Why Gym Marketing Agencies Fail & What to Do Instead

In the last year, three marketing agencies have asked Chris Cooper to buy them out—and dozens of others have disappeared.

The average lifespan of a gym marketing agency is 18 months: They churn through gym owners, only to vanish, rebrand and repeat the cycle.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Coop pulls back the curtain on why agencies keep failing, and then he lays out a better marketing plan for gym owners.

He explains how agencies exploit gym owners who don’t understand marketing and often provide low-quality leads or clients who are attracted by unsustainable offers.

The solution? Stop renting your marketing and build systems you own.

Chris describes four battle-tested marketing funnels that have been refined across thousands of gyms worldwide: referrals, organic social media, content and paid ads.

These funnels feed each other, and once they’re running, they’re yours forever. You'll have a world-class structure that will outlast any agency.

Dive deeper into your marketing systems with Two-Brain’s free resources for gym owners, linked below.

Links

Book a Call

Referral Funnel Guide

Organic Social Media Guide

Content Marketing Guide

Paid Ads Guide

State of the Industry Report

More Free Tools

Gym Owners United 

0:00 - Intro

3:35 - Do you need more leads?

7:15 - Problems with agency results

10:24 - What works? The four funnels

15:06 - Build your funnels with a mentor

Transcript

Chris: 0:02

Hey, it's Coop. Welcome back to Run a Profitable Gym. Today I want to talk about something that's been bothering me for quite a while now. And I think it's time that we had an honest conversation about it. Have you noticed that you're seeing more ads for gym marketing agencies than ever before? Like everywhere you scroll, there's this new thing promising you 30 leads in 30 days, or 20 appointments guaranteed, or some magic formula that's going to fill your gym. Well, there's a reason that you're seeing so many of these ads and from so many different companies, probably ones that you've never even heard of before. And it's not because they're super duper successful. In fact, it's the opposite. In the past 12 months alone, three different marketing agencies that you've probably seen on your Facebook feed or your Instagram feed, three of them have approached me to ask if I'd buy them out. And dozens of others have just, you know, disappeared. Poof. You know, they're gone. Some have even started rebranding themselves as mentorship companies because they want to borrow credibility from people who actually know what they're doing. So today, I want to pull back the curtain on why these ad agencies keep failing for gym owners, what it means for you as a gym owner, and most importantly, what you should be doing instead. Okay, let's start with the history of advertising for gyms, because this isn't new, right? Gym marketing agencies have been around for as long as there have been gyms, but not the same ones. And that's the key. Before the current batch, which seems to change every three or four months, there was gym launch. And before gym launch, there was the new You Challenge. And before that, you had agencies doing direct mail campaigns in the late 90s, and you had newspaper ads in the 2000s, and you had the yellow pages back then, right? It's like reading a book out of the Old Testament. You know, this agency begat that agency, which begat this other agency, which begat the three agencies that just died last week. The names change for these agencies all the time and the tactics change, but the fundamental problem never changes. And here's why these agencies don't know how to get or keep their own clients. Think about that for a second. If these agencies were actually good at marketing, they wouldn't need to keep rebranding themselves and relaunching every 18 months. They wouldn't be approaching people like me asking if they want to buy them out because they can't sustain their own business. They would not be trying to lie and secretly infiltrate gymownersunited.com and send you private DMs about working with their ad agency if they knew how to actually attract you as a customer. And this is pretty ironic, right? They're settling selling you on their ability to grow your gym, but they can't even keep themselves in business. And look, I get it. Starting a business is hard. You know that, I know that. I've been there, you've been there, but when you're selling marketing expertise and you can't market your own business successfully, well, that should tell us all something. The average lifespan of these ad agencies is about 18 months. Some make it to 24 if they're lucky, and a very, very, very tiny few continue to fight on for years. But during that time, they are churning through gym owners like well, like gym owners churn through clients when they don't know how to run a proper retention program. Do you see the parallel here? If you want your gym to be like these ad agencies, then hire these ad agencies. If you want your gym to be a successful gym, then you have to learn how to market yourself. So I'm gonna go a little bit deeper on ad agencies because this is a very popular topic of conversation in our free group, gymownersunited.com, but it also crops up on places like Reddit and in my email all the time. And it drives me crazy because these ad agencies exist because they prey on our ignorance, right? The reason they keep popping up and failing and popping up and failing is because there's always a new crop of gym owners who don't understand marketing. Now, I'm not saying this to be mean, right? Most gym owners didn't get into this business because they love marketing. I sure didn't. We got into it because we love coaching. We love seeing people transform. Like maybe we had a transformation, we want that for everybody. And we love the community aspect. But marketing feels like complicated, right? We've already solved the puzzle of fitness. Let's just solve that puzzle. Marketing feels like a new puzzle to solve, and it's complicated, and we're not super incentivized to do it until we start running out of money. It feels like this mysterious thing that you kind of need an expert for. And these agencies know that. They exploit it. They throw around terms like leads and appointments and conversions and they make it sound really technical and complex. They use confusing language that you kind of understand. So it sounds like they know what they're doing. And then they promise you results in these specific metrics that sound good but don't actually mean anything, right? We'll get you 30 leads in 30 days. Okay, but what is a lead? Is it somebody who filled out a form? Is it someone who actually wants to join your gym? Is it someone who can afford your services? Is it just somebody in your area? Because here's what we found in our state of the industry data, and this is from thousands of gyms, by the way, not just a handful. 14.6% of gym owners don't even call their leads at all, ever. So let that sink in. One out of every seven gym owners pays for leads or does work to get leads and then doesn't even call them. And for those who do call, well, the median set rate, that's the percentage of leads who actually book a sales appointment, is only 33%. That's one in three. And then out of all those appointments that get booked, remember one in three, the median close rate is only 62.5%. So let's do the math here for a minute. If an agency gets you 30 leads and you actually call all of them, which you know already puts you ahead of most gym owners, then you'll book about 10 appointments out of those 30 leads. And out of those 10 appointments, you'll close maybe six. So that's six new clients from 30 leads. Now, that might be fine, you know, if if those leads cost you$10 each. But they don't. And if those six clients stick around for years and they refer to their friends, then that's great. But they probably won't because they were attracted by some special offer that isn't really representative of what you normally do. The ad agency runs this challenge, but you don't usually run that challenge. And they run this six-week kickstart program, but like that's not how you change a person's life. So the problem is not that you need more leads, the problem is that your funnel is broken. You need a process for marketing and a process for sales. You need to fix your sales process first. So learn how to call leads back quickly, learn how to set appointments properly, learn how to close those appointments. Then you need to fix your lead nurture because most of these leads, no matter where they come from, they're not ready to buy right now. They need to be warmed up over time. And then and only then should you be pouring more leads and time and energy and money into the top of your funnel. But the agencies don't want you to hear that because they make money by selling you leads, not by fixing your business. So, all right, let's say that you hire one of these agencies and somehow, somehow, it actually works in the short term. You get some leads, some appointments, even some new clients, right? You're still gonna run into four major problems. Problem number one is low quality leads. When an ad agency is trying to hit a number like 30 leads in 30 days, they are not worried about quality. They're worried about quantity because that's what's gonna get you paying for more. So you wind up getting leads that aren't really interested, aren't really qualified, aren't even really in your area sometimes. I've seen agencies deliver leads from people who live three hours away. I have seen agencies deliver leads from people who thought that they were signing up for a free gym membership, not a consultation. Have you ever seen this? You probably have in your gym. And if there's somebody other than you doing your marketing and running your ads for you, this stuff happens all the time. I've seen leads who filled out a form because they were bored and they were just clicking around on Facebook, but those aren't leads, those are names in a spreadsheet. So that's problem number one. The leads that they get are not high quality. Problem number two is appointments that don't show or convert. So sometimes, even if the leads are decent, they were attracted by some kind of offer, like six weeks for$99 or a free trial or whatever, right? They're not coming in because they know anything about your gym or like your gym or you or trust you. They're coming in because of that deal. So when you try to convert them to your regular pricing, well, they buck, they do the intro and then they ghost you. So that's the second problem. Appointments that show they don't become long-term clients. Problem number three is that the clients are attracted by unsustainable offers. So let's say they do sign up. Great, but they signed up for 99 bucks a month and your normal rate is 175. So now you've got some clients at 99 bucks because you're telling yourself, well, any dollar is better than no dollars, but your normal rate is 175. And so now you've got this two-tier pricing system, and you've either got to upsell these people somehow, or you've got to honor that rate forever. Even if you can upsell them, they're not your ideal client. There's somebody who is attracted by a discount. Those people don't stay. They don't refer, they don't become your evangelists because as soon as they find another discount, boom, they're gone. And here's what's worse: these people at 175, boy, you hope they never find out about these people paying$99 for the exact same service, because then they're gonna ask to pay$99 and they will be right to do so, right? It's just the wrong thing to do. Problem number four, and this is the big one, is complete dependency. Even if everything works properly, good leads, good conversions, good retention, and I've never heard of this from an ad agency ever, but let's say that by some miracle it works, then you still have a massive problem, and that is that you don't know how to market. Your entire business is now dependent on this agency, these other people who don't even know you, don't work for you, and probably don't even have your best interests in mind. And remember, these agencies go out of business all the time. So what happens when they disappear or when they raise their rates or when they start working with your competitor down the street? You're screwed. You spent all this time and money building their business, not yours. Okay, enough doom and gloom. Let's talk about what actually works. Every gym needs to build four marketing funnels. A funnel is how you attract a big audience of leads and then filter people out to the point where they become clients. Right? It looks like a funnel. Every gym needs to build four of their own marketing funnels. Not rent them, not outsource them, build them, own them, control them. And the first funnel we're gonna build is referrals. So this is your lowest cost, highest quality source for new clients, period. If you're not systematically asking for referrals, then you're leaving a lot of money and opportunity on the table. And I'm not talking about just like hoping your clients are for their friends or having a 10% discount for people who are paying, you know, hundreds of dollars a month for your coaching service. I'm talking about having a process, right? An event, a system. We teach gym owners how to do this step by step. We've got a whole guide on it on our website. I'll just post a link below for the referral funnel. You should be running referral campaigns every quarter by doing goal reviews at minimum. These are your best clients, right? They come in pre-sold. You already know that they earn about as much as your current clients do. They stay longer because they've got a support network already in your gym. They're worth way more than a client who answers an ad. So the first funnel we need to build is that referral funnel so that we can turn every future client into at least two. The second funnel is organic social media. Now notice I said organic. We're not to the paid level yet. You should be building an audience on social media, people who know you, like you, and trust you. This isn't about posting random workout videos. This is about building authority in your market, sharing client success stories, educating people, being helpful. When somebody in your area thinks, I need to get in shape, you want them to think of you. Not because they saw your ad, because they've been following you for six months and you've been helping them for free. And I've got a guide for this too. If you click on the uh gym marketing social media guide below this video, you can have it for free. By the way, we're running a 30-day social sprint challenge in our growth group right now. I like to keep business fun. And what we're finding is that when people post three times a day to Instagram, and I give them a little prompt, but the real exercise is just consistency in posting. Boom, their retention goes up and their marketing goes up. And nobody's surprised, but they're all delighted. So the third funnel that you need to build after the referral funnel and the organic social media funnel is your content funnel. And this is where you really start to multiply the value of everything else. Content means blogging, podcasting, videos like this one, whatever format works for you. But here's the key you are creating valuable content that establishes you as the expert in your geographic area. And then you're using that content to drive people into your other funnels. So if somebody searches how to lose weight in Sault Ste. Marie or your city and they find your blog post, that's great. Your blog post has a call to action to join your email list, and your email list nurtures them over time. Eventually, they become a client and then a referral or a social media follower, and then they click one of your ads and they share it with somebody else. Do you see how this works? Each funnel feeds the others. I've got a guide for content marketing down below this video, too. And the fourth funnel is paid ads. Notice this is the last funnel you build, not the first funnel. You should absolutely be running paid ads, but only after the other three funnels are working: referrals, organic social media, and content. Because paid ads are the most expensive way to get clients. And if your funnels are broken, you're just throwing money away. Once you know that your sales process works, once you're getting referrals regularly, once you've built an audience on social media, once your leadernature process is really good, then you layer in paid ads. And here's the beautiful thing: when you run paid ads to people who have already been following you on social media or who have read your blog or who were referred by a friend, those ads work way better. That means your cost per acquisition goes way down. Your close rate goes up. And that's the multiplier effect of having all four of these funnels working for you. So the guide for this is down below this video. You can download it for free. Now, I know what you're thinking, Cook, this sounds like a lot of work. And it is. But you know what's more work? Constantly scrambling for new leads because your last ad agency went out of business, constantly trying to figure out where your next lead is coming from, constantly feeling like you're one bad month away from shutting down, constantly hoping and praying that somebody just comes in the door or one of your clients recognizes your excellence so much that they start wearing a billboard up and down the street, right? But that never ever happens. Building these funnels takes effort up front. But once they're running, they are running. You own them. Nobody can take them away from you. And this is exactly what we teach in our mentorship program and why. We don't just teach it, we mentor you through building them so we know that you've got it done. We walk you through building all four funnels step by step. You show you what to do and when to do it, and how to measure it. That means we turn your marketing from a mystery into a science. Look, I started this episode by talking about the history of gym marketing agencies, the old testament, if you will. And this agency begat that agency, which begat this other agency. But it's time for a new testament. It's time for a more enlightened era. An era where gym owners actually understand marketing so that they can attract people to a healthier lifestyle and coach them to change their lives. It's time for an era where you're not at the mercy of some agency that's going to disappear in 18 months. You don't need a different ad agency. You need systems, you need skills, you need to own your marketing. That's what we do at TwoBrain. We don't run ads for you. We teach you how to run ads. We don't just get you leads. We teach you how to get leads and more importantly, how to turn those leads into clients and turn those clients into evangelists for your gym. I'm not here to build my business on your business. We're here to build your business on our business, knowing what we know, mentoring what we can mentor, and coaching what we can coach. So, all right, let's wrap this up. If you take nothing else from this episode, remember this don't rent out your marketing to somebody else. You need to own it. You need to build four funnels: referral funnel, organic social media funnel, a content funnel, and a paid ads funnel in that order. You need to fix your sales process before you pour more leads into a broken funnel, and you need to fix your lead nurture process, or you're just gonna be wasting money and time. Stop depending on agencies that are gonna be gone 18 months from now. And if you want help building these systems, book a call with us. There's a link right below this video. You'll get on a call with one of my team and we'll talk about mentorship. There's also free tools below this video that you can use. We're gonna walk you through exactly from where you are to where you need to go and what you need to do first, and how to get there. Meaning, we're not just gonna give you a course or a book or a playbook or a tool. It's mentorship, meaning we'll get on a call, we'll help you build it together. And if you want the data that I referenced in this episode, the state of the industry report with all the numbers on leads and appointments and close rates and all of it, you can download that for free at two brainbusiness.com forward slash data. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm Coop. I will see you next time on Run a Profitable Gym.