You want more fitness clients. You want them to stay longer and pay longer. You’re constantly trying to keep up with monitoring session numbers per week, retention rate, conversion numbers that your blog, or podcast (dream?), or regular videos just fall off the radar. They seem unimportant because … well, they’re not burning.
You’re busy putting out fires. Yet, are you at the end of the day better off with your content marketing, social media monetization, email list conversion, and sales rate than you were six months ago? a year ago? Will you be better in 4 months when January hits and you could capitalize on that momentum?
When I peek inside a fitness pro’s social media site (that’s like opening up the oven in the middle of a cookies baking – it’s not the beginning, but you can tell whether they’re going to be good or not) I usually find a lack of connecting dots.
If I’m a marketing expert (social & community manager, customer acquisition specialist, content marketing specialist, email marketing specialist) and I can’t tell how the dots are connected, I guarantee you that a prospect or even an interested customer isn’t going to make it to the next step.
Here’s what I mean.
You want a juicy piece of content (be it a blog, a podcast, or a video) to be the feature of a post to social media. That juicy piece of content should live on your website. It should have value. Big value and a take away for the reader so they feel like boom! they hit gold and this solves a problem they have.
It should invite them to take the next step. Explicitly.
The next step has to make sense. Too often as trainers we think that a Free Consult is the gold standard. It is not even close. Unless someone was ready to walk in the door and pay for training anyway, it’s way too an intimidating first step. You’ve got to have something more..and less. More in terms of information and less in terms of requiring them to do all the work. They still are in an info gathering stage trying to decide if they even know like and trust you. Trying to decide if this will work for them. They need to be nurtured. At least 80% of individuals are still not exercising … because of a lot more reasons than too busy. If they knew what to do and knew how to do it they’d know 10 minutes or 20 minutes a day is enough.
So you need that “thing” we call a freebie to offer in exchange for an email. That’s the first way they “pay” you. It’s fairly safe because they can opt out, they’re savvy enough to know that at this point in time.
They’re opting into an email list.
A special email list. Not a dump site where you put every breathing thing that has a heart beat and wallet who might become a customer. Because if you dump… all you have is a mixture of boys 16 who want mirror muscles and to get off the bench, women with hot flashes, men with rotator cuff issues… and pre and post natal women… and you can not send an effective email to all of them at the same time. You’re boring someone to death who is irritated at what you just shared…while someone else might 1/6th of the time appreciate what you have to say. But they’ll never see it because if you fail to deliver good information you’re never getting email open rates that are better than industry standards. (Hate to tell you, but you don’t want “average” industry standards).
From that email list uniquely developed for a special need based on why they opted in you nurture them and bring them to the program that solves they’re biggest challenge.
So what has to happen?
You have a program (and end objective of reaching out that is not generic “personal training” but it’s packaged in a bow specific to a need)
You have an email service that allows you to automate this process
You have a “freebie” that is a small part of the program.
You have created the opt in from your email server and have that on a web page.
You share your content (blog, podcast, video) with the invite to the next step using the link.
You’ve created content to either bring awareness to the problem, bring awareness that there is an answer, bring awareness that you are the best answer, or all of the above in a series – and that is often called a launch. It happens in the 4-6 weeks prior to a program and has the highest opt in and sales rate than any cold spammy feeling email to “everyone.”
These tools aren’t hard to create. And once they’re created they’re evergreen. Once you are wooing customers you are winning. If you don’t have time to do this now, you may have a lot of time in the future. Because others will do this. And customers do demand it. They’ve been sold before, they do sell and market, and they want custom information.
If you want help taking these steps from concept to reality. LABOR DAY weekend I’m offering a 66% off Fast Flip Fit Pro coaching to walk you through
- content development
- social media sharing
- lead magnet creation
- Opt in to emails
- Email nurturing
- Program offer
If you can do this for one niche, you can do it for all of them. One-by-one.
CLICK HERE to get started. Available until Monday midnight
Four sessions (two each September and October) I’ll share how to step-by-step measure and improve your game)