In this solo podcast episode, Richard Toutounji (founder of ComMarketing) advises leisure‑centre managers who run a fitness facility on how to generate more members without relying on external agencies. He stresses the need to internalise marketing within the gym, even when a broader leisure‑centre marketing department exists. Key tactics include: creating venue‑specific Instagram and Facebook pages; using existing foot‑traffic for "interruption" or "purple‑cow" marketing via in‑facility demos, mini open days, and cross‑promoting gym services in other areas (e.g., spin bikes by the pool). He recommends splitting marketing responsibilities among 2‑4 staff members (coaches, studio managers, etc.) so each focuses on a strength (social‑media stories, client case‑studies, hero videos). He argues most growth can be achieved with low‑cost, internal actions rather than paid cold‑audience advertising or external digital agencies. When managers feel stuck, he promotes the ComMarketing “Marketing Muscle‑Up” call as a coaching service to train the team and design a tailored plan. Throughout, he uses an enthusiastic, conversational tone, urging listeners to act quickly and share the episode.
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So a great way to do that is to use your team resources and split up the roles between your team. Don't get confused just because there's a marketing department in for the leisure center, the whole leisure center. We still have to internalize the marketing inside the fitness facility. Are you a leisure center manager running a gym inside or a wellness facility, but wondering what is the best way to market to generate more business inside the leisure center? In today's episode, I'm going to talk all about that, how to do it, the best way to do it. Should I use an agency to do it? Should I do it myself? What do I do with my team? How do I get them to actually grow the member base? That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. If this is your first time listening in, welcome to this show. In this show, we talk all about how to grow your health, wellness, and fitness studio. a leisure center operator, if you're a gym studio PT business. You know, when I started off in business, it was 17 and a half. I was 17 and a half. I purchased a private fitness studio. It was called Personal Best out in Neutral Bay. I had no idea where Neutral Bay was. All I knew was an hour and a half from where I was living at the time. I went into that business not really sure how to market, but I had all the enthusiasm and the youngness that I needed to figure out it as I went. I used A-frames to market and a lot of hope marketing, hope that people would walk in the door. Now we run a company called ComMarketing. We've been doing this for 10 years straight. So we've pretty much come under it. We've pretty much seen every single opportunity, problem, Marketing hack, marketing growth, and how you really can grow a long-term sustainable business without reaching burnout. And today's episode, I do want to talk about leisure centers. We don't talk about leisure centers much, but leisure centers are a huge part of the ecosystem of communities. They're a huge part of how we get Australia healthier and fitter. how we get New Zealand, how do we get the world healthier and fitter? These are huge centers that really tap into the community. And we work a lot with leisure centers. And when we work with leisure centers, we come— there's one major issue that we have, and they don't know if they know how they should do their marketing because there's a lot of top level. So there might be a marketing team inside for the whole leisure center. So leisure center might consist of a pool, You know, like a swimming center, a health club inside there. You could have conference and facility rooms in there, tennis courts. There's a whole array of different leisure centers there. And a lot of time with leisure centers, it's above-the-line marketing. So you've got a massive facility there, the community know it's there, but the fitness center might be getting a little bit neglected. And so what happens is the facility, the leisure center, have a marketing team, as you may know if you're in a leisure center, and then you've got the internal team that run the gym. And they— you may not have the budget, or you may not have the resources, or you may not be getting the same, you know, shared resources across your gym. Everybody's going to be different. But I want to kind of let you know on a little bit of a hack that you can do to speed up your marketing if you're a leisure center manager. And most likely, as I said, you're in a position where you may have a team that run the marketing in your overall leisure center, but then they might not be tapping into your particular fitness facility inside that leisure center. So a great way to do that is to use your team resources and split up the roles between your team. Don't get confused just because there's a marketing department in for the leisure center, the whole leisure center. We still have to internalize the marketing inside the fitness facility. Now every location is different. You may have opportunities to advertise inside the leisure center, and you may not. You may have opportunities to go to a cold audience, so outside the leisure center and market. You may or may not have the budget. Most likely there may not be a budget to advertise to a cold audience, but the best marketing you can do is marketing to the current people that are walking through the doors every day. And this is including also to an RSL. If you're a gym inside an RSL, it's really ensuring that, you know, first, you know, first thing number one is you want to know what you can and can't do Inside the leisure center? So is there billboard signs, things like that? Number 2, can I be running marketing inside the leisure center? So for example, can I have mini open days? Can I bring, for example, part of what we do into other areas? So for example, can I have a demonstration day? Can I have it like a mini open day and Bring the spin bikes out to the swimming pool, you know, bring the gym out to other areas to get eyeballs on what you actually currently do. Just because it's there doesn't mean people really know about it or have the desire to use it. And so a lot of inside marketing has to work. So internally, it has to work inside the leisure center. So we can go like local area marketing, but, but we don't even need to go local area marketing if we can do a really good job inside the facility. And that, that I call that a lot of purple cow marketing. So ensuring that we can talk to the people that are walking through, they might be going to the pool, but it's more interruption marketing. So take Facebook, what is interruption marketing, and you wanted to be putting it in different parts of leisure center. So we're marketing inside the people that are already there, they're already coming, they've already got probably part of a membership to get there. And so they're the best ways to market. But when you go You know, when we talk about digital marketing, like, you know, who's running the Instagram? Should we have our own Instagram account? Should we have our own Facebook account? Well, the answer is definitely yes, you should, because it gives you more control of what you can do without having to go to the head office marketing and saying, can I do this? Can I do that? That's just too slow. And if you are in that predicament, it is time to sit down and have that conversation of how we can Really expand and get more people inside using all the facilities, not just maybe the swimming pool, but using the fitness facility inside that. And there is a lot of leisure centers that are changing their ways and having different entities. So a swimming pool could be the leisure center, it could be the aerobics, it could be a conference center in there. And there are different, um, you know, like mini communities in there. So mini Instagram, mini Facebooks that are working that, and that's the right way to do it because that grows that community and that gives the opportunity for everybody to see that, um, there's really great, uh, trainers, coaches that are helping you strive and to get fitter. So definitely set up your own marketing, your own Instagram, Facebook page inside the Legend Center. So don't just rely on the top, top-of-the-line marketing to make that work. The other thing I want to touch on is using your team members. So you may not have the resources of a full-time marketing person, and so we're going to market like a small business. We're going to split the roles up. You might have a coach that does a certain amount of hours, and they might want to be in charge of the Instagram stories. You may have the studio manager there that predominantly has never done marketing, but they might want to be in charge of gathering client case studies, or we call them hero videos, and taking those. And so it really is just having 2 to 4 people on your marketing team and splitting the roles up into what they know best. And that kind of comes— the conversation is that most likely you probably won't have to do much outside marketing. There's a lot of room to use the current facility properly to market to the people that are already there. And so it's great in a way because there's not much costs that you'll require to make this happen. It just comes down to having a right marketing plan and strategy in place. So what I'd recommend is to ensure that your team can learn marketing together. And everybody can have a slightly different role. And that's really important when everybody has a slightly different role because you don't want 3 to 4 people learning marketing at once and you're all doing the same thing. That's a lot of wasted hours. So it's always good to split up the roles and everybody's responsible for something else. But the last, the last kind of comment question I want to make here is that when you don't know, you know, what works, what to do, this is really the valuable piece here of Not relying on agents anymore, not relying on your marketing department inside the ledger center. Things move so fast, and you know when we started com marketing ten years ago, we did a lot of services. We did a lot of execution for clients ourselves, digital agency more say. But when we switched over to marketing education predominantly, except for a lot of our you could say market leader clients that are, that just don't want to do anything themselves and really need, you know, in a high competition area or need professional videos created, things like that. Majority of marketing can be done internally by yourself, but the problem is that we don't know what to do or when to do it. And so if that's you and you're in a position where it's like, well, what do I do? I would 100% recommend to jump onto commarketing.com.au and, um, you know, book a Marketing Muscle-Up call and we can show you who needs to do what and where they need— where they need to fit in. Um, that's a good way to get your team together to move forward, but everybody has different roles. So you need, um, you know, you need a coach, you need a mentor, marketing coach to guide you through the path and not having to rely on an external digital agency. Because if we're using digital agencies in this frame of mind, they're going to go external marketing. We don't need to go into external marketing. We need to go internal marketing, as in marketing inside the facility itself. But it's like, what to do? And there's heaps of different ideas that you can do. As I said, the biggest one is to always be seen In the leisure center in different ways, shapes, or forms to do that. I remember I worked on cruise liners for a few years there, and, you know, we ran spin classes in the swimming pool. Not— well, there was some in the swimming pool. They also ran them near the swimming pool just to advise people there was a gym on board, and that really helped to bring awareness. to the gym just by going out and see— people can see what you actually do. And that's the biggest way that you can market inside a facility. But again, a lot of the time you don't have the team for it, but that's easily done when they know what they need to do and they set a role and they get it done. So I hope that helps. If you're a leisure center manager and you need some help, just reach out. Messagecommarketing.com.au, book your marketing muscle up, and we can definitely help you to get your team trained up, ready to go. Guys, this quick one today. If you've enjoyed this episode and you know somebody in a leisure center that is needing a bit of help, share this episode, and I really look forward to helping them to grow the community because it's— I mean, leisure centers are an amazing place where people go In general, so we want to make sure we really support the growth of fitness facilities inside leisure centers. Catch you next time in the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show.
