Fitness Business School – Identifying Your Target Market

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and over the next three episodes I want to work with you to develop your own marketing plan. We’re going to break this up into three segments and today’s episode. We’re going to talk about identifying your target market. 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.

So when you’re crafting your marketing plan, you really want to think this through beginning to end. And that’s not really the way that most business owners do this. Most business owners just kind of cobbled together tactics. They don’t have a real plan of attack. So I want to take this through sequentially and really help you understand what you need to be doing to be effective consistently over time and generate the results that you actually want to generate things that you want to do to move your business forward without nearly the, the, the desperation or the kind of just throw it against the wall approach that so many people take.

So the first thing that we need to do is to select a specific target market. And a lot of people are hesitant to do that, right? Especially in, in moving from local business to hybrid or local business, to online business, people want to go really wide thinking, well, Hey, I don’t want to miss out that whole fear of missing out mentality means that, you know, I’m, I’m not going to narrow to survey specific audience, but the problem is really that if you don’t narrow things down, nobody knows that you’re actually for them. Nobody knows that you are the best possible solution. You’re just an okay solution to a broad spectrum of people, which is not the way to win business in a really competitive market. So the first thing we need to do is identify who you help and what you help them do, right? So the people that come to you come to you to solve a problem, to, to achieve a goal they’re pursuing a desire and you help them accomplish that. You’re a mentor, a guide, a coach. You’re the person that helps them go from where they are to where they aspire to be.

So what we need to do is really figure out who that person is and what problem they want to solve. Now, it could be as simple as I help people in my local town lose, lose fat and improve their health and fitness. But the thing thing about it is the broader your market becomes geographically or, or the more population you have the opportunity to reach, whether you’re in a bigger city or you’re expanding to doing hybrid or online, you have to find other ways to narrow the way that you were selecting your target market. Because if you’re in a small town or you’re just marketing in a specific neighborhood, in many cases, we’ve already narrowed, but it’s been by geography, right? We all think about, okay, well, this is the gas station I typically go to, or the, you know, the grocery store we shop at. And those things are based on convenience more often than not. So we’ve narrowed that way, but if we want to kind of take that artificial parameter away, we need to replace it with something else.

So let me give you three different ways that you can narrow and still really hone in and position yourself as the best solution for the people you’re trying to serve. The first is by making the problem you solve more specific. So for example, you just may be somebody currently who helps people lose weight and gym, but can you help people that have been you know, they’re, first-time exercisers lose weight. So now that’s a different problem. So it’s not somebody that’s had a bunch of experience with, with exercise or they’ve yo-yo dieted, but this is kind of a, an entryway into adopting a healthy lifestyle, or, you know, maybe you’re working people who have a specific type of pain, a back pain or shoulder pain versus general pain relief, or you know, maybe the problem people are facing is that, you know, they, you know, they’re, they’re aging and maybe their metabolism, isn’t what it once was, or they’re approaching or going through menopause or something like that. But there’s a more specific problem that you can solve.

And so if you’re going to really dive into the online world, the more specific you can be, the better, the more you can kind of focus on a local world, you can be a little bit more broad. Okay. So what’s the next market narrower? Well, it’s by the person, right? You can work with people of a certain age people, certain gender people who may be are part of a certain profession or, or athletes that are involved in specific sports or people that have specific hobbies or passions. Like maybe they’re a runner or something like that. I know my wife’s business for many years just focused on specific a specific target market, a specific person that was, you know, it was a busy mom who was gonna work out at home. So very narrow in that regard. And the problem they were trying to solve was figuring out how to get the body they want and feel the way they want in the time they have with all these other things and responsibilities and senses of obligation kind of tugging at them. So we have problem. We have person.

And then the third way that we can narrow our market is our format. Are you delivering what you do in a different format? Are you serving people in a different way? I mean, people can all be trying to help clients lose weight and just improve general health and fitness in a local market. But think about all the different ways that somebody might serve a client base, they could do group large group training. They could do small group training. They could do semi-private one-on-one they could train in home. They could do a hybrid in work with people in person som and work with them virtually some they could do entirely online. They might use a different methodology. I mean, I know in my local market we have CycleBar and Club Pilates and like a neighborhood barre type business, the you know, the traditional big box health clubs. We got CrossFit. We’ve got all these people who are approaching, solving a problem in a little bit different way, right? They’ve got different technology, they’ve got a different format and each of those are going to appeal to different audiences. So when we’re crafting our marketing plan, we’re selecting our target market. Those are the ways that we want to think about this.

We want to think more narrow than more broad. The more specific you are, the more success you’ll have. So let me throw a you know, an addendum onto that too, maybe you have more than one target market will treat each of them as their own unique kind of business within a business. Because what you were saying to a busy mom is different than what you’re saying to a baseball player who wants to improve their performance. So don’t spend your time co-mingling those things be very specific to reach the person that you want to reach. So, okay, we have that first leg of the journey if you will, we have identifying who your target market is.

So the next step is figuring out where to reach that target market, how we’re going to connect with them and really how we’re going to get them to raise their hand. But we’re going to go ahead and save that for the next episode. So if you haven’t figured out your target market, take some time, really dial this in. Think about who you want to serve, who your passionate, excited about serving, who you have, a great deal of experience about serving and who you’re really good at helping. So if you want to think about it this way, if you could only get paid for the results that you were delivering to a specific target market, who would that, who would that group of people be and what results would they be trying to achieve? So with that, we’ll wrap up this first leg of this three part series on crafting your marketing plan. In the next episode, we’ll be back with how you can connect with them, how you can get them to show interest in what you do, and really start to move this from identifying Potential prospect to really transitioning them, to ultimately Become becoming a paying Client.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. And before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more leads or how can I get more clients?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive Fitness Lead Academy for six full weeks for just a dollar. Fitness Lead Academy is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and coaching to attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients. Imagine having three marketing emails written for you each and every week for easy-to-deploy promotions provided to you that are proven to convert and they’re ready to use and proven ads and social media posts given to you each and every month as well. Plus you have access to three weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your brand to navigating things like building funnels and getting ads approved. You get all of this and more when you join Fitness Lead Academy. And to prove that FLA can serve you as your virtual marketing department and not only save you plenty of time, but also consistently bring you more leads and clients, you can get access to the entire coaching program for six full weeks. Again, for just $1. If it delivers for you in the way that I expect it will, you can continue on for just $199 a month. So basically, just one additional client each month and you’re ROI positive. And I’m sure that if you apply what we give you, you’re going to get more than just one additional client each month. And you’re going to likely save at least 10 hours a month to take advantage of this special offer. Just go to TestDriveFLA.com to try it out for six full weeks. If it’s not what you’re looking for, you can cancel it any time.

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