📚 What You Will Learn Today:
When you run an ad on Facebook, Instagram, or Google, you have to tell the computer WHO should see it. That choice is called targeting, and it's where most gym owners quietly waste half their money. Show a boot camp ad to the wrong people and it doesn't matter how good the ad is. This guide explains the four main kinds of audiences every gym, trainer, and studio should know, in plain words, with examples you can set up this week.
By the end of this guide, you will know:
- What "targeting" actually means and why it matters more than your ad's picture
- The 4 types of audiences: Location, Interests, People Who Already Know You, and Lookalikes
- Which audience type to start with (and which to save for later)
- How the same ideas work on Facebook, Instagram, and Google's picture ads
- The one thing to do with every lead no matter which audience they came from
🤔 First, What Is Targeting and Why Does It Matter So Much?
Here's a simple truth: The best ad in the world fails if it's shown to the wrong people.
Think about fishing. You could have the best bait ever made. But if you cast it into a swimming pool, you catch nothing. Cast it into a lake full of fish, and even okay bait gets bites. Targeting is picking the lake. Your ad is the bait.
Every ad platform (Facebook, Instagram, Google) knows a lot about people. Where they live. How old they are. What they're into. Whether they've visited your website. You get to use all of that to pick exactly who sees your ad.
Jen owns a women's strength studio. Her first ad went to "everyone in the state, ages 18 to 65." She got clicks from college kids three hours away and retired men who wanted a pool. Cost per lead: $41. Almost none showed up. She changed the targeting to women ages 30 to 55 within 8 miles who were interested in fitness. Same ad, same photo, same offer. Cost per lead dropped to $9, and most of them booked a class.
Jen didn't have a bad ad. She was fishing in a swimming pool.
The Four Lakes
There are really only four kinds of audiences. Everything else is a mix of these four. We'll go through them one at a time, from "start here" to "add this later."
📊 The Four Kinds of Audiences
Location is the base for everything. Warm audiences (people who know you) give the cheapest leads. Lookalikes help you find more people like your best members.
✅ The 4 Audience Types
We'll take them in order. If you only do number 1 and number 3, you'll already be ahead of most gyms in your town.
Location Targeting: People Who Can Actually Drive to You
This is the foundation. A gym is a local business. Nobody drives 45 minutes past six other gyms to come to yours. So the very first thing you do is draw a circle around your gym and only show ads inside it.
How Big Should the Circle Be?
Look at your current members. Where do they live? That's your real answer. If you don't know, use these starting points:
- Big city, lots of gyms nearby: 3 to 5 miles. Traffic is bad and people have options.
- Suburbs: 8 to 12 miles. People are used to driving 15 minutes for things.
- Small town or rural: 15 to 25 miles. You may be the only good option, and people drive farther.
Add Age and Gender to Match Your Real Members
Who actually buys from you? If your boot camp is mostly people aged 30 to 55, set your ad to 30 to 55. If your studio is women-only, set it to women. Don't guess who you WISH would join. Copy who actually does.
Imagine handing out flyers for your gym. Would you drive to a town 40 miles away and hand them out there? Of course not. You'd stand outside the grocery store two blocks from your gym. Location targeting is just standing outside the right grocery store, but online.
Facebook will sometimes suggest you "expand" your audience to get more reach. For a local gym, say no. More reach from 50 miles away is more money spent on people who will never come in. A smaller, closer audience almost always wins.
Put your town or neighborhood name right in the ad: "Maple Grove: Free Trial Week." When someone sees their own town's name, they stop scrolling. It's the cheapest trick in local advertising and it works every time.
Interest Targeting: People Who Already Like Fitness
Facebook and Instagram know what pages people follow, what they click, and what they watch. You can use that. Tell the platform "only show my ad to people inside my circle who are into fitness, running, healthy eating, or yoga."
Good Interests for Gyms
- General: Physical fitness, Health and wellness, Weight training, Personal trainer
- For boot camps: CrossFit, High-intensity interval training, Outdoor fitness
- For yoga or pilates studios: Yoga, Pilates, Meditation, Barre
- For PT: Nutrition, Strength training, Marathon running
- Lifestyle clues: Parents of young children, Recently moved (a new mover needs a new gym!)
The Big Warning: Don't Stack Too Many
Here's where people go wrong. They add 15 interests, thinking more is better. It's not. Each interest you add shrinks the audience. Pretty soon you're trying to show ads to 800 people, the ads get expensive, and the same few people see your ad 20 times and get annoyed.
Two or three broad interests is plenty. Honestly, for most local gyms, location plus age does most of the work. Facebook's computer is smart. Inside your circle, it will figure out who is likely to click on a gym ad all by itself. Interests are a gentle nudge, not a cage.
A trainer ran two ad sets to the same 10-mile circle. Set A: just location and age 30 to 55, no interests. Set B: location, age, plus "fitness" and "healthy eating." Set B got leads about 20% cheaper. Then he tried Set C with 12 stacked interests. Set C was the most expensive of the three by a lot. The audience got so small that Facebook struggled to find people to show it to. Two interests helped. Twelve hurt.
Instead of narrowing with lots of interests, try "broad" targeting (just location and age) and let your ad's words do the filtering. "Busy moms over 40 who want to feel strong again" in the ad text will attract exactly that person and nobody else, without you having to guess which interest box to check.
People Who Already Know You: Your Warmest Audience
This is the audience most gyms completely forget, and it's the cheapest one you have. These are people who have already heard of you:
- Visited your website in the last 30, 60, or 180 days
- Watched one of your videos on Facebook or Instagram
- Liked or commented on one of your posts
- Filled out a lead form but never booked
- Past members who cancelled
- Anyone on your email or text list
Marketers call this "retargeting" or "custom audiences." All that means is showing ads to people who already know who you are. Think of it like following up with someone who walked into your gym, looked around, and said "I'll think about it." You wouldn't just let them vanish. You'd check back in.
How to Set It Up
- Put the Facebook tracking code (called a "pixel") on your website. It's a small bit of code that quietly notes who visits. Your web person can do this in 10 minutes.
- Upload your lists. Export your old leads and past members from your gym software and upload them to Facebook as a custom audience. Facebook matches the emails and phone numbers to real accounts.
- Build audiences from your videos. Facebook can make an audience of "everyone who watched at least 10 seconds of this video." Free and powerful.
What to Show These People
Because they already know you, you can be more direct:
- Website visitors: "Still thinking about it? Your free week is waiting. Tap to book."
- Old leads who never booked: "Hey, we saved you a spot. Our next 6-week challenge starts Monday."
- Past members: "We miss you! Come back this month at your old rate. No sign-up fee."
A gym uploaded a list of 600 past members and ran a "we miss you, come back for a free week" ad only to them. Budget: $8 a day for two weeks. Result: 19 former members came back and rejoined. That's about $6 per returning member. Their regular ads to strangers cost them about $15 per lead, and only a third of those leads ever joined. Past members are already sold on you. They just need a nudge.
Health and fitness is a sensitive category, so Facebook limits some of the ways you can use lists. You can still upload your own customer lists and build website and video audiences. Just don't try to target by health conditions or anything medical. Stick to "people who know your gym."
📊 Cold vs. Warm: What a Lead Costs
Most gyms spend everything on the tall blue bar and ignore the short green one. Flip that.
Lookalike Audiences: Strangers Who Look Like Your Best Members
This one feels like magic the first time you use it. You give Facebook a list of your best members. Facebook studies them: their age, their habits, what they like, how they behave online. Then it goes out and finds thousands of strangers in your area who look just like them.
Marketers call this a "lookalike audience." Think of it like telling a matchmaker: "Here are 200 people who love my gym. Go find me more people like them."
What You Need
- A list of at least 100 people (Facebook needs enough to find a pattern). More is better. 500 to 1,000 is great.
- The RIGHT list. Don't upload every lead who ever filled out a form. Upload your paying members, or better yet, your members who have stayed 6+ months. You want Facebook to find more people like your best customers, not more people like your tire-kickers.
How to Use It
- Upload your best-member list as a custom audience.
- Create a lookalike from it. Choose the smallest size (1%) for the closest match.
- Layer your location circle on top. A lookalike of your members who lives 60 miles away is still useless.
- Run your normal "free trial week" ad to this audience and compare the cost per lead to your interest audience.
A studio owner uploaded a list of her 340 longest-standing members and built a 1% lookalike, limited to her 10-mile circle. She ran the same trial-week ad to this lookalike and to her usual "fitness interest" audience side by side. The lookalike came in about 30% cheaper per lead, and more of them actually showed up for class. Facebook had found people who were already a lot like the folks who stick around.
Building a lookalike from a bad list. If you upload 100 people who clicked an ad once and never came in, Facebook will find you more people who click once and never come in. Garbage in, garbage out. Use your real members.
🌐 Does This Work Beyond Facebook?
Yes. The four audience types are the same idea everywhere, just with different names on the buttons.
Instagram is owned by Facebook (the company is called Meta), so your targeting is literally the same. When you set up a Facebook ad, you can tick a box to also run it on Instagram. Same circle, same interests, same warm lists. Instagram tends to skew a bit younger, so it's great for boot camps and classes aimed at people in their 20s and 30s.
Google's Picture Ads (The Display Network)
Google can show picture ads on millions of websites and apps. Here, the same four types show up as:
- Location: same circle around your gym.
- Interests: Google calls them "affinity audiences" (people who like fitness) and "in-market audiences" (people actively shopping for a gym right now). The in-market one is gold for gyms.
- People who know you: Google calls it "remarketing." Same idea: show ads to people who visited your website.
- Lookalikes: Google's version is called "similar audiences" or is built into its automatic targeting.
Don't try to master three platforms at once. Get the four audience types working on Facebook and Instagram first. Once that's humming, add Google remarketing (showing ads to your website visitors) as your first Google step. It's cheap and it reinforces what Facebook already started.
⚡ No Matter the Audience: Follow Up in 5 Minutes
Here's the thing that ties it all together. Whether a lead came from a cold interest audience or a warm past-member list, what happens in the first 5 minutes after they fill out the form decides if they become a member.
A lead who hears from you in 5 minutes is many times more likely to book than one who hears from you the next morning. And you can't do that by hand while you're coaching. So set up an automatic text that fires the second the form is submitted:
"Hi Dana! It's Coach Rob from Maple Grove Fitness. Thanks for grabbing your free week! Which works better for your first class, tomorrow at 6 AM or 6 PM? Just reply and I'll save your spot."
Then follow up automatically on day 1, 2, 4, and 7 if they go quiet.
Remember: Great targeting gets the right fish to bite. Fast follow-up is reeling it in. Skip the second part and you're just feeding the fish.
📝 Quick Summary
The 4 Audience Types, In One Place
- Location: a circle around your gym (3 to 25 miles depending on where you are), plus the ages and gender of your real members. Use this on every single ad.
- Interests: 2 or 3 broad ones like "fitness" or "healthy eating." Don't stack 15. Let your ad's words do the filtering.
- People who know you: website visitors, video watchers, old leads, past members. Cheapest leads you'll ever get. Most gyms skip this. Don't.
- Lookalikes: give Facebook your 100+ best members and let it find strangers just like them. Layer your location circle on top.
Same four ideas work on Instagram and Google, just with different names.
Remember: Targeting is picking the lake. Pick a lake full of fish who live near you, and even a simple ad will get bites.
🎓 Your Action Plan
Week 1: Lay the foundation
- Look at your member list. Write down the age range and how far most of them drive. That's your circle and your age setting
- Get the Facebook pixel installed on your website (ask your web person; it's 10 minutes)
- Set up the automatic 5-minute text so it's ready before any leads arrive
Week 2: Launch cold and warm side by side
- Ad set A: location + age + 2 interests. Your free trial week ad. $10 to $15 a day
- Export your past members and old leads from your gym software. Upload as a custom audience
- Ad set B: "we miss you" ad to past members only. $5 to $8 a day
Week 3: Let them run
- Don't touch targeting for 7 full days. Facebook needs time to learn
- Reply to every lead who texts back. Book them in
- Build a video-viewer audience from any video you've posted
Week 4: Compare and add lookalikes
- Compare cost per lead between A and B. Move money toward the winner
- Upload your 100+ best members and build a 1% lookalike, limited to your circle
- Launch ad set C to the lookalike and run it against set A next month
- Write down: spent, leads, booked, showed up, for each audience
The gyms that get cheap leads aren't using secret tricks. They keep the circle small, they never forget the people who already know them, and they text every lead in 5 minutes. Pick the right lake, cast your line, and reel fast. You can do this!
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