By the time I sold my bootcamp business to one of my trainers a few years ago it was turning over a decent profit of £3,500 per month (about $4,500) with for only 4.5 hours of client sessions per week.
If I’m being totally honest I often wish I’d kept it and grown it a bit more, but the cash I received allowed me to put a deposit on our new house which was a bonus.
Anyway I often get asked how did I manage to
a) charge more than practically every other bootcamp in Manchester and
b) where did i manage to find the clients from.
When I handed the business over I had 2,547 leads in my Active Campaign email account.
This was over 2,500 women in Manchester that I knew wanted to lose weight, that knew what we did and that I was able to have a conversation with every single day by email.
So how did I do it?
Simple, I gave them something that they wanted in exchange for their email (a lead magnet) and used Facebook ads to target them.
I didn’t even have to go “balls to the wall” with this.
I was spending just £5 a day on ads and picking up about 5 new subscribers a day and then using email to build up trust and advertise my bot camp and personal training.
Slow and steady wins the race IMHO and this is a strategy that Fit pros even on a right budget can implement
Granted Facebook ads have changed a bit since then and are more expensive now, but the principle is still the same.
Fitness Marketing Principles Don’t Change
Find out what your audience want and give it to them (in their language). Grow and email list, build up trust and make it easy for people to work with you.
If people are not taking you up on your offers it’s usually becasue of a couple of things:
1. You are confusing them with fancy fitness industry language and Personal Trainer speak
2. You are asking for the big sale too early in the relationship.
3. You don’t have an offer in place and are selling simply PT sessions or Boot-camp classes (instead of benefits and results)
What I Would Do Now
If I was starting again tomorrow this is what I would do (and what we currently do for our agency clients).
- Identify my audience and build up trust by doing daily 1 minute videos on Facebook.
- Use Facebook ads to get these videos in front of the right people. Lets be honest Facebook is now mostly a pay to play platform.
- Re-target using Facebook’s ad platform to the people who had watched the videos. Use a lead magnet on my website and ask for their email address.
- Make it really easy for them to come and work with me. Either by offering a trial or a low barrier offer.
- Sell the trials onto long term personal training programs (minimum 3 months)
For the people who didn’t take me on the trial or low barrier. I would continue to provide value and build trust using email.
Just like the value in this blog you are reading right now.
Want to have a chat with us about how we can help you grow your fitness business for you? Get in touch with us here