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How to Set Up a Successful Facebook Campaign For Your Gym (Even If You’re Not a Facebook Marketing Ninja)

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Next to search engines, a Facebook campaign is the best avenue to increase leads to your gym.

There’s no other place that people so willingly share information about themselves that allows you to target your audience to a tee.

And, these Facebook campaign tactics will help any gym owner—whether you’ve run your own ads or not. The goal is to run impactful ads that bring in leads at a low cost. Let’s get started!

A/B Test Your Facebook Campaign

With any marketing strategy, it’s crucial to capture your audience’s interest right away. This either makes or breaks campaign results. When it comes to Facebook, you grab people’s attention with the image.

The power of the image influences how many likes, shares, and comments you get.

Sometimes, an off-beat image works best. Clean cut usually works, but you should measure your competition. Sometimes you need to be the ugly duckling to stand out in a room full of beautiful flamingos. Let’s take a look:

To most, the left photo is more appealing. But, the blue picture conveys the message much clearer. There are more likes on the left ad, but does that mean this one performed better? Let’s take a look…

AdEspresso tested this approach and noticed the second image (the right one) converted 143% higher regardless of the amount of likes.

This study shows that the simplest approach can be the most effective when applied in the right manner. It’s always wise to follow an A/B Testing approach in your marketing campaign.

You should also have great content below your image to make a point as well. Remember, people have serious attention deficit when scrolling on Facebook. A couple lines of good text should help them get the message right away.

Creating Your Image

If you aren’t a Facebook campaign ninja, that’s okay. You can still create amazing images for your ads. Here are a few things to note:

  • If you’re not a designer yourself, you can also use a site like Canva to help you customize your image
  • If time is limited, you can use a company like Design Pickle or Fiverr to find a designer to help you create amazing images for your ads
  • Find the right size image to make sure it fits within the dimensions of the site
  • Remember that the image needs to fit multi-formats (desktop, smartphone, tablet, etc)

And, if you want to include any text on your image, it needs to be short and sweet like “Free Workout,” or “Free Week.” The Facebook rule was that only 20% of the image is text based, but they recently updated that.

facebook advertising - fitness studio marketing video

Facebook Targeting

Your Facebook campaign is most effective when you know the ins and outs of your niche. This way, all marketing investment is spent on the right people.

A great way to target people who you know are interested in your service or product is with Facebook’s “custom audience.” You can do a couple of things here.

The first is to install a pixel on your website that tracks people who come to certain pages. So as a fitness studio, you’d run a Facebook campaign focused on interests related to fitness, or that you know your top members share.

Whether it’s your website or a landing page, you want to track people who visit through a Facebook pixel.

With that, you can import a list of contacts as your custom audience. This is a great way to reach people who are just like your current members, and people who’ve visited your web pages.

Facebook then uses this data from the custom audience, the pages they visit, and content posted to find things about your audience—commonalities for targeting.

Then, they find like-minded people in the thousands of people on Facebook within a 5-mile radius of your fitness studio. Sounds like a normal day of Facebook stalking, right?

Well, this stalking attracts an even larger following outside of your original circle.

Create a Budget for Your Facebook Campaign

If you aren’t a fully established fitness brand, you may not necessarily have the funds to do a full-on campaign. So you need to make sure that your spend reflects a serious return on investment.

There are a few main things to measure in your bids:

  • Cost per click (CPC)
  • Cost per mille (CPM: Cost per 1,000 impressions)
  • Optimized CPM (oCPM)

Establish a budget from the get-go. If you’re new to a Facebook campaign, test your ad campaign with $5-10 a day. This will be enough to see if the ad is effective because you can see the amount of impressions and clicks.

fitness studio gym kpi cheat sheet gym advertising success

Facebook has a set of guidelines and suggestions regarding your CPC and CPM.

If you look at the CPM, you can get the information here regarding budgeting for your CPM. The lowest bid you can pay for your CPC is $0.01. The highest depends on your daily budget because your maximum bid must be 2x lower than this factor.

So if you bid $3.00 on your maximum, the daily budget has to be at least $6.00. While paying more guarantees bigger exposure, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll gain clicks.

That’s why it’s important to test the waters and create a decent budget to see if your ad is as powerful as predicted. Otherwise, it’s back to the drawing board. However…

If it’s a hit, double-down and milk it for all the gym leads it’s worth!

All Successful Advertisers Have a Few Things in Common

Set a specific goal in the beginning of your Facebook campaign to either bring more likes to your page, get more traction to your website, or see the amount of interaction your ad gets. That’s valuable data you can use for long-term objectives.

Ultimately, you need to think of a few main things to really progress your advertising:

  • A/B test your image
  • See if the description garners results
  • Learn to create a quality heading
  • Identify your target audience

These are all valuable assets when creating a split test to see which ad converts the best. Everyone has a unique taste, but it’s important to see which is the most effective for your niche.

fitness sales facebook cheat sheet

To recap, A/B test to see what type of description and image works best for your campaign.

Then, set a budget of $5 to $10 a day on ads. Remember, you don’t want to burn your bank on something that doesn’t resonate with your core audience.

Finally, find out who your core audience is so you can target them directly!

Take time to create a few ads and monitor their performance over a few weeks. Always be open to fine-tuning your ads to test what works and what doesn’t.

You can look directly in your ad campaign to measure the data for yourself. If you have any questions along the way, comment below!

Loud Rumor
Loud Rumor

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