Fitness Business School – 3 Cs of an Effective Marketing Plan

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and I wanna talk with you about the three Cs you need to know to build a marketing plan. 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 end 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.

If you want to build an effective marketing plan, you need to really have an understanding of what I would consider the three Cs, right? And the first of the three Cs is your capacity, the capacity constraints that you have. The capacity really boils down to, do I have the labor, the human resources, the manpower to get something done? And and if not, where can I go find that? Can I hire a marketing technician or a person to execute on this? Because ultimately
somebody has to do the work, right? Like somebody has, you can say going and attending Chamber of Commerce meetings, it’s good, but if you don’t have the time to go do it, then it’s not effective

When you’re building your plan, if you are you know, considering running ads on a specific platform, you know,
you have to have the capacity to learn how to run the ads if you are gonna do them, and capacity to set up and manage them once you’ve learned. So that’s the the first thing. We have to be a realist about our capacity to execute whatever plan we design. And a lot of people you know, they overlook that they, they’re overly optimistic about the time or space they have available. And so they, they don’t leave themselves enough of that time to, to actually execute the plan because they underestimate how long it’s gonna take to learn things. Or they assume that if they have five hours a week that aren’t already scheduled for things, that those are just gonna be a blank canvas that they can use for this specific thing. But maybe they’re not good at saying no to other things that, that
come along. And that five hours turns into two hours before you know it, because they’ve kind of frittered it away five minutes and 10 minutes at a time.

So, do you have the capacity to execute whatever plan that you’re interested in executing? The second thing is, do you have the capability? Do
you have the capability to do the work that is required? It sounds great. Hey, I’m gonna go run Facebook ads, or I’m gonna go run Google ads, or I’m going to figure out how to podcast or whatever thing you’re gonna do to you know, to, to grow your business, to, to reach new people.

Well, every one of those things requires skills. It requires knowledge and the, the ability to execute and not just basic skills. In a lot of cases, if you want to do good work, then you have to have some sort of minimum threshold of competency to do good work. So it’s not enough to just say, well, yeah, I can
learn how to run ads Well, can you learn how to run ads that convert? Can you learn how to write emails that convert? Can is probably the, the the wrong word, because if you’re listening to this, I assume that you have the ability to learn it, but are you actually going to do what it takes to
learn it?

And that’s maybe the better question because, you know, we’ve got to invest time to be good at some things, and sometimes people just aren’t willing to be bad at something long enough to be good at it. They’re not willing to go through that journey of learning to gain the skills necessary to execute. So if
you personally don’t have the capability or somebody on your team doesn’t have the capability, can you hire the capability? I will tell you that I don’t run Facebook ads for my own business because, well, I think I have the capability to run a rudimentary level of Facebook ad I do not have the capability of
running ads at the level that I need to run them to have the business that I wanna have. And frankly, I’m not interested in learning that skill because there are people that I can hire to perform that skill, and I can focus on doing things that I’m more excited about learning to do or excited about doing that maybe I
already have the skillset to do.

So understanding your capability constraints really matters as well. So we have capacity, we have capability, and then the obvious one, cash. Do you have the cash to execute the plan that you would like to, to execute? Because, you know, e everybody talks about like with marketing, hey, the goal is to turn $1 into two, or, you know, $1 into 10 or whatever the, you know, the return on investment is. Well, usually what happens though in this case is $1 turns into 50 cents in
the beginning until you figure out how to optimize things to be profitable. And if you’re gonna hire out, do you have the cash flow to, to hire help? Do you have the cash flow to hire a coach or consultant to help you build, build the plan and give you the, the templates to execute it? Do you have the cash flow
to hire an agency to run ads?

Do you have the cash flow to hire somebody to do appointment setting or to serve as a salesperson? You know, you basically kind of have to decide, am I gonna invest the time to, you know, gain the capability to execute the things that, that are necessary to, to have a successful marketing plan? Do I
even have the capacity to spend the time to learn to do it, or am I gonna invest money to do it faster and hire people who’ve already developed those skills and ask them to execute on my behalf? And that’s the balancing act, right? That’s the choice that every business owner has to make. Now, I will tell
you that I am always of the mentality that yeah, we want to have a basic understanding of every piece of the puzzle, like an understanding of each advertising platform.

We’re gonna ask somebody to run on our behalf because we don’t wanna be held hostage by a particular agency or service provider or whatever else. But I mean, ultimately you know, you, you need to probably figure out, okay, what are the things that I can do and you know, and, and do at a relatively high level where, what are the things I’m going to that I either already have the capability of doing at a high level, or I’m willing to invest the time, effort, and energy to gain the capability. And then for the other stuff, you know, hire out and understand that your job is to make sure that you’re getting a return. If you’re gonna ask somebody else to push leads through your door, it’s your job to make the most of those leads. If you’re gonna ask somebody else to write copy for you, it’s your job to make the most of the people that they help you convert.

But when you are putting together your plan, make these three Cs part of the way that you are filtering your decisions, because, you know, I’ve seen time and time again, people have these grandiose plans that have no chance of being executed because they don’t have the time to execute
’em. They, they don’t currently have the capability of executing them, so they assume that they’re going to invest the time or effort or energy to gain that capability, and then reality hits ’em, and they, they just don’t ever get there. So they maybe they run ads for a couple days and they’re like, well, this doesn’t
work because they haven’t put in the time to learn how to make it work, or they don’t have the cash or unwilling in many cases to invest the cash to, to go out and have some help in deploying this plan. So, you know, when you’re crafting your marketing plan, and make no mistake, you have to have a marketing plan. You have to have marketing and sales systems to have a successful, sustainable business. So when you are building that, build it based on the reality that these three Cs provide, and if you do that, you’re gonna be setting yourself up to succeed.

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

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