Creating a Facebook Ad campaign for your gym can be a complicated and frustrating task, and who wants to shell out THOUSANDS of dollars to a marketing agency and hope it works out?
I sure don’t.
I’m going to share the formula I’ve used to create high-value Facebook Ad campaigns for gyms. This isn’t your typical “free class” or “free week” offer, and it’s definitely not a Groupon-style offer (where you take a huge loss).
This is the same formula that gyms are using to get 20-40 new members and generate TENS of thousands of immediate revenue… and it’s not going to leave you feeling like you just scammed a bunch of people.
The formula will help you attract high-paying clients, it will generate a huge ROA (Return on Ad Spend), and will help you create value for other gym services you offer.
Let’s get cracking.
The formula is based on what I like to call an “Intro Offer”.
An intro offer is when you take the core service you’re offering (generally a monthly gym membership), and you bundle extra value on top of it and then discount the entire bundle.
It’s like giving a new gym member the red carpet treatment for a limited amount of time. (Everyone likes being on the red carpet!)
This achieves 2 purposes:
- To help the member achieve their goals (happy members are more likely to stay long-term)
- To let the member experience your other services in a paying capacity (when members pay for a service, they value it more)
So what is the foundation of your gym Facebook Ad campaign?
1. Your core membership offered for a limited duration
As an example, let’s say you offer your bootcamp classes for a duration of 6 weeks.
If your membership is $150/mo, then the base price of this offer is $225 ($150 x 1.5 months). This number is important because you want to make sure your final offer price is higher than your base price. This will help make sure you set your price anchor high. We don’t want members to have to pay more each month for the core membership after the intro offer expires.
2. Additional relevant products and services
This is where we start adding products and services that will help the member reach their goals. Some of the most common additions?
- nutrition coaching
- weekly checkins
- transformation/goal setting session
- at-home workouts
- tshirts
- Body composition tracking
Of course, part of creating your offer stack is actually stacking the value. So here’s the same add-ons, with example retail prices.
- nutrition coaching ($50/mo, or $75 for 6 weeks)
- weekly checkins ($15/each, or $90 for 6 weeks)
- transformation/goal setting session ($100/once)
- at-home workouts ($50 value)
- tshirts ($25 value)
- Body composition tracking ($25/each, or $75 for 6 weeks)
That’s a total retail value of $640!
But here’s the kicker:
Most of these things are lost-cost (high margin) items for gyms!
What’s next?
3. A discount
I’m a big fan of the 50% off discount. It presents a huge perceived value, and really helps increase the urgency of the offer. Of course, be sure not to discount past profitability… if you aren’t stacking enough value, you won’t have enough available to discount.
That brings the price of this offer down to $320… which is roughly $215/mo.
It gets better:
At that price, your members can afford to remain high-value clients because you’ll be able to transition them to membership PLUS nutrition coaching for less than they paid for the intro offer.
Which leads me to the last piece of the formula.
4. Limited time & availability
Urgency and scarcity are the biggest factors out there to create demand. If there’s no compelling reason to act quickly, then many people will wait… and that can kill the effectiveness of your Facebook Ad campaign.
Of course, you don’t want to create false urgency or scarcity… If you can only handle 30 people – let people know up front! And if you’ve got an end date to your offer (or a start date for the classes), you’ll want to make sure people know that as well.
This way, when you’ve got 3 days left to register with only 5 spaces available – you can let the prospect know and they can decide for themselves.
How Profitable is this Facebook Ad Campaign?
Before we jump into profitability, we first want to understand the difference between front-end revenue and back-end revenue.
Front-end revenue is the total amount of money that you’ll generate from selling your intro offer. In our example earlier, selling 20 intros at $320 – that’s $6,400 in front-end revenue.
If it only cost your gym $800 to run the bootcamp, then you’ve made roughly $5600 in profit (minus ad spend).
It gets better:
You also have back-end revenue, and that’s revenue generated from converting some of these members into monthly recurring memberships.
Let’s assume that 50% of these members stay – that’s 10 new gym members.
And each of these members signs up for the membership + nutrition plan at $200/mo (because they REALLY liked the service you provided).
And on average, they stayed for a (low) average of 8 months.
Those 10 members paying $200/mo for 8 months generate $16,000 in back-end revenue.
That’s an estimated $22,400 in TOTAL revenue generated from this ad campaign.
How Much Do You Have to Spend on Facebook Ads?
Each market will vary on this, but be prepared to spend $500.
Bigger cities tend to cost more, rural cities tend to cost less. Coastal areas tend to cost more, the midwest tends to cost less.
If you’re doing the math, that’s an estimated 1100% ROI for front-end revenue (and 4480% ROI on back-end revenue).
In other words, for every $1 spent on ads, it generates $12.80 in revenue.
(Site note… Actually, I’m generating the ROAS – the “Return on Ad Spend”. The ROI formula is a little more complex, but at least this way you’ll get an idea of how most Facebook Ad marketing agencies come up with those crazy ROIs.)
The conclusion.
If you want to use Facebook Ads in your gym business to generate dozens of new members, create a high-value intro offer, run your ads for a limited amount of time, and then spend the next 6-8 weeks creating the best experience you can in order to turn these into long-term members.
What intro offer will you be trying out?
