Wodify is a leading all-in-one fitness management software, trusted by 5,000 of the world’s top businesses. Wodify and the NCFIT Collective have partnered to help gym owners save time and effort by delivering curated, customizable fitness programming right to their Wodify account. Over the next 4 weeks, NCFIT will be launching their #BuildBetter series and we will be launching 4 blogs that explain each part of this series.
Driving leads and converting sales—that’s the sexy stuff every single marketing guru wants to talk to you about.
“Hundreds of leads through your door. Guaranteed.”
That’s what they lead with in the 30-second sponsored ads we’ve all seen. All it takes is the right ad copy and strategy to get your business right to where you want it to be, right? We know growing a successful gym business isn’t that simple.
Are paid ads a valuable marketing lever you can pull to drive sales and increase revenue? Sure. But there’s a lot more any gym owner should consider before allocating resources towards paid advertising (or marketing gurus).
A good place to start before we even talk about sales and marketing is to revisit our Week 1 Blog and our Week 2 Blog from the #BuildBetter series. Without a quality product on the gym floor and proper Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place, sales and marketing won’t matter much.
Marketing isn’t something that happens only when you run an ad or a promotion. Marketing for your business is happening all the time.
Every time you or one of your coaches runs a class, they are marketing. Every time you’re out in your community wearing a shirt from your gym, you are marketing. Every single post that goes up on your business’ social media channels is marketing.
Everything you do as a gym owner can be seen as an activity that either persuades or dissuades other people to buy into the service you’re offering. That’s precisely what marketing is.
This mindset shift is an important one to make as a gym owner that most likely also wears the hat of Chief Marketing Officer for your organization.
This is why the Product On The Floor is so important. Every time you run a class, you’re marketing to your members and either giving them an experience that wows them to the point where they want to refer you to their friends and loved ones, or you’re delivering an OK experience that’s good for retention but not much more.
Referrals are a huge opportunity for gym owners. For most of us in the microgym space, we don’t need thousands of members to have a successful business—we only need a few hundred.
Thus, referrals can be an incredibly valuable sales and marketing lever to pull to get you significantly closer to your revenue goal. All it takes is a consistent quality product on the floor and a well-crafted referral campaign to make that happen.
Do you have a cancellation log in place that tracks the reasons for cancellation and segments out cancelled members based on their likelihood of rejoining?
How many people do you currently have sitting in your 2021 cancellation log? Out of those previous members, how many are labeled as “Likely To Come Back”?
Now, when was the last time you reached out to your cancelled members, prioritizing those most likely to come back? This is absolutely something you should do before you think about running ads for your business.
Cancellations are people that are already familiar with your service and, if they cancelled for any reason other than moving out of state or clearly stating that they would never like to hear from you again, these are warm leads ripe for the picking.
“I am going to try working out at home for a while.”
“Things are a little busy right now with my kid’s schedule.”
“I bought a Peloton and am going to give that a try for a while.”
All of these reasons should be logged in a cancellation log and, periodically, you should reach out to these cancellations with different angles and touch-points to keep your business top of mind.
Let’s say that your Product On The Floor is dialed in and you have SOPs in place so that your business is operating like a well-oiled machine. You contact your cancellation log every month and feel good about that process. Everything is fine-tuned and you’re ready to scale.
Enter paid ads.
Paid ads can be an incredible tool to help you drive leads through your doors that come from outside of your organic reach.
By implementing a strategic set of ads that drive brand awareness and then retargeting those that express interest in your brand with the right messaging, you could get people to come into your gym that otherwise wouldn’t.
This could be the missing piece of the puzzle to help level up your business and hit the revenue goals you need in order to hit your financial goals.
Want more digital marketing ideas and content? Wodify provides free marketing campaigns, so you can get inspired with ideas and promotions to easily implement and run at your business.
Whether your sales and marketing efforts after this email series focus on paid ads, referral campaigns, or just being pleasantly persistent with the past members in your cancellation log, there is one last—but very important—thing to keep in mind:
The fortune is in the follow-up.
Sending one email to a lead and not getting a response doesn’t mean that campaign did not work. It takes an average of seven touch-points for a lead to convert. Sending one email that goes unanswered is not a valid reason to mark a lead as unqualified.
Only by being pleasantly persistent, having systems in place that keep follow-ups organized, and sending on a regular cadence will your sales and marketing strategies actually begin to pay off in a big way.
This may not have been the sales and marketing advice you were expecting, but it is the sales and marketing advice that works.
If you would like to get more business tips and learn how the Wodify platform can help your business growth, you can book a call here. Hope to talk to you soon!
