Marketing, or at least targeted, effective marketing, is pretty much the foundation of your boot camp’s growth. But you don’t live on the foundation of your home, right? A foundation is simply the stable base on which to build something. The stuff that sustains you is the stuff you build onto a great foundation. Boot camp marketing is the foundation, but boot camp selling is the house itself. It’s the whole point of laying a foundation in the first place, but a lot of people never get to the actual building.
A lot of new fitness entrepreneurs spend a ton of time and energy on marketing and yet their revenue just creeps along, with the occasional dropout and the occasional new client cancelling each other out. They look around at the explosive growth of other boot camps and think that more and better boot camp marketing is the answer. Usually, it’s not. Usually, they need to spend 90% less time on marketing and 90% more time on selling what they market.
There are several reasons why many new business owners market like crazy and then hope that hordes of people will walk in the door and ask to sign a contract on the spot.
Some trainers actually think this is what’s supposed to happen; that great email marketing or press releases or Facebook posts will bring in all the new clients they need to be successful. But that’s just not the case. Many hope that this is the way it will work, because they either hate or are afraid of actually trying to sell these people anything.
First of all, a lot of the boot camp marketing personal trainers are doing is probably for great low-barrier offers that last for perhaps six or ten weeks. Those are great marketing tools, but if that’s all you’re doing, then you have to run these kinds of offers every month or so and you have a revolving door of temporary clients. The problem is that this just isn’t sustainable and it certainly isn’t going to get you the growth that means serious income, multiple locations and a great lifestyle. It will condemn you to working like crazy to replenish one group of deal-takers with the next and doing it for a very unsatisfying income.
Boot camp marketing is not a sales tool…..it’s a tool for finding people to sell to. Selling by means of marketing is like hunting with a shotgun without actually seeing anything. If you keep shooting up the woods, you’ll eventually hit a few things, just maybe not enough to make a meal. When you count on low-barrier offer deals for all of your income, you’re shooting scattershot everywhere and grateful for the few people that come in each month for your offer.