Fitness Business School – Timeless Marketing Lessons

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And I wanted to share some timeless marketing lessons in this episode. So 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 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.

Whenever my family and I go on trips, you know, during the summer, and I’m recording this during the
summer, it is, you know, we take vacations and, you know, I get to kind of shift away from the, in the
business stuff almost all together. And there’s a lot of observational time, a lot of time for me to, to, to
just jot down notes on concepts, on strategy. And a lot of times, you know, I’ll be kind of jotting down
lessons. I’ve learned along the way, whether they’re coming from other people, my own experiences.
And during our most recent trip, I jotted down some, some marketing lessons that I thought would be
really valuable to share with you. So the, the first is when it comes to marketing and selling the, the person that you are trying to speak to’s self-interest always went out, they’re going to choose the things that are best for them.

And I mean, this seems like common sense, but so much a business is a lot of times we spend our time
trying to sell what we wanna sell. We spend our time trying to get people to buy on the timeline that we
want, or, you know, we want them, we, we would think it’s best for our business if they train three days
a week, but maybe it three days a week, doesn’t fit into their life. Maybe two days a week does. So
when your marketing and selling, try to be hyper aware of who the person you are serving is and what
their self-interests are, what they actually want. If you do everything that you’re going to put out there
is going to be more successful and next up, think about where your people want to go. You know,
this whole concept of like a hero’s journey has become very popular in the marketing and selling world.
But if you kind of shine your light on where they want to go and you serve as the guide, you know, that’s
gonna be far more attractive. You know, if we think about where are people want to be and
continue to, to show them that not only is that attainable, but it’s likely if they allow us to guide them,
that’s gonna be a really attractive way to market. Then one of the things that I think the last two lessons
really reinforced for me is we need to select a single target market. We need to focus on somebody that
we really know very, very well. Now that does doesn’t mean you can’t kind of rinse and repeat and
figure out everything for one target market and then take that framework and transplant it to a new
target market and do the same thing. But one at a time, I think is the fastest path to success.
Because if you do you get to know where it is that they’re trying to go, you get to know what their self-interests are. You get to understand their desire because a lot of marketing, everybody focuses, or
maybe, maybe not everybody, a lot of people focus on demographics. They, they want to know, Hey,
this person is, you know, they’ve got a household income of X, they’re a man, they’re a woman. They,
are, you know, employed in these fields. They have this many kids, they do all the stuff.

And honestly, I think highlighting desires in the marketing efforts that, that we put
out there is it is a much sure way to find the person that we want, because I think I, I can look at the
neighborhoods I’ve lived in for the past 15 years and demographically. I think they would check all the
boxes for a lot of the people in, in, in our field.

But, you know, I don’t, I don’t know that on average, a lot of those neighbors were, were ever gonna be
great clients, right? They’re, you know, they’re probably not exactly what people want
because I don’t think that income is really predictive of desire. So I think that, you know, whereas if the
desire is strong enough, people will find the money. And, and, and we can, we can say that in almost
every area of life, if the desire is strong enough, people on average will more often find a way than
if somebody has the means on average, they will, you know, line up with the desire you want them
to have. The, maybe the biggest lesson I could share with you here is a healthy business needs a
predictable way to get new clients. And that may seem like the most simplistic thing on the planet.

But if you don’t have a couple systems that you can count on, that doesn’t mean that they’re gonna
work in a linear fashion. It doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get the same amount of clients every month.
But if you don’t have a couple things that, you know, you can go to, then you don’t have a healthy
business, you’ve got a business that that’s kind of bandaid together because I, I mean, I remember
people that were so dependent on like Groupon and the minute Groupon lost its luster. The
business is dried up now for me, I can give you an example, like my simple, healthy way that, you know, it’s predictable for me to get new business is use a lead magnet to get people on an email list and then follow up with the, the kind of combination of emails that I send, where the, you know, it’s a, a content relationship email with a PS alternated with some offer emails.

That is a very predictable way for me to get new business. Now, some weeks or months are gonna be
better than others. And sometimes that’s dependent on the seasonality of things, and sometimes it’s
dependent on the offer. But it’s predictable. It’s been something that’s worked for me for a decade
and a half, and I have a feeling it’s gonna continue to work. So a healthy business needs a predictable
way to get new clients. when the marketing stuff happens, if we want to create
this predictable way to get new clients, a simple way to, to approach this might be to create this journey
map, if you will, of where your clients come on, board and a predictable way that you can nurture
people and follow up with them and intersperse offers until they become clients. And if you create this
map, it it’s not gonna be precise or nearly as successful as it has the potential to be in the
beginning, because you’re gonna learn things and you’re gonna update the map along the way.

But if you create this, you know, a lot of times people will talk about a, a customer journey map. Well,
you know, we can create a prospect to client journey map, and I think you’d be amazed at how
much benefit and value that would have for you to understand that this, this is actually a process, a
journey for the person that you wanna serve. Then the next, next thing I’d tell you when it comes to
marketing, it is a lot of times people think of automation as technology. And I think that’s just kind of a
narrow, and maybe this is word play, right? But I, I think that the, the goal here isn’t necessarily to
automate things with technology or software all the time, the goal is to create a simple kind of
systematic process that you can hand off some of the other parts that don’t require you.
So, you know, my mentor and friend, Dean Jackson talks about a barista being a
kind of, an example of automation, right? They, they have a system that they can follow, but the fun
thing about that is they can customize based on the interest of the consumer. So if you create systems
and empower people, but you also help them see that kind of customer journey map. So they know
what the outcome that we’re looking for is you can really do some cool things.

And remember, I mean, you hiring a, like a software, like our automatic members is like hiring an employee, right? You’re paying for software to do things that, you know, it’s just replacing somebody manually doing them the same way that you would with the self checkout target or something. Right. Next thing up, the, and this is another lesson I learned from Dean Jackson.
I don’t even know if he intended it this way, but I know that my mentality is treat everybody. He calls
them five star prospects, treat everybody like a five star prospect until they give you a reason not
to. Now he has his criteria for what a five star prospect looks like. You can probably create yours, but for me, you know, I just have this vision of who my, ideal client is. And I don’t expect that the people that I’m talking to at the prospect stage are already ideal clients. I think of them as people who are potential ideal clients, and this dates back to my time as being a college baseball coach, right? A
senior in high school that I would’ve been recruiting. I didn’t think of somebody as, Hey, this person’s
gonna bat third in our lineup, or be our number one pitcher. I mean, they’re 17 and our best players are usually 21, but do they have the potential to become that person?

And if we treat everybody like a five star prospect until they give us a reason not to, then we’re
going to have that, you know, that highly affected, you know, that highly effective prospect journey map that we’re talking about. And, um, you know, and, and then the last thing I would tell you for lessons that I wanna cover in the, this episode is don’t think that you need to automate everything.

Don’t remove the soul of things, right? Like sometimes it, it’s better to, to make sure that you stand out
and don’t make everything feel like it’s just boiler plate, text, and not, um, not personalized to that
person, because understand that everybody that you are speaking with is the center of their own little
universe.

And we want to make them feel important and appreciated and valued. Because a lot of times the
prospects that you are talking to, that’s one of the things that’s missing for them. They don’t feel
important. They don’t feel valued. They don’t feel appreciated. So if you can do that, you already have a
leg up on the competition. So just a few lessons that I thought, you know, might be valuable to you.
There are things that I jot down very regularly notes, kind of like what I just shared, because I think it’s
important for me, not only to go through that stuff and apply it to my business, but I want to teach my
team. I want to teach my clients those same things, because everybody gets very caught up in tactical,
right? Like, Hey, what, you know, I need a lead magnet. I need a funnel. I need this follow up sequence. I to text people. But, you know, I think of those as like frameworks, what do we
put inside them? What do we, you know, if, if it’s boxes that we’re coloring in, what are we coloring
those boxes in with? And the stuff that I just shared today in this episode that’s really the
stuff that helps me shape the way that I’m gonna fill in my frameworks.

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