The Simple Paid Ads System That Gets Gym Owners More Leads

Paid ads have changed. Here’s what gym owners need to know to make them work in 2026.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain CEO John Franklin and founder Chris Cooper close out Marketing May with the paid ads funnel.

You build this funnel last because it’s the one that amplifies everything else.

John explains why the old ads playbook is dead—Meta’s Andromeda update changed how ads are targeted and delivered—and what that means for gym owners.

Chris and John share why gym owners need to know how to run their own ads and understand their ad math, rather than just outsource to an ad agency.

They walk through exactly how to create an effective ad campaign and even deliver two clear action steps to help you get started: one for gym owners who have never run an ad, and one for gym owners who are already running them and want better results.

This is episode 4 of 4 in the Marketing May series. If you missed the previous funnels, check them out via the links below.

Links

The Referral Funnel

The Social Funnel

The Content Funnel

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

0:00 - Intro

1:31 - Media buying is dead

5:56 - The 5-1-30 post

10:10 - How to generate content ideas

15:40 - Campaign structure & tracking

18:28 - Your action steps

Transcript

0:03

Welcome to Run a Profitable Gym. This is the last week of Marketing May where we are breaking down the four funnels that gym owners need to get more leads. And we're closing with a good one, ads. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of Two Brain Business. And with me today is Chris Cooper, the co-founder of Two Brain Business. Chris, you actually built this business by running a blog called Don't Buy Ads. Has your feelings about paid advertising changed? Yeah, absolutely. The reason it was called Don't Buy Ads in the beginning is because my first mentor said, Chris, your business is not ready for an influx of clients. Don't buy ads yet. And we think about ads as like adding fuel to a burning fire. We've already talked about how to make that fire with content, gather people around it. And now we're going to talk about pouring ads on top. So I don't know if you know this, because I've been running your ads for a very long time now, but ads have fundamentally changed in the last year. Meta released this update called Andromeda, and it changed how they target people and find pocket audiences and deliver ads. And as a result, a lot of gym owners who were reliant on ads saw their lead costs skyrocket, which has led to other gurus in the space claiming that there will be mass shutdowns of gyms, because if you relied on paid ads, it's no longer going to work. And while the game has changed, there are things that you can do to bring your lead costs back down. And today we're going to talk through them. But first I want to put my two cents in. My opinion is that media buying is dying and will soon be dead. And that's unfortunate because I'm someone who spent thousands of hours on the back end of Facebook ads manager, focusing on strategies for building audiences, targeting people, bidding strategies, and AI within the platform has just gotten so good that it's largely useless. Like. I try my best job and then I give meta, little to no instruction aside from like writing gym owner in the ad and they're competing pretty even. And I'm assuming it'll get to the point where, um, it is met as doing a better job than anything I could do. So now the name of the game is producing lots of creative, the old way of just having one picture and writing six week challenge and expecting $2 leads that that's long gone. The new way is creating a lot of high volume, creative, getting feedback from the algorithm and using that as a basis for, um, your paid material, which is great for somebody like you who creates a lot of social media and organic content. It feeds the machine what it wants. Now, historically, you've had pretty strong opinions on ad agencies. Yeah. And tell me why you believe that gym owners should not work with ad agencies or you don't recommend in most cases that gym owners hire ad agencies. Well, there's a few reasons. Number one, I think that most ad agencies really prey on the gym owner's fear that it's going to be complicated to learn how to run ads. Second is they exist because gym owners are scared that they don't know how to market. And so they want to just like put it in somebody else's hands and go coach on the floor. But when you become the owner of a business, you have to learn marketing. It's your responsibility. And the ad agencies will come and go. And third, frankly, I don't think most ad agencies do a good job. I mean, you know, in the early days when Facebook advertising was cheap and super duper effective, there were several who really did a great job. But most of the ad agencies now have their incentives backward. They just want to spend your budget no matter what result it gets you. You're far better off to learn this stuff yourself. And now that learning is easier than ever because the meta platform is just going to do it for you. So I'll push back a little bit. I do feel like you have to learn what works, but you have to learn what the platform likes, right? It's no longer you have to learn the mechanics of the ads manager platform. You just have to know how to make content that resonates with your core audience and call out the people that you want to target. Perfect. And so if you are a gym owner who's following the content funnel and the social media funnel, ads have never been easier. Now for most gym owners, you're probably in the neighborhood of five to $20 a day, right? So it's$600 of spend in a month. Let me make sure I did that right. Yeah, that sounds right. Um, so top end $600 to spend a month, uh, typical ad agency is going to be charging you somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand to $2,500 a month. So that's almost like on the top end for X your ad spend. So you can screw up a lot of stuff, uh, and still have cheaper performance than you would once you add in the agency fees plus your spend. So typically I think most gym owners are better served of, you know, let's say an agency can do a B plus job doing a C minus job, but just putting more spend into the machine. Now, I think that's going to net a better result for a lot of people, assuming you get basic training. And that's something we provide to all two brain clients, but there are a ton of free resources out there. Um, so if you're curious, you can go and do that, but we're going to give you, we're going to give you some alpha today. We're going to show you the absolute basics. So now while the way meta delivers ads has changed a lot over the last year, human psychology has not, the building blocks of a decent ad are still very similar and the building blocks of a decent organic post that sells for you are very similar to the building blocks of a decent ad that sells for you. So Chris, we have something that we've been teaching into your brain that has been kind of like the framework of a strong fitness ad for the last, you know, 60 years. I have a slide that we'll put up over here that shows basically the same framework that we're about to teach from like a newspaper article targeting people from the 60s. Sure. So let's talk about the 5-1-30 post, what it is and how to structure one. The 5-1-30 post is you saying that you're looking for five people who want to achieve one goal in the next 30 days. And the reason that this works, even though the advertising, the medium changes, meta changes, is because it appeals to human psychology. So first off, we're talking scarcity. We're introducing scarcity by saying that we're looking for just five people. The next thing that we're talking about is we're relaying what we're selling to their goals. So we're not saying we are looking for five personal training clients. We're saying we're looking for five people who want to lose 10 pounds. So that goal is addressing exactly what they want to achieve. And then 30 days kind of gives them like a time capsule on it. If you just say, I want five new clients for my gym, you don't create any kind of urgency or demand, but most people believe that they can commit to something for 30 days. And that's just the psychology that you need to get them started. And we're still seeing posts like that work really well on organic social media. So just like posting and calling out more of a broad audience. If you were to put that into ads manager, it's not going to perform as well as it would have five years ago, where you have an edge today is if you're getting hyper specific on who you are serving and the outcome. So something like I'm looking for five golfers who want to add 20 yards to their drive in the next 30 days would have absolutely bombed as an ad five years ago. But now men is going to be able to find five golfers who are looking to drive the pocket audience or someone who's had a baby in the last three months, who's having trouble working out and wants to get back into the gym in the next 30 days. That's another example of like a tiny pocket audience that you can create that may work as an ad now that didn't work five years ago. And so that's why we're always talking about getting hyper specific on who you serve and the outcome you are delivering. If you're going too broad, it's going to be difficult for meta to serve your ads to the right audience. There was a time in meta when it was smart to go broad to as many people as you possibly could, but that's flipped now. And it's, it's become more and more important to go narrow and be very specific, but the structure's unchanged. You want to use that five, one 30 framework. And we don't actually teach this as a paid ad. I put this into the paid ad training that we're doing today because you need to understand the frameworks, the building blocks, but we teach it as just like an organic post. So just have people raise their hand and you should test these out. It's free to post this on your social, try calling out some different audiences. You can use this as an email. So send it to your list. Just see who's listening. And again, target dad, target moms, target kids. Like you can just change it around. You can run it as a boosted post and you can run it as a lead ad. There's a bunch of different variants, but this structure of post works really well for selling. That's why we want you to understand it before we get into the meat and potatoes of ads. Specialists can charge more than generalists. So generally, if you're selling something very specific to a very specific niche, uh, I'm looking for five cyclists who want to add 20 Watts to their FTP in the next 30 days. Most of the audience won't even know what that means, but my art, my audience definitely will. So with that lead up, I want to yield better results. And people ask, uh, John, what is more creative? And what I tell them is if you're spending heavy, you want to at least 15 unique creative angles every single month. I can tell you within the two brain account, we're running in our primary leads, uh, campaign within each ad set. We have 45 different variants of ads running at any given time. So the more you feed it, the cheaper it's going to be. I've tested this a gazillion times over, take my word for it. Now, if you are somebody who is a $5 a day, Jim, you don't have to stress out about making 45 different ads. You know, if you're running two now go to four, but double the output tests and then send me a thank you letter. When I tell Jim Morris, they need to make 15 diverse creatives every single month that I kind of get this look like that's a lot of content. And I'm going to teach you something that's going to help you make a little more content. And Chris has never been through this before. So Chris is going to learn with you. Uh, I call this the octopus method. So if you think of an octopus, you got the body in the middle. So a big circle, and then a bunch of legs coming off of the octa. Is it? Yeah. That's what octo stands for it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Little, uh, uh, lesson in words. So the center of the octopus is going to be the thing that you are looking to sell within your ad. So for your gym catalyst, what is the primary thing you want to sell? Like what is your core service that you want to grow? Small group, personal training now. Okay. So I'm going to ask you some questions about small group, personal training at catalyst. And I would like you to answer them. Sure. What problems do prospects face when they come to sign up for small group, personal training at catalyst? Three quarters of them are looking for fat loss now. Fat loss. Okay. So then we'd draw a line off of the octopus and we'd write fat loss. Now what's another one? Mobility. Okay. Really? Someone will come in and say, I want to, I want to be mobile. The way that you and I define mobility is might be different than the way they define it, but they, they just want to get moving and they want to be free kind of thing. So, yeah. And then what's another one? Another one is strength. A lot of people come to Catalyst for strength because we've been talking about strength for 20 years. Okay. And what circumstances would stop them from signing up? Time. Okay. So we'd do a line, time. Yeah. Fear of the unknown, I think is really common. They're not really sure what to expect. Line, fear of the unknown. Reputation. Honestly, we were a CrossFit gym for 10 years and most people think we still are. Reputation. Any more there? The last one is going to be price. People don't know what to expect for price, but they know what personal training costs and they don't know if they can afford it. Awesome. And what outcome can they expect to get after, let's say, three or four months of small group personal training? 10 pound fat loss, definitely greater feelings of independence, which is usually what they're doing for mobility, calling mobility, dramatically improved strength, and some friends to boot. Okay. And why would somebody buy today versus waiting? Time of the year. The message on why to buy now changes for us. Right now, we want people working out to get ready for the summer because our summer is so short. Okay. So we probably rattled off 12 and an octopus only has eight legs, but every one of those would become a piece of content. So you'd say why small group personal training is great for mobility? Why it's great for building strength? Why small group personal training is affordable, why small group personal training is awesome if you are time constrained, why small group personal training is awesome if you are coming back from an injury. And then you would just do a talking head style reel addressing every one of those things, and you could feed that to the machine and let Meta find those different pocket audiences. And then you've gone from one static image to, you know, 12 different videos there. And you can do the exact same thing with a static image or an image with some text on it. And you can easily take what we just created, which was like 12 different ideas, and you could turn it into 36 different pieces of creative that you could feed into the machine. And some of them are going to be terrible. They're going to be really bad. But if you're putting them all into an ad set, Meta's only going to serve the best ones. So like I mentioned, within 2Brain, we have 45 running at any given time. Only three or four are getting any kind of play, where the 41 are just remaining dormant. But we have those in the back pocket. And so we've tested against all those 45 different ones, And they found out these are the three best. And as someone who's been doing this for a while, my gut feeling on what will work and what doesn't work is wrong. You know, it's wrong most of the time. So we made one for our Two Brain Summit, which is our big event that's coming up in June. And the best performing piece of creative was the one that I almost didn't upload into the campaign because I thought it was gonna bomb so badly. So as somebody who teaches gym owners how to make a lot of content, someone who's scared of making stuff like this, how would you encourage them to try doing this? Like, what is a good starting point from someone who's going to zero to staring at making 12 different types of videos for their core service? Well, I think the exercise that you just put me through is really valuable. That was great coaching. And I had even forgotten that one of the primary reasons that people sign up for small group personal training is the time flexibility. They can come at 11 a.m. Or they can come at 1 p.m. Or whatever around my group schedule. So that's a great one. And then what I would do is I would take those 12 arms of the octopus that you just came up with, make a list and ask myself, hey, Chris, why would somebody come to Catalyst because of the price savings available in small group personal training? And I would just spell that out to the camera for 30 seconds and there's my ad. And so it's important to note here that ads and media are starting to converge. In the content funnel episode last week, we spoke a lot about how the last three funnels are kind of turning into one funnel. And you can see here why people who are better at making organic social media will now get better at making ads. So if you're someone who's maybe spending two, $3,000 on an ad agency, it may be better to reallocate that money to make great social because that's going to make your ads a lot cheaper and it's going to give you a lot more variety, which is going to make your leads a lot cheaper. So now that we've covered that, why don't we go into the actual campaign structure itself? When most gym owners start, they may start by boosting a post. So having a post that does well and just like boosting it out to an audience. And that's okay, right? It's a great first start. It's like one-on-one, right? So maybe you try a five, one 30 post and you know, five people raise their hand, you get a sale from that. You can, you can just try throwing a couple bucks behind it, setting the target to very close to your gym and seeing if you get results, right? Like I've seen businesses scale ad spend to six figures a month doing just like follower campaigns and boosted posts. So there's nothing wrong with that. The tier two would just be a lead campaign. So this is telling Metta that you want leads. So serve this to people, the most likely to opt in. And the best starting point is to just use Metta's lead forms. So when you're choosing your campaign objective and ads manager, you would just go down to the lead objective and then you'd use lead forms. And so all that is, is when somebody clicks, learn more on their ad, a pop-up shows up and you collect their name, email, phone. When that's done, Metta gives you that information and you can start your lead nurture process, which is an episode for another day. And for most gym owners running ads, that's going to be the primary way you do a lead campaign. Let's talk about campaign structure because there's all these AI tools, there's dynamic creative, there's budget optimization on the campaign level, on the ad set level, et cetera, et cetera. So let's assume that the primary thing you're doing when running ads is getting leads. We're going to create one campaign for our leads and that campaign we'll just call it the leads campaign. Within that, we're going to create two ad sets, one ad set for men, one ad set for women. And then within each ad set, that's where you're going to put your diverse creative. So the things that we just created, the octopus stuff, we're going to put in each of those campaigns and you can change up the ads for each one. So if you want to make one specifically calling out men, that would go in your, your male campaign. And then you just reshoot those videos, calling out women instead of men. And the budget optimization at the ad set level. So that way, if your women are outperforming your men, which will happen in most cases, you can allocate more budget to the female ad set than the male ad set. A lot of people will tell you to do campaign budget optimization. I like the ad set better because again, like a lot, like more times than not, you're going to be doing 70, 80% of your ad spend to women. So John, this is amazing stuff. It really is like magic, but that can be intimidating to a lot of people. Like they're watching this and they're feeling overwhelmed already. If that's me, what do I do? Should book a call with a two brand mentor because we're going to teach you how to do this. No problem. So let's preface this by saying not everybody needs to run ads. If you are happy with the growth of your gym and you're getting more members than you need every month, what you do is ignore this and not watch this episode altogether. And if you are somebody who maybe doesn't have the coaching on how to run ads, but you know, you want to try it. Your first step is going to be that five, one 30 posts as an organic post. Once you get a couple of comments on that post, the next thing you're going to do is boost it for a few bucks a day to see if you can get more people commenting on it. And then you've created a real funnel, right? Because whenever someone comments on it, you start chatting with them. And that is like the one-on-one version, super simple to do. Like there's a button on the post that just says boost. And then the next step is going to be a simple lead capture campaign, right? And so getting into the weeds and showing you how to set up your ads and doing all that is outside the scope of this video. But if it's sounding confusing, what you should do is just create a campaign, create an ad set for women, put five different pieces of creative in it and try and get them to book a call, right? And what you don't want to do is just say, forget it. And you know, stay scared and hire an ads agency to take this off your plate because you're scared of it. Lean into that. Understand that you need to learn how to do this yourself because it's a skill that you're going to need for the next 20 years, right? If this is too much and your instinct is like, I'm just going to hire somebody else to do it. Like there's a good chance. It's not going to work out for you, right? Because you need to have a basic understanding of it before you delegate this out. The next common question that we get is, you know, well, what can I afford to pay for a lead? Right? Because we, we need to measure this based off of results. Ad advertising is an easy way to light a bunch of money on fire. Ask me, I, uh, went to a tinker meetup last week and we were doing a $60 a day campaign. I thought I was adjusting it down. I accidentally added a zero. So I was doing $600 a day and then, uh, came back a week later for that fun surprise. So, you know, you do have to, you do have to pay attention to this stuff and it is important that you know your numbers. One of the most obvious questions, uh, or one of the most common questions we get is, you know, what's a good lead cost? What can I afford to pay for a lead? What would you answer to somebody like that? Now, after knowing you for a decade, I would answer much higher. And it's basically like up to the price of your on-ramp package. So yeah, the, the answer I would give you is it depends, right? I own a gym and Chris owns a gym. So let's say I do good lead nurture. Chris does poorly nurture. I have high prices. Chris has low prices. I keep people for 30 months. Chris keeps people for 10 months. What I can afford to spend per lead is going to be much higher than what Chris can afford to spend per lead. And so it's important that you know your numbers. We call it your ad math. And so unless you have that information, this is going to be kind of a fool's errand, right? Unless you've run an ad and you're getting $2 leads and the math is so obvious. But a lot of people get to a point where maybe they start running ads and they're getting like $3, $4 leads and it's insanely profitable, right? And then the lead costs will go up to like, let's say $10, where it's still insanely profitable, but they'll shut their ads off because they used to be $3 and now they're $10. They've tripled in price. Right. And so you kind of killed your golden goose because you didn't really understand the math, right? They think ads are no longer working, but when we do the math together, they're making $4 back for every dollar they put into the machine and they've killed it just because ad costs are up. Unfortunately, I'm here to tell you that ads are only going to get more expensive. People are only going to be willing to pay more and more and more for eyeballs and advertisers are only going to get more sophisticated. So you got to figure out how to make it work in the current environment. And you got to let your winners ride, even if the actual lead cost gets more expensive. Now I'm a content guy. I'd like to just blog for the rest of my life. But when I met John a decade ago, I started running ads as a trial. And back then ads were fairly cheap and now they're still fairly cheap, but it still seems overwhelming. You know, meta ads manager changes. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is to work with a mentor to make it really simple because once you understand it once you've got it forever, and this is a skill that you're going to need for the next 20 years, or you'll always be shuffling out $4 for every dollar that goes into your ads by overpaying ad agencies. So this is marketing may. So we're leaving them with tactics that will generate a little house money so they can pay for mentorship so they can get that help that they need. So, the first muscle you need to develop is asking for a sale, feeling comfortable asking for leads on social. So, that's why if you are starting from a dead stop, I'm going to tell you one more time, do a 5-1-30 post, even if it's just organic. You don't need to run it as an ad. Just put one out there and get some leads. Get used to flexing that muscle, asking for people to raise their hand for the service you offer. Now, if you are a gym owner who is actively running ads, this is the test I would like you to do this week. Let's say you have two different ads in your account. I want you to double the creative in that ad set. So, go from two to four. If you have four, go from four to eight. And I want you to see what the results look like. So, in the Two Brain Mentorship program, we help you build all four funnels. And we teach you the ads funnel fourth because it's the accelerator. You want to have a campfire built and glowing before you try to dump gasoline on it or you're just dumping gas onto cold rocks. You want to start by making a referral funnel so that every person that comes into your gym can potentially turn into two or more people. Then you want to have an organic social media funnel. You want to be really, really consistent. Post every day for 30 days. Then you want to build bigger and better content based on that feedback. And then finally, that's when you douse the flames with gasoline by paying for ads. So, that concludes our four-part series on Marketing May. If you missed the other three parts, go back. Go back and watch them. It'll help you set up those earlier funnels and you'll feel more prepared going into this one. If you got value out of this, subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and we will see you next week.