7 Fitness Marketing Mistakes
Marketing doesn’t have to be overly complicated. In fact, if you have dialed in your Ideal Client and Local Market Positioning, it’s pretty easy to figure out exactly what you should be using for fitness marketing efforts and where to find the right people.
However, as a busy fitness business owner, you need to find ways to leverage your time and energy to provide a constant stream of leads to your business. In many cases that means automating your marketing efforts so that you can generate revenue while you sleep. Additionally, you want to become familiar with the common fitness marketing mistakes (and how you can avoid them)!
Marketing Automation will help you generate leads (and revenue) while you sleep.
Digital marketing is easier than ever, and it’s grown well past simple email or pay-per-click marketing that might have been popular 5-10 years ago.
It’s also become simpler to set up and generate leads than it has ever been with a number of great sources for getting traffic and tons of drag-and-drop options for building out a marketing funnel.
And that’s what you must realize if you want to have success with any digital marketing.
It’s not enough to simply pay for some Facebook ads, create a few YouTube videos, or have an email newsletter; you need a marketing funnel that attracts the right types of leads, builds trust with them, and provides value.
You need a marketing funnel that attracts the right types of leads, builds trust with them, and provides value.
Here are 7 marketing mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to create a great marketing funnel that produces revenue while you sleep.
Fitness Marketing Mistake #1: You Don’t Know Your Ideal Client
If you don’t have an Ideal Client profile for your business, you’re really missing out! This profile helps you determine what to offer and how to communicate your offers to potential leads so that it attracts the right type of person to your business.
Being frustrated with tire kickers and low conversion numbers usually means that you have some work to do with your Ideal Client.
Really getting to know your Ideal Client will help you determine what type of offer will get their attention, the language you need to use, and the key selling points to use when building value.
Without having this dialed in, you’re basically taking a shotgun approach and hoping. That’s no way to run your marketing! Rather than throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping it sticks, define your ideal client and strategically go after those folks.
Fitness Marketing Mistake #2: You’re Not Tracking
If you’re going to invest time and money in your marketing, you want to know that it’s getting results, right?
Well, you would think so, but most fitness pros aren’t tracking their marketing efforts at even the most basic level of the 4 Sales and Marketing Pillars.
To get you started, you need to track the following numbers: total leads, Number of Front End Offers, conversions to Core Offers, and your Retention Rate.
If you are paying for marketing, you should know how many leads came from each ad, what your conversion rate for the squeeze page was, and how many people convert from lead to Front End Offer (FEO) at the very least.
Here are 5 numbers you need to track:
- Cost Per Conversion (how much it costs to get a lead)
- Conversion Rate of Squeeze Page (Visitors/Opt Ins)
- Total # of Leads
- Leads to FEO Conversion Rate (How many leads buy your FEO)
- Revenue Value of Campaign (How much you make on FEO sales)
There are hundreds of numbers to track, but these get you started and are easy to figure out using free tools including the Facebook Power Editor and Google Analytics.
Fitness Marketing Mistake #3: You Don’t Have a Funnel
What is a funnel?
A funnel is the path that you move your leads through to build value so they test drive your services through your FEO. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy, but you do need to have one in place.
A funnel is the path that you move your leads through to build value.
Most fitness pros running paid marketing simply collect the leads and try to sell them right away but never do anything with them afterward.
Spend more time building value through sharing your content, videos, or testimonials before making an offer to join your programs.
The funnel can look like this: Opt In –> 3 Emails with Content –> Offer FEO –> 5 Emails with Testimonials –> Schedule a Sales Appointment
While that is a very rudimentary marketing funnel, it’s easy to implement, and anyone with an email system like Aweber or Mailchimp can set it up.
Pro tip: Make sure to provide a ton of value in your follow-up emails!
Fitness Marketing Mistake #4: You Don’t Have an Offer
Marketing doesn’t stop once someone has opted in or once you’ve got their contact info! You need the funnel to follow up, and then you must make offers for them to try what you have to offer.
A huge mistake is assuming that someone will opt in for your gift or you’ll get a lead from paid marketing sources and they will eventually join your program.
It may happen, but there is no better time to ask them if they want to join than the first few days after they have discovered what you have to offer.
Make sure you have a high-value, low-barrier-to-entry, Front End Offer in place that makes it easy for them to start working with you!
Fitness Marketing Mistake #5: You’re Afraid to Invest
If you can’t afford to invest at least $5/day to paid marketing or aren’t committed to tracking your results so you can see a return on your investment, then you should look for other sources of generating leads.
But if you’ve overcome all the mistakes above this, you will be very prepared to make a small investment to test your hand at paid marketing.
Leveraging your time and money can help you generate leads while you are working with clients, developing your business, or even sleeping!
You can’t do that when you only do public speaking or networking!
You may not hit a homerun at first and generate 2-4x your investment back in 30 days, but you can track your progress so that you start working towards that level.
In fact, most beginners with the right guidance can double their investment in at least 30 days. So if you invest $5/day and convert at a very basic 10% from leads to a $49 FEO and generate 100 leads in 30 days, you’ll spend $150 and will convert 10 people.
Let’s quickly do the math:
- 100 leads x 10% conversion = 10 FEOs
- $49/FEO x 10 FEOs = $490
You’ll make $490 from the FEOs and only have spent $150! And that’s before you convert any of those FEOs to long-term clients where your return on investment can really jump up!
Fitness Marketing Mistake #6: You Only Use Facebook Ads
I get it! Facebook is the easiest place to get started with paid marketing. But once you understand the principles of paid marketing and have a funnel that converts set up, you’ll be able to take your paid marketing to tons of different avenues that may be cheaper or a better fit for your Ideal Client.
You can use YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google…
The list is endless! It’s even possible that you could do paid email marketing to your joint venture partners to capture leads and convert them.
All you have to do is get your first opt-in offer in front of the right people, and watch your funnel convert.
Fitness Marketing Mistake #7: You Don’t Stick with It
It seems like paid marketing, especially digital paid marketing, should be an immediate gratification and solution to all your lead troubles.
While it can work quickly, you have to be willing to fight through the learning curve and stick with it to perfect your message and optimize your funnels.
Very few people knock it out of the park on their first try.
If you have a few bumps along the road, stick with it, track your numbers to ensure you’re not losing money, and keep adjusting your marketing to make it better.
Just like you won’t be the best public speaker in your first workshop and you won’t be the best networker at your first group meeting, you likely have some work to do for your paid marketing efforts to pay high dividends.
Summary
After reading about these 7 fitness marketing mistakes— you are either excited by the idea of using paid digital marketing strategies in your business, or you are scared to death of trying them. Neither feeling is right or wrong; in fact, you can build a great business without ever running a single Facebook ad (despite what many gurus may tell you). However, you can automate more of your marketing process if you learn how to do this the right way.
Avoid These 7 Mistakes By Following Our Proven Plan For Marketing Success
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