Read the following two marketing messages and tell me which one feels more powerful to you:
Option A:
Fit Body Boot Camp offers personal training at the lowest possible prices. We provide the most powerful weight loss workouts available and we have the best nutritional consultations money can buy.
Our Unstoppable Fitness Formula guarantees results. No one else can make that claim.
Option B:
Have you ever gotten real weight loss results from a gym?
Well, Fit Body Boot Camp isn’t a gym. But it is where you’re going to get the kind of fitness results you see on those cheesy TV commercials. (Yes, your abs can actually look like that.)
If you don’t know, Fit Body Boot Camp is personal training that won’t bankrupt you, workouts that will get you the body you want, and nutritional meal plans you’ll love to eat.
Which of these do you think would bring you more clients? Or better yet, if you were a prospect, which one would compel you the most?
I know which one would work better. See, I wrote one of these options while purposely committing the same fatal mistake nearly all fitness marketers commit when marketing. Did you spot it?
Well, let’s look at what’s different between the two:
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There’s something about a challenge that just gets people fired up. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for a lot of people, a challenge can be irresistible. They want to know if they can beat it, they want others to know they can beat it, and at the very least, they want to try.
That’s why we run our challenges, because of the visceral reaction they elicit.
But there are right ways and wrong ways to put out these special offers. And if you get it wrong, it can be devastating for your boot camp.
Think about it, to keep your Boot Camp growing and keep your client base increasing, you have to keep filling your sales funnel, right? We’ve talked a lot about these in the past, they are what we call the series of steps our prospects move through as they go from being interested individuals to paying clients.
And we’ve explored many passive ways to keep that sales funnel full, because that’s how you operate an effective business. It’s not sustainable to be working like crazy to keep filling your funnel from nothing all the time. We teach you to put systems into place (like human billboards or email marketing) that keep filling the funnel overtime, all the time.
But occasionally, your funnel starts to run dry or you lose a lot of clients all at once, and you need to dumb a huge number of prospects into that funnel to keep things moving upward. And that’s where the challenge comes in.
But that’s also what makes the challenge so crucial. You rely on the power of the challenge to boost your client numbers when things start to slow down. If something goes wrong, your boot camp is going to be in trouble.
To make sure that never happens, I’ve put together the following dos and don’ts for Fit Body Boot Camp Challenges.
1) Make a Big Fat Claim.
If you want people to have a big reaction to your offer, it needs to stir things up a bit. If you want attention and you want reaction, you’ve got to stick your neck out there. While I strongly advise against promising anything you can’t deliver, I do encourage you to make a big fat claim about your program and the results you can bring people. If you want to get someone fired up, tell them exactly how you can change their lives or their bodies.
Make an impressive promise.
The catch, though, is that you sure as hell had better deliver on that promise.
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Making the sale is, for many owners and trainers, the hardest part of operating a boot camp. They don’t have a problem with the training, they can handle the numerous challenges that come with operating a successful fitness boot camp business, but they are deathly afraid of making the sale and closing the client.
And this fear bleeds into their marketing efforts. They can’t write powerful, engaging copy because they aren’t 
comfortable making a sale. And whatever marketing campaigns they create don’t seem to have the ‘umph’ required to make people take action.
So when I coach these owners and try to show them how they can get the confidence and the tools they need to become effective salespeople, I usually find their consistent failure stems from the same recurring problem: they are selling the wrong thing.
Think for a minute about what exactly you are buying when you purchase a membership to a big box gym.
You’re getting access to a massive, state of the art facility packed full of the most powerful fitness and weight loss tools available. Dozens of machines of all different types and purposes, everything from treadmills to stairclimbers, ellipticals and bikes— whatever you can think of, it’s there. Hundreds of free weights, bench presses, and anything else you need to get ripped. There’s even racquetball courts, yoga studios, Olympic sized swimming pools, saunas, hot tubs, showers, lockers, bathrooms. It’s all there.
And what does your boot camp offer? Well, virtually none of these things. It’s a fraction of the size and has little more than squishy mats and giant ropes hanging off the walls.
So how do you make a sales pitch that can compete with everything the big gyms have to offer? Hopefully it’s obvious by now that you shouldn’t be selling any physical thing that your boot camp offers. Clients can access whatever you’ve got and ten times more at their local gym, so that strategy isn't going to work for you.
So what should you sell, then? How can you compete with these seemingly overwhelming odds?
Actually, it’s easy.
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When we start a Fit Body Boot Camp we hold Grand Opening events, create huge low-barrier offers, and promote the heck out of the new location in order to fill the roster and make sure we get enough prospects in order to sign up a sustainable number of new clients.
But these types of campaigns are really only designed for the first months or maybe the first year of a Boot Camp’s life. Expending this much energy and resources shouldn’t be an ongoing strategy. We shouldn’t have to work tirelessly for months and months on end to constantly overflow our sales funnel with thousands of new prospects every week.
Instead, we should only need to flood the funnel in the beginning, establish a reliable clientele base, and then merely top the funnel off with the rest of our marketing efforts.
So how do we get to this point?
Well, we can do this with occasional promotions. 14-Day Fat Furnaces, 28-Day Flat Belly Challenges, these are great low-barrier offers that we can return to whenever we need a small boost in client numbers or maybe when we expand and grow into larger or multiple facilities.
But what about a weekly, daily strategy that guarantees a constant stream of prospects and clients throughout the year?
Hopefully you’ve all anticipated me by now and you are thinking “referrals” to yourselves because you already know that referrals are the only way to create this kind of constant trickle.
So how do we bring in these highly sought-after yet hard to generate referrals?
The secret to ensuring you always have this kind of reliable referral flow is what we here at Fit Body Boot Camp call the Human Billboard Method.
And it all works because of the 80/20 rule.
If you’re confused, don’t worry, just keep reading and it will all make sense in a minute.
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Whether you’ve just opening and are still establishing your client base, or you are a seasoned pro looking to expand your business, here are 24 unique and powerful methods to get clients through your door.
These are some of my best ideas, developed over years of trail and error, so don’t miss this opportunity to maximize your money making potential.
Without wasting any of your time, here’s what you came for— 24 Incredible Client-Getting Strategies:
1. Be a passionate, enthusiastic, and likable trainer. Keep your energy as high as you can manage. Back in my personal trainer management days I did a survey with the clients of over 50 trainers. I asked these clients what they looked for in a personal trainer more than anything else and the most common answers were: passion, enthusiasm, likability, and energy.
2. Make it known that client referrals are always an uncompromised condition of doing business with you. Regularly ask for them, reward your clients when they make them, and express a lot of praise in front of the other clients when someone brings one.
3. To constantly bring new prospects through your funnel, always run new promotions that offer lower cost and shorter time commitment than usual. Use my 21-Day Rapid Fat Loss Program, or 14-day abs and buns program, or try a 7-day flat tummy program, then convert these clients into regular ongoing clients. The key here is to make sure each program is under 30 days and costs less that $100 dollars— that’s the suite spot.
4. Dial for dollars about once every month (email is another great way to do the same thing). Hit the phones (or the keyboard) and start getting in touch with all your previous clients. Reactivate former accounts by making special low-barrier offers and attractive incentives.
5. Do weekly grocery store tours, educate the public about yourself and the effectiveness of your Boot Camp System, and then present low-barrier offers with every outreach program you create.
6. Schedule at least one “lunch and learn” with a local business that employs ten or more individuals. Present 20 minutes of content, hold a 10 minute Q&A session, then make an irresistible offer. Business to Business outreach not only brings you clients in the short-term, but establishes a steady referral stream by broadcasting a positive reputation for you and your Boot Camp.
7. Present all new clients with a certificate that allows them to bring a friend along with them during their first week of Boot Camp sessions. New members are excited, pumped, and want to tell all their friends about how great their new healthy choices are: these are the easiest referrals and conversions you’ll get.
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I want you to think for a minute about what marketing truly is for you at its simplest and most fundamental level. You probably own one or more Fit Body Boot Camp location and all of your prospective clients live in or near your neighborhood. They all live, work, shop and play within a reasonable distance of your home and your Boot Camp.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Every individual with the potential to become your next successful, long-term client is a member of your very own local community.
So what should that mean to you and how does that help us understand the fundamentals of your small business marketing? Well, I hope it’s obvious by now, but what I’m trying to get across here is that marketing, in its simplest sense, is nothing more than reaching out to and getting involved with your community.
Now lets complicate things a bit. While in principle all you need to do is get involved, in practice, there are very particular ways you should go about doing this. It isn’t just about reaching out to anyone anywhere, it’s about finding the people and the places within your community that will respond to the right marketing techniques.
So let’s explore some great strategies that will equip you with awesome ways to get involved with your community and market your Boot Camp.
#1) An effective and relatively simple way to get some attention on your Boot Camp Business, to build relationships with other local business, and get involved with your business and consumer community, is called Cross Promotion.
The process is easy.
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When new fitness boot camp owners or people who are considering starting a boot camp ask me for advice, one of the things I tell them is that they need to learn as much as they can about how to start a boot camp successfully, but in order to be successful they also have to know where they want that business to go.
“I want to be successful” is not a plan. It’s not even a goal, because it has no measurable criteria. If you go into business with only the vaguest idea of a plan, you will waste a great deal of time, energy and resources working things out as you go. You may even fail and fail quickly.
There has never been a better time to start a fitness boot camp business, but you don’t just need to know how to start a boot camp, you need to have a step-by-step plan in place to reach very definite goals. Every day needs to be spent following at least one of those steps, or you risk losing very important momentum.
I want to share with you some ideas and points that to consider in order to create a path to success with your new boot camp business.
How much do you plan to earn in your first year?
Some people might say, “I have no idea how much I’ll earn” but they’re looking at it the wrong way. Revenue isn’t something you wait to see. Revenue is something you plan to see. The steps you take to build your business should be based on what you set as your first year’s revenue goals.
It doesn’t matter what dollar figure you set; you can reverse engineer a plan to make that amount. Many new boot camp earners make $100,000 their first year and it’s because they broke it down into monthly, weekly and daily sales goals. How much do you have to bring in to make $100k a year? A little over $1,900 per week. That’s just $385 a day if you’re counting five days per week. Knowing that makes it a lot easier to set daily and weekly steps that get you there. (more…)
Usually when we think about boosting our boot camp revenues, we’re talking about bringing in new clients, either by increasing the number of sessions we do, opening another location or just putting a big marketing campaign into play.
But there is a really cool new way to increase your income by thousands of dollars per year in the next six days, without doing one more thing as far as boot camp marketing. One of the coolest things about it is that you don’t even need one new client.
There is a fantastic new program available to us that was created by the brilliant Jeff Sherman. It’s called the Fitness Game Changer and it’s something that you can offer your existing clients right now to really boost your revenue. In fact, the holidays are the perfect time to roll it out.
Jeff has made an additional $48,000 so far by offering the program to his existing clients.
The Fitness Game Changer is an 8-week program that will help your clients blast through plateaus, reboot their motivation or get ready for a special event by turbo-charging their results. It’s a fantastic nutrition and accountability program that is getting great results for clients all over the country.
While they’re getting great results, you’re making money and getting a ton of testimonials, social proof and word of mouth.
The beauty of it is that you don’t need to do anything other than show it to your existing clients, sign them up and then copy/paste/send the program components to the participants. (more…)
When I talk to people about marketing a personal training business, I get a lot of nuts-and-bolts questions about where to market, how many posts to put on Facebook, how to get more followers and so on. Those nuts and bolts questions are important, but the principles of effective marketing come first and you have to have them firmly in your mind before you do any of the nuts and bolts.
Here are what I consider to be the four most important things to keep in mind in order to create your marketing plan and then maximize its potential.
You are selling outcomes, not products
At least nine out of ten personal trainers in your area are competing on price and features (like the latest fitness fads or on-site child care) and their marketing reflects that. YOU need to be in the business of selling outcomes and your marketing should reflect that.
When you focus your marketing on what you can help your clients achieve (and what you are helping your current clients achieve), you take yourself out of all of that competition and set yourself apart. People like on-site child care and they like knowing that the latest fitness fad is available and they’re willing to pay rock-bottom prices for it when rock-bottom prices are offered.
But you’re offering results and people are willing to pay much more for those. So focus on what you and only you can deliver to your clients and then use plenty of social proof in your marketing. (more…)
