“Facebook ads is dead!”

 

…or at the very least has become much harder to use.

Thousands of clubs rely on paid social media to reach the members in their area and Facebook and Instagram are at the core of that plan.

Since Facebook stopped tracking Apple users (a lot of them use Facebook), it has made it extremely difficult for businesses with smaller advertising budgets to track which of their ads are actually working. Simply too many sales and potential customers aren’t being tracked, so many gyms have no idea where their money is going.

 

But hopefully, this is the shake up that is needed for your business to not rely on a single platform to gain your members.

 

It’s never been more important to diversify how you secure new members, because as we’ve seen, if your preferred platform changes how they do things…then it can shake your business to the core.

 

And with that, let’s look at some alternatives to Facebook ads that can help you discover an entirely new audience, using all the same resources you have right now!

 

 

CLICK ANY OF THESE TO SKIP AHEAD…

TikTok Ads

Linkedin Advertising

Google Ads

Google My Business

Your Local Area On Reddit

 

 

TikTok / TikTok Ads

 

TikTok has quickly developed from something that “just the kids” are using, to one of the most popular social medias in use right now.

If you were under any impression that TikTok is nothing compared to Facebook, then I have news for you.

 

In 2021, these were the user numbers globally for TikTok and Facebook:

• TikTok: 700 Million

• Facebook: 2.9 Billion

 

Tik Tok has already amassed a quarter of Facebook’s numbers and it continues to grow, while Facebook is reporting losses for the first time in its history.

While TikTok’s age demographic is much younger than Facebook, it still has a proportional size of users who are entirely old enough to sell your gym too.

 

 

In 2020, a full TikTok user review in the UK revealed that:

• 24% of TikTok users were aged between 15 and 25 years old

• 9% of TikTok users were aged between 36 and 45 years old

• 6% of TikTok users were aged between 46 to 55 years old

TikTok’s younger audience makes it the perfect platform to gain access to an entire age group which left Facebook a long time ago (or were born too late to even sign up to it – just to make you feel old).

And couple that with an ads platform which offers accurate targeting and allows you to actually crack your purchases across all devices – it’s the perfect next home if you want to expand your social media offering.

 

 

Linkedin Advertising

 

Linkedin has a reputation as a solely business social media. But it’s a ripe environment for you to start selling to new customers on a social media platform where the competition for health clubs is really low.

We’ve already put in a lot of research with our very own Linkedin Ads, so you can get a campaign that’s ready to go by clicking here.

But in short, Linkedin is Facebook, but 10 years ago.

More active users, with cheaper ad costs and a larger reach to an audience who are working and have money to spend.

It’s a dream come true for anyone looking for a Facebook alternative that targets a working age audience who are eager to purchase in your area.

 

 

Google Ads

 

Google Ads differs from other social media ads because it works completely on search terms and not just on targeting your interests.

So if someone is searching for something on Google, all a Google ad allows you to do is simply appear at the very top of the first search.

This is a great hack if you want to quickly shoot up for Google searches for gyms in your area, as the searches for local gyms are usually very simple in our experience.

 

 

Just a few examples include:

“Gym in x”

“Best gym in x”

“Cheapest gym in x”

 

So hop on Google Ads and set a small budget to start hacking your way to the top of Google searches for your area. You’d be surprised how few businesses use this as technique.

 

 

 

Google My Business

 

Is your gym listed on Google Business?

Then you’re missing out on an instant SEO boost to get you to the top of Google search results.

Whenever you Google a business you’ve likely seen the listing at the right of the page, giving you directions and quick ways to get in touch with them.

Google My Business allows you to enter this information directly into Google, which is great for 2 reasons:

• It helps you show up on Google maps and more Google searches.

• It instantly tells Google what your business is, so they can deliver you straight to the top of searches.

So take out the chance of Google’s robots trying to decipher what your gym is by your website alone, by directly inputting your business straight into their search engine.

 

 

Local Area Reddits

 

Message boards are a great way to get in touch with your local community, and especially if you live in a larger town or city, then you’ll easily find communities on sites like Reddit very easily.

For anyone who has never used Reddit, it’s the largest website in the world and is made up of small communities known as subreddits. Everything from “fishing” to “cute pictures of owls” has its own community, which you can join and post in.

 

 

It’s clear to anyone that having access to a large range of people who have formed a community in your local areas is great for your business, but even better, Reddit also has a very user friendly ad platform which allows you to target specific subreddits, which you can use to advertise to people in your area with their own local club.

It’s a technique that barely any local businesses are making use of and is the perfect way to get your gym in front of a huge range of demographics who all live locally for a very cost effective advertising cost.

 

…and why haven’t we mentioned Instagram Ads?

Instagram is owned by Facebook and uses exactly the same algorithms and tech that Facebook ads use.

If you’ve never used Instagram before, then it can certainly be  a great avenue to explore, but all of the problems with Facebook’s advertising system will be present over on Instagram.

 

There’s never been a better time to free yourself from a platform prison…

 

It can be extremely easy to become comfortable using a single social media to run your entire gym from, but as we’ve seen, if anything changes then it can cause havoc with reaching your future members.

Facebook ads is a cautionary tale of how quickly a seemingly secure service that you’ve used for years and grown to rely on, can suddenly become unusable.

This is the perfect time to shake out of the comfort zone and start experimenting with new ways to find your members. Experiment with new social medias and diversify your techniques to reach as many people as humanly possible from your local area, to spread the good word about your gym or health club.

 

And we can help…

As you can see, we really get stuck into every aspect of helping gyms and clubs succeed. Our success is directly tied to the success of our partnered clubs, so we are always ensuring that we’re at the cutting edge when it comes to helping all of our gyms grow and market themselves effectively.

If you’d like to get in touch about how we can help your club succeed, then you can always book a demo with our sales director, Grant Harrison, who would love to show you how our full club management package can help you improve and grow every aspect of your business.

Social media is a fundamental aspect of every day life.

Within the last decade, the impact of social media has gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many people.

It has insinuated itself into politics, the workplace, home life and just about every aspect of life you can imagine and continues to evolve at lightning speed. Although this make it difficult to predict which way it will morph next, one thing we can be sure of is that social media isn’t going anywhere so learning how to utilise it to your advantage is key.

Many new and upcoming businesses use platforms such as Facebook & Instagram in order to get their name out there and gym and fitness studios are no different.

Facebook has quickly become one of the most popular to use as an advertising platform as it is far less complicated than most other advertising platforms, such as Google Adwords. Combine that with the fact that your target audience spend a great deal of their day on Facebook and the ability to use precise profile targeting when setting up your ads – it’s a sure fire way to have confidence, knowing your ads are reaching the right people, at the right time.

With the flexibility of choosing a budget that’s right for you, there is no better place to start your online advertisements.

 

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CAMPAIGN

One of the most crucial elements of creating your Facebook ad campaign is your campaign structure – getting this right will be imperative to its success.
Facebook ads has three levels:

• Campaign
• Ad Set
• Ad

First of all, lets dive in to look at the campaign. The campaign sits right at the top level of your Facebook advertising campaign. This is where you will set a goal or one single objective for the campaign in question. For example, your campaign goal may be to sell 15 memberships each month.

Setting a campaign objective ensures that you have a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve before you start to create any Facebook ads. So think about what you want your goal behind your Facebook Ad campaign to be. Do you want to:
1. Drive targeted leads to your website?
2. Increase membership sales?
3. Promote a special, limited time offer?

 

SETTING YOUR OBJECTIVE

When creating your Facebook ad, Facebook will provide you with the following options to select as your objective.

In the example we have used above, of selling 15 memberships each month, the objective you would select is conversions as your campaign objective.

Once you have selected your objective, its time to look at your ad set. This is where you need to identify the audiences you wish to target through specific ad sets. Facebook explains ad sets as:
“A group of ads that share the same daily or lifetime budget, schedule, bid type, bid info and targeting data. Ad sets enable you to group ads according to your criteria.”

Each ad set that you create will target a specific audience, create by you. By creating multiple ad sets, you can ensure the ads you create will relate with the intended audience. For example, your gym or studio might target those those in the 18-30 age group, within a 10 mile radius of your facility.

However, that generic campaign audience can be broken down into much more targeted audiences: female students, aged 18-21; male students, aged 18-12; working mothers with a reduced radius of 5 miles.

The numbers of ad sets you create is dependant on the objectives of your campaign and the type of service your gym offers. Be aware that each of your audiences would be engaged by completely different offers so it is really important of creating targeted audiences for your ad sets.

 

GET TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

When it comes to any kind of advertising, targeting to a specific audience is essential. No matter what advertising platform you choose to use, if you’re not targeting your offering to the right people then your ad will not achieve the results you desire.

The ideal place to start is to think about your dream customer, or perhaps even multiple dream customers. Write down all the common characteristics that make up this person, or multiple lists of characteristics for all of your customer profiles.

Each of the ad sets you create you should only target one audience at a time, otherwise you risk making your offer too generic in an attempt to try and engage all your audiences which is likely to affect the success of your ad.

When thinking about your audience, consider these key questions:

AGE

What is the age of your dream customer?

Every Facebook user is required to enter their birthday when they sign up, taking the guess work away if you want to target you ad to a specific age group.

GENDER

What is the gender of your dream customer?

Women and men have different ‘Facebook habits’, with women spending slightly more time on Facebook. Women and men will also be attracted to different types of ads.

LOCATION

Where is your gym or studio located?

Your reach will differ depending on where in the country you are based. If you own a gym in a big city, you will only need to target a smaller radius (1-2 miles) than you would in the countryside, due to density of population.

 

WHAT’S YOUR BUDGET?

Now it’s time to set the budget for your ad set.

When setting up your ads you will be required to set a daily budget and then Facebook will optimise the delivery of your ads in an attempt to meet the stated daily budget. It’s important to note, your daily budget is just an average, and if there is a particular day where there are more opportunities that another, Facebook will spend up to 25% over your budget. Similarly, on days where the opportunities are lower, Facebook may spend up to 25% below your budget.

Facebook tends to spend higher budgets much quicker, so start with a smaller budget and build up slowly – you can trust that Facebook will optimise the smaller amount and provide you with a good return if your ad is attractive to your target audience.

 

WHAT’S YOUR SCHEDULE?

Now it’s time to turn and consider when you would like your ads to run.

With Facebook ads you have the opportunity to tailor a schedule that is best suited for your audience. Would you like your ads to run continuously and turn them off manually? Or is your preference to select a specific start and end date?

You can also select specific days and time of days to display your ads if you know enough about your target audience to know exactly when you might catch them scrolling social media. The only downside to this is that scheduling is only available for lifetime budgets, as opposed to daily budgets.

 

TIME TO GET CREATIVE!

The next step to tackle in getting your ad set up is the individual ads for each of your ad sets! Now you need to start thinking about your ad, what is going to capture the attention of your target audience?

It’s a good idea to test multiple ads at the same time to give you the best chance of achieving your desired results. Remember you can always pause ads that aren’t performing how you’d like and keep high performing ads active.

Here are some of our top tips to get you started:

It’s all about the wording

Make sure you use attention grabbing, action-orientated wording. Think about your target audience, what would grab their attention?

People scrolling social media will have a short attention span and are often scrolling through whilst on the go, so you’ll need to get your message across in a couple of lines and encourage users to click for more details.

Include your location in your headline

Although Facebook has great location targeting capabilities, it can still go wrong. Start off by entering a realistic mile radius for your audience and be sure to include your location in the header of your ad to evoke the attention of local users.

Have a call-to-action

The use of a call to action allows you to reflect the offer you are trying to share with your audience. By being upfront and specific from the outset, users will be taking a more defined path of action and you’ll be more likely to achieve your objective.

 

ADDING A SENSE OF SCARCITY

Adding a sense of scarcity to your offer is a proven and timeless sales technique. The scarcity tactic targets the audiences fear of missing out and evokes and action that they may not do otherwise. This is a really great tactic to apply to your Facebook ads.

Look at the difference in the wording of these two ads:

OPTION 1: Join now and get £20 off with the code NOFEE.

OPTION 2: Join before October 31st and get £20 off with the code NOFEE.

By adding in an expiry date to your offers you are placing a limitation on the offer you are advertising. This will make encourage your audience to take immediate action to ensure they take advantage of the offer before time runs out.

This is a simple sales psychology. By creating a sense of urgency, you are encouraging your target audience to take a particular action in a particular time frame. You have the option to either limit the time that your offer is available, or limit the number available – that’s up to you and the service that you offer, you could even choose both if you wanted!

Giving something a sense of exclusivity makes it instantly more desirable, and the perceived notion that it is of a higher value.

 

USE RELATABLE VISUALS

Although the wording of your ad is a crucial part of ensuring it’s success, you also need to select an image to go alongside it. This image will be the first thing that your target audience will notice and ultimately will be the deciding factor as to whether they choose to stop and read your ad or not. So it could be said that this is the most important part of your ad.

Social media is incredibly visual, so when it comes to selecting images to use within your ads you have two options: pay for stock photos; take your own photos within your facility.

Although taking your own photos is desirable as it gives you the opportunity to showcase your facility and make the ad seem more personable, however getting a good quality photo to use is much easier said than done. Lighting is everything as well as ensuring you have a photo which can be optimised for all different devices.

You also need to consider what your target audience would want to see. For example, if your gym is tailored toward older men looking to maintain their fitness, a stock photo of a 20 year old flawless male would be inappropriate and unrelatable to your target audience. You’d be much better off finding a photo of someone older exercising either from a stock photo supplier or better yet, a photo taken in your own facility.

You might also consider using a video instead of an image if you know someone capable of video editing. This gives your target audience that opportunity to understand what your business is about and will bring your ad alive. However, as Facebook videos auto play in the newsfeed, it is key to make them eye catching and compelling. You also need to remember that it is up to the audience as to whether they have the sound on or not, so your video needs to work with sound as well as without.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR LEADS

When your audience is selected, schedule defined, ad written and visual chosen – it’s time to decide where exactly you’re going to send your leads who click on your ad. There are a few questions you should be asking yourself here:

• Where will leads go when they click on my ad?
• What happens when a lead submits a form following my ad?
• What I’ll do with leads who do not complete the desired action?

Although you choose to send your leads to just your Facebook page or homepage of your website, you should ideally create a dedicated landing page. A landing page enables you to create a page which is an extension of your Facebook ad, continuing the offer that you originally grabbed their attention with.

Your landing page should give users the option to take advantage of the offer which they were shown on your Facebook ad, for example if you were advertising a discounted membership, they should be taken straight to a page where they can purchase the membership – with the discount code automatically entered if possible, or repeated on the page and users reminded they will need to enter it. This will make the decision making process much easier and users will more more likely to follow through on the call-to-action.

 

THE FACEBOOK PIXEL

When setting up your Facebook ad the last step you will come across is adding your Facebook pixel.

The Facebook pixel is code that you place on your website. It collects data that helps you track conversions from Facebook ads, optimise ads, build targeted audiences for future ads and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.

The perfect place to add your Facebook pixel is on a customised thank you page. Not only do thank you pages add value to your customers by showing them how much you appreciate their interest or purchase, it also gives you the chance to provide your audience with more information. For example, try and upsell another product or service, educate leads on your gym with a brief explainer video or mention an additional limited time offer.

When more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook will get better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions, this is known as conversion optimisation.

The top takeaways of the benefits of adding the Facebook pixel are as follows:

1. Measure Cross-Device Conversions: Understand how your cross-device ads helps influence conversions.
2. Optimise Delivery: Ensure that your ads are shown to the people most likely to take action.
3. Create Customer Audiences: Dynamic ads help you automatically show your website visitors the products they’ve viewed on your website.
4. Learn About Your Website Traffic: Get rich insights about how people use your website from your Facebook pixel dashboard.

 

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO NEXT

Now you’ve selected your audience, defined your schedule, written your ad and chosen your visuals – it’s time to consider what are your next steps?

If your ad is performing well, it might be time to consider increasing your budget to try and reach more people. The most effective way of doing this isn’t just to increase the spend on one single ad, so you are better off by duplicating the ad which is performing well and having multiple duplications of the same ad running at the same time, each with a small daily budget which Facebook will optimise to ensure its getting maximum exposure amongst your target audience. You will also have the option to tick ‘leave existing reactions’ each time you copy your ad which we would recommend doing so that all interactions on your ad are also copied across which new people coming across your ad for the first time will find encouraging.

Another option to consider is retargeting your Facebook ad. Unsurprisingly there will be a large number (roughly 75%) of your audience who will see your ad, click through to your landing page and for whatever reason, choose not to take you up on your offer.

There will be numerous reasons why they would have decided not to sign up, so trying to decipher this isn’t important. What’s most important is that due to the inclusion of the Facebook Pixel, you will be able to segment your audience in order to see those people who didn’t follow through with your offer and therefore show the ad to them again.

This time you make subtle changes to your ad in an attempt to try and engage these people a second time round.

To find out more about retargeting your Facebook ads and the process in which to do this, take a look at our ‘Run A Successful Facebook Ad Strategy For Just £1 A Day’ webinar for a more in depth guide.

Facebook Advertising comes with a huge amount of benefits when it comes to creating awareness of your club locally and, ultimately, increasing your membership numbers.

If you’re not currently using Facebook Advertising to promote your club, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. An opportunity to stand out from your competition and consistently generate new enquiries and sign-ups.

We live in a world where social media platforms are becoming ever more powerful and prominent. In the UK, we spend almost 25% of our mobile internet usage time using Facebook. The sheer volume of people using Facebook each and every day means that it’s a complete no-brainer to use the platform as part of your overall marketing strategy. It’s where your prospects are ‘hanging out’ and, therefore, it’s most definitely where you should be advertising.

And it’s not just the vast number of users that makes the social media platform an essential channel to include as part of your strategy to attract new members. What makes Facebook Advertising so effective is the vast range of targeting options available to businesses. These targeting options mean that you can be extremely focused and precise with what audiences you target with your ads and what messages you use to engage with them. It’s these targeting options which put Facebook Advertising up there as one of the most advanced and powerful platforms for advertising your gym or club.

Want to target people based on their age, their location, their gender, the sports they’re interested in or whether they like going to the gym and keeping fit? No problem. Facebook’s hyper-detailed targeting options guarantee that your ads will only show to the right people. It’s the combination of the sheer number of users combined with an incredible ability to refine who you’re targeting that makes Facebook Advertising essential for any club looking to maximise new member sign-ups and to increase the ROI on their marketing investments.

 

Use Facebook generally to promote your club or use is more tactically to promote specific offers, deals and unique selling points. For example, you can:

 

Showcase & generate awareness of your gym or club.

Facebook Ads are a great way to promote your club and your facilities and memberships in general. Carousel and Video ads are an effective ad format to show off your entire club in a way that will be extremely cost-efficient and which potential members will really engage with. Never underestimate the power of creating awareness using platforms like Facebook. If someone doesn’t know that you even exist, how on earth are they ever going to sign up to your club?

 

Promote your latest offers.

Promoting offers on Facebook is a proven way to generate lots and lots of enquiries and new member sign-ups for your club. Whether it’s simply a discount on membership, a free first month or a free pass, the right offer promoted in the right way is a sure fire way to bring in new members.

 

Facebook Carousel Ads (above) are a really engaging ad format which allow
you use a range of engaging images and messages as part of the same advert.

 

Shout about your club’s real selling-points.

Just revamped your gym or started a brand new range of classes? Perhaps you’re less expensive than your competitors?  These are the selling points that you need to shout about and which often differentiate you from your competition. Tell potential members about these things using Facebook Advertising and, used in the right way, it’s guaranteed to help bring new enquiries into your business.

 

If you’re not using Facebook Advertising at the moment and what some advice on where to start (or if you’re using the channel but not quite getting the results that you’re after) simply get in touch with us here at Ashbourne and a member of our team will be happy to help. You can call us now on 01564 741 837 or, alternatively, simply click here to drop us a message.