Fitness Business School – Who is Your “Who”?

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to help you identify your ideal client and decide who is your, who 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.

One of the things I see business owners, not just in the fitness industry, but since we’re talking about fitness business you know, specifically in our industry, it, they struggle with determining who their ideal client is. And so over, over the years, I’ve kind of established this simple filtering process to help people gain clarity and identify who they should be marketing to, who they can, can really be known for serving. And there’s like this simple kind of step by step process that I thought would be kind of fun to walk through during this episode. So the first thing that we can do is start with the, the general client category because in our industry, there are basically like four different client interest or broad categories. There’s the first one, which is, you know, fat loss, body composition, improvement, weight loss. The, the thing that I think gets marketed the most, the second category would be sports performance. And, you know, obviously there are all sorts of different kind of derivatives under that umbrella, but the, the broader category would be sports performance.

The third category would be general health and wellness. And I think you know, peak performance falls into that category. When we’re thinking about general health, general wellness it’s not necessarily a number on a scale it’s I want to feel better. I want to improve longevity. And then finally the fourth category is more like pain relief or corrective type of work. Which I think is a really cool category that maybe gets underserved in the fitness industry, because I think we, we feel like that’s more of a medical industry thing, but that’s, that’s it like almost every local fitness business falls into one of those general themes, if you will. Now the, the next step in narrowing. And a lot of people don’t think about it this way, but we can narrow through our solution format. And when, when I say that, it’s basically, how are you gonna solve the problems for those clients that you help? And I, if we think about this, I I’ll talk about it more in a minute, but if we think about this, this is a real narrowing factor that helps you identify the right client as well. So, you know, there’s, there’s one on one training that’s delivered in, in a facility or maybe it’s you know, delivered in home. Those are two different two different ways to solve that problem.

The person who wants in-home training doesn’t necessarily want to go to a facility there’s semi-private training, there’s small group training, there’s large group training, all of those being facility based, right. There there’s hybrid training, a blend of facility based, or in-home combined with online. Like I mentioned, there’s, in-home, one-on-one training, there’s online, one-on-one training, and then there’s online group based solutions. So pretty much every training solution falls into one of those buckets. So if we think about how we start to, to identify the, the person we wanna serve well, if you think about fat loss is the broader category, and then you say, Hey, we are going to deliver our solution in a small group setting. Well, that already is pretty narrow. If we’re thinking about who we wanna serve, because maybe that person isn’t attracted to the bigger groups that go to places like orange theory, or maybe a 45 or something like that, maybe they really want a more intimate feel, a more private setting, maybe, you know, the person who wants one on one in-home, they’re the person who doesn’t wanna go to a gym at all.

So you don’t need to be a whole lot narrower in that sense now again, if you’re doing online, you may not need to narrow any further because the other thing that a lot of people don’t realize is we’re already narrowed in our reach. If we’re, if we have an online or an offline business, because geography, right, we’re serving a specific geographic population, we’re serving an audience that it has to be convenient enough for them to come and work with you in a, you know, in, in a consistent fashion, you know, 1, 2, 3 times a week, or maybe more so we’ve already narrowed. So if you think about the number of people that are, you know, within 10 or 15 minute drive time of you, or maybe even less than that maybe, maybe it’s a seven minute drive time. That used to be the, the barometer we used with our local training businesses. We did all of our local marketing. Obviously it didn’t, it, it wasn’t necessarily the case with like radio spots or something.

But if we were doing direct mail door hangers, if we wanted to put up a billboard, if we were trying to form strategic alliances, it was usually within that seven minute drive time. So, you know, that alone may be enough to, to narrow things down and you may not have to specialize any further than that. However, if you’re in a really competitive market or a meaningful part of your business is online, then we can focus in an even more specialized way. You might wanna say, instead of general health and wellness, you may serve the 50 and over market instead of sports performance, you may work specifically with one or two sports. You may go, women’s only, men’s only something like that. You may focus in on you know, post rehab type training people with specific like back and knee pain. You may work with first time exercisers. There are any number of ways to narrow further. And if you’re online, the beauty of this is the population is so vast that you can be hyper focused and just work with people who experience back in hip pain. And you’ve got literally millions of people across the globe who are struggling with that.

That can be that starting pool that you, you begin advertising to. You begin putting content in front of you can go so narrow. I, if we’re going online, if you just wanted to work with softball players, you could do that. Heck you could probably work with just softball pitchers if you wanted to narrow even more specifically. So that’s, that’s the beauty of that online market is you can be hyper focused and you can speak directly to that person. You wanna speak to as to the desire they have the problem they’re trying to solve the goal they’re trying to reach, but in a local market, we may not have to be quite as narrow simply because we have those kind of invisible geographic boundaries that, that people are, are, are kind of adhering to when they’re making their local consumer decisions. So hopefully that helps a little bit when you’re deciding who your, who is start with those you know, kind of four big Client categories narrow by your solution format, and then decide if you need to specialize even further. If you do that, you’re gonna have a really good handle on who you should be marketing to, where you should be spending your advertising dollars, the businesses you should be forming a strategic alliances with, and frankly, what your messaging should be.

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