Typically, we make resolutions at the New Year and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the time for making boot camp marketing resolutions for 2015 is now, so that you can begin planning for new things, wrap up any unfinished business and make sure that you have the resources and knowledge you need well in place before the new year begins.
Now, you may not be in the practice of making New Year’s resolutions for your business marketing. It’s really not that different than creating a new marketing plan each year, which is something you should be doing. But let me help you by giving some direction, to help get you started on the process of evaluating what you’re doing now and what you should be doing next year.
Evaluating What You’re Doing Now
The first thing you need to do is take a good look at all of the components of your current boot camp marketing plan. Are you building an email list? Are you sending out high-value content and low barrier offers to your email list on a regular basis? Are you advertising and if so where? Are you building and using your Facebook page, Google+, YouTube following?
Take note of every single thing you’re doing to market your business and then evaluate your return on investment of every single one. Don’t forget that you’re investing your time in marketing as well, so even the free marketing strategies have some cost in time.
Once you’ve gone through this process, you should know every single thing you’re doing to market your boot camp, how each one is performing and which marketing strategies or venues are being neglected. Now you can begin making some intelligent and informed boot camp marketing resolutions for 2015. (more…)
Bedros has spoken several times about the extremely effective fitness boot camp marketing that can be done on Facebook. But it’s possible to create a great following on Facebook and get lots of great comments and interaction without actually making any money from it.
At the last Fitness Business Summit, Josh Carter, perhaps THE Facebook marketing expert in our business, spoke in depth about maximizing the potential of Facebook for getting new clients. Bedros just uploaded the entire one-hour video and I strongly recommend that you go watch it here. His nuts and bolts advice is invaluable.
But in the meantime, I want to share with you his simple and effective plan for using Facebook as a fitness boot camp marketing funnel. It’s a deceptively easy, five-step plan that turns Facebook onlookers into qualified leads for your business.
That’s really the main crux of Josh’s talk; that all the Facebook fans in the world won’t make you money unless you are creating a funnel through which they become actual leads. Even though we talk a lot about the value of organic promotion (posts that your friends and clients share with their friends), organic promotion doesn’t actually get you the multitude of prospects that Josh’s plan is going for.
The fact is that only about 10-15% of your Facebook fans see your status update or motivational post. So even if you have 5,000 followers, only 500 or so are being reached. Why? Because Facebook wants you to pay for wider-reaching or more targeted ads.
At first, you might think this sucks. But targeted ads are well worth the money. In fact, Josh likens Facebook to a money machine when targeted ads are used. As he says, “You put ten dollars in and get eleven dollars out. If you had a machine that did that, how often would you put a ten-dollar bill in the machine? As often as possible.” It’s called investing in your fitness boot camp marketing and it’s a smart investment. (more…)
When you’re starting a boot camp, you have a number of tasks in a number of different areas, including your physical facility, marketing, staffing and your daily operations. Sometimes it can really help your mindset and your progress if you can identify a handful of top priorities for right now, to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed or bogged down with details that can wait.
Here are five things you need to accomplish in your first month if you’re starting a boot camp.
Focus your marketing efforts on the three most important client funnels.
80% of your new clients are going to come from three channels: Facebook, your email list and client referrals. It’s especially important in the beginning that you focus your efforts on these. One of the best things about this list is that they’re all free, which can be important when you’re operating on a start-up budget.
So how do you maximize the potential of these channels?
Start posting relevant content regularly to your Facebook page. At least one post per day. The most important posts are usable content that your followers will share and that help set you up as an expert, progress pictures that your clients’ friends will comment on, and any low-barrier offers that you have going on.
On your Facebook page, invite followers and visitors to sign up for your email list. Entice them with an opt-in page that rewards them with a free fat loss report, workout video or other valuable download. When new clients or customers using a low-barrier offer come in to your boot camp, always get their email addresses and add them to your list. Ask people to sign up for freebies and valuable content whenever you post a YouTube video, share a blog post or hand out your cards or flyers. (more…)
This year’s Fit Body Boot Camp World Conference was no surprise; it was dynamic, packed with practical information, exciting, motivating and inspiring.
If you weren’t able to make it to the Fit Body Boot Camp World Conference, I want to share with you some of the things that you would have taken away from the conference and used to go back to your fitness boot camps pumped, informed and focused. If you’re just starting a boot camp, these points should be printed out and taped somewhere that you can see them regularly.
Find a mentor or coach or more successful friend and then ask and learn.
Don’t try to figure everything out on your own, especially if you’re just starting a boot camp. Successful people, especially Fit Body Boot Camp top earners, are happy to share what they know with people who are willing to listen.
Whether you need to learn how to become a fitness marketing powerhouse or how to find, hire and train your staff, ask questions and then listen to what people who have already mastered these things have to teach you. You’ll save years of trouble and financial struggle just by taking advantage of other people’s experience.
Do at least one thing every day to move yourself closer to your goals.
Every day that you stand still is a day wasted. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll work on making the most of the three best sales funnels at some point. Work on one of them today. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll come up with a fitness info product once you’re making more money. Start brainstorming ideas this week. Don’t decide that you’ll give those windshield flyers another week to pay off, try another strategy right now. Have a list of goals and then list out some steps to reach those goals, then do at least one of those things every single day. (more…)
$5,000 in extra revenue in one week. All the result of doing nothing more than sending out three short emails to your boot camp marketing email list. Does that sound pretty decent?
What if that $5,000 in turn led to an extra $83,000 this year?
Josh Carter did it and he’s put the entire promo together in a package for others to use, including the three emails for you to cut and paste. Let me tell you what he did.
Josh wrote up these three emails and sent them all out to his email list over the course of a week. The offer he made to the list was for his 28 Day Fit for Fall Challenge, which sold for $98 (two payments of $49). In that one week, he’d gotten 55 people to sign up, netting him $5,390. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Based on Josh’s conversion rates, he’ll turn those 55 people into 35-40 new clients paying $197 each month with monthly recurring billing (EFT). At minimum, that’s an additional $82,740 revenue. From three simple emails that you can get here.
Like I said, Josh put a promo package together to make it easy for you to duplicate his results, whether you’ve been in business two months or two years.
Here's what you'll get with it.... (more…)
There are all kinds of incredibly effective fitness marketing tools at your disposal. You could go spend one hour on RenegadeFitnessMarketing.com and learn enough to triple your business this month. You could check out some of the done-for-you marketing products available on this site and have in your hands everything you need to take your fitness business to the next level.
But if you don’t have the #1 most important fitness marketing tool – the right mindset – none of that will do you much good.
What I’m talking about here is getting rid of self-doubt. Specifically, two kinds of self-doubt. Doubt in your value and doubt in your abilities. Either one of them can cripple your business by keeping you from using the tools and strategies other people have used to become very successful.
Doubting Your Value
Maybe your mindset issue is doubting your own value. Not as a person, but as a trainer, leader and teacher. You don’t go out there and market yourself and your business because you don’t think you have anything valuable to share. You don’t talk to people about what you do or send out informative emails to your subscribers because you doubt the value of what you have to say.
Here’s what I have to say: the next time you walk into your fitness business, take a look at the clients there. Look at the client who’s laughing and smiling because she lost another inch or finally managed to climb a rope. Take a look at the guy who was fatigued and eating nothing but junk when he walked in three months ago.
What do you think your value is to them? What is the value of what you’ve helped them achieve? What will that value be five, ten or twenty years from now, when they’re living active, healthy lifestyles? (more…)
Your fitness boot camp marketing efforts should always be targeted toward one market group or toward promoting one aspect of your business. The shotgun approach to marketing (selling everything to everyone and everywhere) is extremely inefficient and costs more money while getting fewer results.
There are different factors that determine how and when you should change the focus of your boot camp marketing campaigns, and the changing seasons are one of the biggest. A lot of fitness businesses see a drop-off in incoming prospects and even in retention once the kids are back in school, but that doesn’t mean that fall should be considered a slow time for business. It’s just time to target your fitness boot camp marketing to a couple of specific groups and to shine a light on how your boot camp meets their needs.
Parents are a great group to target once the kids are back in school. There are a few reasons for this:
#1 – While the school years is really busy for parents, many stay at home and work at home parents have more flexible schedules during school hours.
#2 – Lots of parents overeat and let their exercise routines fall by the wayside during summer. Fall is a great time to show them how you can help them make up for it.
#3 – The holidays are approaching and that puts pressure on a lot of people to lose weight before the holiday eating season begins or to look good at parties and family gatherings. If they start now, they can make a lot of progress and often reach their goals by the time Thanksgiving arrives.
So what are some things you need to focus on when you’re marketing and selling your boot camp to parents? (more…)
We talk a lot at Fit Body Boot Camp about the incredible value of having an email list and working it for maximum results. But we don’t talk as much as we probably should about how to start a fitness boot camp email list from the ground up. After all, most personal trainers aren’t all that experienced in marketing and as new boot camp owners, they need some guidance in getting those names before they can start building their business.
Luckily, building an email list isn’t as hard as you may think and no, you shouldn’t fall for some fly-by-night company offering to sell you a list. Those lists will be full of people who have been spammed to death, people who aren’t even a little bit interested in getting fit and people who changed their email addresses six years ago. It’s not that hard to get your own list going and I’m going to give you some very simple steps that will show you how to start a fitness boot camp email list and what to do with it to start making money and growing your boot camp business.
Step 1: Create and offer a free report, nutrition plan, mini-workout or other gift and advertise it on your website, your Facebook page, on Twitter and Google+ and everywhere else that you’re visible. Make it something relevant, something that provides real value, but keep it short and simple. Then let people know that you just need their email address and you’ll get it right to them. Now you have a list of people who are obviously interested in getting fit and healthy, so that means they’re more likely to be interested in your fitness boot camp, as well.
Step 2: Send them your free gift, but also deliver other great content to them on a weekly basis. This could be pre/post workout recipes, best ab exercises, an article on boosting metabolism or whatever you like. I would also strongly suggest you sign up for FitPro Newlsetter, which looks like a great fitness magazine, already contains great new content every month and you can also add your own content to it. It’s a great plug and play solution for high-value content. (more…)
In these days of reality TV shows, Videos and YouTube, everybody on the planet wants a share of the spotlight. For most people, it’s all about validation and attention. But that’s not the only reason to upload yourself. For the fitness professional, becoming known as a subject matter expert via social media can be boot camp marketing gold.
Think about some of the nationally or internationally-known fitness professionals out there. They all became known as experts in their niches and that is when they started making real money. Jason Feruggia is the strength and conditioning expert and his info products and programs sell. His articles are in Men’s Fitness and other respected publications. Mike Chang established himself as an abs expert on YouTube and now his Six Pack Abs programs have made him a wealthy man. Bedros’s huge reputation on YouTube as a boot camp marketing expert is what led Spike TV to call him up and ask him to act as an expert on their Gym Rescue series.
It used to be that getting on TV was the way to establish yourself as an expert. Look at Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz and every single person on HGTV. But now, people are establishing themselves as authorities on social media and then ending up on TV. But even if you don’t want to be a celebrity, you do want to take advantage of the huge boost it can give you in your boot camp marketing efforts.
We’ve always talked about the huge potential of marketing on Facebook, but this is one giant level above that.
Here’s what happens. (more…)
