Advertising vs Marketing, Which Do You Do?
When you first become a personal trainer it’s difficult to grasp that you really need to be an effective marketer to turn this into a career path rather than a hobby. It has taken me a long time to really understand what it means to be a marketer. Lucky for you I tend to be a little stubborn and seem to learn slower so by continuing to read and attend Profitable Personal Trainer events you will learn and progress much faster than I have.
Many small businesses use the dartboard method of advertising and promotion.
Today let’s discuss one of the main differences of advertising or promoting your business and marketing your business. Many personal trainers (and for that matter small businesses) typically advertise or promote with what I refer to as the dart board method. Let’s try this haphazard idea and see what happens, it either succeeds or fails which determines whether they do it again or if they move on to generate a new idea.
Now if you are marketing your business the process is different, it’s methodical, it’s a system and it removes a great deal of emotion in evaluation of the results. It may start with the same idea, but the application is never haphazard, it’s calculated, focused, systemized and includes a series of events rather than just one event. Let me try to explain.
Let’s say your latest offer is a 21 day boot camp program. Many trainers might look at this and say, “I normally charge $200 I’m going to offer this for $150, that’s a great deal.” Truth is no one will care; there are deals available every day. Let’s say you run it anyways and happen to sign up 5 people and they love your program and all of them stay with you after at $200/month. You just generated $1000/month more in sales, seems successful right?
An astute marketer would make this same offer with a series of events that will greatly out perform the above offer, watch what happens. (To make it even more interesting this trainer is only going to keep 80% of the people that take advantage.)
Initially they offer the same 21 Day program for free, but only for the first 8 people. It should be easier to attract the 8 as it’s now entirely free. So no money up front but they will keep 6 which now produces $1200/month after the initial 3 weeks.
The program doesn’t stop there a subsequent ad or offer is released saying, “Last week we offered you a 21 day program free but only had room for 8 people, these spots were filled quickly. We are going to open up a new time slot making room for 6 more people at $87.” (This ad would be run whether they did recruit the 8 or not, the point is to motivate people to action by using an event, scarcity, deadline, consequence.)
This offer is still far less than the competitor trainer, and because of the use of scarcity in the first and second offer the people that were thinking about it last week are now pushed further to action because they are worried they will even miss out further. By recruiting 6 more people this trainer just added $522 in immediate sales and another 5 people per month or another $1000/month. Would you rather have $1000 up front and $1000/month or $522 upfront and $2200/month?
Depending on the continual response rate the marketer continues to squeeze customers from the prospect funnel with subsequent offers in a continual format. This is the difference between what most trainers do and what you should do. Each promotion should be a targeted series of events with an expectation for an outcome. Each offer needs to be extremely high value, use emotional language and provide deadlines and scarcity to push to action. But at the centre of all of this is a system, marketing your business once again requires systems. When it’s a complete system it’s never a failure because you can eliminate emotion and evaluate each response by the real facts and results. From there each new offer is just another version of this system; soon you will find yourself easily out promoting, out branding and out performing all of your competitors in a fraction of the time. The proof is in the pudding using these very tactics we’ve recently grown our studio’s monthly EFT by double digits during the worst months of the year for our industry and in a “poor” economy.
So are you going to continue to advertise or start marketing?
The Only 3 Ways to Make More Money
There are only 3 ways to make more money as a personal trainer. I explain what they are and how you can use them in this short video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvayrrlM5ro[/youtube]
Don’t get stuck in the moment, always be looking forward.
Chasing your own tail will NOT make you a Profitable Personal Trainer
Our very nature sometimes has us chasing our own tails, now that you are aware, don’t. The other day I had a discussion with one of my key employees, he’s taking on a larger role in the company, a role he’s becoming very inspired and passionate about. Within this role he has really been striving hard to take steps to rapidly develop himself and its working.
Recently after returning from a personal development weekend he was eager to bring back what he had learned and apply it for the good of the company, unsure of how to do that he chose to discuss what he thought was a good plan with me. Now any time someone takes initiative it’s never a bad plan, Ready, Shoot, Aim is almost always the best answer. However our nature seems to be to chase our own tail, rather than looking forward to how we might develop the future we work backward and apply new knowledge to old problems often never really allow ourselves to take leaps and bounds forward.
By this I mean as you learn from this blog or within your work days many new ways to improve your business don’t get stuck in the trap of fixing and restructuring something that might be working ok in an effort to make it perfect. You are much better to look past that as to how you can continue to develop your system so that as you grow the problem is corrected forever more through growth and the application of that system. Failure to do this has you forever looking for perfection while the world speeds on by to which you will never keep up.
- Focus on your top 5% delegate and outsource the other 95% as much as possible, this is difficult but keep trying.
- Duplicate as soon as possible, find great people and begin to give them responsibilities. This can be a service trade or your first employee but two can accomplish much more than one, make it work for you.
- Schedule your time and always start with the hardest thing (or thing you least want to do) each day. You will get more done and look forward to each day as it only gets easier.
- If you’re a solo trainer think long term, you will never have the life you want always working IN the business, schedule time you need to work ON the business.
This website is full of champions, together we succeed. Share your comments push each other forward.
Raving Fans of a Facebook Personal Trainer
If you don’t have a Fanpage for your business you are missing out on a lot of potential customers. Facebook is so well populated with so many people spending so much time on Facebook the search and traffic volume is ridiculous. As such any new page create on Facebook is crawled and indexed by the search engines soon after. I talk about it a lot because I believe that using the internet is easily the least expensive with the highest rate of return strategy for attracting many new clients.
Go create a Fanpage right now but make sure you set it up right.
Your Fanpage name should begin with your dominant key words. (ie. Red Deer Personal Trainer – One-to-1 Fitness, Red Deer Fitness Boot Camp – FIT Camp by One-to-1 Fitness)
Make sure to complete all areas of your Fanpage, the more information the better. Next make sure you have all your Fanpages linked to your Twitter account, the more tweets you send the more people that are going to follow and pay attention to them, automating this process will save you massive amounts of time.
Now if you’ve been following my blog you know that it’s critical that you add new content to your website every week, in fact multiple times a week is preferred. Each time you add new content add the link to your Fanpage AND share that to your profile. You will soon find your Fanpage with a high listing on key word search engine searches and by sharing to your profile often you create more traffic to the page further enhancing its ranking.
Now you can also easily and quickly send a broadcast to all your fans, just use the edit page link on your Fanpage and on the subsequent screen on the right side you should find the option to send an update to fans. Content and regular communication builds a loyal group of listeners that will hear and respond to an offer when you are ready to present one.
Additionally once or twice a month suggest your Fanpages to all of your friends, not often or they’ll just ignore it.
Now for the icing on the cake, use the friend locater, find people with similar interests (fitness, personal training, weight loss, working out, boot camp, etc) and begin inviting all kinds of new friends. In my opinion this is the true power of Facebook it’s an advanced social network that the astute marketer can use to funnel new prospects to your services.
Delegation for the Sole-Proprietor
In our world of technology even a one man show can have a team or staff, even if their virtual. If you haven’t already I highly recommend you read one of my very favourite books, The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris. Outsourcing taken to extremes, it’s a fun read and one of the most enjoyable and inspiring books on being an entrepreneur that I’ve ever read.
How could you benefit from outsourcing?
Well imagine the relief of having someone that can return calls, or perhaps clean and tidy your studio, respond to emails, writing content, optimizing your website, or creating opt-ins?
Some of my coaching clients have already faced the danger of burnout as they dive into supercharging the engine of their business to setup for explosive growth, the danger of course is running out of steam as you hit the launch phase. So how can you build a team if you have little resources or funds to do so?
Well if you’ve been paying attention the first thing you should have been doing is organizing and building your list. Not only is your list a source of new customers it’s a great place to look for part time colleagues. Offer service trades to delegate out your tasks to well suited people within your network. The best part of this is you can often easily turn these people into paying clients later, leverage your time and kick off your group programs with adaptable people, or even better they contribute so much that you hire them long term and leverage them to grow your business even faster.
Additionally check out websites like www.elance.com and www.odesk.com within this virtual world it’s amazing how easy it is to draft a quick description and hire someone to provide a number of functions seemingly overnight. This is an especially efficient way to tackle your content needs for your lead generating high conversion website, or to have true experts optimize and position you according to specific instructions all on a pay as you go basis.
The wealth of knowledge and talent available is staggering. If you’re not delegating and outsourcing you are stunting your ability to grow quickly. Check it out today!
How to Get on the Map!
Have you ever noticed that when you are looking for a business on the internet that Google usually pops up with a little map and all the similar businesses near your location?
It’s now easier than ever to get listed on this map and something you should do immediately today, it will almost guarantee you a first page top link in a matter of days.
Here’s how simple it is…
1) Goto Google.com
2) In the top right corner if you hover with your mouse you should see the option to sign in. Click here and if you haven’t already created an account do so now.
3) Once you have signed into your account the main page should have a number of links on it. Mid way down there should be a section titled “my products”. On the right hand side of this section there is a link for “Places” click here.
4) On this page you should see the option to Add a New Buisiness.
5) Complete all the details of your listing, once it’s complete and saved you will need to verify your listing with a PIN entry. This is now super easy as they will call or text you with the PIN. A quick entry and your listing is now complete and will begin appearing on Google Maps and local searches shortly.
6) When completing your listing take advantage of being able to list in 5 different categories, start typing your keywords and choose the best results accordingly.
Make sure when you write your description you use your primary key word, make it real easy for people to find you. Additionally I highly recommend you attach videos to your profile, the internet now is all about video people want to check you out long before they ever talk to you. Gain an edge over your competition by always having the best listings.
Special Guest: Steve Hochman “The Boot Camp Dominator”
My colleague and buddy the crazy Steve Hochman took the time to send me this video to amp you up to go get lot’s of new personal training and fitness boot camp clients. This is perfect timing for this, while you’re at it you may really want to check out Steve’s Boot Camp Formula 5 for more ways to take yout boot camp over the top!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqj5yEzgxMg[/youtube]
How to instantly earn an extra $5760 a year or more.
Today we had our monthly team meeting. Our discussion had a very important focus for everyone to consider, is it easier to attract new clients or retain the ones you have? You guessed it, keep the ones you have, but have you ever considered the math behind it?
In any given geographical area there are only so many people. Of those people it’s generally accepted that 8-13% of the total population will possibly be looking or using a service like ours. For easy numbers use 10%. Now list out all of your competition, it’s easy to see these numbers dwindle.
Now consider how many people are left for you to draw from and attract as personal training clients. People are going to come and go but the question becomes can you keep them longer? It may not seem like much to lose 1-3 clients a month but when you start to do the mat it can be pretty staggering. Let’s use the average of 2 per month. On average the majority of our clients see us 3 times per week for 30 minute sessions, let’s assume your training rates are the national average of about a $1/min. So each client lost is costing you about $360/month or a grand total of $8640 over the course of the year! ($30X3X2X12)
Now you won’t prevent everyone from quitting but let me tell you, and we know this from tracking within our facility, that only about 1/3 of people quit for reasons other than they are not getting enough value. Sure they may tell they can’t afford it or they are just ready to work on their own but in truth all they are saying is that your services are no longer providing enough value for them to justify the cost. A classic example of this is that thing you want so bad you scrimp, save, cut corners and get it anyways. We all do it, and we will all do it again.
Simple steps to retaining clients:
- Recognize their successes more often. Not just during their sessions, make a point to give them a quick call, send them an email, congratulate them on Facebook or make some kind of simple silly little award.
- Ask yourself can you feel 100% sincere and comfortable and believe that you deserve to mention at the end of every session, “great job today! By the way I am never too busy for referrals, I’d really like to train more people like you.” You might think it weird to say this all the time but in truth you need to because your clients are talking about you or thinking about what they are doing but many won’t actively think to refer if you don’t remind them.
- Deliver over the top service, the next time a client cancels suddenly just take 1/3 of the time you had planned to be with them to call, email, or Facebook them and other clients to tell them how great they are and how much you appreciate them. If you just invested these few precious minutes all the time you will be the busiest trainer in your area in no time.
- As my buddy Steve Hochman says go “APE” shit in every session with your clients. Appreciate them, be Passionate and Enthusiastic.
It’s really that simple, we always make things harder than they are. I see the numbers and the math behind our business every day; I know if you just work on these things and make them habit you will retain more clients longer. After all wouldn’t you like to instantly increase your earnings by $5760 a year? ($8460 less the 1/3 of client cancels for reasons beyond your control.)
Business Ignition Workshop – What Did You Learn?
Always meet new challenges head on!
Man what a weekend, first rafting down the Kicking Horse on Saturday with Apline Rafting and then spending the day with North America’s top fitness marketer Bedros Keuilian at my Personal Trainer Business Ignition Workshop in Calgary.
38 of Canada’s soon to be top fitness experts were drenched with nearly 8 hours of super valuable content ranging from getting going as a solo trainer, to expanding to operate your own studio, to every dirty little trade secret used by the world’s top internet marketers to dominate the search engines, out position, out perform, and out earn just about anyone in your path.
I’ve been coaching with Bedros for over 3 years; I’m part of his elite seven figure mastermind group. It was an honour to speak alongside him for the second time but it’s truly amazing how many new ideas and how much I learn still every single time I hear him speak.
Bedros Keuilian comes to Canada.
My favourite parts are still always the list building and conversion tactics, your list is so critical to rapid physical growth. For those of you that weren’t there this weekend I will share something with you that only my elite coaching clients have known or talked about to this point that was shared this weekend.
A little while ago working with one of my elite coaching clients we discovered something. Recipes are powerful list builders. By posting a simple classified with a catch title and the instruction to simply reply to the ad he has been growing his email list by as much as a 100 new contacts a week. By using ongoing contacts you can quickly grow a big list of warm prospects in as little as 30 days. A list of 500 people can easily produce a $100,000+ income for a personal trainer. So far he’s taken a list of a couple hundred to nearly a thousand in roughly 60 days.
Here’s a sample of what your ad might look like:
Mouth Water, Good For You, Chocolate Muffins
Everyone has a sweet tooth, satisfy yours while still getting in great shape. Simply reply to this ad with your name and email and I will send you this recipe and others like it for free. Recipes provided by (your area)’s top personal trainers.
This can be run on electronic classifieds; it could even be run in print. It has been one of our absolute best list building, high converting classifieds.
What were some of the “big” items you learned this weekend? If there’s enough interest I may make the workshop video available. Leave your comments let me know the big take away items for you and if you’d like to get your hands on the workshop video.
The Conversion Pitch
Yes Star Wars is my favorite all time movie!
If you’ve been reading Profitable Personal Trainer at all you know that the fitness marketing strategies I like to employ the most are the ones that revolve around giving over the top value to your prospects. It’s not rocket science, its simple rapport, invest in people and they in turn will invest in you. As Zig Zigler so profoundly says, “the more you help others get what they want the more likely you will get what you want.”
Now it is that simple, and yet it isn’t. If you’ve been planning re-packaged short term free programs to massively attract new leads, if you’ve been offering up blockbuster high value trial packages so it’s a no brainer for people to try your services, don’t forget you still have to ask them or present them with an offer to continue. In other words at some point you still have to sell.
High value marketing systems will continually allow you to create a steady influx of new prospects and will rapidly position you as the good guy expert in your community. But without a conversion plan you will only see about 10-15% of your clients turn over into loyal paying clients with little to no effort.
Each time you execute a high value free program (like a 21 day rapid fat loss bootcamp) at just over the half way mark you should be converting clients. Now here’s the easy steps to making sure 80-90% of your people stay:
1) Make sure your service is over the top, they have to absolutely love what they are doing when they are training with you. (duh)
2) Make sure they get results. Give them all your best stuff and go the extra mile with accountability to ensure rapid results do happen. (duh #2)
3) Present them an irresistible offer. Discount their first month, offer them extra bonuses that cost you nothing. (An Infrared Sauna works so wonderful for this, in Red Deer a sauna drop-in cost like $15, but 10 sessions in the sauna costs me about $1.00 worth of power.) Free bonuses from professional partners. The e-book you recently wrote. The 100 healthy recipes you compiled from all across the internet. It doesn’t take much to really crank up the value.
4) Present everything to them with emotion.
Mrs. Jones you came to me 50 lbs overweight, you are on high blood pressure medication and type II diabetes runs in your family. It’s been just 2 weeks and you have already dropped 11 lbs, and just last week I noticed you were able to complete 40 squats and on day 1 you could only do 2. You mentioned you are sleeping better and your clothes are getting loose. I know you’re not yet done your trial but I am so proud of your results I wanted to give you this…(insert high value offer). There is no pressure at all to continue but man your results are going so good, I really want to see you lose that 50lbs in no time, don’t you agree things are going well?
How can she really say no? The only likely objection might be a financial one which means either the value you are providing isn’t high enough or she can’t afford it.
5) The secret weapon, the downsell. – Some clients may genuinely not be able to afford your most typical program, so offer them something for $97 a month. Even if it’s a nutritional meeting once a week, or a couple of bootcamps and a follow up call. The point is if they’re getting results and having fun they will continue but they are not going to tell you how much they are willing to pay.
Bottom line is you have to close, I see too many trainers lately applying some of the great fitness marketing strategies that have been listed here but they are not booking the sales consults to convert their leads to paying clients. Your goal has to be at least 1 new sales appointment per day.
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