How we Generated 74% more organic leads for a gym franchise with one Google Post

I want to share a story of how we were able to generate 74% more organic leads for a gym franchise using Google Posts.

Google Posts is the latest rollout inside of Google My Business. With Google Posts you are able to write microblog post up to 300 words that will show up in the knowledge panel when someone searches for your business.

Google Posts is the greatest thing that Google has implemented for Google My Business ever.  I am serious.

Think of Google Posts as a big free Google ad where you can add a picture.

There are few gyms that are using Google Posts, and the ones that are using Google Posts are not using it to its fullest potential.

In this blog posts we will show the basics of setting up the posts and the strategy we used to get 74% more organic leads.

Creating Google Posts inside of Google My Business

It is not that hard to create a google post.

1. You have to login into your Google My Business account.

2. Once you are inside click the Posts tab.

3. After you click the posts tab you are ready to create your post.  Click the camera icon or post icon to get started.

4. The next thing you want to do is upload your picture.  Your picture has to be at least 200×200 pixels.  We have found the best size is 600×450.  Google will automatically crop you your picture and we found the 600×450 size works all the time.

5.  This is when you add your post.  Your post can be anywhere from 100-300 words.  Your post can be about anything you want.  It can be about an upcoming event, a blog post, special offers product announcements etc.

6. After you added your post you can add a url to where you want the traffic to go.  We suggest using utm codes because Google Posts is not integrated with Google Analytics yet, and you won’t get any data if you don’t use utms.

7. After that click the blue publish button and your Google Posts will appear in the knowledge panel and in Google Maps. Easy enough. 🙂

 The one trick we used to generate 74% more organic leads.

There is one trick we used inside of Google Posts that everybody forgets, and that is the make this post an event.

If you don’t activate this tab your post will only last for 7 days and you will have to keep creating new posts.

With the make, this posts an event tab we can set the time we want the event to start and when we want it to finish.

For this gym franchise, we ran the campaign for 30 days and we set the event for Nov 1st to Nov 30th.  Setting up the Google Post this way, we were able to stay in the knowledge panel for 30 days without us having to touch it.

After we created the event we used the Google post just like we were running a Google Ads or Facebook campaign.  We had an offer for a 30 day free trial, and once the potential customer clicked the link we sent them straight to a landing page where they could fill out the form and get their coupon.

After 30 days the numbers were impressive to say least.  In November we generated 66 leads from the Google posts alone!

Overall from the 5 locations we tested the Google Posts on,  we had a 38% opt in rate which is off the charts.  Organic traffic on average for for this gym franchise converts anywhere from 1-3% for the 30 day free trial pass.  Our Google Posts campaign got 66 leads with only 146 users.

On of the gym franchise locations had a 45% conversion rate for the 30 day free pass. These leads were hot the bottom of the funnel and ready to sign up.

Were these numbers a fluke?

No they were not. Turns out in December we did even better.  We ran the exact campaign but this time instead of 5 locations we did 6 locations. In December 2018 we got 99 leads from only 193 users.

Conversion rate overall stayed about the same, it was 35% in December. The highest conversion rate between the locations was 47%.  Overall the last two months we had the highest amount of leads from organic.

What did we learn?

Google posts works!

1. Make sure you use UTM codes to track your results.

2.Turn on the event button to make your Google Posts last longer.

3. Send your traffic to a landing page to get leads.

4. Rinse and repeat.

This has changed the way clients see SEO. We can show them results on month one now when we start a campaign.

Even if the client is not ranking well in the search engines, we can still provide value, and give them leads that came from their SEO campaign.