Fitness Marketing Math

Tim knows his marketing math, check out his results.

It’s amazing how much has changed in the last 4 years. Going from a struggling solo trainer to owning a 7 figure studio, from training people to training trainers and trying to manage, teach and motivate them to work together to outperform and avoid the pitfalls that seemingly all trainers make.

What I’ve come to realize is that business is continually just one big mathematical equation, today I’m going to try to shed light on this, to share an idea with you that you past, present and future can be evaluated, planned and predicted with simple math.

Eventually if you read enough business books or talk to enough business people you’ll hear the term KPI or Key Performance Indicators. Every business has them, the handful of vital components that statistically and predictably explain your business revenues in the past months or can predict with accuracy what they will be in the future.

Some of the most notable would be the size of our audience, the number of new potential clients each month and the number of actual new clients each month. These are often referred to as prospects, leads and converts. Do you know the number of prospects leads and converts of your own business? If not this should be a top priority for you to learn or track. (Search for sales report, or set, show, close for more information on tracking.)

Based on my own experience I’m going to give you some numbers which you may use as goals and targets or simply at least for a point of illustration. Your audience will vary dependent upon the size of your email list, or the number of pieces for a direct or addressed mail campaign, or the listeners of a radio audience, etc. As for leads you should be striving to generate at least 1-2 per business day or 20-30 people that inquire or ask about your services. From there the question is how many people can you convert to paying customers? If this number is below 50% improving this should be your biggest and top priority as you strive for a benchmark average of 80% conversion.

How big do you want your business to be? How much monthly revenue do you wish to generate? Do the math.

Desired monthly revenue / amount of average monthly purpose = total required # of clients for desired monthly revenue. (Let’s say this works out to 100.)

For easy numbers let’s say you’re closing only 50% of the interested leads or potential clients. This means to reach our desired revenue we need to reach 200 prospects. If we could hit our benchmark of about 1-2 leads per business day we’ll need approximately 6-7 months to reach the required number of leads to achieve our desired income.

So how do we generate the leads?

Well on average most marketing mediums have about a 3-4% response rate. This means if our audience was about 100 people a well designed message and offer should attract on average 3-4 people who will want to know more about our services, or 3-4 leads ultimately becoming 1-2 new clients.

So here’s where we start doing some math. 200 is 4% of 5000, we can safely assume to acquire 100 paying clients at a 50% close ratio we’ll need to reach an audience of approximately 5000-7500 people or about 850-1100 per month to reach our goal in 6-7 months. (Comparatively if we could reach that benchmark average of an 80% close ratio this number drops to 3100-4500 people.)

As we break it down even further we could consider we somehow need to find approximately 200-300 people per week that have any sort of connection to health, wellness, or image consciousness and to somehow get them a message. Does this seem like a daunting task? It doesn’t have to be.

Here are 6 ways you can reach your audience each week:

1)      Do you have an email list? A facebook fanpage? If not now is a great time to start, build a mailing list by sharing quality information with people like blog posts, or an email newsletter like FitPro Newsletter, etc. Ask past and present clients to refer their friends and build this list. You shouldn’t be pitching offers to your email list every time you mail them but after providing about 3-4 items of value it’s time to make an offer. So if you send out 4 blog posts per month you’ve certainly earned the opportunity to give them an offer once per month.

2)      Where can you find a gathering of people you might talk to? Could you talk to 50 people per week? At the mall, farmers market, park, or a lunch and learn? This could easily add up to another 200 people for your required monthly audience.

3)      Those pesky lead boxes. Every 4 names in a lead box you can potentially assume that the equivalent of 100 people of your audience looked at it. How many boxes would you need to get just 4 names per week? This could easily account for almost half of your required monthly audience.

4)      Direct mail or addressed mail. Canada Post allows you to pick postal codes of desired neighbourhoods; you can easily dictate how many pieces you send. This can be a great way to top up your audience reach a few times per year.

5)      Endorsed letters. Who loves you? Would your accountant, lawyer, real estate agent send a letter on your behalf telling their clients how great they think you are? Maybe you should ask them, and here’s a tip, write the letter for them.

6)      Referrals. Your clients love you, when people find good value they like to tell others, encourage them with incentives and deadlines this can easily add up and bolster your audience reach.

My point is when you think about it it’s not that hard to find people to talk to, most of us are just generally way too sensitive to the people that say no leading us to not pursue enough people. Maybe now that you understand the math you will be more resilient and persistent.

The application of this will have a staggering result, I know this because it’s one of the key KPIs in our business, it’s one of the primary ways we do all of our planning and have maintained steady growth through all four of the previous years. With cashflow planning you can see how you can even calculate months in advance how much money you may need to spend on marketing to reach your goals and exactly what you need the results to be.