Are You Making These 10 Common
Fitness Marketing Mistakes?
By Eric Ruth
Business today is more competitive than ever before. To survive and thrive, you can’t just offer a great service and/or product at a fair price. You simply have to know how to market effectively.
Most fitness professionals I talk to have no idea how to get the most out of every marketing dollar they spend (and not just fit-pros, basically every small businessperson has lots of trouble with this).
So today I want to share the 10 most common marketing mistakes that are draining your bank account instead of engorging it.
#1: You fail to determine specifically who your market is and what their wants and needs are.
How can you get more of your ideal clients if you don’t know who they are? TARGETING is truly one of the top marketing success secrets.
Can you clearly define – in about two sentences – who your ideal client is and what he or she wants and needs?
You must know the WHO first, then you can focus on the WHY.
How can you expect to adequately fill someone’s needs if you never take the time to really understand them?
If you want to own your market, find out what your clients really want – and then give it to them
#2: You don’t focus your business on the needs of your prospects and clients.
Look at all your marketing materials. Do they clearly convey the BENEFITS your prospects and clients will get by utilizing your services? Or do they drone on endlessly about you and your company?
This self-centered approach is killing your marketing. Your messages must let your prospects and clients know that you are concerned ONLY WITH WHAT THEY WANT!
#3: You fail to capture your prospects and client’s names and addresses.
This is the single biggest profit-killing mistake you can ever make. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is more important than your house list: your sphere of influence (SOI) database.
It costs five times as much (at least) to generate a new client than to resell to an existing one.
Your SOI already knows you and trusts you.
All you need to do is develop a SYSTEMATIC way of keeping track of them and contacting them regularly.
#4: You don’t try to sell your clients something else on the “back-end.”
If you just hop from one client to the next, always searching for that new client and ignoring (marketing-wise) or under-serving those you already have, you will NEVER create a truly profitable, secure and ever-growing business. You’ll be like a rat on a wheel, running and running, but never getting anywhere.
#5: You fail to make doing business with you convenient, easy, appealing – and you’re not ready to sell when your prospects and clients are ready to buy.
If you’re just doing business 7am-7pm, and only with those people you’re currently training or those who call you, you’re losing out – big time.
With the technologies now available: internet, answering machines, toll free voicemail, fax machines, direct mail, etc. there is no reason why you can’t LEVERAGE your time and be doing business basically 24/7.
Be fanatical about servicing your clients and prospects. Focus on THEIR needs consistently.
#6: You are not persistent and willing to stick it out until you’ve contacted your prospect enough times to warrant dropping him/her – constantly testing and trying new approaches until you find the hot button that sells.
That really needs very little explanation. The bottom line is that successful businesspeople are persistent in their dogged approach to winning new business.
#7: You have no marketing plan to guide your business to financial success.
If you’re flying by the seat of your pants, it’s just a matter of time before you crash and burn.
YOUR BUSINESS WILL NEVER SUCCEED ON A LARGE SCALE BASIS UNLESS YOU COMMIT TO WRITING A PLAN THAT GUIDES YOU TO SUCCESS!
#8: You don’t have any idea how to write or produce persuasive marketing materials that get your prospects to buy NOW, or that get your clients to buy again.
Dan Kennedy calls it “marketing incest.” It’s when everyone in a given category is copying everyone else in that category – and they just get dumber and dumber and dumber.
Look, image advertising DOES NOT WORK. Branding is virtually impossible except within your SOI. Direct response IS the ONLY cost-effective, trackable, measurable and quantifiable way to market your services.
Study DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETING like your life depended on it.
#9: You don’t tell your prospects what it is about you that should make them want to do business with you instead of someone else.
Do you have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? This answers the question, “why should I (the prospect) do business with you instead of choosing another option or doing nothing at all?”
Some people call it an “elevator speech” or “unique selling advantage” or whatever. Essentially, they are all the same thing.
You must be able to clearly articulate, in compelling, benefit rich style, EXACTLY why you are the solution they need.
#10: You don’t change. Even though you know better, you still go back to running you business and marketing the same old, unprofitable way.
Your EVOLUTION as a businessperson is just as critical as your spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual evolution.
Life is a classroom. And your business is one of the subjects you are studying and learning. Are you getting a passing grade?
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