Marketing & Sales
Secrets of Social Media Success
Social media offers fitness businesses an opportunity to market products and services. But there are some best practices to consider when navigating online platforms, explains Rochelle Sanchirico, head of marketing and analytics for Webs.com.
Sanchirico offers these insights to help you maximize your social media presence:
10 Great Ways to Boost Sales and Leads
The best way to attract your next customers and keep the ones you already have is to give, give, give. When you create and share valuable content, you’re positioning yourself as a trustworthy expert and you’re building your brand naturally. This lets you showcase your talents at a very low cost while you explore your options, and an approach that works for you and your customers can then take you from free to fee.
Smooth Sailing Toward Specialization
When I noticed the trend toward specialization building in the fitness industry a few years ago, it struck me as the answer to the professional slump I was in. After teaching and training for more than 20 years, I had hit a wall. Specializing seemed to hold the promise that I could raise my training fees and enjoy a wider variety of professional opportunities.
9 Simple Ways to Keep Your Clients
The success of your business relies solely on your ability to attract and keep clients. Use these tips to enhance the client-trainer relationship so that you can focus more on providing quality service to your current clients and less on finding new ones.
Optimize Your PR Campaign: Build Relationships and Tell Stories
e-steps-to-be-media-ready“Three Steps to Be Media Ready” (April 2014), I explained the meaning and importance of public relations. I also talked about how to become media ready by identifying yourself as an expert, sharing your story, and creating and distributing quality content.
How to Market Your Business With Facebook
Facebook is often used as a means to market products and services. However, updated algorithms have made it much more difficult to spread the word. Learn tips and tricks to make sure your audience gets the message.
Summer Retention Strategies
Helping your clients stay active and take care of their health is a year-round challenge. In the summer, your efforts often seem to get lost among shifting schedules, vacation plans and other activities—all of which affect client outcomes and, ultimately, your bottom line.
Navigating around this complicated time takes some flexibility and planning on your part. Discover strategies for motivating and retaining your clients during the summer months.
Flexibility Is Key
Inspired Service, Part Two: Leadership With Heart
In Part One of this five-part series, we proposed that the quality of customer service—the core of which is to make members feel special—is the most significant factor in a company’s bottom line. We discussed “how” customer service must evolve to reflect a company’s values more powerfully, and “why” it must evolve: so that people are inspired to become members.
Networking Know-How
Many experts suggest that networking is a great tool for growing a business. But the process can be awkward or uncomfortable for some fitness pros.
Frank Pucher, CEO of 121 Personal Training in Roseland, New Jersey, offers his top tips on becoming a master networker:
What You Should Be Doing With That Email List
Despite what you may have heard, email marketing is not dead. It is alive and well, and it can be extremely effective in helping your clients keep their fitness—and your brand—top of mind. As of 2013, there were 3.6 billion email accounts (Hubspot 2013), which is why email marketing is used by the biggest names in the business.
You may already have an email list but feel unsure what to do with it, or you may be starting from scratch. Either way, this article will cover how best to use email marketing to grow your business.
Three Steps to Be Media Ready
“People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.” —Seth Godin
What is public relations? And why, as business owners, do we need it?
“What special promotions do you use to draw new training clients?”
I use flash sales, which consistently help me attract new clients. Offering a deep discount through a flash sale for customers who sign up within 48 hours always encourages even the most intimidated client. I normally hold a sale whenever I have space for a new person. The dis- counted price lasts for varying lengths of time (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, etc.). I advertise on my website, Craigslist and Facebook and even in “old-fashioned” fliers. This promotion hasn’t failed me yet; if anything, I have too many new clients. You definitely have to know when your caseload is full.
Enhancing Your Brand
As a personal trainer, you’re faced every day with the challenge of selling yourself.
To keep your income flowing, you strive to keep your current clients, hunt for new clients and develop new program ideas. But there’s a big difference between cash flow and long-term profitability. The personal training business is increasingly competitive. Personal trainers who compete on price, train too wide a variety of needs or say that their program is “great for anyone” don’t have a good grasp of personal branding. If you’re underpaid and
undervalued, this might be you.
Social Networking for the Pilates Pro
In this age of social networking, it is imperative to connect with clients outside your facility via the Internet. Gone are the days of relying only on fliers and posters to tell clients about your offerings and events—now it’s all about engaging with clients on your blog, your Twitter feed or your Facebook page.
Analyzing Flash Deals
Fitness professionals around the world have jumped on the flash-deal bandwagon to try to generate more business and attract new clients. It looks like an attractive arrangement: Flash deals, such as Groupon or LivingSocial offers, put your business in front of a whole new audience, bring some new faces through the door and help you grow and expand your client base and revenue.
Growing the Pilates Market
Ken Endelman has not taught a single class in his 37-year Pilates career, but the Pilates world would not be the same without his leadership and contributions. In 1976, when Endelman was working as a furniture designer and craftsman in Los Angeles, a prospective client asked him to build a reformer—something with which he was completely unfamiliar.
A Personal SWOT Analysis
As a Pilates instructor, you’re continually striving to enhance your clients’ well-being. But now and again, you must take some time to do a little soul-searching and assess what is best for you. What are your needs, wants, goals and aspirations? Maybe you’re ready to further your education or you’re eager to work with a new market.
Using LinkedIn for Financial Success
LinkedIn calls itself the world’s largest professional network. Launched in 2003, it has over 225 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn can be a very effective marketing and networking tool for your business if you follow these basic steps.
Develop a Client-Focused Profile
The Thinner Winner Contest
Drive your revenue, boost your membership and help your community slim down with a weight loss contest. In just five easy steps, you can promote, run and celebrate a community-wide Thinner Winner contest. The details can be tweaked to fit your community.
Launch a Thinner Winner contest now or transform an existing weight loss contest.
How Does Thinner Winner Work?
Insurance Considerations for Fitness Professionals
When was the last time you took a hard look at the risks your business faces and the systems that you have—or don’t have—in place to safeguard yourself when disaster strikes? In this article you’ll learn how to manage the most costly risks to your business and how to stay ahead of the risk-management curve as your business grows