Fitness Business School – Business Mistake #7 – Inconsistent Marketing

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about one of the most common challenges that we face is fitness business owners, and that is inconsistent marketing, but more importantly, I want to talk with you about how to break through that, how you can come up with a simple plan that you can execute to keep the clients coming in. So let’s get to it.

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.

Let’s talk about marketing. So every week I will send out an email to a small segment of the people who subscribed to my daily newsletter. And I will ask them a question about whether or not they still need to get new clients. Now, obviously the answer for most, all of us is, yeah, we want new clients, but really what I’m trying to do is start a conversation. I’ll want to know what they’re doing to get clients, because if somebody tells me they’re not getting enough clients, well, there’s a reason, right? Like there’s something that we should be doing differently if we want a different outcome.

And invariably, the response that I get back to the question, well, what are you doing to generate new clients? And now is one it’s pretty own fulfilling. It’s usually something really simple like, well, you know, I get clients from word of mouth or I get a few referrals. You know, I ran a Facebook ad, but it didn’t work. You know, they they’ll say, okay, I’m making a few posts each week on social media and it’s just this really inconsistent or erratic way of generating business.

And admittedly, our industry kind of lends itself to that. Our industry really kind of it has created some safety nets and I, and I’ll take some of the blame for this because I know that you know, I was kind of at the forefront of introducing this recurring billing way back in 2004, in 2005, where clients would sign up for monthly payments subscriptions up to that point. Most everybody really sold in packages. And, you know, because of that, because we have people who are predictably going to pay us month after month. Sure. We’re going to have some attrition. We’re going to have some natural attrition or we’re going to have some attrition tied to events. Like some of the things we’ve experienced over the last six or seven months, but, you know, because we have people that are going to continue to come back.

A lot of, we fall into the trap of not pursuing new business each and every day. And we’ve talked about this and different episodes of the podcast being open every day. But, you know, I was speaking with business owner outside of the fitness industry yesterday, actually. And they, they were talking about all the things that they did to generate business, having to get reviews on Google having to really work on SEO. So they would show up whenever somebody was looking for the solution that they provided and really having to kind of pursue new business every day because they didn’t have recurring revenue. Like whenever a job was done, that that relationship with that client was probably done for the immediate future. Sure. They make a go back and do work for them two, three, four years later, but it’s not going to be a month after month thing. And you know, we’ve kind of fallen into this trap of just relying on the business that we generated in the past to stay with us. And then we kind of get defensive or upset if those people leave, knowing that everybody’s life circumstances changed. So we have to be proactive instead of just hoping that our current clients stay. We want to do what we can to keep them to stay. But our job is to always be generating new business. And in my opinion, that means we should probably be marketing 364 days a year. I mean, sure, take Christmas off. That’s fine. But we need to be out there 52 weeks a year, pursuing new business.

Now, what can that look like? Well, in my mind, we want to have at least kind of four things in motion. We want to have probably a couple online mechanisms in place. Something paid something organic. So we’re, we’re running some paid ads, even if it’s a really low budget, we’re running some paid ads to make sure that we’re staying in front of a high volume of people. And then we’re doing something organic and it could even be on your personal Facebook page, or it could be picking something on, you know, on Instagram. And we’re posting just to stay visible, to stay in front of people, to build relationships with people. So we’re doing something, paid something organic online. We have something for referrals in place that we’re doing systematically. Maybe it’s a point of sale referral promotion. Maybe it’s just kind of creating a spreadsheet and going down and making sure that over the course of a three month span, we’ve asked all of our clients individually, if they’d be interested in bringing a friend and then maybe the next three months span, we hand them a gift card and say, Hey, can you share this with somebody you think would be a good fit for what we do and you know, so we’ve got a referral mechanism in place, and then we’ve got something offline. We’ve got public or strategic alliances or networking. Maybe it’s even direct mail, right? We’ve got something in place offline.

So we’ve got these four boxes checked and then there’s this fifth component and it’s followup. It’s saying, okay, I’m going to do these four things paid online, organic, online referral, offline. I’m going to do those four things and make sure I’m doing something related to those four things each and every week. And then I’m going to follow up with all the leads that are generated by that and try to move those leads to book hemming, actual prospective clients, because there’s a difference, right? A lead is somebody who’s kind of said, I’m interested in losing weight or I’m interested in improving my health or fitness, or I’m interested in improving my performance, but they haven’t necessarily said, okay, I want to hire a coach or I want to talk with you about how maybe you can help me. So we spend our time each and every week in those four categories. And we S men were working there to generate leads. And then we follow up with all the people that we’ve connected with over time in those four categories to try to move them from just being a lead, somebody having a general interest to actually being a prospective client, somebody who might actually come in and work with us in whatever format that we’re going to serve them through. If you are doing that 52 weeks a year, we’re not going to have a shortage of clients. Sure. We can always want more than we have, but we’re not going to be panicked. If somebody leaves, if somebody says they want to put their contract on hold, if somebody moves out of our area, if somebody just says, look, you know what? I’ve got too much on my plate right now. And I can’t make this a consistent thing for me. Well, no big deal, because we’re continually filling that pipeline with new people. We’ve got simple, systematic things that we can do consistently. Now take that approach. And honestly, it’s going to put you ahead of like 98% of the competition in the fitness industry. Because very, very few, literally like 2% of the people that are in our industry are going to check all five of those boxes week after week. If you do, that’s a competitive advantage. If you do it consistently, it’s a massive competitive advantage because consistency is not a strong suit of small business owners. Do it have some perseverance the day, the weeks that you get busy, find a way to do something may not be the optimal thing, but do something to check those boxes. Do that. You’ll do great.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.