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.

You simply find all the local small businesses around you and your Boot Camp that might have an overlap in their market between your clients and their customers. This could be a healthy restaurant or grocery store, a sports equipment store, a vitamin or supplement shop, or anything else that relates to health and fitness even remotely. Once you have compiled a list of all the businesses you would like to form relationships with, you need to seek out the owners and managers of these businesses. Find out who they are and arrange a meeting with them in-person, on the phone, or through email.

After explaining who you are, what your Boot Camp is and what Fit Body is all about, you ask if they might be interested in a cross promotion. Tell them you would like to send a message to your email list promoting the qualities of their business and ask if they would do the same for you with their list. If they are a reasonably successful shop with some established history in your community they should have a pretty sizable list compiled from all their customers or clients. By offering access to your list you gain access to theirs.

Make sure you approach these owners and managers with an already completed email for them to send out so that all they truly need to do is press “Send” and enjoy all the new business that will come from your cross promotion.

This marketing strategy not only allows you to get involved with your local small business community but it also gets your name and brand out to thousands of prospective clients living, working, and shopping in your community.

#2) My second community marketing tactic is a great way to find clients while building relationships with local small businesses that aren’t directly related to the fitness industry: Lunch and Learns.

Lunch and Learns are a very simple process, can be done by anyone, but probably aren’t something you’ve ever realized could be effective. You might not think that giving lunch presentations around local offices would get clients through your door, but it does.

Here’s how it works:

Get into contact, either through the phone, online, or in-person, with owners and managers of local small business or offices with roughly 10-15 employees. Tell them who you are, what Fit Body is and what your Boot Camp is all about, and let them know that you would like to buy them all free lunch. When they agree to your offer of free food, set up a time and come bring them a nice, affordable, healthy meal that anyone can appreciate. While they eat your awesome meal, give a short presentation about your Boot Camp, explain all the many benefits and awesome features that it offers, and let them all know that you would like to offer a free one-week trial for all of them to come and check you out!

Trust me, once you bring people food, spend a few minutes explaining how awesome our brand is, and do all this with a very friendly and approachable tone, they will know, like and trust you before you even get anywhere near presenting an offer. And if that offer is free, they will love you for it.

Do this three or four times and for a small investment of money and time you will bring dozens of new prospects through your doors all while reaching out to and creating value within your community.

#3) Today’s last community involvement marketing strategy is the most effective but also the most complicated. The final method we’ll explore today is called Cross Marketing.

Once again, your community involvement specifically includes fostering relationships with local small business owners. This time, however, you are going to return to those health food and grocery stores that you previously reached out to with your Cross Promotion campaigns.

Here’s what you are going to do:

Get in touch with your contacts at grocery stores and let them know that you would like to produce an informative and helpful instructional workshop that teaches local community members healthy grocery shopping habits. Ask them if they would be willing to allow this workshop in their stores.

They should be willing to work with you if your cross promotion went well and they won’t have a problem when you ask them to email out to their list about the workshop. You should also send out to your list promoting the event and see if the store will allow you to post advertisements at their location endorsing the event.

You will also need to require a $10 reservation fee; this is essential for many reasons. First of all, you don’t want the workshop to seem unattractive because it’s overly accessible; you want to generate a sense of urgency by letting people know that there are a limited number of spots that must be reserved. And be sure you are very clear that the deposit is refundable.

But the $10 you get from each attendee will also be your most powerful tool for incentivizing the store to allow you to hold your workshop. On the day of your event, when your prospects show up for the workshop, you will be distributing back their $10 in the form of Gift Cards from the store where the event is being held. This way, everyone gets their money back and the store will have assured sales.

This type of event is a great way for you to build a positive image of yourself and your Boot Camp within the community. People will see you as knowledgeable when you offer them great instruction, helpful when you show them how to improve their lives, generous when you give back their money, and they will have an opportunity to experience your personality and feel as if they have gotten to know you. The know, like and trust factor you will be generating from this event is massive.

I think you can see now how marketing your Boot Camp is really just getting involved with and creating a presence within your community. If you can get word out about you and your Fit Body Boot Camp to local business and consumers, your marketing will explode. So equip yourself with these tools and start getting yourself as many new clients as you could ever need.

This entry was posted on December 3, 2014 at 1:57 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 Blog, Boot Camp Marketing, Fitness Marketing by Steve Hochman | No Comments Yet