You know you have the best equipment, and your staff is the best in the business, but how do you go about effectively marketing your gym without breaking the bank?

Traditional advertising such as the local Yellow Pages, or radio and television, however small the station, are just too far out of the advertising budget that many gyms have to work with. In addition, how well this kind of investment works is almost impossible to track. You may indeed be gaining a new member as a result of a commercial they have seen or heard, but the chances are you will forget to ask, and they will be too busy trying out all those exciting machines to remember to mention how they heard about your gym in the first place. However, in order to survive and prosper, marketing your gym successfully is crucial.

There is another, very effective and economical method of marketing your gym that you may have never considered, or even heard much about. In today’s economic climate, the savvy gym owner should consider the great power of online advertising. Thanks to the great spread of everyday Internet use by exactly the people you need to target and the power of major search engines like Google, you can target specific geographical areas for people searching basic keywords, in this case things like “get fit” “gym” and “fitness class”. Even better, online advertising lets you target the specific demographic you are seeking. By searching for such specific keywords, the user is already showing an interest in improving their physical fitness, and exactly the kind of service you have to offer. That is half the battle won already!

But how does this kind of marketing really convert into great gym advertising? To be most effective you need to direct the person who clicked on your brief little online ad to a more expansive “landing page”. On this page you need to create a great and compelling reason for this potential customer, or visitor (they are “visiting” your page now) to share their basic contact information with you. Several informative articles on physical fitness and getting in shape should pique the visitor’s interest in your gym and its staff, and if you were to combine that with a printable coupon that visitors can download by inputting their contact information into a short online form, you should be onto a winning strategy. This contact data is emailed to you immediately, so you can follow up on these hot leads right away, while getting fit is still fresh in their minds.

The true beauty of using the Internet and this kind of gym advertising is how little it costs. You will only be charged for potential customers who take the time to “click” on your ad specifically, those people who are demonstrating a real interest in your facility. Online advertising like this really is the best and economically sensible way to make the best of your gym marketing dollar.