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.

So what is a Human Billboard? Well, pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a walking, talking advertisement for your Boot Camp and your training methods. This person should be a client, obviously, and they should be the perfect example of the best-case scenario.

Now, there is a bit of a science when it comes to finding those individuals who are perfect candidates to be set up as human billboards. First of all, you don’t necessarily want to pick the prettiest people or even the fittest or the most ripped clients that you train. No, what you need to look for are those clients who display the best transformative results. You need to take the people you have lost 30, 40, 50 pounds or more and broadcast their results.

You see, it isn’t about showing how you can make a fit person a bit more fit; and just because this is fitness advertising, it doesn’t mean all you need are some hot chicks in sports bras. What you want are real people with real, noticeable results. It’s all about the transformation.

Now that you understand the parameters, it’s time to choose who you think will make your best human billboards. Find those clients who have all the previous qualities I mentioned, and also keep an eye out for those charismatic, energetic clients that love your boot camp and your methods. You need people who love your boot camp enough to convince friends, family, and others in their circle of influence to come and try out your system. This is going to be about 20% of your overall client population.

How do I know this? Remember when I mentioned the 80/20 rule? Well, this fitness industry standard tells us that approximately 20% of your clients will bring in 80% of your referrals. So what does this tell us? That we need to grovel, pamper, and cater to absolutely every need, want and desire of that special 20%.

As you begin to identify who within your clientele has the potential to bring in lots of referrals, you will begin to develop a familiarity with this select 20% of your boot campers. And once you know who falls within this 20%, you’re ready to start hand picking your human billboards.

These are going to be your shining stars. The ultimate success stories, the biggest losers, your partners in spreading your message of a healthier lifestyle. But you need to put the right structures and support systems into place that allow these potential stars to shine as your biggest and most reliable referral generators.

And you do this with incentives.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you should offer referral incentives to each and every one of your clients. But there are special programs we design specifically for our high performers, our human billboards. Precisely what this incentive should be I’ll leave up to you. You know your clients, you know what gets them excited, and you know your budget. So taking all this into consideration, find out what offers you believe are affordable yet still enticing enough to get your top performers to perform at the top. Once you have your incentives ready, begin offering them to those elite few who you have identified as your best potential human billboards.

When you set this up just right, you will discover that these few loyalists will bring in an incredible amount of new prospects. And as they continue to enjoy your incentives, they will continue to work harder, display even more transformative success, and get excited to bring in even more prospective clients.

So, don’t forget to remember these three essential things:

1) Offer incentives to all of your clients.

2) Identify the 20% of your clientele that brings in 80% of your referrals and reward them greatly.

3) Search that 20% for the special few who will become your human billboards and set them up to be your shining stars.

These three referral generating strategies will ensure that you constantly have a steady stream of new clients walking through your doors each week.

This entry was posted on January 7, 2015 at 1:12 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Boot Camp Business, Boot Camp Marketing by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet