“How much should we be spending on marketing?” is one of the most common questions gym owners ask, and one of the hardest to answer honestly, because most published figures are either vague industry averages or numbers pulled from a completely different type of business. Here’s a more useful way to think about it than chasing a single “correct” percentage.

Why percentage-of-revenue rules of thumb don’t travel well

You’ll often see advice suggesting gyms spend somewhere between 5% and 10% of revenue on marketing. It’s not wrong exactly, but it’s a rule built for a stable, established business with a known audience and a known cost per member — not for a gym that’s just opened, rebranding, or trying to break into a competitive local market. A brand-new club fighting for initial visibility usually needs to spend well above that range for the first six to twelve months; an established club with strong word-of-mouth and high retention might comfortably spend less.

Treat any single percentage as a starting point for a conversation, not a target to hit.

The more useful question: what do you actually need marketing to do?

Budget should follow objective, not the other way around. A club trying to fill genuinely empty off-peak capacity needs a different spend level than one that’s already near capacity and mainly focused on retention. A club opening in a new location needs a heavier initial push than one maintaining an established position. Before setting a number, get specific about what you’re actually trying to achieve over the next quarter or year — new member volume, off-peak utilisation, retention, brand awareness in a new catchment — because each of those has a different realistic price tag.

Where the money actually needs to go

A marketing budget for a gym typically needs to cover several distinct things, not just advertising spend:

  • Paid advertising — the media spend itself, on whichever platforms your audience actually uses.
  • Content and creative — photography, video and copy, since ads with weak creative underperform regardless of budget.
  • Technology — CRM, email/SMS tools, and whatever supports your booking and retention journeys.
  • People or agency time — someone has to plan, execute and analyse all of the above, and this is often the line item gyms underestimate most.

A common mistake is spending the whole budget on ad platforms and leaving nothing for the strategy, creative and CRM work that determines whether that ad spend actually converts.

Cost per lead varies enormously by intent

Be wary of any figure quoted without context. A cold, broad-reach social ad targeting “anyone interested in fitness” will produce a very different cost per lead than a highly targeted campaign aimed at people who’ve already shown intent — searched for a gym nearby, visited your website, or engaged with your content. Judging a campaign’s efficiency without knowing what kind of audience it was targeting is close to meaningless.

A practical starting framework

Rather than fixating on a single percentage, most gyms are better served asking three questions: What specifically are we trying to achieve in the next 3–6 months? What would it realistically cost to achieve that, based on our market and competition, not a generic average? And can we afford to fund it properly, rather than spreading a smaller budget so thin across every channel that nothing gets enough weight to work?

A focused budget on two or three channels, funded properly, will almost always outperform the same total spread across six channels at a level too low for any of them to gain traction.