Opening a Boxing Gym

Usually I work on building tech products, but I decided to go a different route with this business. Earlier this month I moved to a town of about 10k people where there's not many options for practicing martial arts. Boxing and MMA have been a big part of my life these last few years so I was bummed to find there wasn't any available gyms to train at - so I decided to open my own!

Unfortunately there's not a lot of available commercial rentals here, so I decided I'll start coaching at the local rec center and youth club in the meantime. I'm also hosting free group workouts at a park to start building a client base.

In terms of marketing, I've posted flyers on local businesses' windows downtown (with their permission of course). I also created a Facebook and posted on local classified pages, although this hasn't led to any engagement so far. I created an Instagram where I've gotten some engagement from. The thing that seems to work is to find other local fitness businesses, go to their list of followers and then following people from there. Liking photos seems to really catch people's attentions.

There's not a whole lot to do in town, so I think this could be a pretty successful business. People here chat a lot about rumors and happenings, so I have a feeling I'll get more clients once the word of mouth spreads. Getting to that point will be the hard part I think though. Ideally when I do find a space, it'll be downtown so it can generate foot traffic. I have a couple friends who own boxing/mma gyms and they said this brings in a lot.

Would love to get ideas and feedback. What would bring you to a gym, especially if you haven't tried boxing before? How would you go about marketing this sort of thing?