Obviously, the gym is closed, but we’re trying to attract as many new people as we can. So, we use it in this group. So, people that haven’t used the club before, they’re now open to it as well, but we’ve got to get their data. It’s all well and good just saying, “Yeah, come and join and view the video.”

But for us, we need to use those as leads. So, anybody that now does it obviously has to give us their email address and contact details, so that we can follow up with them. And as we get closer to reopening, we can use that data. How are we collecting that data?

 

Harvey:

So, the two best systems to do it are, either take people to your website, to fill in a form. And then, once you’ve got their email address, email them a link to the group. Obviously the group is free. They could find the group if they wanted to, but the idea is it creates this idea that they have to give you their data to get to the group.

The second best way, which we’ve been discussing is, so Facebook groups, you can ask people questions, before they join.

And of course, one of those questions can be, “What’s your email address? Do you want us to contact you on, or what’s your phone number?” Or something like that. So, the thing to remember is that once you let someone into a group, that information disappears effectively.

So, the best way we’ve found to do it is that we ask them, “What’s your email address?” In the group. Before we allow them in, we then take a note of that information, put it into our CRM, and then we let them through.

The best way to do it, if you want to remain completely GDPR compliant, which I’m sure we will want to, is to do it in two ways. So, you can get them onto your website, get their email address so that you can send them the link to the group.

And then, one of your questions to let them into the group is, “What is the email address that you used?” Because, what it allows you to do is firstly, you can compare notes to see who’s actually going from the email to the group, but also it allows you to double check their email and then email them later because they’ve already agreed for you to have their email in the previous point.

So, there’s two good ways of doing it really, you can either take them straight to the group, or you can make them fill in a form beforehand.

 

Grant:

That, filling in a form. I’ve just signed up to a Tony Robbins master class. And he’s got about 600,000 people on his closed Facebook group, and that’s exactly how he did it. He had his landing page, he did his Facebook ad or whatnot, directed us to the landing page, filled in the form. Soon as it then says, “Right, now you joined the Facebook group,” and it asks you the email address that you’ve used on that landing page. It’s almost getting that information twice from you. So, if it works for him, it’s going to work for you.

 

Harvey:

I think, whenever pretty much any business or even any freelancer or anyone, the big problem they have with social media is they just don’t know what to publish. But, I think the way Toby and Grant talking about doing all their classes through this, the good thing about that is it takes the onus of needing to come up with content, off you. Because, if you were going to host 30 classes during a week anyway, you now have 30 Facebook posts.

 

Toby:

Absolutely. That always kills me. The, not being able to make up any content for your social media, because the gym has just got so much, it’s got Exercise of The Day, Workout of The Week, diet stuff, you got so much, there’s articles everywhere. So, yeah. I hate that reason, but that’s another good excuse or argument for scheduling, because you can spend the day looking for content, getting pictures from your gym and lining it all up and you’d get your head space in the right mentality of the marketer.

 

Harvey:

Exactly. I think it’s important to note as well that we’re primarily talking about Facebook and Instagram, mostly because our audience reacts on them.

They’re our best platforms and they’re connected. And obviously, Facebook are quite good. They put in a lot of the tools necessary to quickly engage and get in touch with your members. But, if you’re from a different gym where say, you are more focused on business people, they might respond better on LinkedIn and it’s unlikely, but someone might respond better on Twitter or they might even respond really well on Tiktok.

I know during this, we’re talking about Facebook and Instagram, but try to take these ideas about how you can get people involved, and then transplant it onto any of the platforms you use. We’re not saying, “Hey, you can only use Facebook.” But, if you are a gym where you have a big LinkedIn following, because you’re after a certain type of business person, then just try and use LinkedIn groups in the same way, try and engage people in these ways.

 

Toby:

You’re absolutely right. And it’s quite funny you say that because I imagine if you’re a gym on the other end of spectrum that did kids class and stuff like that. I don’t know if it’s sleazy or not to do TikTok stuff? Because, obviously kids are massive on that. But, they’ll be pestering. Oh, they’re not massive on it?

 

Grant:

No, no, they always on it.

 

Toby:

Yeah. So they’d be pestering you to, “Oh, so they’ve seen this on Jim and Sally Holloway advert, and they’re doing these kids’ classes and they’ve done it in such a way that attracts them. That’s one route in.

 

Grant:

Yeah. Well, use the platform that’s relevant to your club, as I say, in your demographic. But also, as well as just doing classes. So, we don’t want to be doing the same classes again and again. So yes, we’ve got our timetable. It’s also important to mix it up with what you do. So, we might do a full 45 minute Zumba class, but then on Tuesday it might be exercise of the day and we’ll do different things.

It might be a 10 minute lower body workout, or something like that. So, mix it up because otherwise you’ll just have the same people that come to the same class again and again. And all you’re doing is hitting the same people you’ve got. So, we’ve got over a thousand members in the gym. If we just do the same time table, we’ve only attracting the same 20, 30 people that always go to our classes.

We need to do different things to get the other guys, and the other people that are using the gym.

 

Harvey:

It’s completely right. And then of course, if you were only attracting 20 each time, if one person suddenly decides that they’re not in the mood for it, then you’re down to 19. You’re only eventually going to end up with zero people, if you keep going for the same people.

 

Grant:

Different ideas of exercises.

 

Toby:

So, the big thing with the Facebook live stuff that we found is that, originally it was going to be just for our paying members who have continued to support the club while we’re closed.

However, we realized after a chat with our accountant, that from the first lock down, the reason we were able to claim membership payments as a donation and then pay no tax, was because we weren’t providing our normal service. But, had we been providing The Fit Club live stuff in this lockdown, then we’d be providing a service and we’d be due to pay VAT on that.

So, what we’ve done is we opened it to any members, frozen, paying, and even people just from the Redditch area. So that, it still does count as a donation, but we’re also now collecting a massive amount of data. We’re providing a great service for everyone and yeah, just building up that list and hitting them as, and when we reopen.

 

Grant:

That’s really important. I think if you take anything away from this podcast, that’s the thing. Obviously, if members are continuing to pay, you have to pay the VAT on that income. However, the accountant now says that if you just provided the service to the local area, so not just members, then you don’t have to pay VAT on the money that’s coming in.

 

Toby:

It’s the same with the Ashbourne app, because it’s accessible to people that are frozen, as well as people that are paying. Again, you’re not providing any exclusive services to those that are paying. So yeah, you wouldn’t have to pay VAT on that.

 

Grant:

So, you can market and save on tax?

 

Toby:

Is that not the dream? That’s a pretty, pretty good argument for doing that.

 

Harvey:

I agree with Grant. I think, that’s the golden thing to take away.

 

Grant:

Yeah, you can turn it off now. You don’t need to listen to the rest, you’ve got the nugget that’s going to save your money so that’ll do,. So another thing that we’re going to do is we’ve just started a podcast for the gym. So, it’s got fitness tips and things like that.

So, what we’ve done is we’ve used our staff, who are the experts in the gym. So, we run the gym and own the gym, but they are the experts in the training, different types of training, nutrition and things like that. So, we’ve got them to do the podcast, so that they can tell people how they should be eating, different types of training methods and things like that. The principles of training that they’re the experts in. So, use your trainers to give information to back to your clients.

 

Harvey:

Well, while we’re talking about social media and content, I guess we can take it away from the creative side and look more at the analytics of it, as we love doing in the Digital Marketing world. So, I think this will probably be the best time.

If you’ve got a lot of your staff together, if you’ve got a bit more free time to focus on these things. Beyond just trying to come up with social media content, a good thing to do is maybe, take a look back through all of your social media and see what’s actually been responding.

See, what’s been getting responses, sees what’s been getting engagements. Because, the real worry with social media is not that you just won’t come up with any ideas, is that you’ll just be doing lots of stuff, which actually no one really cares about, and no one’s responding to.

So, good things to look out for are, in Facebook and Instagram, and most of the social medias, pretty much all of them like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can look back and see the engagements for particular posts. So, pretty boring, but you can do it in a day.

Make a spreadsheet and go back post by post and just see what time it was posted. Make a note of what the subject was, make a note if it was a video or a picture, make a note of how many people responded to it. Because you can find some interesting things.

For a few other jobs I’ve done previously, we found that posting later in the day was actually better than posting in the morning. And the idea was, we thought, “Well, we’ll get more views in the morning because the post will be up longer.”

But, what actually turned out was that most of the people on our page were Americans. So, we were posting in the evening and actually it was Americans visiting the Facebook page. We just assumed everyone was from the UK. So, possibly not relevant with the gym, but you can be surprised by when things will get engagements and what content will.

You might find that actually the stuff about classes and more of your admin stuff gets less views than the funny stuff, or things you talk about the gym, staff members putting up funny posts. And if you find out what actually is getting engagements and getting people back to your page, then that can be very effective and then getting more people to actually see the other stuff that you want them to, like the classes.

 

Grant:

Yeah, it means you also don’t waste your time. That you don’t want to be putting up classes and posts where you’re not getting any engagement. So, absolutely find out what it is. You can also ask your members, just send out a post and say, “What else do you want to see? What do you think we could do better?” They will give you the feedback. You could create a survey and send it to them.

Or you could just literally put a post on Facebook, “What other content…” We’ve just done the same in the Gym Owners Forum in our Facebook group. “What other types of podcasts would you like us to produce? What things you want us to talk about?” So, get as much feedback from the members and make your life easy because they’ll come up with the content for you.

 

Harvey:

Yeah. I mean, you can even make polls on Facebook. Just have, “Do you want to see more classes? Yes. No.” It can be as complicated or as simple as you want.

 

Grant:

Okay. Well, thanks guys. Hopefully we’ve given you a few more ideas of how you can improve your social media and things that you can do. But, I think that the main key is that tax break, Toby, that is a gem, you’ve come out with a beautiful one there. So-

 

Toby:

I found it out, to be fair. The real advise is

 

Grant:

Talk to your accountant, is the moral of the story.

 

Toby:

If you have any questions about anything that we’ve discussed today, please do get in touch with us. We’re all available on the Gym Owner’s Forum Facebook group, and we’d be happy to help with any questions you have. Yeah. Please do feel free to reach out. Through.

 

Grant:

Okay. Hopefully we’ll see you next time, when we’ll have the next episode of the Gym Owners Forum Podcast. Cheers guys.

The busiest time for the fitness industry is just around the corner, so it’s time to put your marketing into full throttle and rebuild your club after the lockdown losses, to give you a strong start to 2021.

It’s make or break, so the same old marketing tricks simply won’t do the trick. You need to focus on maximising the value from every second of the day and every single one of your members. This is no time to simply offer the lowest prices. You need to start truly competing and offer the best service out of every single gym in your area.

In this podcast, our team of gym owners and digital marketers come together to discuss their plans for growing their club (The Fit Club Redditch) over Christmas and into January 2021.

From improving websites to hosting smarter promos and focusing their social media marketing; the Ashbourne team are here to give you the most complete and honest breakdown for how you can help your club recover in time for the New Year.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Fresh ideas to help you compete with gyms in your area
• Insight into what is actually holding gym members from returning to your club
• Tips on how to drastically improve your customer journey for more sign ups over the holidays
• How you can use the rest of 2020 to maximise your efficiency in your admin and marketing your club
• Help with your social media ads and marketing

 

Remember to join The Gym Owner’s Forum facebook group for even more support from gym owners across the UK and Ireland.

If you’re interested in more direct help for your club, collecting your direct debits, to handling your marketing, then get in touch with Ashbourne today for a free demo and discussion. You can also find loads of helpful free resources on our site.

 

Listen To The Gym Owner’s Forum Podcast

You can listen to the podcast here, or find it on your favourite podcast host.

 

 

The Podcast Transcript

 

Grant:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our next episode of the gym owners forum podcast brought to you by Ashbourne Membership Management. I’m Grant Harrison again, and obviously we’ve got a few more topics to talk about this episode. Joining me again is Toby and Harvey. How you doing, Toby?

 

Toby:

I’m very well, mate. Very well. Glad to be here.

 

Grant:

Good. Harv, you all right?

 

Harvey:

I’m very well, Man. It’s good to be back for another episode.

 

Grant:

The last episode that we’ve recorded got quite a lot of positive comments. So hopefully this one will as well. So what we’re going to talk about in this episode is, after lockdown and coming into January, what marketing ideas you can do just to really drive the club forward, trying to get it in prime position come the new year. So we’ve got quite a lot to cover. Again, we’re going to try and keep the episodes quite short, about 30 minutes. So you can just jump in and jump out. But yeah, so track it on. Let’s get on with it. So Tobe, we’ve obviously put in quite a lot of ideas that we can get into the fit club ready for January. What are we looking at?

 

Toby:

So to start with, we’re saying to get the jump on your competitors. I think that’s one thing we’re looking at. Obviously, a lot of gyms in the local area. And just to start now with your memberships, with the campaigns for Christmas and January. So, one thing that we’ve started up is the online store where we’re going to be selling membership vouchers as Christmas presents and then also bundling a few products that we have in the shop anyway to make little gift hamper type things. So we’ve already seen memberships for January and for Christmas selling, even though we’re in lockdown, which is obviously brilliant. So we completely beat our competition to it and anyone that was um-ing and ah-ing about what gym, if they hadn’t heard of us, are coming our way.

 

Grant:

So we’re selling that to our existing members?

 

Toby:

Existing members for loved ones, yeah. And also done some Facebook ads with Harvey and promoting it to the wider Redditch area.

 

Harvey:

Literally the whole Redditch area.

 

Toby:

Yeah, literally the whole Redditch area. And parts of Birmingham with Harvey’s Facebook ads.

 

Harvey:

People will travel 40 miles for that gym.

 

Toby:

Absolutely. For that gym.

 

Grant:

We essentially using our members to do our marketing for us. So with that, obviously those packages are being put together. Our current members can buy the one month and a hat or whatever the package was and to give to their friends, relatives, whatever it is. And then they’re also bringing those members in for us. So that’s working.

 

Toby:

And it’s a paid in full membership. So when people sign up and come into the gym, we’ll get that email address and we’ll use them as a lead pretty much. They’ll only be entitled to a one month or three month membership. But once we put their emails into our prospect management system, they’ll get an automated program of emails, which will then convince them hopefully to join on a longer term deal and yeah, get the most out of the club.

 

Harvey:

And the good thing as well is that if you bought a thousand protein flasks…

 

Toby:

It’s hard to shift them.

 

Harvey:

Well, exactly. And if you fail to shift them, then it’s always like if you’ve got 500 left, then your next promotion is, let’s give away a flask with each membership because that thing seems really valuable on the face of it, but really, if each one’s… was it about a pound fifty?

 

Toby:

Yeah, something like that. It is the cross selling, like you say. It’s a good way of getting creative with what you’ve got in stock. Similar with what we were saying last episode about sending stock in bulk via the online store. That’s been a really popular thing where we’ve had all this stuff that’s actually going to go off in the next month, but people have been really pleased to take it off our hands. And everyone’s a winner in that situation.

 

Grant:

Okay. So we obviously, we’re trying to get the jump on all of our competitors by getting all of our December marketing in place now, rather than waiting for January and doing a January offer, we’re trying to get everything in place now, get people into the club in December when it’s generally a quieter month. I shouldn’t imagine, it will be quite this month after the lockdown. But getting everybody into the club, getting them having a month of using it, the facility, making them feel comfortable. So come January, we are the obvious place that they’re going to stay. They’re not going to then go and try somebody else in January. They’ve been with us for a month and trying to get them all in place. So we’ve also got a few other Christmas campaigns as well, haven’t we? We’ve got the vouchers and the offers. What else have we got?

 

Toby:

So one that we’re looking at the moment is pay what you like for December. But the trick with that one is, whatever you do pay will be donated to charity for the month. So it was a nice incentive to give something back in the community during what is a pretty rubbish time for a lot of people, and a good way of incentivizing someone to sign up to a 12 month membership. So that’s what we’re looking at in the minute.

 

Grant:

So you say they can pay whatever they want for December. So they’ve got to join on a 12 month membership and for December they can pay whatever they like.

 

Toby:

Exactly. And the December payment goes to charity.

 

Grant:

Perfect. So whatever we raise for that goes to charity. So it puts us in a good light. We were going to give December away for free, but we thought, “You know what, let new members pay what they want, and that will all be donated.” That’s going to work well.

 

Harvey:

Yeah. The good thing about that as well is, it gives somebody an incentive to come to the gym outside of just wanting to come to the gym. Because somebody might be thinking about maybe starting in January after December’s blown over. So it was just a great way to just get somebody signing up now rather than spending a December of people not coming to the gym and not knowing if there’ll be interest in January, but people will be signing up to be like, “Hey, I get to do a good deed.” And then at least you have a gauge of good next year is going to be.

 

Toby:

The way we’re tracking it is quite clever as well. We’ve made a voucher code for the charity and people that sign up with that voucher code, we can see each month who’s used it and then we can donate that amount of money to charity. So it’s just really easy and yeah, good marketing before Christmas.

 

Grant:

The reason we’re doing it this way as well, rather than just saying, “Get December for free” because a lot of clubs are now saying, “Join now, pay nothing until January and you see, you get December free.” The trouble is, what we find at Ashbourne is that the amount of defaulters that come January, because they’ve not paid anything at the start, they don’t feel like it’s theirs. So because they’ve not paid anything, they think they can just stop their direct debit. So come January, doesn’t matter. So we got to start… Where if people pay something at the start of their membership, they’re less likely to default.

 

Harvey:

It’s also a weird phenomenon about, that often free trials don’t convert as well as promos that are pay a pound.

 

Toby:

So devaluing it.

 

Harvey:

Yeah. So it’s a weird phenomenon that you’d expect the cheaper something is, that then people would go for it. But actually if you get them to pay a small amount for the trial period and then they enjoy the full period later, they’re much more likely to stay on. And as you say, Grant, it sieves out the people who are just like, “Well, I’ll just get a free December and then I’ll just ignore the default letters.”

 

Grant:

Yeah. Well, the thing is, they can pay whatever they like. So they could pay 27 pounds. They could pay 50 pound for the first month. They could pay one pound. All that’s going to go to the charity, which is… So it’s up to them really. We know we’re getting a prospect, which we would have given December away for free, but they’re more, what’s the word, they’re more integrated into the club because they’ve made that initial payment. So that’s what we do with that one.

 

Toby:

Tested the card. That’s it, isn’t it?

 

Grant:

Yeah, absolutely.

 

Toby:

There’s actually currency in the account, which is crucial.

 

Grant:

Good. So another thing that we’re going to do as well, is use our current members. So I think we’re going to send out a bring your friend in for free for the end of December. So send out a message to all of our members that they can bring in a friend into the club to train for the rest of December for free if they train with their mate. But obviously what we’re going to do there, is get their email address, get their contact details, treat them like any other member, give them an induction, give them a program so they feel invested in the club. And then hopefully when it comes down to the new year and they think, “Right, what club shall I join? Well, I’ve already had three weeks there. I already go with Mary. Let me join the club that I know I’m used to going to.”

 

Harvey:

Well, I think the lesson to take from all of this is, hopefully most people listening will find the idea of, “Oh, we’ve made an online store” and “Oh, we’re giving money away for charity and now we’re doing an entire month free for guests.” The lesson to take away is, be more creative with your promotions. If you’re thinking that lockdown is over and you can just go in with the usual, “I’ll have a fiver off the month.” Unfortunately, you are going to have to incentivize people to get back to the gym because a lot of people are going to maybe be under the impression that they don’t need the gym after being off for so long. Some people are just not going to want to come back because they might want to continue social distancing. Be more generous than you ever would because at the end of the day, every gym at the moment, there’s been a lot of cancellations and you’ve lost a lot. So it’s time to start being extra generous because in the long run, those members will come back. But you just got to make yourself stand out now.

 

Toby:

I think just the standard referral competition, I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with them yourself, Grant. But you speak about being generous. Maybe now’s the right time to invest in a real rockstar prize for your referral competition and just scream about it. The one I was thinking about is, is flight vouchers, purely because instead of buying a holiday for them with flight voucher, you can keep posting pictures of different locations, and that’s going to tempt different people for different reasons. You send a picture of the slopes or whatever, beach and yeah. Just try and tempt people into referring as many people as possible.

 

Harvey:

Also, the great thing about that is, like you say, if you pick a location like Disneyland, you might have a single 40 year old guy who might want to be involved in the competition, but he’s like, “I’m not going to go to Disneyland by myself. That’s going to look a bit weird.”

 

Grant:

Yeah. A big price is really good. So years ago when I started a referral campaign, I started off with, it was a water bottle with a towel and some flip-flops, that whoever referred the most members would get that. And to be fair, it was a bit shit. Because the price was a bit rubbish, we didn’t get many referrals. When I upped the prize to a TV, a bike, an iPod or whatever it was, something really big and tangible, the amount of referrals went through the roof. We had so many more people referring their friends to come and join. It paid for itself. And also, if you put that prize up for the month, it sits there for the whole month and now you can make a big sign in your gym, “Refer a friend and when this holiday, blah, blah, blah.”

 

Grant:

Whoever refers the most, gets the prize, but that will sit there for a months advertising. Next month, do it again and again. Some clubs, they just say, “Oh, if you refer a friend, we’ll knock a pound off your membership.” Well, big whoop. If I bring my friend in and I’m going to get a pound off my membership, it’s not going to do anything for me. Yeah, absolutely. Where if I can say, “You know what, I’m going to get three of my friends to join the club and if they join, I might walk away with a 40 inch telly or a holiday.” Great.

 

Toby:

I think all this talk as well, obviously coming into January, it’s very easy just to focus on the new members and forget about the old ones a little bit. It’s the age old thing, isn’t it? So keeping an eye on your attention is obviously crucial. I was going to say that contacting any canceled EDs that you’ve had and getting them to reinstate is now the priority in the next few weeks ahead of December and then January, because there has been a few and they’ve been trickling in. So yeah, I think that’s one for the gym manager. Get them called and get them reinstated before the gym opens.

 

Harvey:

Well yeah, because as soon as your retention rate falls off, that’s where the value is. And if you lose your old customers to your competitors in the area, because people are going to be super competitive now. Everyone’s on a mad dash to get as many members as possible. Be very wary of what other gyms in the area are doing because if you don’t, your old members have been supporting you through all this time. If you start pretending like you don’t care about them, they will go to your competitors.

 

Grant:

And also, because we’ve lost members, we’ve lost an income, to just keep reducing our prices is going to devalue our product. We don’t want to compete against pure gym on price and it’s pointless. We can’t do it. All their other clubs can sustain a failing one. So what we have to do is say, “No, you know what, we’re not going to go with 16 pound a month and just compete purely on price. We’re going to give more value.” So all these ideas that we’re going to get and bring people in, we’ll say, “Right, we’re going to give you an induction. We’re going to give you a program. We’re going to do follow-ups. We’re going to check your progress. We’re going to create the Facebook group and talk to you and be the independent club.” Don’t come try and compete against them purely on price. So just find a different angle.

 

Grant (continued):

Obviously pricing does come down to it if you’re in a 90 pound a month gym. But for the sake of being 20 or 25, people will pay that extra five or six, seven pound a month if they know they’re going to get proper service. People don’t really want to join the budget clubs but if they know that they can for a little bit more, they can get a lot more service and feel part of that community at somewhere else. Okay, so we’ve come up with a few marketing ideas there. We’ve got obviously, the main thing there is to get that jump on your competitors. Start your January marketing now, get things in place, ready to go. Don’t wait until the 2nd of January and then say, “Right, let’s now compete against everybody else.”

 

Grant (continued):

So we’ve got the campaign for Christmas. We’ve got the free training, bring a friend in for the remainder of the month, pay what you like for December and that obviously goes to charity. So it makes your club look like an important and a caring place. The referrals and the things like that as well. Okay, so moving away from the marketing ideas, obviously it’s also about getting the club ready for that increased footfall. And obviously, we’re expecting a huge influx of people into the club December after lockdown and January as well. So if we do nothing, the club is going to be very, very busy. So we’ve done a few things to try and spread the load out if you like.

 

Grant (continued):

So not everybody is coming in at 5:30 because we will just be packed and the club will be inundated with people and overwhelmed, and that will have a negative effect. So what we’ve done is, one of our promotions is bring in an off-peak membership, haven’t we? So the the off-peak membership means when the club is quieter, people are coming in and obviously the turnstiles will manage all that for us as well. So it’s not a case of somebody having to sit there, “Oh, no, you’re a gold member, you’re an off-peak, you can’t come in.” The turnstile will simply just manage it all for us. We’ve essentially got to take the pressure off ourselves in terms of-

 

Toby:

And another thing as well with the big influx of people, is making sure the equipment is up to scratch. Yeah, it’s obviously an absolute staple of the club and the treadmills were one thing that we’ve recently just had to repair four of them. And yeah, they’re going to be the most used thing in January. So you’ve got to have it all spick and span, oiled up, ready to go. And that’s what we’re doing at the moment. So just getting it all ready. Because I remember last year, just not… Oh, sorry. Earlier this year, not being able to get on one. Treadmills, cross trainers, all of the cardio stuff completely used.

 

Grant:

I think he’s the least that people expect, isn’t it? You’ve been locked down, when they come back, the least they… And obviously, we talk in independent clubs here. Obviously all the big chains and the budget clubs will probably have an onsite repair person. We’re independent, it’s down to the owner. But the least that people can expect is that everything works when they come back.

 

Harvey:

As well as, outside of even just being able to handle the influx physically in the gym, be ready to handle the influx even with the signup process. If your website-

 

Grant:

And let’s hope that is an influx.

 

Harvey:

Exactly. But this is the issue. If you have suddenly people who are wanting to sign up on your promotions, make sure that it can be done online through the website. Don’t have it through contact forms or people trying to ring the gym. Because if you make it too complicated for people to sign up, they will not sign up. They will get bored after three steps.

 

Toby:

Yeah. Even though that is the case, absolutely, we’re still going to need more extra staff in there on those busy times because you get people coming in that can’t work out how to put in their bank details into an online form and stuff like that.

 

Harvey:

We’ve made sure that the fit club website is just extremely simple to just click a button and go straight through. And then they use the Ashbourne join online system with a coupon that when they enter the coupon, it literally gets rid of all the other things that the coupon doesn’t relate to. It’s the most simple, basic thing. So we could have a thousand people sign up. I hope that happens, but we’ll see. We could have a thousand people sign up and if they do, we actually don’t have to deal with any of them. We don’t have to be there answering the phones going, “Oh yeah, let me get your details down.” Messing that up.

 

Toby:

Customer journey is what you’re talking about. And it’s absolutely essential at this time, making sure it’s as easy for them as possible. We spoke earlier briefly about the prospect management system and how it automates emails when people sign up. So, they’re going to get an email straight away with the app. They’re going to get an email straight away with the booking software and how they’ve registered their classes. And it’s just going to hold their hand the whole way through the process and make sure they have to ask us as few questions as possible.

 

Grant:

Well, that’s it. We’re asking a lot of our staff and our manager in the club, to keep on top of everything, keep managing it. So that’s why the automated lead management and everything like that, all the automated emails and texts that go out are scheduled. So it doesn’t matter when somebody submits a contact us form or a join now, they automatically get the emails in the same sequence. Because obviously we’re asking our manager and all our staff to contact all these people and deal with all our current customers as well. So if we can take contacting all the prospects away and just automate that process, that it means they can spend more time on the rest of it. And that’s really important because yes, we want those new members, but if we neglect our current ones, they’re going to drop off on the other end.

 

Grant (continued):

So this prospect management module, so you can do it all yourself. We’re not here to say you must buy the Ashbourne prospect management module. You can do it all yourself. You can send the email, you can send the text, you can do the follow-up. But it’s a time consuming process. Where if you get this prospect management thing, it does it all for you. It will just send that email out. Somebody will completely the contact us form or I’d like a code or whatever. And it would send out the text, send out, they’ll do the follow-up. If they don’t join it, sends them another follow-up and so on and so on. It’s basically removed a member of staff for us. So it’s really useful.

 

Harvey:

Yeah, you see some people conducting all of their prospect management from a Gmail account, just replying in these endless chains. I do think people don’t realize how much time they can save in their business. I would often say if you’re running a business and there were certain tasks that you dread to do, then maybe think about how you can automate them. Don’t just be constantly catching up at three in the morning. Actually review everything. This is the time to do it. Review everything and make sure where you’re not automating things. And if you don’t know about ways to automate things, then type it into Google, go and look, there’s so many ways to automate things. We haven’t touched on this much, but for social media, for instance, there’s platforms like Hootsuite is one, Canva-

 

Grant:

What’s Hootsuite?

 

Harvey:

Hootsuite and Later, is another one. All of these, they’re basically just online platforms where you connect up all your social media and then you can schedule things ahead of time. So we know that Facebook has a scheduling system. But for instance, Twitter doesn’t, Instagram doesn’t, LinkedIn doesn’t. These things link to all of your social media and allow you to schedule ahead of time. So once again-

 

Grant:

Ah, perfect. So now for instance, while we’re not doing anything, we can schedule all of our next three, four weeks posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all from one thing.

 

Harvey:

Exactly. We are not going to be touching the social media unless something extreme happens, like an asteroid hits the club, and we have to update people about something. Like, a national lockdown maybe.

 

Grant:

Don’t do that, come on.

 

Harvey:

We’re not going to touch social media in December. It’s already done. So look into these things.

 

Toby:

The other one as well, that I asked you about earlier was, you can schedule your Facebook ads to start at certain times, can’t you? So we want to really crank them up.

 

Grant:

You told me you were going to actually physically ramp them up manually yourself. You only got to just sit there and schedule them. So come Boxing Day, you’re not going to be moving. You’ve done it already, aren’t you?

 

Toby:

Grant, I do all of my work in January. I do nothing for the rest of the year.

 

Grant:

You’ve had a whole month off now. Awesome.

 

Toby:

Yeah. So I guess one area we haven’t really touched on, I guess it is obvious because everyone should know their gym inside out, is knowing your unique selling points. Who are you targeting? If you’re like us, we cover a range of interests at the club. So, we’re trying to reach out to a lot of different demographics. But potentially, if you’re trying to appeal to older people or younger people, anyone, bodybuilders, the like, you need to be targeting them in certain ways. I think it’s fair to say Instagram is more of a youthful platform, maybe a bit of a generalization. But I think on the whole, if you’re targeting that age group, Instagram would be a good place to do it.

 

Harvey:

All of the young people have left Facebook.

 

Toby:

Replaced by their parents.

 

Harvey:

Exactly.

 

Grant:

I’m on Facebook.

 

Toby:

That’s awkward.

 

Harvey:

It’s very true, if you’re hitting social media channels, be aware of who’s using them and also don’t be afraid to start going into ones that you might dismiss as new. Tik Tok, for instance. This might not be as relevant for gyms, but it’s one of those things where the number of people who run businesses are probably in their thirties, all say, “Oh, what the hell is Tik Tok?” But Tik Tok is one of the most popular things with 18 to 24 year olds. And if you were advertising on there and had a presence on there, you would be hitting 18 to 24 year olds. So don’t be posting to your Facebook and going, “Where’s our 18 to 24 year olds” because they stopped using Facebook a long time ago. Some of them don’t even know Facebook really exists because they were born after Facebook existed. It’s been around a long time.

 

Toby:

I think that’s a really good idea. If you’ve got characters in the gym, get them on Tik TOK because it will appeal to a group of people, isn’t it?

 

Harvey:

Exactly.

 

Toby:

Okay, yeah. I like that. I’ve written down here as well, if you’re trying to hit an older demographic, how would you do it? And I’ve written, Grant, what would appeal to you?

 

Grant:

I’m not that old.

 

Toby:

You getting on.

 

Grant:

Well, the thing is as well, one of our clubs, they realized that most of their members were 45 plus. So what they did is, they changed all of their marketing. They marketed just the same as any other club, put pictures out of people in the gym. But when they literally looked down into all of their data, they found that most people were older because of their price point and the type of club. They were an older type club. So what they did, they changed all of their marketing, all their images of people in the gym, to reflect that. So what was the point of having an 18 year old on the treadmill when they’re aiming for 45, 50 year old people? So they changed all of their marketing.

 

Grant:

All of their photos became more relevant. So as you say, know what you after. If you’re a bodybuilders gym, have pictures of bodybuilding champions and things like that and how you’ll your success. Just have pictures that are more relevant to you. Obviously, it almost goes without saying, but you’d be surprised of how many standard type health clubs then put a picture of a bodybuilder on. That actually, that’s going to intimidate people. I don’t want to join that one. So know what your market is. And as you say, get the right images.

 

Harvey:

Well, this is all part of the review process. It’s hard to talk on this about the entire UK because different parts of the UK are in different lockdown periods and some are just functioning as normal and don’t have the time to review these things. But go back to basics and really review everything you can, because this is going to be a make or break for a lot of businesses. And all of the things that you could ride off like, “Oh, we had a bit of a slow website or we don’t have an online signup.” These things are really going to make the difference in the long run of how quickly you can recover.

 

Grant:

If you don’t have an online sign up in January, obviously, unless you’re at quite high price point and you need to do a proper sales tool, then that way you’d obviously bring people in and do the tour, then sign them up. But if you’re a standard price point and you running an offer, you need to get people to sign up straight away. So just get them on your website and get them signed up. But speaking of on the website and things like that, I think another thing that we’re going to do as well, is just give away a free ebook or a checklist for how to get through the Christmas period. So basically, don’t eat too much. So we’re going to send that to all of our members that share our posts, tag somebody in it. So we’re not asking them to do anything particular, but if you tag a friend in our posts, if you share our posts, we will send you for free, our how to survive Christmas without putting on the pounds checklist.

 

Toby:

Really good one. If you’ve got a local partner that you think might be interested in working with you, say on Instagram, if you want to get a load more Instagram followers, do a joint competition and say that for each entry is when you take a friend in the comments. And you’ll get people tagging 50 people if the prize is half decent and you can double your Instagram following overnight. And that resource just becomes more and more powerful.

 

Harvey:

Well, you could advertise back to all of them on your Facebook ads and Instagram ads. Feel free to check out the Ashbourne site. We’ve got an entire free ebook on that stuff. We’ve got loads of free resources. But if there was the time to learn new skills, this would be it. So just become smarter in the way you’re marketing yourself and start outreaching more because this is not the time to rest on your laurels. I think that’s really the lesson of the day.

 

Toby:

Absolutely. We’ll be sharing all this stuff on the gym owners forum Facebook page. That’s the best place to access it on a pretty much daily basis.

 

Grant:

No. Good. Okay. Well, thanks guys. I think we’re coming up to our time now. So essentially, the key to it is, do it now, get the jump on your competitors so that you can hit January running and you’re already the place that people associate with joining a gym rather than, “Which one shall I join?” As I say, we’re going to have plenty more episodes to come with just more ways to get more members and things like that. But this was just a bit of a taster of how to get into January. So thanks to Toby and Harvey for joining me today. As I say, we don’t have a, and this is an Ashbourne sales thing, but if you would like more information on how Ashbourne can help your club, then just drop us a line or go onto the website and we’ll help you out as much as we can.