What’s Going To Help You Grow Your Fitness Business, Get More Clients & Bring In More Revenue…

Every business and every industry evolves and adapts over time.  The fitness industry is quickly evolving with an increase in competition and leveling up of the business owners involved.  More money is being put into franchises which makes things a bit more challenging for the small business owner and private studio owner who want to make a real difference.

How can you out market your competition and clearly show your community why you are the best?

Here’s a few ideas for marketing your business in the coming year.

Paid Facebook Marketing

You can’t get away with throwing a few bucks into a boosted post or hoping to put $10 into a FB ad and get a good return on your investment any more.  The good news is that there is still time to have a big impact in your local community through paid advertising on social media platforms.

However, it’s now costing between $7-10 to get a lead!

For most fitness business owners taking the time to learn Facebook marketing strategy and create the marketing that is required to make it successful takes too much time.  It’s why many fail when they try to run FB ads or other paid social media marketing.

Instead of trying it yourself, outsource! Invest in someone to run your ads and create your funnels for you.  Take the time you save and put it back into your business by focusing on converting the leads that get delivered to you.

If you want a simple solution check out Lead Enginge Marketing.

Strategic Partnerships

Joint ventures and other strategic partnership attempts fail for many fitness business owners.  The biggest reason is a lack of clarity on the purpose and plan of each relationship!

You go in and hope that the other party will promote you and bring in a flood of new clients.  That rarely happens.  Typically the other business owner isn’t great at marketing and they are busy running their own business.   These ideas sound great at first, but then fizzle out.

Instead of relying on hope to build your business create a plan…

Invest a few hours to map out a few levels of strategic partnerships with your business.  Brainstorm all the ways that you can add value to a business and how they may be able to provide you leads.

Here’s a few examples:

• Basic Partnership:   Each party sends out 1 email per quarter to their respective email list and social media audiences.
• Premium Partnership:  Sponsorship opportunities for challenges,  discounts provided to all new clients, 1 sponsored email or video per month
• Exclusive VIP Partnership: Exclusivity (no other related business will partner with you), Premier sponsorship of all challenges, Ads or banners in gym/business,  1 sponsored email and social media post per month to audience.

There’s obviously more details to be hashed out to make this work, but that gives you a good start.   If you treat this like a true partnership and invest time to building these relationships and managing them they can provide you a lot of exposure and leads.

Seminars

If you love to educate your target market and position yourself as a subject matter expert in your community there’s no better way than getting in front of people.

This idea takes a bit more work to get right, but it can pay off big time for you and your business.   You have to be able to market and fill the seminars or workshops you do and then be able to conver those individuals into prospects for your business.

Using seminars to generate leads is the equivalent of online marketers using webinars.  You have a captive audience that is invested (with their time) in listening to you present on a topic you are the expert in and that they need to solve a problem for themselves.   The hardest part is usually finding the right topic to attract lots of people and then filling the seats.

Start small, even 5-10 people in a seminar is a great start.

Use your joint ventures, paid marketing and your email list to promote the seminars.  I’d recommend hosting this for free at first to get more leads.  After you get registrations put a system in place to follow up with each lead and confirm their post.  You can expect a few to not show up after registering for free, but if you market well and keep them engaged between registration and the seminar you should get a good turn out.

The conversion strategy at the seminar isn’t to sell a higher ticket item or even your Front End Offer to the audience.  Instead, offer a free Success Session to everyone in the audience and provide a special incentive to them for booking it right then and there.

Now you’ll have qualified prospects committed to sitting with you 1-1 where you can conver them to clients.

Content Marketing

This is a longer term play, especially if you aren’t going to spend a lot of time and money to really promote your content.  However, putting out amazing and helpful content that benefits your audience is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and be the go to when someone needs help reaching their goals.

The best part about this is 99% of business owners won’t do this consistently enough to make a real difference.  If you can be that 1% and commit to a year of content creation on a consistent schedule you can absolutely stand out.

Content can be video (a really good choice right now), written or audio.  A combination is even better!   Think about how many podcasts are also on YouTube.  When you have video content it’s easy to get it transcribed and turn into a blog, add to multiple platforms to share and audio can be pulled and put into a pdocast.

Commit to putting out at least 1 peice of great content each week for a year and track the results.  Again, this is a long term play, but those that can accomplish it will have a leg up on the competition.

Do a quick brain dump of the questions you get asked in session or by prospects and you’ll have  great start to your content.    Don’t worry about impressing your peers and other business owners, this is about helping your target market and potential clients solve a problem.

Planning, Tracking and Optimizing

The number of business owners that I speak with who aren’t using any type of marketing calendar or tracking system for their business is amazing.  How can you possibly expect to identify what’s working or systemize your business if you arne’t planning, tracking and optimizing your marketing?

Successful fitness business, those with High Performing Fitness Businesses, are going to be planning out a content marketing schedule, promtional plan and tracking their marketing activities consistently.  They will also take the time and see the value in tracking their leads and creating some accountability around themselves for the follow up needed to convert those leads.

When you track the right things and plan appropriately optimization is easy.  You simply look at the data and it will tell you what’s working.

If you’re not planning, tracking and optimizing your marketing each quarter then there’s a good chance you’ll not hit your growth goals and all of these other marketing ideas are worthless.

Your Marketing Systems Are Here…

Inside The Academy we’ve worked hard to put together modules, courses, curriculum and tools that help you become a better marketer and business owner.  If you want to ramp up your marketing and grow your business in the coming year and aren’t in the The Academy you better hope that your competition isn’t either…