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?
10 Ways to Get More Clients Right Now!
Based on the emails I’ve been getting I know I have a lot of brand new trainers reading my blog each week. That’s awesome because I still remember just how tough it was to get going with my personal training business and all the basic mistakes I made then. If you need more clients here are my top 10 ways as a new or experienced trainer that you can get more clients right now:
1) Be the trainer that everyone wants to hire. This may sound silly but to be honest one of the biggest problems we’ve had hiring trainers in our facility is they don’t come with the energetic personality you need to be super successful on your own. Each day has to be fun, your primary job is to be uplifting to the people around you and inspire them to commit to the practical magic you teach them.
2) Consistently ask for referrals, and offer referral rewards. This business is based on service and good service produces great word of mouth advertising. Be sure to subtly remind your clients that you really appreciate referrals or offer a referral contest 2-3 times per year.
3) Run real value free trial programs. Make people an offer they can’t refuse, commit to giving them 2 weeks for free or for $1. Show people really value and over deliver your enthusiasm and personality to build a raving fan base. These people become paying customers and bring others.
4) Use the Human Billboard program I learned from my good friend Steve Hochman. Offer people a free trial program and ask them to invite their friends, for each paying customer they refer give them more free training time. What could be better than free personal training after all?
5) Repackage your programs into short term rapid solutions for immediate problems. Ie. The 21 day Summer Tummy Solution. Use Kijiji and Facebook advertising to attract new targeted leads to these short term programs.
6) If you are currently training clients, call your old clients and create a special offer just for them. Don’t wait for them to call you, show genuine interest and get in touch. We’ve signed up over 30 clients in the last 30 days with 2 special packages just for previous clients.
7) Get out in the community schedule at least 1-2 speaker sessions a month for any office with more than 10 employees, a service club, a charitable organization, or anywhere you can find 10 or more people.
8) Immediately position yourself as a community expert, contact at least 2-3 complimentary type businesses each week. Offer to add the manager or key employee into one of your group programs. Provide a nice discount for remaining employees and over deliver. Hairstylists talk to 10-20 people a day wouldn’t you like them to be talking about you?
9) Use list builders on Kijiji and Facebook every week to grow your list and apply 2-step marketing methods to your list 1-2 times per month.
10) Use lead boxes in high traffic areas to increase your list even faster and improve response to 2-step marketing emails.
If you made it a priority to totally commit to applying even 4-6 of these points on an ongoing basis there is absolutely no reason you can’t be booked solid as a personal trainer in the next 30-60 days.
Your Marketing Calendar
People are interesting creatures, like cats and children we all have an innate curiosity and the need to wonder and celebrate. In a previous coaching group I had a chance to meet with ultra successful Canadian Fitness Internet Marketer Craig Ballantyne. I didn’t know what to make of Craig at first; he comes across as a pretty ultra serious guy. It didn’t take me long though to realize though he’s not only a great guy he’s super passionate about business and totally brilliant. One of the things he talked about that afternoon was your Marketing Calendar.
If you haven’t caught on by now a contact list is critically important for your fitness business, or any business for that matter. The second thing is you need to be in regular contact with them, well that’s all fine but what the heck do you talk about this week?
Craig had a brilliant idea, pick yourself up a calendar today and start to write all the birthdays for you, your family, colleagues, friends, favourite superstars, your pets, your anniversaries etc. Its funny these all become great reasons to unveil your next crazy hair brained idea to your list.
It sounds ridiculous, but remember that innate curiosity, as people we all live vicariously through each other. You don’t need to look any further than Facebook to see how wrapped up we are in each others lives.
The marketing calendar becomes a fun way to bridge the gap between content, sincerity and offer to the prospects on your mailing list.
How to get your old clients back
After over 19 years in the fitness industry personally I’ve had somewhere around 3000 one-on-one personal training clients. Sadly you will learn as I have that for most of your clients, even the ones that are really successful with the best of intentions, they will one day need you again. Now if you’ve provided a great experience they may remember you again, that is if a savy marketer doesn’t get to them first.
Your current and previous clients are what are known in sales as your “lowest hanging fruit.” Whether it’s now or in the past you have earned their trust and hopefully have a much stronger rapport than you would a complete stranger. Because of that rapport they are twice as likely to repeat buy from you than a brand new customer will be.
If you want a sure fire high conversion method of filling your training schedule today, call your old clients. However you need to have a solid high value offer to go with your call.
This is just one of many strategies my elite coaching clients use. Could a mentor help your business?
Here’s what we did that netted us a 75-85% conversion bringing our old clients back.
Our three year anniversary at One-to-1 Fitness was May 27; we used the idea of this celebratory day to encourage our old clients to come see us again. Rather than the normal celebratory drivel that costs you lot’s of money and gets you nothing we decided to instead invest in great people. I had my sales manager go through our old client files and pick out a whole pile of people he remembered, the ones he had the strongest rapport with. After looking at their previous goals we called them to “check up” on how they were doing maintaining their goals. Since most people slowly slip back we offered a solution, we gave them 2 weeks of training on us in our spiffy new small group training program. What’s important is we showed we genuinely cared because we contacted them and took the time to see what was important to them, we offered them something of high value, and created the appeal of a different experience than they previously had with us.
All of these people only previously knew us for our great one-on-one services. Now they had a select and limited opportunity to be part of a program that was a pile of fun in a small group setting and totally obligation free, they couldn’t lose; why not come and see some familiar faces? Of course we hyped all the new renos and such to, that never hurts. The best part is if you just provide the same killer service all the time, this program sells itself!
Bonus: The Insurance Policy
As always marketing is really about customer value, how you can provide over the top value and still find a way to make a little profit. For our conversion of this program we just sweetened the deal, gave everyone a nice short term price break (call it a signing bonus) and we used all the value adds from our partner businesses. (Each client received something like $500 in free bonuses, so much so it becomes a no brainer.)
Provide value, everyone wins! In summary remember these components:
- Always genuinely care, call and see how people are doing.
- Offer them something high value and have a reason for you offer, ours was our anniversary.
- Make the offer limited and provide scarcity, in our case we only had so many spots to fill and they were starting on a certain date. Push people to take immediate action.
- Don’t blow it by trying to convert too soon, provide real value.
- Have a high value conversion offer, make it a no brainer.
What’s in a name anyways?
Quite often I receive questions from new personal trainers wondering how to decide on a name for their fitness and personal training business. The truth is when it comes to fitness marketing and selling personal training a catchy name means very little. I learned this the hard way so you don’t have to.
When I began personal training I went through the same dilemma, and for some reason I loved the name Fitness F/X, which naturally was taken so I had to settle for Cabel’s Fitness F/X. I was fortunate that at the time people were just really getting online and one of my first few clients insisted I need a website and as luck would have it www.fitnessfx.com was available.
Now here’s the thing, you and I, we’re not Nike, we’re never going to have a swoosh of our own. We simply do not have the millions upon millions of dollars to spend to develop a known, recognizable symbol like the swoosh. You and I we have to work smarter, we have to think about what exactly Average Joe and Jane are doing right now.
Average Joe and Jane likely just got home from work or are relaxing after dinner after a long day of office duties, running after the kids and chores. A thought crosses Jane’s mind, she came across what used to be her favourite pair of jeans in the closet this morning and they didn’t fit when she tried them on. She just never lost all the baby weight she gained during her pregnancy and tonight she’s feeling a bit down on herself about it. Joe well he’s being working 50 hours a week trying to do the best for his family, after years in the office he’s finally moved into that new position and is home to his family at a reasonable time. Life is good financially they are comfortable and can enjoy some of the finer things, one problem though, his belly sticks out further than his chest and his wife just never looks at him the same way much anymore.
Jane and Joe respectively grab their laptop or iPhone and not wanting their partner to really know their insecurities think maybe it’s time to figure what they could do to get back into shape. What do they do?
The go to Google and they begin typing in things like, “fastest way to lose weight” “best weight loss diet” “workout program for weight loss” and of course “personal trainers in (insert your city name).”
Do you happen to see Cabel’s Fitness F/X anywhere in there? Nope, me either. So neither Joe or Jane ever found my website or me, but I bet quite likely they would have found LA Weight Loss, Jenny Craig or a Profitable Personal Trainer that really understood how to attract clients. If only I had named my business Personal Training in Red Deer…..hmm you may notice now in spite of my studio being named One-to-1 Fitness our website is built on www.PersonalTrainingRedDeer.com and you will never ever hear me refer to www.Oneto1Fitness.com even though I do own it.
So by now you should see the actual name of your business doesn’t really mean much when it comes to selling personal training, fitness marketing and putting yourself in the place people will actually find you.
Now it’s not bad at all to have a catchy name, I would suggest one that is gender neutral and leans toward the first thing you think most people think of when they think of getting in shape. This was how we selected One-to-1 Fitness; it was our idea of a catchy way to instantly describe what we wanted to be known for.
If you are just starting your business though, don’t spend a lot of time or money on this endeavour it’s just not time for that if you are determined to become and ultra-successful Profitable Personal Trainer.
What The Alarm Salesman Did Wrong…
Is your personal training business secure?
Yesterday an interesting thing happened it has nothing and everything to do with selling personal training and fitness marketing. The doorbell rang. I was in my home office intently concentrating when this noise distracted me. Seriously these days you know when the doorbell rings unexpectedly it’s a sales call. Funny, I like sales calls now, it’s like they just unexpectedly walked into a practical exam for sales and marketing. The poor alarm guy, though he was nice enough, he failed miserably.
He opened with a, do you have a security system now? Terrible! As terrible as these following personal training headlines:
- Get in Shape for Summer
- A Personal Trainer Can Get You Better Results
- Spring and Summer Boot Camps – Spots available, start today!
His question though seemingly valid wasn’t, you see the answer doesn’t matter, in that split second he disconnected with me and put me on the defensive as I knew his primary objective was to sell me on his new alarm system.
You Have to Get Them Emotional…
A much better approach would have been to introduce himself, and tell me something like, “Did you know that 50-100 break and enters occur in Red Deer every month? (Real number easily found on google.) Did you know that means that X# of people in this neighbourhood had their house broken into last month? (Divide number of neighbourhoods by total per month.) Your house is being targeted and here’s why…(high perceived value item, maybe like the 10 things you are doing every day that will make your house a target for serious theft. Like not locking your garage door to your home, like leaving your registration and garage door opener in your vehicle, like not quickly picking up the newspaper on the front step showing that you aren’t home or don’t pay attention, like not displaying alarm signage as a deterrent, gee and I am a personal trainer.)
Now let me ask you, do you feel comfortable knowing your house is a target? Do you do some of those above things I mentioned? Does that make you worry in the slightest?
About a year ago my neighbour had his vehicle broken into on the exact weekend we were away, that easily could have been our house. Similarly my wife’s poor co-worker had her house completely emptied in broad daylight. I bet you have or have heard a similar story, does thinking about that raise your level of paranoia?
We are hardwired to become emotional when we use the right language, as a successful coach you need to understand that attracting clients (and more importantly having them commit and comply with your instructions) will be much more successful if you can generate a vested emotional interest within them.
The point is just by changing your approach you now have a prospect that may naturally have been on the defensive and resilient to sales now defenceless because they are emotionally invested. Even though we have a security system in our home, between this failed sales visit and writing this post even I think we need to be more careful with our home, the power of emotions.
The same is true of personal training. The headlines above can be more powerful, here are some examples:
- · Get in Shape for Summer Good news, there is a simple way you can lose 10-15lbs before July.
- · A Personal Trainer Can Get You Better Results Your gym membership failed you, Jenny Craig failed you, this won’t!
- · Spring and Summer Boot Camps – Spots available, start today! Do you qualify for this weight loss program? 5 spots available.
You know what? As a Canadian personal trainer trying to learn the ins and outs of fitness marketing strategies you have a serious problem. You are too nice, too plain, and don’t use enough emotional language, it’s time to start! You will thank me later, adjust your headlines, your ad copy, brochures and even your conversation, every little step will drastically improve your results, I guarantee it!
8 Steps to Becoming a Profitable Personal Trainer
If you want to become a member of the elite, a fitness marketing specialist, someone who can sell personal training with ease, a truly profitable personal trainer than you best pay attention to the following:
1) Stop doing 60 min sessions, switch to abbreviated training either a 45 min session or better yet a 30 min. If you think you can’t get a client an effective workout in 30 minutes you are not alone, I felt that way too but just trust me and do it. 60 minute personal training sessions are counselling sessions that will burn you out fast and keep you broke. 30 minute sessions allow you to appear to be cheaper than your competition while in reality you can be more expensive on a per hour basis. Your clients will find them easier to schedule and will be able to afford more of them which overall means their results will be better.
2) Don’t sell packages of personal training sessions, sell the lifestyle. No one loses 40lbs, corrects hypoglycaemia or lowers blood pressure in 10 sessions. You want clients that are serious about adopting a new lifestyle and the need you more than ever. Do yourself and them a favour and make it easy, sell ongoing monthly training packages not packages of sessions. (Ideally using EFT.)
RnR is an important part of being a Profitable Personal Trainer, Wendy and I like to get away any chance we get, our May long weekend was spent at Radium in BC.
3) Utilize sincere selling. Care about your clients and prospects, when you meet a new client use an extended meeting to get to know them, to learn about their goals, fears and pain. Ask them questions that stir emotions about why the need to make lifestyle changes. Your job is to make them feel as though you are saving their life because potentially you are. The more focused and aware you become about their needs the more they will fulfil your financial needs and with far less resistance.
4) Increase the value. Your job description when it comes to client appointments can be summarized in two words: service and value. Provide killer service and always find ways to provide more value: ie. Valuable additional content in the form of articles, newsletters, strategic business partnerships and discounts, tele-seminars, paper system materials.
5) Ask everyone for a testimonial, social proof will be better than any advertisement you can ever dream up, take before and after photos and videos and ask for testimonials often from every single client.
6) Always be building your list. Use public speaking, opt-ins, Facebook ads, classifieds and special free programs to constantly create an influx of new leads.
7) For each new step document the system. Longevity becomes about time and task management. As each new spoke of the wheel begins to turn document the system so it may become a repeat process. If you do not have anyone in your network to delegate to you will eventually but only if you have systems to teach. Take it from me, I failed to duplicate 4 times before I succeeded because I didn’t have documented systems.
8) Don’t forget to take time off and relax, get away from the business of personal training and do something fun. I hope you had a great long weekend!
Do you have a mailing list? If so how many people are on it and when did you last contact them?
Contact Management is essential for fitness marketing!
As a follow up to my last post this is the next big step for you and likely also your website. You see as fitness professionals we’re pretty limited to the dollars we can spend on advertising and various fitness marketing strategies. For us relationship marketing is where it’s at, but as the world continues to move faster and faster we are all governed further by technology; traditional networking is becoming increasingly difficult.
As will be a major topic of discussion this weekend at the Business Ignition Workshop it’s critical you learn as many ways as possible to build a ‘list’ of customers and prospects. It’s quite common that when people start building a list they forget to nurture it only to become frustrated as they now possess a dead list.
You nurture you list by frequent contact, an example is the words you are reading at this very moment. I try every week to make sure I contact you on Monday and Thursday so we might engage for just a few moments and continue to build our relationship. As you will learn from my good friend Mr. X these relationships are extremely valuable and never just from the standpoint of making a sale.
This website and my attempt to gain regular contact with numerous fitness professionals has already brought me new colleagues and ideas that have allowed my training studio and other businesses to make huge strides forward. This is why of all the fitness marketing strategies you might learn; the idea of content, list building and continuity are the foundation principles that will determine your total success as a whole.
Anyways…back on topic, a key element for list building is automation through some form of contact management. If you can provide an easy way to provide regular contact with your list without spending a lot of time; you are free to keep performing the technical work that many of you are trying to grow beyond. (I mean let’s face it, if you’re a solo trainer you still have to train people, and yet you need to develop the systems so you don’t always have to train people, get it?)
By using a contact management product you save a lot of time, by using a website blog and publishing regular content that you then also distribute to your list you leverage further; you maintain regular contact and also attract new prospects with all the posted content. The icing on the cake is now you can put the two of those together to help build your list also, this is the opt-in. An example of an opt-in is the offer for Factor 3 up in the top right corner of this website. I have offered you some very valuable information in exchange for the trust of contacting you next week, my goal each week is to continue to offer you value in hopes that eventually we’ll find a way to help each other and grow our respective businesses.
Makes sense right? Now the question for those not super techno savvy is there an easy solution to handle this problem? Well, in my opinion yes, as a fitness professional you absolutely should have some form of contact management as part of your fitness marketing strategy, and an electronic product is by far the cheapest and these days most successful. Though you can use simple products like iContact, Constant Contact, or Aweber I hands down recommend FitPro Newsletter, you see as I have mentioned previously FitPro is the only product designed for fitness professionals, it’s completely customizable but the beauty is it’s also done for you. Their professional writers add great new articles to every issue so you don’t have to worry about it like the others. Come times like now where you are super busy training people you don’t even need to think about sending content to your list as they will all receive great new content every two weeks on your behalf. Now when you need to contact your list for other reasons they’ll even still remember who you are. J
The list is king! Grow it, nurture it, it is the key to your success.
YES! Contact me today to schedule a FREE no obligation consultation and trial workout.