Fitness Business School – How to Get More Leads

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I wanna talk with you about how to get more leads. Let’s get to it.

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.

I think one of the things that I’ve traditionally been known for obviously, is follow up because I’ve got this absurd streak of sending a daily email for like 8,000 consecutive days. And there are a variety of ways that we follow up, whether it’s that doing some texting, we do some stuff in Messenger and Facebook. I mean, you can follow up with phone calls there. I think follow up is a huge, underutilized area of business for most fitness business owners.

But I mean, ultimately you gotta have people to follow up with. And so that’s what I wanted to talk about was the different areas that I believe you need to have in place if you’re going to have a successful fitness business. So, I’m going to say this under the, the premise that you want to build a business that
at minimum does $20,000 a month in revenue, and m maybe your aspirations are much greater than that. And so if that is true, and, and mind you, if your goals are $5,000 a month or something like that, you can probably peel a couple of these off. But if you want something of that magnitude, I’m gonna tell
you the things that I believe you have to do to generate leads. And the first is you need to have what I call like your attraction assets in place.

You need to have a Google business listing because for those of you who are old enough to remember the Yellow Pages, it’s basically like where people go when they’re searching for something. So having a Google Business listing, making sure that you, you’ve built out your profile effectively. Make sure that
you’ve got plenty of reviews from happy clients. Make sure that you’re posting announcements every week or two to keep it fresh. You have pictures so people can see more about you. You have to have that built out at, at a reasonably high level. Secondary types of attraction assets that you don’t own are
things like profiles on places like Thumbtack or Yelp or whatever else. Internal attraction assets be you gotta have a lead magnet. You gotta have something that you can give somebody in exchange for their contact information, whether that’s a guide or a report, or a book or a video series, or a home workout
or a gift card for your services.

There has to be something that you can give somebody in exchange for permission to follow up and their contact information. So that’s the first bucket. We have to have attraction assets in place. The second is we need to have some sort of approach to organic, online social media. My recommendation
is pick one channel, get really good at it. And when I say social media, I don’t necessarily know that YouTube, like YouTube’s a little bit more like a search engine. But you need basically a platform. And whether that’s Facebook, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, I don’t, honestly, I don’t
really care. I have no personal preference here. Very much platform agnostic. Wherever your people are, you need to be somewhere that you can educate them, motivate them, and demonstrate that you can help. The ones that seem like they’re the most popular are places like Facebook and Instagram.

You probably need to be managing that on a daily basis and putting out something of value. The difference would be like if you’re doing YouTube again, which isn’t necessarily defined as social, but it’s media you can get away with less frequency than daily, but it’s still not, Hey, I’m making one post a month. Like, you have to get to be good. Your goal should be to be the best in your respective market. So if we think about businesses like yours that serve the audience that you serve, you’re trying to be number one or two in that category for that channel. And if we can do that, now we’re creating visibility. People can find us, people can opt in and we can follow up with them. But also people get to do a little bit of research about us.

They get to gain some awareness about us without them opting in. So there’s not much risk on their part. Well, they’re doing the discovery part of the process. So, so that’s number two. Number three is referral marketing. You need to be able to turn one client into two. And that is something that starts
from the minute somebody comes in your facility, giving them an opportunity at the point of sale to bring a guest, invite a friend to gift a membership to somebody that that’s where it begins. We need to have strategies in place to periodically allow them to invite guests in gift memberships to people. From
my perspective, referral marketing though extends well beyond that. It can be creating charity events that allow them to introduce people to our business in a positive light. It can be getting re reviews from those clients so that they’re now becoming an ambassador for our business, even when they’re not
proactively trying to, it can be getting them to share their successes on social media or share our content on social media.

It can even be having creating situations where they’re wearing swag from your business out in public so people see them and they become billboards. But we need a comprehensive referral marketing strategy because typically the people that we are coaching, we want more people like them.
We want people who live around them. We want people who have similar interests. And probably from a demographic standpoint, if these people can afford our services and it’s convenient for them to participate in, then the other people in their lives may very well meet that same criteria. So we have to
have referral stuff in place. And then the, the next one on the list is we gotta have some offline marketing. So many people have abandoned offline marketing for at least recently because online marketing’s in some ways easier. It’s at least more convenient.

You don’t have to get out. There’s not the fear of rejection. Nobody gets their feelings hurt as much when somebody blows off their Facebook post as they do, and somebody kind of blows them off in person. And so getting out, doing networking building relationships with local businesses and
doing strategic alliances that way, becoming a member of the Chamber of Commerce or BNI group or a local neighborhood business group, connecting with local organizations, whether it’s PTAs or sports organizations just getting out, doing what we call our a hundred cups approach. I mean, getting
out and meeting with people, the pace at which you will build that relationship and move those things forward. It’s just so much faster to get out and do things in a face-to-face environment than to do things online because I’m a guy who sends an email every day, and odds are you don’t.

And it’s still, I can move a relationship forward more in 15 minutes of a conversation than I could in two years of email. So offline marketing is huge. And you can step it up and do more paid stuff, direct mail, you can run ads through media outlets. But no matter what, you need to have a
presence offline, locally if you’re going to reach that kind of benchmark that I alluded to. And then finally, we need to be doing paid ads, if you like. You can get by without paid ads if you’re an early stage business or I’ve got a couple people that, that are wonderfully successful clients that have built businesses beyond the 20, $25,000 a month mark without utilizing paid ads. But they’re the outliers, they’re the exception. Paid ads being ads to lead magnets on Facebook ads to very low barrier offers periodically on Facebook.

The same things on Instagram or ads to offers on like through Google ads. Like that needs to be part of your marketing portfolio because if it’s not, then what we’re gonna find is, we don’t understand that we pay to acquire clients. Like sometimes we just think that clients should come to us. I
think that having paid ads is essentially like hiring somebody to go out and market on your behalf. And frankly, that’s technology as a whole. Like, if Facebook is willing to distribute an ad for you to more and more people, or Google is willing to distribute an ad to for you for more and more people,
like, that’s no different than paying somebody to go around the neighborhood and hang up door hangers or, or distribute flyers or whatever else, except it’s probably way more effective. So if you’re not utilizing paid traffic, paid advertising, it needs to be part of the plan.

It’s just not first do those other things and then layer that on so that the ad also is being reinforced by everything else that you’re doing. When somebody sees the ad, if they do want to go kind of explore and do some discovery about you there, there’s something to see that’s gonna represent you in a
positive way. So if you need more leads, there are the components, there are kind of the pillars, if you will that you need to have in place to consistently fill that pipeline so you have people to follow up with. You wanna build a great business, that’s where you start.

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

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