Fitness Business School – The Economy of Attention

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about the attention economy. Let’s get started.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

Something I recently shared with coaching clients was how I kind of think about the evolution of the way that the value of money has changed, and so I’ve been a business owner versus the way that time or attention, the value of that has changed. And you know, I don’t think that it would come as a surprise to anybody that
the value of money has decreased over time, right? I mean, we have inflation. The home that I live in would’ve cost less when it was built than it would cost.

Now if I went to sell it, and there, I mean, even a different example, there are plenty of quote unquote high ticket courses out there that people are charging, you know, upwards of 5,000, sometimes 15 or $20,000 for that don’t contain any more intellectual property or support than programs that when I
first got into the fitness industry and was either a buyer of courses or a creator of courses were being sold for a hundred ninety seven, two hundred ninety $7. So the, that, that kind of money side of things ha, has changed in that way. But I’ll tell you, the bigger change in my opinion has been the value of time and
attention. And I recall very vividly the, you know, a couple consultants in the fitness industry telling me in no uncertain terms that giving things away for free, giving free sessions, free week trials, free two week trials was a bad idea.

And I heard any number of marketing experts talking about giving away content was a bad idea because, you know, you didn’t want to give away your secret sauce, so to speak. You didn’t want to give away the things that made you good or better or different. And the, I think the thing that recognized at that point in
my time in college baseball helped me a great deal with this was that people’s time was valuable. And if I got somebody to come visit our campus, it was a zero sum game. If they came to visit our campus, they weren’t visiting somebody else’s campus that day. And I had their attention, I had their, you know, their
focus. I got to put my best foot forward and present how we may be a better option for the player, for the family, for them to reach their goals as a student from, you know, from a development standpoint as a player.

And then from a maturity standpoint, going from adolescence to adulthood, I was able to have this controlled environment where I could really put my best foot forward and demonstrate to them how we may be a fit. And that time was valuable and they weren’t paying me to come to campus, right? So I
always viewed it that way. And so when I got into the fitness industry, the same thing held true. If somebody was in my gym, I had kind of taken them out of the marketplace regardless of whether or not they had paid or not. You know, I had their attention. I made the other marketing, the other gyms less
relevant during that window that I had their attention. And, and that has always been a big piece of the way that I’ve approached business since, you know, I mean literally since like 2004. And the pendulum has really swung that way be, or where having that time and having that attention from somebody has
become significantly more valuable than it was then because there are far more things tugging at attention than there were at that time.

I mean, in 2004, we didn’t have iPhones, we didn’t have Facebook. We weren’t being in inundated with nearly as many messages there. There certainly was an a steady stream of YouTube shorts or TikTok videos that people were scrolling through. And so getting somebody’s attention was much easier. Holding
their attention was much easier. You know, this certainly isn’t anything of a medical diagnosis or anything like that, and I’m not equipped to make that sort of assessment. But when people say that, you know, they, they don’t have a good attention span or they’ve got some sort of attention deficit issue, I mean, the world
that we operate in now makes maintaining attention and focus harder than it’s ever been by, by many multiples because there’s so many things that are being thrown our way. And so because of that, it is so much harder to get somebody to stop and give you their undivided attention.

And it’s even harder to get them to keep paying attention to you over time to keep being an important part of their day or an important part of their life over time. And so where this really kind of manifests itself in our world is that we see a lot of business owners say, okay, I am putting out content on social media and
I’m not getting a bunch of new leads or a bunch of new business. And if they’ve been around the industry for an extended period of time, what they’re seeing is diminishing returns on the same amount of effort. And it’s not that they’re doing any worse, it’s just that the market has changed and they have not. And you
know, I mean, anybody who’s spent any time on social media understands that, you know, you are just one more thing in the feed if you see it from the consumer’s eyes or the perspective client’s eyes.

But as the person doing the work, you’re like, Hey, I did all this good work. I put together this content and I’m putting it out there, and people aren’t responding. When, you know, Facebook doesn’t necessarily show it to everybody. We would want to respond. Instagram doesn’t show it to everybody. We would
want to respond. And even if they do, I mean, somebody may spend a fraction of a second on it as they scroll through, they may not give it their undivided attention. And I think that forces us to do things differently from, from a few different perspectives. I think that it forces us to do things differently from a
volume perspective in some ways. Like we need to figure out how to distribute the things that we create with more consistency or more frequency, I guess, because it’s not enough to post it once and hope people notice it.

Like I see people say, well, I posted this lead magnet, this offer on my personal page, and then I’ll go to the personal page and they post it once, and then they post it again six days later, and they wonder why they didn’t have people flooding through their door. Like you have to make sure it is seen. It is your
responsibility not just to create it, but it’s your responsibility to create enough distribution to make sure that it is seen and understood and you know, so that’s one piece of the puzzle. But then the second piece of this is you need to be hyper relevant to the person that you’re talking to. And as people have looked for
kind of levers or ways to create more efficiency, I know a lot of people have started to use things like ChatGPT or whatever else to create content.

And that content has no personality. And that content is just more information that yes, you can check the box or you can mark off the thing on your to-do list and say, well, I did this, but you didn’t do it well enough to make a difference in anybody’s life, and you didn’t do it well enough to get somebody’s
attention. So if you are going to try to grow your business through an online channel, you’re gonna have to do better than you’ve ever done to get their attention, because attention is harder to come by, but it’s more valuable than it’s ever been. And if you can get somebody to come in your gym paid or free, it
doesn’t matter if you get them in your gym, now you have their attention, whether it’s undivided or not, it’s still most of their attention. I’m not saying they won’t look at their phone here or there, whether they’re at their gym, but if they actually walk through the door, now you’ve got this relatively captive audience
and you are able to put your best foot forward.

So getting them through the door matters more than it’s ever mattered. Getting somebody to stop and listen to you matters more. It’s more valuable than it’s ever been, but you’re probably gonna have to do better. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to work harder, but you do have to work smarter. You
do have to make sure your messaging is really dialed in. You do have to make sure that the quality of the things that you’re putting out aren’t just haphazard. Check the box, get it out the door. And then something else that I think it is paramount, but not everybody’s gonna buy into this. Heck, I give people a lot of
resources to do this that are in our programs, and some of them still don’t buy into it. You are gonna be way better off if you get people to opt in and not just try to get their attention on the busy landscape that is the internet.

You want people to opt in a permission-based way to email, to text messaging, so you can control when you’re putting things in front of them and get a much higher share of their attention than if they’re just finding you on social. You know, a lot of times people used to think in terms of their website being a
storefront, right? Like, this is the online storefront for my business. And, and I thought that way too. But the way that we view that, that was a storefront on Main Street, right? And you knew that with a little bit of effort, you could get people to see it because you had a much higher chance of people just
window shopping, driving by the store because there were fewer stores. But now, you know, there are millions of stores competing for their attention. So what the display in your storefront is less relevant than it’s ever been.

You have to get somebody’s attention first. You have to be able to get somebody’s attention first. And it’s a little bit of a tangent, but that’s why people like Orange Theory or F 45 or outside the fitness industry, you know, chick-fil-A or Blaze Pizza pay 2, 3, 4 times as much to be in class
A real estate in high traffic areas. So they get that attention through intrusive visibility. So you see them even when you’re not looking for them. And unless you’re spending significantly more on ads to put your stuff in front of people regularly, all the other stuff you’re doing has to be better. Now, if you’re running
ads, then you can get more of that visibility, you can get more share of attention because you are paying for it. But if not, then you’re gonna pay for it. With time, you’re gonna pay for it with effort, you’re gonna pay for it with quality.

So that’s the way that I think about the attention economy. But I wanna do a follow up episode and talk about how this impacts you as a business owner internally, not just how it affects you with prospects externally. So look forward to that episode soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

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