Fitness Marketing Strategy

Fear, Doubt and Action.

Fear, Doubt and Action.

Published by on September 30, 2010 | Leave a response

Well I am just getting set to head out to Las Vegas to see all my colleagues in Bedros Keuilian’s ‘Seven Figure Mastermind’ group. It’s no secret at all that I believe a big reason my life has changed so much in the last three years is that I’ve turned to coaches and trainers that allowed me to overcome many fears, doubts, and insecurities when it comes to business.

personal-trainer-marketing-failureAs fitness professionals we know full well the value we provide to our clients in terms of knowledge, support, accountability and reassurance when it comes to pushing them to reach our goals. As effective coaches it’s all of those things that we then hope drive our clients into taking action, implementing immediate change into their life and voila! Each time someone does rapid physical change occurs.

After 19 years in the fitness industry, after being near bankrupt, dealing with bill collectors, wondering how I was going to buy groceries next week, to being defeated to the point of leaving the industry not once, not twice, but three times, I can tell you I have a faced fear a few times. Sometimes I’ve won, other times I’ve completely failed. Sometimes I was so dejected I would even spend a few of the final dollars I had to my name on a single lottery ticket. Not because I really believed I would win, but simply for the positive feeling of “what if?” Just that moment to dream would be enough to inspire me to pick myself up and take the next action, even just a little one.

A wise piece of wisdom someone once told me, “You know what a rut is? It’s a grave with the ends kicked out.”

I’ve had training clients and now coaching clients who have expressed to me their fears, in days past they’ve told me why they can’t do something, why now is not the right time. Next week I might be having that same conversation with one of my coaches, its human nature.

Frustration, discouragement will inevitably occur and that’s why we are needed by our clients; that’s why you need colleagues to turn to. If you are stuck in a rut now or the next time you experience that feeling remember those wise words that someone once told me, “You know what a rut is? It’s a grave with the ends kicked out.”

Fear is natural; fear prevents us from action, the number one rule of success in business: Continue to take action. It’s true, and if you doubt it for a second look at your client success stories, the biggest successes come from frequent repeat action.

As Jim Collins talks about in his book Good to Great, it’s all about continually pushing on the flywheel; inevitably momentum occurs and swiftly carries you forward. I’m off to Vegas to share the tale of the wonderful momentum we are now experiencing after months of trying to correct a few little problems, the inspiration carries and I know they will provide tonnes of new ideas that will continue to carry us all forward.

Forget your fears, push them aside, take action today. Right now make a list what are the 5 SPECIFIC things you need to complete in the next 7 days to push on the flywheel of your own business? Don’t be afraid it’s never the right time!

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Tips to Achieving a 90% Close Ratio

Published by on August 24, 2010 | 2 Responses

Let’s face it, most personal trainers are not great salespeople, and they don’t want to be. I understand that and I’ve been annoyed the same way you have by numerous pushy salespeople. But the truth is if you are meeting new prospective clients and 9 out of 10 are not signing up you’re working really hard but not nearly maximizing your profitability. Trust me one of your competitors may be doing a better job, but you don’t have to let that happen.

Anyone you have met with, are about to meet with or who is currently your customer is much more likely to purchase something else from you than a new person that you haven’t met or is brand new to your list. This is why it’s critical to not let them get away and to ensure you close as many deals as possible. By striving for that 90% consistent close ratio you don’t have to do any more sales than necessary to enjoy the best your business has to offer.

Now rather than write about how to sell I’m specifically going to focus on the situations at the end of the consult where a client either says no, they’re not interested, or they have purchased a much smaller package than you felt they needed or would have licked.

When a client says no…

What this really means is you haven’t earned their trust enough by listening to their fears and reflecting the necessary info to allow them to determine they can overcome their fears with your services. Try reinforcing them with sincere questions; if they don’t do this how will they overcome <insert> fear? If you can keep them connected within this conversation you may then earn the opportunity to present another offer.

The Secondary Pitch…

At some point a client will always say no, if you are able to continue to discuss with them you may get the chance to present a second offer. If not by email, phone or mail a few days later (is not as good as live but) can also be a great opportunity to provide them another offer. The reason this may work is if you have earned their trust they may still have said no because the offer didn’t appear or convince them it contained enough value. These secondary offers need to be quite aggressive and show lot’s of obvious value. Things like: 2 weeks of personal training for $2, 21 day free bootcamp, 1 month of semi-private training for $47, etc. Pour on the value; make it impossible for them to say no. The point is you know once they try your service and feel the difference they are going to say, so what are you willing to do to attract customers? (This is why it’s also important to raise your rates so you can factor in these kind of deep discounts at times, but that’s another post.)

The Add-on…

Another common situation is people come in with an idea in their head about how much your service should cost. You may go through the whole process smoothly to discover what you feel they need to reach your goals costs more than what they were committed to spending. If presented the right way to show the value you may be able to add-on extra items to the package for a few dollars more moving closer to the target you had hoped for. Even beyond the first appointment it’s good to make a few notes of what you feel would be best for the client to reach their goals and after a couple of sessions you may present a couple of package add-ons to them and find them more receptive. Trust and value are the two key limiting items when it comes to purchases. You up both of these and people will respond.

By using secondary offers and add-ons you can easily hit your 90% close ratio, the extra investment you make is easily worth it when you consider how costly and difficult it is to continually attract new fresh targeted leads.

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Advertising vs Marketing, Which Do You Do?

Published by on August 17, 2010 | Leave a response

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.

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?

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Raving Fans of a Facebook Personal Trainer

Published by on August 5, 2010 | 2 Responses

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.

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Delegation for the Sole-Proprietor

Delegation for the Sole-Proprietor

Published by on August 3, 2010 | Leave a response

%image_alt%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!

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How to Get on the Map!

Published by on July 29, 2010 | 1 Response

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.

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Special Guest: Steve Hochman “The Boot Camp Dominator”

Published by on July 27, 2010 | Leave a response

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]

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How to instantly earn an extra $5760 a year or more.

Published by on July 22, 2010 | Leave a response

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.)

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