“My Gym’s Instagram Does All the Work”

“Honest question before I sign anything. Instagram has brought me every new member I’ve got this year. What’s the website actually for?”

That landed at eleven at night, two days after I’d quoted a gym owner for a rebuild. I typed four sentences back and went to sleep.

He deserved considerably better than four sentences. I get some version of that same question on nearly every sales call I take, and what I manage on a call is a sentence and a half before one of us drags the conversation back to the proposal.

So he’s getting the long version tonight, and so are you.

He’s right about Instagram

I’m not going to argue with a man about where his own members came from, and I’d be an idiot to try.

Your profile does work that no other trade I audit gets handed to it. Your members film themselves in your building, at six in the morning, sweating, delighted, and then they tag you in it.

A dentist can’t do that. A roofer can’t do that. You get free footage of strangers enjoying your product, which is the hardest thing in marketing to buy.

So no, I don’t want you posting any less. Why would I?

The part he’d already done

His website was pointing at that profile before I ever opened it.

The icons were sitting in his footer where the builder had left them, which is ordinary in a trade that lands 3 of 47 on that check.

Owners tell me nobody clicks those things anyway, which is one of the four excuses I ranked when I went through Indianapolis.

79.2% of gym websites link a social profile, against 66% of everything I audit.

So the connection he was asking about already existed, and it was running in one direction the entire time. His site had been quietly handing people over to Instagram for years.

What he was really asking is what comes back the other way. And where does she land when it does?

She has already decided

Nobody browses gyms the way they browse for a sofa.

She’s watched your reels for a month, she’s walked past the window, and her coworker joined in March and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. By the time she types your name into anything, the argument inside her head is finished.

She wants a time, a price and a way in.

Now try finding your own class times on your own profile at eleven at night, the way she has to. Scroll back past the reel, past the pull-up video, past the coach’s birthday.

You posted the schedule in a story and the story expired on Tuesday.

That hunt has a website version too. A woman gave up before she ever reached one gym’s class times, and I fixed it by taking something off the homepage.

How long did that take you, on your own profile, knowing exactly what you were hunting for? She doesn’t know any of that, and she isn’t as motivated as you are.

The price is worse. Almost nobody in this trade posts it anywhere a stranger can find it, and I understand exactly why, because the conversation goes better in person and everyone in the fitness business knows it.

She isn’t coming in to have that conversation, though. She’s deciding tonight, in the dark, with a phone she’s been holding for an hour, and an unanswered question is a reason to close the app and try again never.

What breaks when there’s no form

Put a form on that page and she can hand you her name and her question at eleven at night, while she’s still keen and still faintly annoyed at herself.

Leave it off and every question has to become a message that sits and waits for a human being, and the human being is you. She asks what time the beginner class runs. It waits there until you’re off the floor at noon.

By lunchtime she’s joined the place with the sign-up button.

Would you have waited?

30.3% of gym homepages carry a contact form, against 28% of everything I audit, so he had a great deal of company.

His website wasn’t doing anything. He was right about that, and it wasn’t the website’s fault, because nobody had ever given the thing a job to do.

So do you need one at all?

That was his actual question, so I’ll answer it straight instead of selling at him.

86.2% of the gyms I sampled have a website, which tells you what everybody else decided, and a crowd is not a reason.

In New Orleans I ranked the five reasons owners give me for skipping the website entirely, and the one I believe. Instagram carrying the whole business is the version I hear most in your trade.

The reason is that Instagram is where she makes the decision and your website is where she acts on it, and those two jobs want completely different rooms.

One is a window full of people having a good time on a Saturday morning. The other is a desk with a pen sitting on it.

Ask your profile to be the desk and it does the job badly. Ask your website to be the window and it does that job badly too. Most gym owners I meet are asking one of them to be both.

The eleven days nobody plans for

A gym I look after lost access to their account for eleven days last year. Someone tried to log into it from a laptop on the other side of the world, the whole thing got frozen, and their appeal went into a queue that nobody has ever seen the far end of.

Eleven days without the machine that brings them every new member. In January.

Their website carried on doing its small, quiet, unglamorous job the entire time, because nothing about it needed anybody else’s permission to keep running.

It does ask something of you. Everything on that upkeep list stays in your hands, which is more than you can say for the account.

What would you have been left holding for those eleven days?

I’m not telling you that to frighten you into hiring anyone. I’m telling you because the owner had said my opening sentence to me, almost word for word, the previous summer.

You can settle this without me

61.4% of gym sites run analytics, a little ahead of 58% across my whole sample, so the odds are decent that yours is already recording what happens on it.

With nothing recording, nobody in this argument has any evidence at all, and that includes me.

Go and look at what your website did last month, then look at what your profile did. I’d put money on the profile.

That isn’t the win it sounds like, though. It means your profile did all that work and then handed her to a page that couldn’t take a booking off her.

The thing to do tonight

I build gym websites for a living, so discount everything above by however much you think is fair.

Then get off the gym wifi, pick up your own phone, and try to book yourself into a class on your own site without messaging a single human being. Time it while you do it.

If you can’t finish before you’d have given up on a stranger’s website, send me the address and I’ll go through the whole thing for nothing.