Fitness Business School – Be More Visible to Your Audience

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk to you about becoming more visible in your market. If you feel like you’ve been that hidden gym, this episode is something you need to listen to

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 til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

The vast majority of independent fitness business owners, the path they followed to get into business often kind of sounded like this. So let me know if this hits home with you, right? A trainer leaves the gym, they were training in. They’re going to go out on their own, maybe a few clients follow them, you know, and, and hopefully those clients who refer, refer a few more, but it’s almost never as many as you expect. In fact, almost never as many clients as you expect to follow you do because you know, there it’s a change. It’s not as convenient as it once was. And then maybe if that, if that new fitness entrepreneur is ambitious, they reach out to some people that they know to spread the word that, Hey, we’re, we’re now in business. Perhaps they even run an ad. They saw someone else run on Facebook or, or they start making a few posts on social media. And, you know, if they’re smart, if they’re aggressive, they probably invest in some products or coaching to get more clients. But almost always, they hit a plateau.

The buzz of being new kind of dies off they’ve extinguished this whole low hanging fruit that they had to build their clientele that, you know, there are no more clients to pull with them. They’ve got all the ones who either want to come, or you know, they’ve been kind of tapped out because the, the place that they worked in for some sort of non-compete. So now the business owner has a job. It is, it is work. They’re spending most of their time training people. And they’re, they’re just scrambling to replace anybody who leaves are working long hours. And you know, it, it’s not nearly is awesome as they probably anticipated when they went into business for themselves. Now the, the tactics they learn a lot of times are the things that they think of work. It just doesn’t work quite as well as they hope. You know, they they’ve heard about this Facebook ad that will create a flood of business in their gym, but when they do it, it brings in a trickle.

Now, if you’re like most of the business owners that I get to work with, and I know that some of this is reflective of who I market to and the people that I’ve worked with along the way, you probably know you’ve got something good to offer. You know, that you’re better than most of the competition. It’s serving your clients at caring about your clients at delivering results. So, so why aren’t people referring more? Why aren’t more people seeking you out for your help? I mean, I’ve heard this thousands of times over the last 15, 16 years. And when I say that I’m not exaggerating and the solution, it’s not easy, but, but the answer is pretty simple. The people are the perfect fit for what you offer and how you can help in the problems that you solve. And the goal is you can help people achieve. They don’t even know you exist. You’re, you’re invisible to them, right?

You’ve allowed yourself to blend in and basically be anonymous. You’re just, you know business, this that isn’t on their radar at all. And all those awesome, the things that are happening inside your facility, they’re invisible to the outside world. And they’re invisible to the people who need to know about it the most. So you’ve got to find a way to stop being invisible. You’ve got to stop blending in.

Okay, you got to be that first one business, your ideal prospect thinks about if they, you know, whenever they want to solve their problems or, or pursue their desires, if you’re ready to stop blending in, if you’re ready to stop being hidden, you’ve got to pour yourself into being known and making sure that people understand how you can help with the same vigor and passion that you, that you display whenever you’re serving your clients, right? Like you have to have that same desire to connect with new people and serve them that you display whenever you’re serving the current people that you’re working with. And that seems maybe simplistic or very elementary, but it’s true. I mean, take inventory of your time. How much time effort, energy do you put into connecting with new people, with putting your meshes message of how you change people’s lives out to the public for people to see how much time do you spend each day connecting with new people that you might be able to help going out, doing public speaking, networking, putting, you know, demonstrations of what you do, coaching people for free on social media, delivering results to them in advance so they can gain the confidence that you can help. Have you documented your expertise in a book or a report and shared it with the world. Do people actually have the, the opportunity to get to know you and get to know about you? One of the things that I’ve always kind of been floored by, I live in, you know, the Eastern part of Louisville, Kentucky, and my, my younger son is finishing up fifth grade in elementary school here locally. And my older son who’s now in college, went to the same elementary school and within a half a mile of this school and with them in about a mile and a half of where we’ve lived throughout, there was a training facility that I’ve never heard. I heard a word about. I’ve never received a direct mail piece from I’ve never been targeted with a Facebook ad. I’ve never seen a social media post. I lived in the subdivision that they were adjacent to that basically, after looking around on their website is precisely their target market. The parents of the kids who go to this elementary school, the one that we’ve spent nine years being associated with have never received a flyer or seen a yard sign or done any sort of email marketing, even though plenty of other businesses do market through this elementary school, they leverage the PTA.

They do different types of advertising drops. I never got anything through the newsletter from our homeowner association or the print magazine that came out that that talked about. And so finally, recently I noticed this business went out of business and it, it didn’t surprise me in the least because you know, that market is there. The, the opportunity, literally, you know, there, there are a couple of thousand homes that many of the residents would have fit. This, this business is profit th their target market, based on what I see online, at least what I was able to learn about them online. And they just willingly stayed invisible. They were invisible to me that if I hadn’t been looking around to, to basically get a feel for what other fitness businesses were in the market, because of what I do for a living, I would have never found them. I would have never known about them. I would have never known how they could help, what kind of results they might be delivered. I wouldn’t even gotten to know what services they provide. And that is sadly a very common kind of path in our industry. People are comfortable staying inside their four walls and griping about the things that aren’t happening for them instead of going out and making things happen. I mean, there, I went over a handful of things that this business could have done to create more awareness for their target market in their respective area. And all of those things are things that you could do as well. So if you’re comfortable with settling, for being invisible for, for the masses, if you’re comfortable being invisible to the people that could be paying you to help solve their problems and achieve their goals, that’s fine. But if you want to stop being invisible and start getting a constant stream of clients you love working with, then the responsibility falls to you. You have to get out of your comfort zone and make sure that the people that you want to serve know about you, just like the clients that you serve have to get out of their comfort zone if they’re trying to achieve their goals as well. So here’s the challenge for you as we close this episode up, go out and make sure one new person that potentially could be a client of yours learns about you today. Because if you stack that up day after day, you know, 365 days a year, if at least one new person that that is a prospect is potentially at least a lead that might be interested in what you have to offer. If one new person comes out knowing about you, how you can help knowing the type of clients that you serve and the results that you deliver, then you’re going to be fine. You’re going to succeed. And you are going to start to get that word of mouth and you are start going to start getting that momentum that you need to build the business that you do.

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