Using Snapchat to market your facility on the cheap

If you’re not familiar with Snapchat it has a ton of filters for taking pictures. It also has a way to create your own for marketing purposes. This feature is called geofilters.

A geofilter is a picture filter designed by you that you can pay a small fee for that will be available in a specific area at a specific time frameset.

You can edit these in many different ways with your own wording or logo or both. There are two ways I have used these with great success.

Two ways to use Geofilters

In the gym on a day everyone is excited about a WOD or a max, make one of these filters by going to Snapchat from your desktop (this only works on the desktop to set up).

We will use a day where we max for an easy example. This past Monday I created a geofilter that had my logo on it and it had the words “MAX OUT MONDAY” on it. I posted on the whiteboard and in the members-only group to check their Snapchat filters.

I had 150ish members come through the door Monday and all day long my members had their phones out taking pictures. All-day the local Facebook feed and Instagram were filled with pictures my members took with the filter, tagging each other and the gym.

It wasn’t just pictures of the lifts but of them smiling and having fun, those are the pictures that get good interaction on social media and make the gym look like a place others want to be. The total cost to have my member marketing the hell out of my gym, about $4.

Creating a specific Filter

We also use bands a lot (no need to start that debate here) and I create a filter that says “BANDS OUT GUNS OUT”. Members share the pictures and people see the bands and ask about them.

This would give you an opportunity to engage somebody who hasn’t yet been inside your gym but is interested and asking questions. Bands work for me, you could be creative, it is simply a way to not only market but start a dialog with prospective members.

Fostering a local and loyal community

You can use geofilters for local events, especially sporting events. My town bleeds football. Our team is called the Tigers. I’ll set up geofilters for the football games that says “Good Luck Tigers From BCSC”. You can also do this for festivals, county fairs, college basketball games, even Times Square in NYC on New Year’s eve, any event where there will be many people in a small area.

I use this tool often, sometimes more than once a week and it never costs more than $6 or $7 at most but it gets my logo and message shared over many social media platforms. It is a very cheap and effective way to get in front of a lot of people.

I don’t use Snapchat myself except for talking to my wife, you don’t have to be on it at all to make this work. It is actually a very simple process you do directly on their website and takes about 5 minutes from start to finish.

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