Promos to Include in Your Marketing Calendar

Marketing isn’t solely based around promos, at least not for the most successful fitness businesses. You must market consistently throughout the year. You can do this by providing relevant content and adding value for your ideal client and target market.

Much like your clients nutrition and fitness changes the most successful fitness businesses are taking small, specific actions each day to market their business. But, every so often you need to strike while the iron is hot. You need a big surge in your marketing. This is when you run specific promos to really boost your business.

There are 5 promotions you need to put in your marketing calendar this year. Here they are:

1. Fitness or Transformation Challenges

When planned during the right time of year with the right message you will get a surge of new clients by running a challenge.

From my experience there were several times of year to hit it big with a challenge:

• New Years (typically 1-2 weeks after January 1)
• Before Spring Break
• Before Memorial Day (kick off for summer)
• After Labor Day/Start of School
• Holiday Time

If you build out your marketing calendar to have 2 bigger, say 6-8 week, challenges during the year you can fit in 2-3 other shorter, 21-28 day challenges for smaller events. I always liked to run a New Years challenge and Fall challenge that were 6-8 weeks. Then hit up 21-day sprint challenges on Memorial Day and during the holidays.

When planning your calendar build out 3-4 weeks of prep time before the challenge kicks off to set up your marketing. If you’re only relying on FB ads and your own email list or networking list to fill your challenge then 2 weeks is plenty.

However, if you want to leverage joint ventures and strategic relationships then you want to extend that out to the 4 week time period. During these challenges, pull out all the stops and focus all your marketing activity on filling it.

2. Referral Contests

There’s a good chance that referrals are a big part of your marketing plan already. And that’s great but at least once per year you should be running a huge, coordinated effort to boost referrals.

I typically liked to run these during the slower times of the year for our business. That meant during the summer months or holiday time. This is a great chance to inspire those clients that don’t refer often to refer. It will also give your top referring clients a reason to step up their referral game!

For your contest, set aside 2-3 weeks where you will collect contact info and allow friends/family to come in for a free test drive. Reward your clients with points for each contact they provide, each person they bring in and each person that signs up. The points are weighted differently.

Then draw for a few prizes at the end of the contest. This allows everyone who participated to be in the running to win the prize.

The key to making this work is making it easy on your clients to bring people in, building up the contest for a week or two prior so they can plan, and to constantly recognize those that get points to build up excitement throughout the contest.

3. Paid in Full Special

There’s likely a time of year that you need a surge of cash or want to really boost your numbers. When that time comes around it’s the perfect time to run a paid in full special for your top clients.

This is also the chance to target your top clients with an opportunity to secure a premium level VIP membership. It will be a great deal for them and raise their value to your business for another year.

Instead of your traditional “buy a year of training for 10% off if you pay up front” type of offer, take a different approach. Put together a VIP membership that includes access to all your challenges, all your workshops, your top training package and a few other bells and whistles for a premium price.

The perceived value of this package will be really high, adding up to several thousand or even ten thousand dollars. But you’ll be offering it at a discounted rate. When you promote it use a 4-day email and personal outreach strategy to target your top clients with the offer. Limit the number of these VIP memberships that you offer to less than 5.

If you sell them for $5,000-$7,000* you could generate $25,000-$35,000 in a few days for your business. Plus, your top clients will have access to everything you offer and most likely get better results in the coming year.

Not only are you getting a surge of cash, but you are creating better advocates of your gym and better clients.

*NOTE: This is just an example. The price of this membership is relative to your current rates.

4. List Building Promotion

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of building your email list. The trouble is most fitness pros brush this off and passively build a list. Or worse they build it but don’t utilize it.

If you need help utilizing your current list check out the Email Marketing Systems Mini Course. But, if you want to build your list fast, then run a list building promotion 1-2 times per year.

My favorite way to do this is create an amazing lead magnet such as an e-book, cheat sheet or video series that solves one, JUST ONE, of your ideal client’s most pressing problems.

You probably have a great lead magnet in your current content. It could be a shopping list, workout program, nutrition tips or motivation series. Once you know what you’re going to offer, build out a landing page or have someone build it for you.

Create an amazing lead magnet that solves one of your ideal client’s most pressing problems.

Then get to recruiting! Start recruiting joint ventures, strategic relationships, and even plan out a social media and FB ad campaign to spread the word.

If you have the ability to track where leads are coming from you can reward your strategic relationships and joint venture partners for the leads they send you. Either when they join the list or when they sign up for your front end offer (which you will present to them via email after the opt-in).

Tracking not an option? Then estimate what type of value a lead is worth to you and offer to compensate the joint venture or strategic partner for sending out your opt-in offer.

If you plan to spend $300 on FB ads to get leads then you can afford to pay $100-200 to these other businesses/people to send out 2-3 emails for you to their list. In fact, you could probably afford to pay more as you will likely get a higher ROI from these emails than FB ads.

A few years ago I paid $350 for a business to send out 3 emails to their list of 10,000. I got over 1,000 leads from those 3 emails. That’s a steal! Doing this 1-2 times per year along with simple list building activities throughout the year in your other marketing can help you build a local email list that is extremely useful to your business.

5. Public Speaking/Workshops

If I had to go back and build a fitness business from scratch I’d do two things…

Build an email list and do workshops or public speaking at least 1 time per month. Speaking or hosting workshops is a way to build your authority in your community and establish yourself as an expert. It’s the reason that all the MLM companies have their product pushers go out and do shows or demos of their products.

When people give up their time to pay attention to what you have to say you are automatically seen as an expert. You build credibility and you have a captive audience who is ready to buy.

At least once per quarter host a workshop and invite all your old leads, ask clients to refer, promote via your email list and even run FB ads to it.

The workshop should be something that DOES NOT require someone to workout. A workout workshop is intimidating for many people that don’t know you. Instead do a nutrition workshop, motivational workshop, uncover top myths, etc. Present on a topic that you are comfortable with and help the people that attend get a little closer to their goals.

If you get at least 15-20 people to attend your workshops and simply make an offer at the end to join your front end offer, you’ll get several takers. By collecting attendee info (you are doing that right?) you can follow up with those that weren’t ready to decide right then with another offer later.

Wrap Up

The best way to ensure that you implement these 5 winning promotions in your marketing is creating a marketing calendar. It’s like your training program for getting new clients.

I hope that I sparked some new ideas for you and inspired you to step outside the standard marketing approach of utilizing word of mouth and networking as a marketing strategy.

These 5 promos will set you up to market your business with success and grow your business quickly. Doing all 5 this year would be amazing, but if that sounds overwhelming pick 1-2 and give them a shot.

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