Fitness Business School – Becoming the Market Leader in Your Area

Full Transcript

Hey everyone Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about how you can become the market leader in your area.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

So I think most of us want to claim that crown as the market leader in our respective area, and let’s face it, it’s subjective. Whoever the market leader is, it’s kind of relative to who you’re serving and what you’re doing. But a way maybe a simple way to think about this is there are basically three ways that you can become the market leader in a specific area or vertical in your local market.

The first is through pricing, right? You can become the market leader for a service by being the lowest price or the highest price, or by just having a completely different pricing model, like maybe a results-based pricing model. And then the second is by offering a different product, a unique product. I think that when, for example, in our, our industry pricing, Planet Fitness really came in and said, okay, we’re going to lead through pricing. We’re going to be a discount price, or we’re going to be kind of the quote unquote, Walmart of fitness and win that category.

And then product-wise, I mean, we’ve seen people like Orange Theory come in and try to integrate technology and maybe a little bit different setting to, to offer a different product or a slight variation on a product to, to win that category. Or if we want to go a step further looking at places like Cycle Bar or Club Pilates, and by offering just again, a slightly different product.

But then the third is through positioning, through identifying a specific target market and working to become the best option available to the people in that target market and of the three that, that are there. Pricing is fine. If you can do it profitably, if you can find a way like planet fitness has to, to go into a market and be the, you know, be the lowest priced option very much like Walmart and compete there and do enough volume that it’s almost impossible for anybody else to come in and compete with you and be profitable doing it that can work, but it’s not easy to do, right. And it’s also not easy to, to, to do with smaller businesses because there’s always going to be somebody to come in that may be unaware of how to operate a business profitably and successfully. And they will undercut you with pricing, not understanding the long-term ramifications of it.

Then the second leg, the, the product. Well, you know, the, the product thing is it it’s a temporary place market to be the market leader, because all somebody has to do is come in and essentially knock off your product. They see what you do. They see what you have, and then they can come in and really just come a clone of what you’re doing. And we we’ve seen that with people who’d go in and say, Oh, I’m going to be a kettlebell gym. And then before, you know, it, somebody places an order to perform better in their kettlebell gym too, or, you know, somebody being you know, a knockoff of a cycle bar or plot, and all of a sudden you’re not unique in that market. You’re not the, the undisputed leader anymore. So the place that most of the people that I would work with in an independent business setting, so not franchise models or big corporate type of businesses, but independently owned businesses that have, you know, one, maybe two or even three locations, but not massive operations, the best way for them to become a market leader is through positions. So, you know, if the beauty of this is, if you do it through positioning, it, it’s something that can be sustainable. It’s hard to knock you off the perch at the top.

So how do we do this? Well, the first thing that we want to do is try to become locally famous. My friend, Dean Jackson, calls it three miles famous. And really it’s about going out and identifying who your specific target market is. And making sure that you know where they are and you are very visible to them. And you will for being an athlete, being an expert, a coach to those people, even before they pay you. Whether that means in a non pandemic society going out and doing public speaking at organizations or in venues where they are located or sending direct mail to their neighborhood or running Facebook ads or creating content, whether it be a podcast or a local online, kind of your own local TV show, if you will, where you’re answering the questions they have answering the questions, they should have kind of coaching them before they actually pay you to coach. Yeah. And you become kind of a mess. Any celebrity locally, you’re going to see people coming up to you in the grocery store saying, Oh, I saw your video, or, Hey, you’re the person who has that podcast. And before, you know, it, you’ve really built up a bit of a moat that it’s hard for the competition to ever catch up with because most of them aren’t going to be willing to do the work, to do that.

And then finally, if we want to win through positioning, we need to be generating a lot of social proof. We need to gather testimonials or case studies from people in the local market that we can use, because what’s so great about that in a local area is if you’re using a testimony or if you’re using a case study people, no that person are actually going to see it, right? It’s not like some of these kind of fake testimonials that we see online. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of cease and desist letters we’ve had to send based on people that have used some of Holly’s testimonials to market their own business and online, it’s hard to know what you can trust and what you can, but what’s great about local social proof or local case studies is if you have a study of somebody who lives in a certain neighborhood, people are gonna say, well, wait a minute, that person’s my neighbor. I know somebody works with that person, or we go to church together, whatever else. So it carries so much more weight. And then the same thing with reviews, whether it be Google reviews or Facebook reviews or any other platform you’re using those, those reviews are generally perceived as, Hey, these are real people. This is genuine social proof. It’s not fake. It’s not manufactured. It’s people who are sharing their experience. And there’s, again, a possibility maybe even a probability depending on your market, that people are going to know who that person is. And so the impact is magnified.

And then finally, if we want to win through positioning, we’re, we’re constantly proactively pursuing referrals. We are asking our clients to introduce us to new people. We’re asking them to share things on, on social media. We’re asking them to give opportunities to come and experience what we offer a way to the people in their lives or invite people to participate. But it, again, it makes the, the competition almost irrelevant referrals really kind of jump you up the line or up the ladder, I guess, because it makes the shopping around the, the kind of cold cold investigation of other options, almost irrelevant because you already get to borrow like a prospect gets to borrow the experience, the trust, the confidence, the comfort that comes from their friend already having a positive experience there. So if you want to win, if you want to be the market leader in your area, my recommendation, isn’t thinking, well, Hey, I’m going to do it because my product is so unique. Yes, we want our product to be a little bit different if we can, but a lot of times to make it so different in a front facing way. It’s a losing battle. Usually the way your product is different is on the inside of your four walls where people may not be an expert enough in the product to differentiate before they get to know you before they get to experience it. You know, people may not always understand why you’re better before they’re educated on, on the type of business on the type of solutions that are provided because this isn’t their area of expertise.

And then pricing wise, you know, it’s tough to become a market leader competing on price. So the way that I recommend that you do it again is go back to that positioning, go back to finding a way to be the best possible solution for a target market. Become very visible to that target market generate plenty of social proof, create a bunch of referral opportunities for the people that you already serve in that target market. And you’re not only going to position yourself as a market leader, but it is by far the most challenging position for other people to try to overtake, right? So it creates what we would call a moat that, you know, the competition can’t easily just cut prices and say, no, we’re the cheapest now. Or buy some equipment and say, no, we have that product now. No they’re going to have to put in a lot more legwork. They’re going to have to build a lot more. They’re going to have to put a lot more time and effort into becoming locally famous too, to ever try to catch up with you. You’re going to have such a headstart that this is in my mind, the obvious path to take. If you want to build a great business, that is sustainable over time. So if you want to become the market leader, positioning’s the answer.

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