Marketing & Sales
A System to Manage Clients and Leads
A list of current and prospective clients can be invaluable to fitness professionals promoting upcoming events, distributing newsletters and cultivating member relationships. IDEA FitnessConnect’s client management system makes it convenient for fitness professionals to manage and grow their clientele directly from their profile pages.
Daily-Deal Sites: Benefit or Burden?
Regarding the news item “Leverage Daily-Deal Sites for Business Success [Making News, March 2011], my business partner and I have featured our company on a number of the daily-deal sites in Los Angeles and have had mixed experiences. While I agree it was a great way to expose our business to a huge market that might not know about our outdoor circuit training classes, it was a lot of work for very little return on investment.
The Four “PRE’s” of Sales Success
Whether you sell facility memberships or your own training services, at some point you’ll be asking a potential customer for money. Yet you may find yourself racked with stress about conducting such consultations, the thought of closing the deal bringing more sweat to your brow than your last blast on the cardio machines.
Internet = Next Training Frontier?
According to the 2010 IDEA Personal Training Programs & Equipment Trends report [IDEA Trainer Success, September 2010], only 19% of respondents offer online training programs. Nearly 50% provide online client reminders and information. These data may seem unimpressive now, but IDEA member Jason Bosley-Smith, CSCS, believes the Internet is the perfect venue for business growth. He recently traded his brick-and-mortar training facility for www.thefitrx.com, a website that provides online coaching and training, among other offerings.
Polishing the Facility Profile
Fitness professionals are not the only ones maintaining profiles on IDEA FitnessConnect. Program directors and club owners are also leveraging their clubs’ presence in this directory to feature staff, increase member leads and reinforce marketing efforts.
The Top 5 Closes for Personal Trainers
“Close” is a worrisome word in sales, often evoking cringe-worthy images of high-pressure boiler-room selling tactics, used-car lots and plaid suits. Canned one-liners aside, the “close” is simply the final part of a conversation when you ask the big question, “Yes or no?” As this involves securing both a decision and money, it can be the most stressful part of selling for both fitness pro and customer.
The Group Advantage
Given the sheer number of people using sites like Facebook and services like Groupon, fitness professionals are investing their advertising dollars in spaces where they can influence local groups and social networks. With better research into consumer insight (thanks to profile pages), personal trainers can identify their audiences and target their digital ad campaigns more effectively.
The Top 5 Sales Phrases Every Trainer Should Know
You stock your training tool kit with uber-adaptable equipment for every fitness level: a TRX, a stability ball, maybe some tubing or a yoga mat. Since you can never be completely certain what your fitness client will need on any given day, your go-to gear adapts to any training trial. But what about the tools you use to gain new training customers–do you have a stash of stand-by sales phrases that adapt to diverse personalities equally well?
What You See Is What You Get
Fitness professionals use online videos to share training tips, demonstrate exercises and showcase their choreography. Since sites like YouTube revolutionized the way people view, create and share videos online, use of the medium has skyrocketed. Today hundreds of millions of videos are being watched daily via mobile devices and video players embedded across websites (YouTube 2011). And now, via IDEA FitnessConnect.
See It, Read It, Like It, Share It
Rarely do we see content displayed online without an assigned “share” button or “embed code.” With one click, you can instantly share content from a website and post it to your Facebook page or Twitter™ feed. Sharing digital content by means of an online social network is an increasingly efficient way to distribute information. No more cutting and pasting URLs into e-mails or printing out articles for reference.
The Top 5 Sales Secrets of Successful Trainers
“They said they were interested, so why didn’t they sign up with me?” “They keep saying no.” “I just want to help people. What am I doing wrong?”
As a sales trainer, I have spoken with many struggling sales rookies. Having just completed their umpteenth unsuccessful consultation of the day, they often voice their frustrations with more than a hint of dejection.
Promote Yourself, Retain Clients
We’ve all seen it. A club’s group fitness schedule posted on the facility’s website with former instructors still listed. A personal trainer’s blog with last session’s boot camp dates advertised. Even when your efforts have successfully led people to your schedule or site, outdated class or event information may discourage any further inquiry into your programs.
Blog to Connect
Activating a profile on the IDEA FitnessConnect directory is one way to generate client leads and enhance business marketing. However, your “overview” page is only a first impression; to differentiate yourself from other fitness professionals listed in your area, you can do more. An active blog creates another opportunity for (future) clients to learn about your skills and services.
The Language of Job Postings
If the world as we know it were coming to an end and it was your job to find skilled individuals to rebuild society, how would you pick the “right” people? If you chose wisely, they all would flourish; if you chose unwisely, everyone would flounder. When you’re hiring for your organization, use the same careful consideration.
Do you have a blog for your business? If so, what does it include? If not, why not?
We started our blog in December of 2008. We’ve done a total of 102 posts so we are averaging 5 posts per month. Our goal with our blog was twofold. First, we wanted to create a better connection with our clients by providing them great information on exercise, diet and nutrition as well as activities and fun events we would be offering. Second, we wanted to increase our search engine optimization to drive additional traffic to our website and to our business.
Social Media Power
I read Lance Breger’s article “Social Circles: Marketing Your Department” (using social media) in IDEA Fitness Manager [July–August 2010] and loved it! Having written social media–related articles myself, I completely enjoy when another fitness professional provides his/her fresh perspective. This article adds to the body of knowledge that already exists about social media marketing, but also takes it to the next level by providing practical applications that are both innovative and “doable” for all fitness pros.
The Client Newsletter, Your Way!
Digital newsletters (or e-newsletters) can be an integral part of a marketing strategy, keeping fitness professionals in contact with clients and prospects via e-mail. In the 2009 Advertising Effectiveness Survey by Forbes, marketers identified e-newsletters as the second most effective online marketing tool for generating conversions (first was search engine optimization).
Anatomy of a Profile
The IDEA FitnessConnect directory is now available to more than 16 million fitness- and health-oriented consumers through sites like www.ideafit.com, FitnessMagazine.com, SparkPeople.com, Active.com, and ihrsa.com
Marketing Advice: How to Go Guerrilla
Marketing: one of the most crucial aspects to the long-term success of your fitness facility. But where do you start? There’s direct marketing, consumer marketing, B2B (business-to-business) marketing, online marketing and more. However, one essential form of marketing that is commonly overlooked is guerrilla marketing, unconventional marketing that relies more on creativity than a big budget.
Selling Personal Training Services With Flow
Do you love personal training but dislike selling your services? To help people, you need to train them, and in order to train them you need to sell your services. You know you can’t be a wallflower, but you don’t want to be pushy, either. The good news is that you can learn “Buy-Chi,” the art of selling personal training with flow.