How to use Facebook Ads to Grow Your Crossfit Business

Lift your membership numbers in your Box each month with Facebook ads

The big question: Does Facebook ads work for CrossFit gyms?

Obviously, the answer is yes or this would be a really short article lol.

So then how do you run profitable Facebook ads for your CrossFit box? Advertising without some kind of ROI is a non starter for any business right?

Well, it all comes down to knowing your numbers and your target market.

Who is the ideal client for your CrossFit affiliate?

This is due diligence that is not just specific to Facebook ads, but to any of your marketing activities.  Who are your clients? Are they men or women? How old are they? What interests do they share? What products do they buy? How much money do they make? Where do they hang out (both online and offline)? What stance do they take on political issues?

You get the idea…REALLY dive deep and know what makes them tick…motivates their purchases.

The more you know about your clients the better you can hone in on people just like them who will be more likely to join your CrossFit box.

What is your average monthly and lifetime client value?

What this means is how much, on average, do you make per client in any given month, and then over the average lifetime of a client.

In other words if you have 2 members, one paying $90 and the other paying $110 then the average monthly value would be $100.  If your average client sticks around at your box for a year, then your average client lifetime value would be $1200.  You need to know this so you can start to figure out how much you can pay to acquire a client and remain profitable (ie in business…).

And once you know these numbers, this is where you start to understand the power of paid advertising.

What percentage of interested prospects do a trial at your CrossFit box?

Say you get 10 calls a day, but you can only sell 1 of those people on coming in for a trial.  If that’s the case, fix this before you blow money on Facebook or other advertising. You want your internal systems to be as good as possible before you overload it with more potential members.

Paid traffic can actually break your sales and onboarding systems – or rather, reveal weaknesses in your sales and member processes.

If you can’t convert hot prospects (i.e., people who called you for information about your affiliate) into free trials (whether that is a one on one intro or a free class) at a rate of at least 65% you need to work on a whole host of other marketing and sales systems before you start paying for less than hot prospects.  If this is you check out this post on handling calls from prospective members.

What percentage of free trials become paying members?

Finally, how many of the people who come in for a free trial actually sign up and give you money?  It’s all well and good to run 5 people a day through free trials, but if you sign up only 1 or 2 of them a week then it’s really just a colossal waste of time – yours and theirs.

I hate wasting time. It’s the one thing you can never get back.  You want to close a lot of these trials.  If you are qualifying people properly on the phone or when you book their trial you should be able to close more than 50%.  The highest rate I’ve ever seen was 88% over 6 months.

As the volume of trials goes up, this number is likely (but doesn’t have to) to go down.  Before you start paying for prospects work on converting at least 50% or more of your free prospects into paying members.

No amount of marketing jujitsu or ninja advertising strategy will fix a broken sales process.

What does this mean for Facebook ads for my CrossFit affiliate?

WARNING: MATH AHEAD

The answer is pretty simple. The combination of these numbers tells you how much you can afford to spend per click/conversion.

Let me explain…

Let’s say (for the sake of simple math) you earn an average of $100/month from a member.

You convert 70% of your prospects to free trials, and 50% of those trials to paying members.

That would mean that if your Facebook ad brought you 100 new prospects, you could expect to end up with 70 new trials and 35 new members.  For an increase in revenue of about $3,500/month.

To recap: assuming 100 new leads from Facebook…

100 x .70 = 70 (free trials)
70 x .50 =  35 (new members)
35 x $100 = $3,500 (added monthly revenue)

Not too shabby eh?

So, there’s an important point of distinction here…

It’s important to note that 100 new prospects (or leads) is not the same as 100 clicks on your ad.

Not even close.

We’re talking about two very different things: Clicks and Conversions.

First your ad persuades people to take an action, or click.  In other words, an ad that takes the person to a landing page on your site where they are prompted to enter their name, email and phone number in exchange for something of value (this could be to book your free trial, or a voucher/discount, get a free report, video series, or maybe a quick intro to the paleo diet, etc.) Doesn’t really matter.

They would only count towards your 100 prospects if they both clicked on your ad and entered their info into your lead form (that’s what we call a conversion).

Conversions = leads.
Clicks ≠ leads.

Oh, and more maths coming at ya…

A good, sorry, a GREAT Facebook ad will convert about 2% of the people who see it (impressions) into clicks (that gives us our CTR, or click-through rate). And about 10% of those clicks turn into captured leads/prospects on average.

That would be an exceptional ad click-through rate. Most CTR will only be between .50-1.7%.

For simplicity’s sake, If your ad did convert at 10% (or .10) – meaning 10% of people that clicked filled in your lead form – that would mean that your Facebook campaign would have to bring you 1000 website visitors (clicks) to get you those 35 new members.

Sounds like a lot but here’s how it looks laid out start to finish:

50,000 (impressions) x .02 = 1000 (clicks) x .10 = 100 (leads) x .70 = 70 (trials) x .50 = 35 (members)

If this was the case, then you could reasonably afford to pay up to $3.50 PER CLICK to acquire a new member, meaning you would start making money on these members on month 2, for a total campaign cost of $3,500 at most. 1000 (clicks) x $3.50 = $3,500.

So let’s break this down real quick…

This means that (if all else remains equal) you’d be paying: 

$3.50 per click
$35 per lead
$50 per free trial
$100 per new member

These are your break-even numbers.

What that means is, you now have data points that tells you how to tell if you are profitable with your Facebook campaigns. If your cost per click is higher than $3.50 you know you are in the red the first month. If you’re paying more than $100 for a new member signup, probably time to look at the funnel and optimize some things like ad copy/image, landing page, etc to get that back down.

I used even numbers simply because it made the math easier.  Most CrossFit affiliates are not in the position to add 35 new members every month. Most would be happy adding 5 or 10 new members a month.

If you scaled down the campaign, you would be looking at spending up to $500 for 5 new members. That may not sound great, but keep in mind that those 5 new members could be worth $3000 – $6,000 if they stay an average of 6-12 months paying $100/m.

This is lifetime value…and you paid $500 to make $6,000. That’s an 1,100% ROAS (return on ad spend) if you were wondering.

You don’t have to spend anywhere near that much on Facebook ads to get results though, so breathe easier.

Managing your pay per click costs with Facebook ads.

Armed with all the data we just figured out above, you now know the maximum you could afford to pay on Facebook to acquire a new member, while still remaining profitable.  You can expect to pay much less that our example, but I strive to spend less than 20% of this number on my ads. You would adjust our formulas to fit your business model and pricing structure.

So there you have it…

This is how to go about acquiring new customers for your box from Facebook at a profit; and growing your CrossFit business. Paid advertising is just a numbers game. Know the rules, and you can win big.

If you need help growing your box, I’d be happy to talk with you about it. Let’s schedule a strategy call and see if it’s a fit.