Growing Your Business with 6 Low Cost Marketing Tips

Facebook marketing and running ads is all the rage right now and for good reason…it works!

But, what if you don’t have the time right now to learn FB marketing or the money to invest in running ads to grow your personal training or boot camp business? How can you market without investing a ton of money?

First, I want to make sure you understand that all marketing requires some expense. You’ll have to invest time and energy if you don’t want to pay for marketing. And it’s critical that you understand the ROI or return on investment for your marketing campaigns.

If you spend $100 and get back $1,000 that’s a great return on investment. You may not have that extra $100 right now or you want to find a few new ways to market alongside your paid marketing campaigns to leverage more of your time and grow your business.

Your Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

1. Ramp Up Your Social Media Activity

Social media can be a huge leverage point for you if you need a low cost marketing strategy to deploy. The trouble is most trainers use it without a plan and mindlessly post content or try to pitch their newest program right away.

Social media is about being social and having conversations. Pick your 1-2 best social media platforms—usually the ones you’re already active on or that your Ideal Client frequents the most—and start implementing the following posting schedule.

Post two times per day minimum. Types of posts:

• Videos of your sessions
• Testimonials or case studies of your clients
• Blog posts with content to help your Ideal Clients
• A FB livestream video of a workout your followers can do
• A video tip of the day for nutrition or training
• Follow along workouts
• Ask questions

Those are just a few of the ideas that you can use to grow your following and increase your marketing.

One of our FR coaching clients started posting videos of his sessions and pictures of his boot campers working out from every session he ran. He started getting 6-8 leads a week from Facebook without ever paying for ads!

2. Build A Local Email List

One of the absolute best ways to market your business is to build a local email list. And you don’t need 100,000 subscribers to be successful. A couple of thousand or even couple of hundred people on your local email list will give you a place to share your message and market to leads.

To build your list you need to have an email marketing system. Something like MailChimp, Aweber Email Marketing or one of the other low cost providers will be just fine to start out. There’s no need to invest a lot of money in an advanced system.

Start building your list by offering an ethical bribe or lead magnet. I suggest a quick workout download or video or even a nutrition checklist to help someone solve a problem they are facing. Your offer should be dependent on your Ideal Client and meet their needs.

You can start your email list by asking to add all your current clients to it. You’ll be keeping them up-to-date with what’s going on at your gym while providing them with valuable tips and resources.

Once they agree to allowing you to subscribe them to your newsletter list, send them an email asking them to send out the opt in page to their friends to join your list as well.

If possible, provide them with the email template and links to send out. Make it easy for them to refer people to your list and it will grow fast.

From there you can build your list through joint ventures, social media and on your website.

3. Leverage Success Stories

Now that you have a list and a social media plan, make it a priority to collect 1-2 testimonials a week and share these success stories with your list and social media following. At the end of each testimonial, include a call to action to join your email list or start your Front End Offer Program.

Doing this over and over will build trust with your audience and allow you to leverage your success stories to market for you. But it’s up to you to collect them and share them.

If you need help creating good testimonials, we wrote an article to help you out titled How to Create Great Fitness Testimonials for Your Business.

4. Optimize Your Referral Program

There are many approaches to getting more referrals in your business, and it’s the absolute best way to grow quickly if you are delivering on your customers expectations.

Actually, check that… you need to be OVER LEVERAGING! If you’re not getting referrals do a review of the following:

• Are your clients getting the results they want?
• Are you providing an exceptional experience?
• Do you make it easy for clients to refer you business?
• Do you treat referrals like a long time client and give them the best experience you can?
• Does every client know about your referral program?

If you’re not able to answer yes to all of those questions, go back and review a client experience. See where you can make it better and simplify your referral process to make it easier. A simple way to get more referrals is to hand select 2-3 clients a week and approach them before or after their sessions.

When you talk with them use this script, “[First Name], we love having you in our program and I just wanted to let you know that you’re our Ideal Client. We wish that every single client could be just like you [add in some key points that make them your Ideal Client]!”

Follow that compliment up with, “We want to work with more people just like you. Do you know anyone that fits the criteria and that would be a good fit? I assure you that we’ll take care of them if you’d be willing to introduce us.”

From there get the introduction through a text, email or phone call. Leverage the recommendation of the client and wow the lead with your experience.

5. Run Local Workshops

Workshops aren’t just for getting your great clients to spend more money with you. They can be used as a great lead generation tool. They will also position you as the authority figure in your community once you’ve done a few of them.

Pick a topic that is interesting to your target market and Ideal Client. You should avoid workout type workshops and stick to more educational workshops for lead generation. That takes some of the intimidation out of it for the leads.

Create a flier or simple webpage that explains the benefits and who it is for. Then have a call to action on it to register. If you aren’t good with technology, have them call in to request their ticket.

You can market your workshop through social media, your email list and through joint ventures. Your clients may even be willing to spread the word for you on social media.

If you had just 10-15 leads in each workshop you’d be able to rapidly grow your business. As you get better and better at delivering and marketing them, you’ll quickly build up to having 20-30 people at each workshop. Just one or two of these a month could double or triple your growth!

At the end of each workshop make an offer for the leads to join your Front End Offer or add them to your email list to market to later.

6. Create a YouTube Channel

This is great if you are good on video. I love YouTube because it acts as its own search engine and social media platform. You can leverage the content that you add to it on your blog, other social media and through emails.

Create a simple plan to capture a few 2-5 minute videos each week with your phone’s video camera covering tips, tricks and tools to help your Ideal Clients get better results. Not only will you be able to educate your current clients through the content, but you can leverage your content to market your business as well.

Here’s a template for your videos:

• Introduce yourself the same way each time.
• Lead with the end. Let them know what they will learn right from the start.
• Give them 2-3 tips or bullet points on your topic.
• End with an action step.
• Tell them what to do next, give them a call to action.

This works for educational as well as workout videos.

By consistently posting these and then sharing them on your other platforms, you’ll start to build an audience and gain some credibility in your area. You can even share these with your joint venture partners or the media in your area to get some extra exposure.

Summary

Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. By following these simple marketing tips you can grow your boot camp or fitness business without having to invest a lot of money into your marketing campaigns.

Instead of trying to do them all, pick 1-2 that you can start with right now and get to work on marketing your business!

Want To Accelerate Your Marketing Plan?

Master your marketing and get more clients without having to make the mistakes that most trainers make by going through our Fitness Marketing Mastery curriculum inside The Academy.  For one low monthly price you’ll have access to everything you need to grow your business.  This simple system makes all of your marketing easier and more effective.