Chris Cooper's Blog, page 60

Email Isn’t Dead: Starting Conversations That Lead to Sales at Your Gym

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Everybody on social media loves to talk about social media, but I built my personal training practice and then I built my gym and then I built Two-Brain Business on email. I’m Chris Cooper, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And today I’m gonna talk through why I still use blog posts and emails and you should, too. You know, a lot of people look at Two-Brain Business as this massive media machine, but they should just copy what we do as an example. So today I’m gonna break that down for you. How to actually do what we do and grow the way that we grew. There are a lot of gurus out there telling you to build a personal brand and, you know, I don’t remember any of their names right now, but they’re sharing tips on Instagram and TikTok, but there’s a lot more to marketing than just getting attention, and that’s what email will do for you.

Chris Cooper (00:53):
So let’s start this talk by looking at your marketing funnels. So every marketing funnel is gonna have three basic layers. They might have four if you break it down more, but there’s at least three separate stages in your marketing funnel. So the top layer is to gather attention, and then you’re gonna have this second layer that builds trust or converts your leads into prospects. And then this middle layer is like the conversational layer, right? That’s where you get people to book a call or book their No Sweat Intro with you. And then the bottom layer of the funnel is that sales meeting itself. So get attention, convert, build trust, sell. Now many gym owners especially try to build a funnel that’s missing pieces. So they want to jump straight from that top layer, you know, Facebook, straight to the bottom, like “come in and do a free trial” or “come in and do an NSI.”

Chris Cooper (01:44):
So they’ll run Facebook ads promoting a six-week challenge. You remember those. And the ads will push people right straight from top of funnel into the sales meeting without building up any form of trust or having any kind of conversation. And so when that lead from Facebook reaches the sales meeting, they’re wary, right? They’re skeptical, they have no idea what you’re selling, and they probably aren’t gonna sign up. And if they do sign up, it’s because you’re super good at sales, but they probably won’t stay long. But if you take a different approach and you attract attention and then build trust with your knowledge and your help and have real conversations with people, then your sales meetings are actually pretty easy. They turn from this hard sell to a cold audience to coaching a friend into what they should do. So today we’re talking about that middle layer in your funnel where you build trust and affinity.

Chris Cooper (02:37):
And to do that you have to have a conversation. There are one or two ways that you can have that conversation effectively. You can start a free Facebook group in your community or you can use email. So here’s how I’ve used email to grow my training practice and then my gym and then Two-Brain. When I was a personal trainer, I was reading websites like testosterone.net, which later became T-Nation. And I was reading elitefts.com and I was reading bodybuilding.com every day for hours. And I saw guys like Joe Defranco and Christian Thibaudeau and Alwyn Cosgrove build their audience by blogging for those sites. And so I figured out how to write a blog, and I started putting up really technical articles on ATP synthesis and linear periodization on my free Typepad blog, but nobody was reading ’em. So then I approached a couple of online local news websites about doing a monthly column on fitness and wellness for ’em.

Chris Cooper (03:35):
And they were interested because online news was really trying to grab as much market share as they could. So they would feature stuff that the real newspaper wouldn’t print. And that got me quite a few clients. My first clients that I ever got for personal training came from meeting people in person at the treadmill store where I worked. But the next dozen came from referrals. And when I started publishing columns and blogs around 2001, I started getting these emails from strangers. But there were two problems with the online news sites. First, I didn’t own them, so I knew that they could pull the plug at any point. And second, my posts were hard to find. I wanted to get my message right in front of people. So I started collecting email addresses from the people who asked questions. They would comment on my article on the news website and then I would say, “Hey, if you want a deeper answer, here’s my email address.”

Chris Cooper (04:27):
I’d comment right on that news site, and some of ’em would email me and others would see that email address and then they’d email me about something else. And that literally filled my training book. I had 43 clients at once. Many of them were attending more than once a week. And I would work one on one with them every single time. When I realized that all the growth at the personal-training studio where I was working was coming from me, I decided to open a gym. And there were a few reasons. I mean, my family needed more money and I had some investors who were really pushing me to do it, but I wasn’t scared to open a gym because I already knew that I could work hard and I already had a working client-acquisition system: email marketing. So I wrote a blog post about my new gym, I put that on the news sites and I opened with just over 30 clients on day one.

Chris Cooper (05:18):
And then two weeks later I added a coach who was also on that email list. Now, you don’t probably have access to free public news sites, not anymore, but social media does that for you. You own the news sites now. You own the newspaper. And that is social media. And social media’s job is to get people to give you their email address so that you can take the next few steps that I’m gonna lay out for you here. There was a super bonus that kind of happened, and I’m just sharing this story to show you that you have to keep your eyes open to opportunities. So around that time in my city, the chamber of commerce published their annual guide, their business guide, and I got a copy. And on the back cover was the email address of every business owner in town.

Chris Cooper (06:02):
Email was such a novelty then, like 2006. You’d never get that now. But what you would get now is if you go to like your city’s chamber-of-commerce website or you look for publications, you’ll probably get their Facebook handle or their Instagram address, right? So you know, you can still get this information. You’re just gonna contact them differently and then move them to your email list. Now back then even I didn’t know how to email people directly. So I just opened up a free Yahoo email account, no joke. And I would copy 30 email addresses at a time into the address bar, and then I would write my email and I would hit send. And I’ve got a picture here of one of my first emails. This was from November 2006. And I used this email to fill up spin classes.

Chris Cooper (06:52):
I had these portable bike trainers. I would sit in front of about eight or 10 people at a time and we’d like ride our bikes in this crummy apartment that I was using as a gym, right? But it worked. I mean it made me probably $1,300 bucks, that email. So eventually after doing this for a while, somebody told me what BCC meant. Like I shouldn’t be sharing everybody’s emails with everybody else. So every Friday I would send an email to every email address that I had, and it kept building. Because I could only paste like 40 at a time, eventually it would take me about three hours. And every piece of communication that I got, every waiver, every sports team, every resume, I would add that email address to my Yahoo account. And when I would get really desperate for money, like the money that I needed to pay my first mentor, I would go to my email list—’cause that’s where the money was, and I knew it.

Chris Cooper (07:42):
And I would write an email with a strong call to action like, “Hey, click here to buy 10 personal training sessions in advance.” And I would usually generate $300 to $500 on an email if I gave a strong call to action. So when my first mentor said, “Hey Chris, you need to hire a cleaner and then use the time that you buy to grow your business,” I knew that if I wrote an email I could probably pay the $500 fee that he was charging me for that first session. And it actually worked. So then I started tracking my results that I was getting with my mentor through blogging, and I wrote this blog called dontbuyads.com. It was in the same Typepad account that I was using for my gym by the way. I started just sharing that, and I was doing it for myself.

Chris Cooper (08:26):
I was writing that blog for me. I was trying to retain everything that he was telling me ’cause I couldn’t do all of it at once. And there were some really valuable lessons that I didn’t wanna forget. So I started writing the blog to myself, it was called Don’t Buy Ads because the first thing that he told me was “your business is not ready for new customers. You start bringing in new customers right now, you’re gonna lose ’em quick. Like your systems suck if you’re not there. The training isn’t great. It’s filthy. Like you need to be the one meeting these new people, and you need to give them a great gym. So don’t buy ads yet ’cause you’re not ready.” So I started blogging the results that I was having, but it was a public blog, and other gym owners started reading it and they started emailing me for help.

Chris Cooper (09:08):
This was 2009. And they would email me questions, and I would answer them. And then when they were asking really good questions or when the answers to those questions were less than a thousand words, I would just turn ’em into blog posts to save myself some time instead of answering the same question over and over. And that’s how the conversation went. And then other gym owners would read that blog post and they’d respond with the next question; the second question; the follow-up; the smaller, more detailed question. And then I would clarify, and then that would turn into a blog post, too. And these conversations built to the point where people were asking me for mentorship because they trusted me so much that they trusted my advice or my guidance more than they trusted their own ability to generate ideas. I never offered the service, and I had never talked about it on the site.

Chris Cooper (09:57):
It had never even occurred to me. What eventually grew into Two-Brain Business started in these conversations and these requests for help. And by the way, I see this with gyms a lot. They get people onto their email list and they started having these conversations and they have this epiphany like, “Wait a minute, the service that I’m offering is not actually the service that these people are asking for. I should instead just go back to them and say like, ‘Hey, would you like personal training?’ And then offer personal training.” Like the conversations sometimes actually reshaped the business. So back to Two-Brain and dontbuyads.com. When I turned those blog posts into daily emails, people really started to pay attention. There was some stuff that was happening, like Google was no longer prioritizing blogs over everything else. And so Seth Godin wrote a great post telling us all we should let people sign up for our RSS feed, or, even better, sign up for an automatic email every day.

Chris Cooper (10:50):
And hundreds of people actually did. So they started getting my blog posts in their inbox. Sending an email makes these blog posts or these conversations a really active process instead of a passive one. So I don’t have to wait for people to go to my blog in the morning or go on Instagram or click on my site. I know they’re gonna check their email. You probably check your email before 8 a.m. And there’s gonna be a message from me waiting there. So it’s asynchronous. I don’t have to be online to talk to ’em. It gets a better response. A call to action in an email is way more effective than a call to action in a social media post. And you know, if you’re not really good at sell by chat, like texting people through Instagram or through Facebook, you should really be sticking to selling in emails because that’s where you can have a great call to action.

Chris Cooper (11:36):
So all of that is to say email is important. It’s still really valid. It’s probably more powerful than any social media. And now I’m gonna tell you exactly how to do it. Alright, so first you gotta clearly define your funnel. You know, rip the cover off my book if you need something white to draw on or whatever. Use a napkin. I just need you to draw an inverted pyramid, and we’re gonna map out your funnel. So at the top of that funnel, I want you to write down “attention” and then draw a line, and then go down to the bottom and write NSI and draw a line above that. And there’s gonna be a middle gap in between attention and NSI. Okay? So we’ll get to that in a moment. First, pick one thing that you’re doing to get attention.

Chris Cooper (12:16):
So maybe you’re good at Instagram, or maybe you’re better at Facebook. Whatever that is, that’s gonna be your attention layer. Now, if you’re doing a good job on those platforms consistently, then you probably don’t need paid ads yet. Okay? Now in the middle, that’s your collector, that’s where you have these conversations. So you can either start a free public Facebook group that all of your attention-getting media points to or you can set up an email list. The email list is easier and doesn’t require constant maintenance. Okay? So the top-of-funnel stuff, whatever that is, Instagram let’s say, should point directly to the mid-funnel stuff. And that’s it. That’s its job. So on your Instagram, you should be talking about your website or join your email list. If you’re brand new, you might be able to get people on your new Instagram profile to book an NSI and skip that middle step, but that’s not gonna last long.

Chris Cooper (13:09):
Those are just the early adopters. You need to get them into conversation. And your top-of-funnel media, whatever that is, has one job: to get people into conversations, okay? So that top-of-funnel media should not be talking about booking NSIs. It should not be talking about the value of the overhead squat. It should be saying “here’s something to help you join my email list.” It should all point to that, okay? Now the way that you get them on that email list is that you have a website that converts really well. So it should have places on it for people to either book an appointment or fill in a form. Why do you want them to fill in a form? Well, you know, maybe they’re requesting your pricing or they want information about your kids program or they want to get your free guide on stretching or whatever.

Chris Cooper (13:53):
But that form exists to capture their email address, and you’re capturing their email address so that you can add it to your email list, right? It’s there to collect email addresses and start building your list. Then every day you’re going to email that list with some interesting help. So keep it short and stick to basic HTML. Don’t use any fancy headers or images, and make it useful. Don’t send them an opinion or a long editorial every day. Like an email called “The Five Steps to Reducing Back Pain” is way better than an email called “Smoking Is the New Sitting” or whatever—why our culture promotes this kyphotic, rounded posture and how it’s hurting us. Like just tell people what to do, and always build the list, build the list, build the list. Add email addresses to that list at every opportunity. Ask for email addresses at every opportunity.

Chris Cooper (14:41):
The next step is to follow Gary Vaynerchuk’s “jab, jab, jab, right hook” strategy. So what you wanna do is have interesting, helpful content for maybe three emails in a row, right? Those are your jabs. Then you have a very clear call to action on the fourth email. That’s your right hook, okay? And jab, jab, jab, right hook forever and ever and ever. If you repeat that, you don’t have to get fancier. And that’s actually the next step in your email marketing strategy: just continue. Don’t stop. Delegate if you have to. But creating content is a skill that you’ll use forever, even when the platforms change, right? So once upon a time, fax machines were kind of the platform that you used to get attention. Then it was newspapers, and then it was online newspapers, and then it was Facebook. And if Facebook dies—psst, it’s not dead—and the new platform is like LinkTok, whatever, it doesn’t matter because you point your content from LinkTok to your email list. You own your email list, but you don’t own Facebook. Just like I didn’t own those free public newspapers, but I own that email list, and I can keep it forever. So here’s a picture of my email list for Two-Brain Business. There are 40,000 people on it. They didn’t all sign up on the same day. This list has been worth literally millions of dollars to me. Okay? Now here’s a snapshot of the email list at my gym. I’ve culled this list, so there’s only about 2,400 names on it. But if I went all the way back to when I founded my gym 18 years ago, I’d have 4,400 names on it. I know that because that’s how many people that I have in my booking and billing system.

Chris Cooper (16:22):
And if I was really desperate for new clients or really desperate to fill a class or a specialty program, I would go straight to that email list. Okay? When I need help, when I need money, when I need rescue, the email list is the place to go. It’s a gold mine. Social-Media posts are not a conversation. They’re a one-way blast. They’re a monologue. They’re yelling because you’re trying to get attention, and they’re at the top of your funnel. But hopefully you can get people to want a conversation with you. And that conversation is where the magic happens before you bring them into your NSI. So to sum up, your email list is where people come to like and trust you. Your email list is where most people sit until they’re ready to book a No Sweat Intro, right? Just because they haven’t booked right now doesn’t mean they’re never going to book.

Chris Cooper (17:12):
Next, you own your list. You don’t own Instagram. Also, the algorithm doesn’t change. Like spam filters get better, but if you avoid the obvious stuff like putting in pictures or headers or hidden text, then you’ll reach most people on your list. Like just keep it plain text. Finally, don’t mistake social-media posts for a solid connection in your hierarchy of communications. It’s not. Social media is always gonna be a crapshoot. You don’t know what’s gonna attract attention. Email is a far greater opportunity. And even if people aren’t interested in your service right now, with email you’ll stay in front of ’em until they are. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” This week on our blog, I break this down for you even more step by step. And if you wanna talk about it, please just go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free public Facebook group. You can reach me in there, and you can ask questions. You’ll hear from 8,000 other gym owners. And that’s even the place to find me if you wanna start a DM conversation about mentorship. Thank you for your service.

The post Email Isn’t Dead: Starting Conversations That Lead to Sales at Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

AI: Don’t Produce 1 Million Blogs No One Will Read

With AI, you can produce hundreds of blogs in minutes.

So can all the other gyms in your town.

Let’s suggest 10 gyms produce 50 blogs a year for a total of 500 blogs on general fitness and nutrition topics.

How will you possibly cut through the noise and get anyone to read yours?

The answer: You must learn to build an audience, and then you must stay connected to that audience.

Earning Eyeballs

Chris Cooper wrote this a few weeks back:

“Five years ago, producing daily content for your audience would put you in the top 1 percent of businesses worldwide. Now it puts you in the top 50 percent—that means if you’re not producing daily content, people will choose the gym owners who are.”

Coop will be the first person to tell you just producing content isn’t enough. People need to see that content, too. If you can’t get anyone into the theatre, there’s really no point in playing your songs.

To build an audience, you must do three things:

Publish consistently.Publish at a “B+ level” so consumers see value.Connect with people to keep the conversation going.

Coop covered the first two elements here.

The last one? That’s where you move from casting seeds into the field to nurturing the best plants.

You have two great options for doing that:

1. Get people into a private group where you can lead the conversation.

Facebook is the best option right now. An online group allows you to bring people together in one place where they know they’ll get regular doses of helpful, high-quality content that interests them.

While you can’t escape the whims of social-media algorithms altogether, you can teach people to check your platforms regularly for great content, and a private group gives you the best chance to earn attention. When people seek out, engage with your content and receive DMs from you, some of them are guaranteed to become clients.

2. Get email lists and phone numbers.

Yes, email is “old school.” But it still gives you a more direct way to tell people “I published something!” It’s a shortcut past the deluge of content on social media, even if you must contend with email spam filters. And text messages? If members of your audience look forward to getting texts from your business, it is certain that you will acquire new clients regularly.

Check this out, from optinmonster.com: “70 percent of customers say that SMS marketing is a good way for businesses to get their attention.”

Build Your Audience

Later this week, Two-Brain Business will publish its newest guide for gym owners: It’s got a host of prompts you can use to direct AI to create content for you.

But remember that anything you produce with or without AI is just a raindrop in an ocean unless you build and maintain an audience for your content.

The new guide will be available on Sept. 19, and you can get it in the Gym Owners United group: join here.

The post AI: Don’t Produce 1 Million Blogs No One Will Read appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

CEBA Solution: Hope for Gym Owners as Loan Deadline Nears

FitBizWeekly released some disturbing stats for gym owners in late August:

60 percent of Fitness Industry Council of Canada (FIC) survey respondents have more than CDN$50,000 in debt.Another 20 percent of respondents accrued more than $100,000 of debt since 2020.65 percent of respondents say they will not be able to repay Canadian Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loans that come due on Dec. 31.

The last stat is particularly bad.

CEBA loans ran up to $60,000, with $20,000 forgivable if the other $40,000 is paid back by Dec. 31. If businesses don’t repay the $40K, interest on the entire $60,000 starts accumulating at 5 percent per annum.

The full amount of the loan—with interest—is due Dec. 31, 2025.

One must wonder if any struggling businesses saddled with CEBA interest payments will make it to 2025.

FIC—IHRSA of the north, so to speak—is concerned about small businesses, and so is the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB).

“Gym owners only took on these loans because they were forced to shut down for weeks and months at a time,” FIC executive director Gabriel Hardy said in a release. “We will continue to fight for an extension of the CEBA loan.”

In an article posted to the FIC website, staff reported that more than 30,000 business owners have signed a CFIB petition in support of extending CEBA deadlines. The CFIB’s data suggests about 250,000 small business could die in 2024 if the deadline isn’t pushed back.

But even if the deadline is moved, the money is still owed. So gym owners must either figure out how to pay it back or the extension just delays bankruptcy by a year or two.

But there is hope.

Recovery Is Possible

A few weeks back, I asked Chris Cooper how long it takes gym owners to get to $100,000 in net owner benefit—salary, dividends, and any other benefits they receive.

The answer: 2 years, 1 month and 9 days on average—regardless of starting point. This data point comes from tracking more than 2,200 gyms over the last seven years.

If you aren’t interested in averages, Coop told me a gym has gone from barely breaking even to paying its owner $100,000 a year in just eight months.

I’ll let you figure out the exact mechanics with your own spreadsheet, but it should be obvious that if a gym can gain the ability to pay its owner $100,000 a year, it could gain the ability to pay  off a loan and eventually pay the owner $100,000 a year.

How does something like this happen? Three reasons:

Fitness entrepreneurs focus on building their businesses.They avoid distractions and take action daily.They follow the exact instructions of an experienced mentor.

The last part? It’s critical. If you’ve been struggling to repay a CEBA loan over the last years, you don’t have time to make mistakes and “figure it out.” You need to make progress fast.

The way to do that is with the help of a mentor who can guide you, motivate you and hold you accountable.

Remember: With guidance, the average Two-Brain gym owner can earn a six-figure income in about two years even if the business is in rough shape at the beginning. And some owners have gone from breakeven to $100,000 to in eight months.

So if you’re looking down the barrel of a CEBA loan—or any other debt—take an hour to do some research. Book a call with Two-Brain here to find out how we can help you turn your gym around.

The post CEBA Solution: Hope for Gym Owners as Loan Deadline Nears appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Gym Marketing Masterclass: Your Funnels in Detail

Announcer (00:00):
This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Today, how to get more clients into your business. Successful gyms have up to four marketing funnels working for them all the time. Every funnel should lead to a free consultation. That’s how you constantly add high-value members. Gym owner and mentor Colm O’Reilly laid out all four funnels in detail at the 2022 Two-Brain Summit, and his live lecture is presented here for you on “Run a Profitable Gym.” Now here’s Colm O’Reilly.

Colm O’Reilly (00:25):
Yes, it’s called “the four funnels.” But really what this is is an impassioned plea for you to take marketing seriously. Marketing is the absolute lifeblood of your business. Yes, delivering the service is really important. Managing your clients, it’s really important. Taking care of yourself is really important, but getting new clients in is literally the lifeblood of your service. There is a myth, and when I started CrossFit, I believed in like the myth of remarkability. Glassman said that, you know, when you open up your gym, you don’t have to do anything. Everyone will just see your excellence. And I believe that it was like, “Oh, this is awesome. I just have to put up great CrossFit workouts, post them on a blog. Somehow people will find them. They’ll come to my gym and find all about that.” That worked for Glassman ’cause he was a very social person in a gym of about 6,000 people that saw him coach his clients every day.

Colm O’Reilly (01:18):
My gym was down a dark road in a dirty industrial estate at the time. I don’t know where your gyms are, but people have told me their gyms are on main streets and they still have to tell people. There is no guarantee that clients will just come in for you. So marketing has a cost, and we’re gonna talk about that cost and how we’re gonna put our efforts into it today. Now marketing seems like it’s something that’s really complex, but we’re gonna make it simple for you. That’s simple but not easy. And there’s a joke about the difference between simple and easy that I wasn’t allowed tell. So come up and ask me afterwards for the punchline for that one. Okay, everybody wants clients to come in, and I get it, you’ve so much work to do, and you want clients to come in, but we’ve all had the weight-loss client that wants to keep doing the same thing and lose weight.

Colm O’Reilly (02:05):
“Can I just show up at your gym twice maybe on a good week and lose weight?” No. “Can I just run good classes and occasionally post to the ‘Gram?” No, you’ve got to put the work into it. Now our four funnels there, the referral funnel, that’s the Affinity Marketing, that is talking to your awesome clients and trying to get more awesome people like that in. They are your people. The second one is your organic social media funnel. That’s posting about your awesome clients in a way that relates to people who aren’t there yet on their journey. Like-Minded people on Facebook—finding them, getting them into your groups and sliding into those DMs. Then we’ve got the content funnel. That’s our blog, that’s our email list, that’s getting our authority out there. And then finally, everybody’s least favorite, the paid marketing funnel. The first funnel is the referral funnel or the Affinity Marketing funnel.

Colm O’Reilly (02:58):
They are your warmest people. And the first mistake I want to talk to you about is that when you do goal reviews, if you do them with the intent of getting a testimonial straight away or getting a referral straight away, you will 100% repulse your clients. They don’t wanna do it. They know it’s just a sales exercise. And that’s smarmy sales. Your Affinity Marketing, your goal review is primarily a retention tool, right? Because your clients won’t sell for you. I was talking to one of my ramp-ups, Kate, and I said, “Tell me about your seed client.” It’s like lesson one or two in the ramp-up. And she’s telling me Alrick is brilliant. Like he’s moved over to Ireland, he’s in a small town, he works the local coffee shop.” She’s in a small village, everyone knows everyone. “And He is always telling people about my gym.”

Colm O’Reilly (03:46):
I said, “That’s awesome. What does he say?” And she goes, “He’s always telling people how sore he is and showing him ripped hands.” Your clients are not salespeople. They’re not marketers. They don’t know how to market your gym. We have to teach them to do that. Or rather yet kind of inception them and help them along with that. So the goal review is primarily a retention tool. That’s where we’re gonna give the goal review and say “I care enough to ask ‘how are you doing really?'” ‘Cause everybody in the world over, you ask them “how are you doing?” and everybody goes “good.” They don’t tell you what’s going on until you ask them that third, fourth or fifth question and genuinely want to know what’s going on. “How Is your fitness?” “Oh it’s good.” “I know when you joined me you wanted to lose 20 pounds. Are you still on your journey?” “Eh, maybe.” “How’s the sleep? How’s the nutrition? What are you eating for breakfast? What’s lunch? What’s dinner? I noticed you’re only getting in three days a week instead of four days a week.” Asking the extra questions. Now, being Irish, I know Bono of course, and he told me never to name-drop. But Chris Cooper told me that if you care about someone, you care about their extended family, you care about their environment, you care about their colleagues. And it has to be based off caring. “Who Else is in this journey with you? Who’s with you? Is it your spouse? Is it your best friend? Is it your coworkers?” The second big mistake people make when they’re doing Affinity Marketing is they’re like, “Great, can I have their number and ask for a No Sweat Intro?” “Oh, F off.”

Colm O’Reilly (05:23):
This is where you again have to resist the urge. And I know you’re busy. You’ve gotta resist the urge to try and skip the discovery process. “Well, Tell me about your wife. What’s she into? Well, she used to be really into rock climbing, and she hurt her knee a while ago.” “That sounds tough. What’s she doing for rehab?” “Well, she was going to physio, but she wasn’t going to rebuild.” So there you go. “But She didn’t do her physio right? And she’s still in a lot of pain. Okay, well like is she interested in coming in and maybe we could do some upper-body work while her knee heals? Is she up to that or is she a bit nervous?” That’s a great example of that. Or you know, “My spouse really likes the idea of fitness, but they’re a cardio bunny and all they think about is CrossFit is just weights just heavy, bulky stuff. “

Colm O’Reilly (06:14):
“Okay, Yeah, I get that. I get that. Well how about we set up a two-on-one workout where she comes in and she does some Assault bike and box steps and we throw a light medicine ball around and we keep it more cardio focused for her?” That’s how we do the next step of Affinity Marketing. Not just “gimme the damn number. I’ve gotta hit my sales target.” When they’re in as well, then if we’re going to have the conversation, the next stage then is asking the questions of them that maybe nobody else has asked them. “What Is that extra 20 pounds doing to you? How do you feel when you look in the mirror? How do you feel when you’re put on clothes? How’s it impacting your love life? How’s it impacting your social life?” They’re the extra questions that really matter. And then the final part of that sales process is does your solution match their pain point And where we’re coming from, that genuine place of caring, “Does my solution, can it help your problem?”

Colm O’Reilly (07:08):
And the only way I can know your problem is if I really, really ask “does it match your pain point?” Then you’re gonna make the sale with Affinity Marketing. I’ve got a great client in Ramp-Up. Walt is his name, and I get like emails once a week from him. Now, once he figured this out, ’cause he threw out the initial Affinity Marketing post and he’s like “I’m not getting anyone. I ask my seed clients for names and numbers. Like, okay, well, this is a fault of mine. I didn’t ask you or coach you enough. Initially what he did was he would just take the seed clients out and say, “What do you like about my gym? What don’t you like about the fitness industry? Whose number can I have?” And amazingly, he didn’t get numbers. When he slowed down and asked the extra questions, now he’s excitingly emailing me. He started working with me and Two-Brain at the start of the year, and he’s now gone from 60 to a hundred clients, and he’s selling higher-ticket packages because he’s slowed down and he’s asking the question. I’m not saying it’s down to me. I’m saying it’s down to him slowing down. Now next up we’ve got the second funnel. This is your organic social media. And 10 years ago, it was really easy to get likes and get engagement in social media because that’s kind of how CrossFit blew up. And I know not everybody’s a CrossFit gym, but we all know what CrossFit is now. It’s noise. You’ve gotta put out stuff all the time and you’ve gotta put out stuff that’s really appealing to where people are. If anyone ever saw a documentary on the Fyre Festival, absolute operational disaster but fantastic marketing campaign ’cause what they got is all the influencers, and they got them to post bright orange squares on their Instagram, and that breaks the flow of scrolling. So you’ve gotta think of “what’s gonna be an appealing image when I put this out?” And you’re never gonna know unless you put them out. You put out those images and see what’s going on. And then for marketing, what we’re really doing is we’re just talking about one of four things. Most of the time we’re talking about their pain points, their objections to getting started, the process and the result.

Colm O’Reilly (09:07):
So a pain point is “you’re feeling tired, you’re feeling sluggish, you’re overweight, you’re not strong enough.” The objection is “you don’t have time to meal prep. Getting fit is too expensive. You’ve tried personal trainers before, they haven’t worked out for you. You’re carrying an old injury.” The process then is what we talk about. “Look, This is how we do things in class. This is what we do. We start you with a conversation to know about you personally. We want to know about your goals. We start everybody in a very personalized manner.” “Or we use weights, we use cardio, we mix it up. We always have a coach with you.” And then finally the result: “You’re happier, you’re healthier, you’re fitter.” That’s what we’re doing is we’re solving a problem and we’re opening up a curiosity loop. So if any Marvel fans are in the room, if you guys all watched “Infinity War,” it was a couple of years ago and at the end, Thanos, the big baddie, snapped half of reality out of existence.

Colm O’Reilly (10:08):
Everybody talked about the movie “Infinity War” for a year until “Endgame.” The follow-up came out and everybody watched “Endgame” and said “that was cool” and went on about their life. The reason why “Infinity War” got talked about so much is it opened up that curiosity loop. Have you ever seen those posts—such as titles that say “look what happened when this person joined my gym. The answer may surprise you”? That’s opening up a curiosity loop. Or are you really tired with Irish people talking to you about marketing and want to figure this out? Oh, that actually wasn’t a joke. It was a legit question.

Colm O’Reilly (10:44):
That’s how we get people into a group. And one of the purposes of our groups is that we wanna build intimacy. With all other things being equal, people are gonna pick intimacy over authority. Most people aren’t looking for the absolute best gym in the world. They’re looking for the best gym in their city or their town, and they’re probably not even looking for the best gym. They’re looking at the best gym for them. And the only way they can do that is if they know you. If you’re the person they constantly see on their Reels, on their Instagram stories, on their Facebook feed, in their Google maps, they constantly see you talking to them about their problems, their issues. They’re like, “This is the person who’s front of mind to me, right?” That’s the reason why we want to get people into our group—because they’ll see our group posts and then yeah, absolutely, we can start to sell by chat. And I know Tiffy talked a lot about it, so I’m just gonna sum up some points here as well. It does take time. It’s worth the investment. It takes time to send messages and say, “Hey, thanks for joining my group. Tell me a little bit about yourself.” You have to be genuinely interested and you have to lead the conversation. Again, most people mess this up when they try and say, “Hey, thanks for joining my group. Book an intro. Link there.” That’s not personable. That’s just absolute 100% “I know this person is trying to sell me something.” No one wants to be sold on a thing. They want the perception of they took part in it. So how we do that? We ask multiple choice questions versus open questions. So an open question for you guys would be “what’s your biggest struggle as a gym owner?”

Colm O’Reilly (12:22):
That’s difficult to answer. If I ask you “what’s your biggest struggle as a gym owner? Is it getting new clients in? Is it paying yourself? Is it building issues? Is it staffing issues or is it something else?” Even if I’m wrong with all those answers, all those suggestions, it’s a lot easier for you then to come up with the next one. So when I’m asking someone “what’s your biggest struggle with your fitness? Is it getting the workouts in? Is it the nutrition side of things? Is it your motivation or mindset or is it something else?” it’s a lot easier for them to answer that question. To follow up with that again, if they say, “Well, I just can’t get the workouts in”—”Well, let’s do an intro.” Don’t rush it. Get them to tell you more, and then demo the next step. You don’t have to give them everything. You just providing a framework to things. And that’s how we use organic marketing to drive our clients towards us. Okay? Now, as much as you all like me and think I’m a swell guy, you wouldn’t get me to do open-heart surgery. I know how to set up your Facebook ads for you. I don’t know how to fix your Tesla. So you do need authority on top of intimacy, and that’s where your content funnel comes in. That’s where you are the guy or gal who knows what their problem is and knows how to solve it. That’s where you build your expertise. And this is a building process. This is a slow-burning process. I don’t have the latest, but I remember Chris telling me that it takes people about six months of opening his daily emails for them to book a call. Most people will start writing a couple of emails and they go “I’m not getting anything from this” and give up. You know, again, you don’t have to recreate the wheel. There’s a content bank that you all have access to as part of Growth.

Colm O’Reilly (14:11):
And what you’re saying in your emails is “I understand your problem because I’ve either solved it myself or I’ve helped people like you solve their problem. So I’ve helped people like you.” And what you’re doing—and Jason, this goes back to your question earlier about what material you put in. So in the earlier session, Jason asked “what material would you put publicly versus your group versus your private group?” Did I get that question right? Yes. Generally, what I would recommend is you give people the framework of how to do things publicly, but when they become private clients, that’s when you give them the actual steps. So right now I’m giving you the framework. I’m talking you through the four funnels. When you log on to members.twobrainbusiness.com and go to your ToolKit and go to your Content Vault, that’s the actual posts.

Colm O’Reilly (15:01):
When someone wants to get fit, we’re gonna say, “Hey, we’re gonna lift weights and get out of breath.” When someone wants to improve their nutrition, we say, “Hey, we’re gonna eat these foods in these quantities.” That’s the framework. When we say, “Okay, today’s workout is deadlifts and skipping,” that’s the actual content. Now what you can also do in your emails is talk to people’s fears and concerns. And that’s essentially saying “I know your fears because they’re X, Y, Z. I know you’re afraid of starting something again and failing. I know you think you’re too old, too outta shape, too broke to get fit”—or whatever the things are. And you say “but don’t believe me. Here’s my client stories.” So during the goal-review process, if you’re proud of someone and you genuinely care and you’re genuinely motivated, tell them you wanna celebrate them.

Colm O’Reilly (15:54):
And you can either celebrate them by saying, “I can write your story or we can do a video.” If your clients normally bump once they’re in front of a camera, they get nervous or they become a robot, don’t film them. They don’t want that. You wanna make them a hero. So you can say, “I can write up why I’m so proud of you.” They might be a little bit embarrassed, but trust me, humans crave attention. Oscar winners on average live seven years longer than their non-Oscar-winning counterparts. These are people in Hollywood who have pretty much all the money to invest in all their health, and they still crave human acceptance and appreciation that much. So we can do that to our clients. We can help them. And stories help people overcome their fears. So in our emails, in our blog content, that’s what we can say “don’t believe me? Listen to what Billy’s done or Sam has done.” Jay Rhodes, unfortunately he’s not here, but Jeff Jucha does excellent content like this, so go steal his. Now if you don’t live in West Little Rock, don’t say, “Hey, West Little Rock guys, what’s going on?” But follow Jucha because he does a great job of writing these content emails in that respect. And finally, what everybody hates: paid marketing. I joke about that. With all our other funnels, we don’t see the level of attrition. With our Affinity Marketing, we don’t see or hear all those conversations—our seed clients are great members, and they go out and tell their friends about our gym but mess up the sale. They don’t tell them about anything cool, like “this person really took care of me.” They just say how sore they are from the workout. With our posts. We’ll put them out.

Colm O’Reilly (17:31):
We don’t see the number of people who see the posts but don’t like, don’t comment, don’t engage. With our emails, we can write the best email in the world, perfectly suited to this individual at this point in their life, and if they don’t open it, we don’t get to see that. That’s a missed opportunity. With paid marketing, we get to see all these leads, and that’s why we see a high attrition rate in paid marketing. That is 100% normal. And if you look at all the data from all the leads in Two-Brain over the last six months, the lead to set rate is 56%. So for every 10 leads you’re gonna get, five of them are never gonna make the stage of even setting a No Sweat Intro. Now they’re not bad leads. They’re just cold leads. They’re just not ready to hear about that yet.

Colm O’Reilly (18:21):
So what paid marketing is is how we give Facebook or Google money in order to get us quick leads. But we are, with Facebook in particular, we are interrupting them. They might sign up and they might instantly decide it’s not for them. When I show clients how to analyze their Facebook ads, I point out that for every three people that click on an ad, only one person waits for it to load. These ads load in about half a second. That’s how quickly people talk themselves out of doing what’s in their own best interest. They’re not screwing us over, they’re not wasting our time. And why I’m so insistent on this is this is the mindset difference I’ve seen between people who are successful with Facebook marketing and people who are just giving Mark Zuckerberg money. So anyone in this room have more network than Mark Zuckerberg?

Colm O’Reilly (19:09):
No. So don’t give him money unless you’re going to get the return. Now, how do we get over that—as well as understand they’re just not ready yet? They’re just not ready to make that commitment to themselves yet. They could be perfect. You could be thinking “this guy gal is absolutely perfect to join my gym,” but if they’re not ready, they won’t pick up the phone. So you just get the reps in, park and move on. And if you treat your paid leads, when you’re starting off, as a chance to develop your lead-nurture skills and your sales skills, you’re ultimately going to be better off rather than thinking “a lot of these are a waste of time.” Now you cannot rely on automations. I’ve used Gym Lead Machine ever since I went to New York. John said, “Give me your laptop,” and he signed me up without asking my permission. True story and it’s fantastic. Gym Lead Machine are your automations, and they catch people who slip through the net. But non-automated human contact is the difference with paid lead machines—the difference with paid ads becoming successful or not. Now I know I’ve talked at you a while and give you a lot of information. So to break it up, I’ll show you a picture of me as a baby.

Colm O’Reilly (20:29):
Okay. It was a picture of a baby drinking a pint of Guinness in the pub, and it was all meant to get a big laugh. So just pretend you saw that. Thank you. Now there is actually a reason behind that. You have to treat leads like newborns. You have to pleasantly and persistently pursue them. Pleasantly and persistently pursue prospects until they either tell you “yes, sign me up” or “go to heck.” You cannot overreach with leads. Most people give up after two attempts. Most successful people take about seven to 10 to get through to people. I had a girl once Martha was her name, and I rang her every day for seven days straight. I rang her even on Sundays, and eventually on the eighth day she said, “Thanks for not giving up on me.”

Colm O’Reilly (21:29):
She booked an intro, signed up, started training with us. And when I went to confirm the intro with a text, I found that she had canceled an intro 11 months previously. She worked in HR in a pharmaceuticals company. She was just finished maternity leave. So she was busy. When people are on Facebook, they might be waiting for their coffee. Or when people are signing up to your website, they might be at a traffic light. Even though we shouldn’t be on our phones while driving, we all are. They might be going into a meeting. Don’t be afraid to continue to reach out to them. If you honestly believe that you can change their life, and I genuinely think that someone based in Dublin is better off being a member of my gym than not, then it’s your obligation to continue to reach out to them. Okay?

Colm O’Reilly (22:14):
They’re scared. They’re scared of getting started. So the more we reach out to them, the better we can help them overcome that fear. I’m just gonna continue to riff here as well. Okay, so with marketing, the way I think about it is there’s one really important question you should ask to determine is your marketing campaign working. And that’s “am I hitting my sales slash revenue target?” Some gyms have sales targets, like they want to make five grand in new business this month. And some have revenue targets. Like “we just wanna make 25 grand this month.” My gym’s the revenue target, right? I don’t care if it’s renewals or new business, I just have a target. I have to get there each month. It works for me, might work for you. But that’s the only question that matters.

Colm O’Reilly (23:06):
And to put it back in fitness terms, if you have a weight-loss client and every two or three weeks they’re stepping on the InBody and that weight is trending in the right direction, we don’t care what’s working, really. We don’t care if it’s the workouts, the nutrition, the sleep, or the stress management because it’s working. And that’s the same with your marketing. If you’re hitting your target, your marketing is working. Now obviously you want to know when it breaks which parts to look at. But if you’re getting obsessed about “well this post got 32 likes and this post only got 10 likes and you know, I got cost per lead of $2 last month and now it’s $4,” you’re missing the wood from trees. Ask yourself “am I hitting my sales or my revenue target?” That’s the most critical question. Then you look into what’s going on.

Colm O’Reilly (23:59):
And again, very funny to stand up here and say, as the marketing person, it generally doesn’t come down to marketing. It comes down to your lead nurture and your sales process. That’s where you need to invest time. It used to be like eight years ago, people could just rock into my gym and they’d, you know, do a class and they’d sign up. Sweet. Then about four years ago, we could just set up those No Sweat Intros and people would book a No Sweat Intro on Monday for Thursday. And then on Thursday I’d see them for the first time, and I could chat to them. Now, post-pandemic world, we know when someone thinks of the gym, that’s when I’ve gotta start nurturing them. Now obviously we want to keep marketing, but that’s how we do it. It’s all about that nurture and finding the right matrix that works for you.

Colm O’Reilly (24:46):
And speaking of that, we’re now gonna go to our worksheet. So people always ask me “where do I find all this time?” And I had a gym owner once come onto a marketing call with me late and the 30 minutes are tight for time as they’ve got another call. And this gym owner was like, they needed leads and they needed members quickly. And he was like, “I’m just finished my workout,” pumped and sweating, still shirtless. And I said, “Oh, what did you do?” He said, “Oh, just finished that Atalanta from the Games there.” For those who don’t know, Atalanta was the 2020 Aromas Games final. It was a mile run, a hundred handstand pushups, 200 pistols, 300 pull-ups, and another mile run, all while wearing a weight vest, right? I totally want you to get your workouts and take care of yourselves, but not at the expense of your business, which means you can’t work out anymore.

Colm O’Reilly (25:38):
So with your worksheet now, I’d like you to go through the answers and share them with your team. What we’re gonna do is start with one really inefficient hour of the week or 10 minutes a day and schedule that. We’re gonna figure out which funnel we’re gonna put our focus into, and then which part of the funnel it is, and then we’re gonna commit with our table to one action. And I’m gonna give you guys 10 minutes for that. So it seems like there was some good conversations going on there and people began to take action on your marketing. And I had a great question about like “what do you do when people are messaging you?” Leads are messaging you through the day. And it’s like, well, most of us, the times we think of as our classes and our PTs we think of as our “work.” And then we put our programming and our staff development and our marketing when we’ve got quote-unquote “downtime.”

Colm O’Reilly (26:26):
And that’s why I wanted you to schedule it—it is that important. It is as important as delivering classes and delivering your PT sessions and having your goal-review meetings with your coaches as well. So just a couple of things before we wrap up. And one of the things was, I forgot, is that with your posts, you wanna make them so, so, so simple. The initial Affinity Marketing guide that Coop wrote was about 90 pages long. It was brilliant, and it was all full of great stuff, but people are busy, people are stressed and they can’t absorb that information. But then when the 19-page super colorful one came out, everybody started Affinity Marketing. So make your marketing simple. Speaking of that as well, speaking of simple, Brian bought me to a baseball game on Thursday. I’m not saying mine is simple, I’m saying I’m simple, but what he explained to me is that the best hitters in the world miss about seven outta 10 shots.

Colm O’Reilly (27:20):
They bat .300. Is that right, Brian? Did I get that? Okay, they swing .300. The best swingers in the world do .300. What this means is that most of your marketing is gonna quote-unquote “fail.” You send out your emails and you might only get three out of 10 opens, right? You’ll post and out of all the people that follow you, maybe 10% will get to see them. This is normal. It’s just a numbers game of marketing. So that’s okay. It’s our job to find the best way to start the conversation. And that’s all marketing is. It’s starting the conversation. Now for any history buffs in the room, do they know what Alexander Graham Bell want people to say when they first answered the telephone, when it was first invented, anybody know what he wanted to say?

Colm O’Reilly (28:13):
Shout it out. Ahoy. Ahoy was suggested as the way to answer the telephone. But Thomas Edison came out with the first telephone book, and he said, you start the telephone call with “hello.” Marketing is that. It is figuring out the best way to say hello to somebody. And very often we can think, I don’t wanna bother someone and we won’t say Hello. Dr. Laurie Santos of Yale University runs a very popular course called The Science of Happiness. And one of her tasks is to get people to say hello to strangers on the commute on the L or in your local Starbucks. And everybody thinks nobody wants to be disturbed, but what they find is everybody is begging for you to start a conversation with them. So it is your object objective, it’s your obligation to start saying hello to people. Thank you.

Announcer (29:16):
Thanks for listening to “Run a Profitable Gym.” Please don’t forget to subscribe. Now here’s a final message from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.

Chris Cooper (29:24):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness. Every day, I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.

The post Gym Marketing Masterclass: Your Funnels in Detail appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: Paid Ads

Want a steady stream of new clients?

You need four marketing funnels running at all times.

In this series, I’ve helped you build three funnels: the referral funnel, the content funnel and the organic social media funnel. Now it’s time to add fuel to the fire.

Before you run ads, you should have the three other funnels set up. Each multiplies the value of paid ads: referrals double your return on ad spend, content builds trust with cold leads, and organic social media lets you build a better audience for your ads and give people little samples of your personality. A lead who clicks through your ad with no other context will be very cold.

Paid ads aren’t an art; they’re a science. We teach Two-Brain gym owners how to be scientific about ads in our Growth Course.

Here are the most important things:

1. Know your numbers. It’s easy to say “my ads don’t work!” but when we audit a gym’s marketing funnels, we often see the ads do work but their sales process is broken. Or their lead-nurture process doesn’t work. Or their website doesn’t work. Before you can determine what to spend on paid ads, you need to know your set rate, show rate and close rate. (We teach you what these are and how to measure them in our RampUp program.)

2. Boost your best organic posts first. If you don’t have good traction with your organic posts, you probably won’t be good at creating ads. Think of investing in ads as pouring gasoline on an already-burning fire. The bigger the fire, the greater the impact of the gasoline. If you’re not good at consistently posting on social media, it’s too early to pay for ads. Two-Brain clients can easily build a publishing habit: There are hundreds of posts, images, AI prompts and graphics for them to swipe from our Content Vault.
Spend $5 a day boosting your three best posts before you set up an ad campaign.

3. Set up three ads and test them. Use a mentor to jump through months of trial-and-error, but do not use an agency to run your ads for you at this stage. Remember when I said that paid ads are a science, not an art? That means you’re going to be systematic about testing. Run three ads for at least 14 days, then pick the one that performs best (meaning it creates a measurable increase in leads to your site). If your site doesn’t measure the number of leads you’re getting, go back to Step 1 above. Pick the ad that’s performing best. Shut off the other two ads and dedicate your full ad spend to the working one.

4. If you want, try running two more ads as testers while maintaining your spend on the working ad.

5. Finally, you can outsource the process only when you understand your metrics, have someone who will report on the process and know how to fix the process when it eventually stops working. (This could be months or even years, but eventually every ad campaign will stop working—and you won’t know it’s stopped until you understand your metrics.)

Ad Agency?

Hiring an ad agency before Step 5 will not help you. It might generate traffic, but you won’t know. You won’t maximize your return on ad spend because you won’t have the other pieces in place. Instead, the agency will maximize the spend instead of the return. Their job is to spend the money.

When an agency leaves—as they eventually will—you’ll be back to square one. It’s better to learn to drive before you buy the car.

The top reasons gym owners hire ad agencies is fear: They don’t know how to run ads and they fear they can’t figure it out. We help them do that, and it saves them $3,000 every month in agency costs. Some still decide to hire an agency later, just to save time and energy. I get that. But they’re doing it with their eyes open, and they know how to tell if the agency is doing well with the gym’s money.

When to Run Ads

Should you run paid ads? Yes. After you’ve set up your other funnels.

Do you need to run paid ads? Probably not. I spend $5 per day to run the same ad I’ve run for three years. I’m in a small market, but I also have good referral rates, solid content and consistent social media posts.

We teach clients how to build all these funnels, in order, in our RampUp and Growth programs (and it’s all plug and play).

You didn’t open a gym to learn marketing. But when you opened a gym, you accepted the marketing job. Don’t worry: It’s not complicated when you build your funnels with a mentor.

The post Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: Paid Ads appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: Organic Social Media

What systems drive new clients to your gym?

If you don’t know, your marketing efforts are going to be inconsistent and ineffective.

We teach gym owners to build and operate four funnels at all times, and each funnel leads to a free consultation where gym owners can sell high-value services to clients who will stay for years.

Today, I’ll lay out the social media funnel.

Free Samples!

Think of social media as the “free sample” stands at the grocery store.

The free, snack-sized samples exist to get you interested. If you like the sample, you buy the lasagna and consume the whole tray. Then, hopefully, you make the lasagna part of the weekly rotation in your house.

Social media isn’t enough to replace “real content,” but it can serve as a “sample tray” to get people to consume that real content.

Start by getting good on one platform.

Which one? The one your clients use. If your clients are 30-55, that’s probably Facebook. If they’re a bit younger, that’s probably Instagram. If you’re not sure where your clients consume social content, ask them and then learn about that platform.

Take your larger, more valuable content—I talked about this in the previous post in this series—chop it up into little samples, and put these tidbits on social media. Or you can create separate social posts that lead to your real content.

Remember: Your objective isn’t to win Instagram. Your goal is to get people off Instagram and onto your platform.

Funnel Anatomy

Top of funnel: a social media channel (like Instagram). Post every day and always include a call to action. For example, “DM me for details!” or “click the link to read the whole article!” Even better: Create a lead magnet and use it to start conversations: “Want all 30 keto recipes? Comment below this post and I’ll send it to you!”

Mid-funnel: Start chats with prospective clients to deliver your promise. Pretend you’re standing in front of the person in a line to buy coffee. “Hey! How’s it going? I saw your comment. Thanks for that. How are your workouts going?” Then just carry on the conversation.

Bottom of funnel: Invite them to chat with you in person. This last step is where most gym owners get really shy. But they shouldn’t—you’re not asking the person for a date. The “ask” doesn’t have to feel awkward. Imagine you just met someone who wants to find the local library and you’re headed there tomorrow. “Hey, I’m going there myself—want to meet here and I’ll walk over with you?” For a gym owner: “Hey, I get it—sometimes I fall off the fitness wagon, and I own the damn gym! Want to meet me there tomorrow and I’ll show you around? I’ll bring the coffee!”

The social media funnel should amplify the other funnels you already have in place by creating excitement and curiosity. Remember, if you own a business, social media is your stage—but it isn’t your pulpit. You can turn clients away from your business just as easily as you can turn them toward it.

Key advice: Post daily, and don’t try to be perfect. If you’re in Two-Brain, you can swipe graphics, photos, sample posts, calendars, AI prompts and everything else you need from our Content Vault.

The post Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: Organic Social Media appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: The Content Funnel

Your gym needs more than one way to acquire clients.

And most gyms struggle to get new members because they’re inconsistent in their marketing.

Two-Brain gyms always have four marketing funnels running, and every funnel leads to a free consultation. In the first post in this series, I laid out a referral funnel that replicates your current clients.

Today, I’ll give you the content funnel.

Building Trust and Authority

The content funnel multiplies the effect of every other funnel because it builds trust and authority.

I built my first gym with Yahoo Mail and a weekly newsletter.

I built my second gym with a blog.

I built Two-Brain Business with content—first a blog, then a book, then a podcast, and now a YouTube channel and everything else. We publish to multiple platforms several times a day.

Five years ago, producing daily content for your audience would put you in the top 1 percent of businesses worldwide. Now it puts you in the top 50 percent—that means if you’re not producing daily content, people will choose the gym owners who are.

I’m not talking about social-media posts here: I’m talking about publishing valuable long-form content on a blog, a podcast or YouTube.

Parts of the Content Funnel

Top of funnel: a blog, podcast or YouTube channel. Pick the one that feels most natural to you.

Mid-funnel: your “container” for leads. Push people to one place—either a free Facebook group or your email list. Start conversations with your content and continue conversations on your own platform.

Bottom of funnel: Push clients to book a free consultation. Use sell by chat in your free Facebook Group and specific booking links in your emails.

The most important aspect of the content funnel is consistency. For me, this means investing the first 30 minutes of my day creating content (as I’m doing now, at 6:10 a.m.).

I’ve built every company I own on content marketing: 95 percent of what I build is given away for free. The other 5 percent is expensive. People trust me (thank you) because they “know” me through my content.

Do whatever it takes to produce the content. Two-Brain clients have a huge Content Vault full of resources they can copy and use, including blog posts, emails, lead-nurture scripts, graphics, images, AI prompts and more.

So should you use AI?

If you’re unable to produce daily content at a B+ level, then use AI to generate blog posts or video scripts for you.

If you can produce regular content above a B+ level, you don’t need AI.

But remember that AI will help your competition produce a lot of content now. So do whatever you need to do to ensure your story is being told daily.

The post Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: The Content Funnel appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The 4 Essential Marketing Funnels That Will Grow Your Gym

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Your gym needs more than one way to get clients. The roller coaster that most gyms ride is because they’re not consistent in their marketing. They see something, they try it, they get a few clients, and then they drop it to try the next thing. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and today I’m gonna share the four marketing funnels you need to maintain consistent growth. Successful gyms have up to four marketing funnels working for them all the time. So today I’m gonna lay out each one, from getting attention at the top of the funnel to collecting information to nurturing leads to booking a No Sweat Intro. Two-Brain clients have these broken down step by step, including all the tools required and scripts to use, in our Growth Toolkit. Every funnel that we teach you to build leads to a No Sweat Intro. Every funnel also makes the other three funnels work better because if your referral funnel is working well, then every client that you bring in from your paid ads funnel can become two clients, which improves your return on ad spend.

Chris Cooper (01:01):
So let’s start there. Your referral funnel, you wanna set this one up first. Most gyms treat referrals as a passive process, but no gym owner has time to wait for a client to remember to tell their friends or bring their spouse in. So you have to make this funnel effective by asking for referrals. You have to turn it into an active process. So at the top of this funnel, your current client books a goal review and you say “are you completely satisfied with your progress?” And if they’re satisfied with their progress, then you can ask them to bring their spouse in for a two-on-one private session with you to try out the service. Alternately, if they’re not married or you don’t know who their friends are, you can just say “is there anyone else in your life who would like to see the same progress that you’ve made for yourself?”

Chris Cooper (01:48):
The next step down in that funnel is that you call the potential referral. Again, you’re taking control here. While your client is still sitting with you in the office, you’ve just finished their goal review, you call their friend or their spouse and you say, “Hey Jane, it’s Chris from Catalyst gym. I’m sitting here with Mary. She’d love to invite you in to work out with her. What do you say?” And if you’ve got the client on speaker phone, that’s even better. You could also just text the referral while the client is still with you or email them and CC the client. You wanna have the client, you know, figuratively in the room with you so the referral lead feels a pull to say “okay” because they don’t wanna let their friend down. And then the bottom of the funnel is that you do a two-on-one session and then you ask the referral and the client to do an NSI with you right after that session.

Chris Cooper (02:35):
And you don’t say “so how’d you like it?” Instead, you follow the NSI script, and you sell the benefits of your service, which is fitness, self-love, weight loss, confidence, instead of selling the features, which is like hard workouts that will make you barf. We all know that referrals are the best kind of new clients to get. They are pre-filtered for personality and for price. They have a friend in the gym, so their retention is usually better. And when one client adds a spouse, the whole is more than the sum of their parts. You can really change the lives of their whole family. Because this is so important, I like to get even more directive. So going into the goal review, I know the name of at least one important person in the client’s life. I ask specifically about that person in the goal review.

Chris Cooper (03:22):
This way the client doesn’t have to, you know, brainstorm names or think about who they wanna throw under the bus or even assume that none of their friends would want to join. You take the lead and you will see far greater results. We call this Affinity Marketing, and we teach it in the Growth Toolkit to Two-Brain gyms. The most important part of the referral funnel is this: you never stop doing it. If you try it once and you don’t get a new client, don’t give up. The process requires practice to feel natural. Saving the life of a client’s spouse is worth trying it again. So that’s the referral funnel. And, as a reminder, your gym needs more than one way to get clients. The reason that you’re going up and down with client acquisition is because you try one thing and then you stop doing it and try the next thing.

Chris Cooper (04:08):
Instead, you have to set up four different funnels and let them compound their effect on each other and never stop. So I just shared the referral funnel. Now I wanna share the content funnel. The content funnel multiplies the effect of every other funnel because it builds trust and authority. So I built my first gym with Yahoo Mail and a weekly newsletter back in 2005. I built my second gym with my blog. I built Two-Brain Business with content—first with a blog, then with a book, then with a podcast. And now with YouTube and everything else. Five years ago, producing daily content for your audience would’ve put you in the top 1% of businesses worldwide. Now it puts you in the top 50%. That means if you’re not producing daily content, people will choose the gym owners who are. I’m not talking about social media posts here.

Chris Cooper (05:01):
Not yet. I want real, valuable, long-form content on a blog, on a podcast or on YouTube. So here’s the funnel. Top of the funnel is that blog, podcast or YouTube channel. Pick the one that feels most natural to you. Mid-Funnel is your container for leads. This is like your waiting room. So you wanna push people from your media, your content, into this waiting room. Pick one or the other, either a free Facebook group or your email list. Start conversations with your content and then continue conversations in your waiting room. Okay? Bottom of funnel is where you push a client to book an NSI. If somebody is a good fit, then invite them to meet with you and talk about your service by using sell by chat in your free Facebook group or specific booking links if you’re using an email list instead. Like the referral funnel, the most important thing with the content funnel is consistency. For me, this means investing the first 30 minutes of my day creating content, as I was doing when I wrote this at 6:10 a.m. I have built every company that I own on content marketing. 95% of what I build, what I create, is given away for free. The other 5% is expensive. People trust me—thank you—because they know me through my content. Do whatever it takes to produce the content. Two-Brain clients have a huge Content Vault to copy and use, including blog posts, emails, lead-nurture scripts, lead magnets, graphics, images, social media posts, AI prompts and more. One last note on content: Should you use artificial intelligence—AI like ChatGPT? If you’re unable to produce daily content at a B+ level, then use AI to generate blog posts or video scripts for you at least to start.

Chris Cooper (06:51):
If you can produce regular content above a B+ level, you’re good at it. Then you don’t need AI, but your competition will be producing a lot of content now at a B+ level. Decide what you need to do to not be drowned out. Alright, so now we’ve gone through the referral funnel and the content funnel. Now I wanna share with you the social media funnel. Think of social media as the free sample stands at the grocery store. The free samples exist to get you interested, right? It’s not a full meal, but if you like the sample, you buy the lasagna and then you take it home and you consume it. And then hopefully you love the lasagna enough that you make it part of the weekly rotation in your house. Social media isn’t enough to replace real content, but it can serve as the sample tray to get people to consume the real stuff.

Chris Cooper (07:40):
So start by getting good on one platform. It’s better to be good at one thing than it is to be mediocre at five different platforms. Which platform do you pick? The one your clients use. If your clients are aged 30 to 55, that’s probably Facebook. If they’re a bit younger, that’s probably Instagram. Then you take your content from the content funnel and you chop it up into little samples and you put it on your social media tray and you serve it up to strangers. Or you can create separate posts for social media that lead to your real content. Remember, your goal is not to win Instagram. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 followers on Instagram if none of them click through to book your service. Your goal is to get people off Instagram and onto your platform, into your waiting room, your email list, or your free Facebook group, or even to book straight into an No Sweat Intro.

Chris Cooper (08:33):
So the top of your social media funnel is your social media channel, like Instagram. You’re gonna post every day, and you’re always going to include a call to action. For example, your call to action might be “DM me for details” or “click the link in comments to read the whole article.” Even better is to have a lead magnet up at the top of the funnel, like, “Hey, you want all 30 keto recipes? Just comment keto below this post and I’ll send it over to you.” And what that does is it leads directly to mid-funnel. Mid-Funnel for social media is chats. So you wanna start chats with prospective clients to deliver on your promise or to guide them to an NSI. So pretend that you’re standing in front of the person in line to buy coffee, and you say, “Hey, how’s it going?”

Chris Cooper (09:18):
Then you say, “Hey, I, I saw your comment on my Instagram yesterday. Thanks for that. How are your workouts going?” And then you just carry on the conversation—like you’re good at this. The bottom of the funnel is when you invite them to chat with you in person. And this last step is where a lot of gym owners get shy, but they shouldn’t because you’re not asking the person for a date or to marry you, so you don’t have to feel awkward. Instead, imagine that you just met somebody who’s trying to find a local library and you’re going to the local library tomorrow. What would you say? You would say, “Oh, hey, you know, I’m going there myself. Do you want to meet here tomorrow and I’ll walk over?” Or “I’ll guide you for a gym owner.” This would be like, “Hey, I get it. Sometimes I fall off the wagon, and those are good cookies, right? And I own the gym. Wanna meet me there at the gym tomorrow? And I’ll show you around. I’ll bring the coffee this time.” The social media funnel should amplify the other funnels that you already have in place by creating excitement and curiosity. Remember, if you own a business, social media is your stage, but it’s not your pulpit. You can turn clients off from your business just as easily as you can turn them on. So post daily, but don’t try to be perfect. And if you’re in Two-Brain, you can swipe graphics, photos, sample posts, calendars, AI prompts, and everything else you need from the Content Vault. Alright, so we’ve been through the referral funnel, the content funnel, and the social media free funnel. Now you’re ready to talk about paid ads. The roller coaster again that most gyms get on is because they see something, they try it, they get a few clients, and then they drop it and move on to the next thing.

Chris Cooper (10:52):
And so a lot of people in our “State of the Industry” guide will say, “Yeah, I tried Facebook advertising” and maybe they invested a hundred or even a thousand dollars, but they didn’t take the time to get good at it, and it didn’t work because they didn’t have any other content to build trust. They had no other social media profile to build excitement, and they had no referral network to multiply the results that they were getting from their ads. So paid advertising is really there to just add fuel to a fire that’s already blazing. So before you run ads, you should have all three of those other funnels set up because each multiplies the value of paid ads, right? If you get a client from a paid ad and they in turn bring a referral, that doubles your return on ad spend. The content that you publish and produce builds trust for the cold leads who see your ads.

Chris Cooper (11:39):
And organic social media lets you build a better audience for your ads, letting you retarget people as well as giving them little samples of your personality to taste test. A lead who clicks through your ad with no other context will be a very cold lead and hard to sell. Paid ads are not an art; they’re a science. We teach Two-Brain gym owners how to be scientific about ads in our Growth Program, but here are the most important things. First, know your numbers. It’s easy to say “my ads don’t work.” But when we audit a gym’s marketing funnels, we often see that the ads are working, but their sales process is broken, or their lead nurture process doesn’t work or their website doesn’t work. So before you can determine what to spend on paid ads, you need to know your set rate, your show rate, and your close rate.

Chris Cooper (12:27):
Now we teach you what these are and how to measure them in our RampUp Program. Next, you wanna boost your organic posts first. If you don’t have good traction with your organic posts, you probably won’t be good at creating ads. Think of investing ads as pouring gasoline on a fire that’s already burning. The bigger the fire to start with, the greater the impact of the gasoline. If you’re not good at consistently posting on social media, then it’s too early to pay for ads. Now Two-Brain clients can do this easily. There are hundreds of posts, images, AI prompts, and graphics for ’em to swipe in our Content Vault. The next step with paid ads is to spend $5 a day boosting your three best posts before you start an ad campaign. So set up three ads and test them. Use a mentor to jump through months of trial and error here, but don’t use an agency to run your ads for you at this stage.

Chris Cooper (13:21):
Remember what I said, that paid ads are a science, not an art. That means you’re gonna be systematic about testing. You’re gonna take a scientific approach, so you’re gonna run three different ads for about 14 days. Then outta those three, you’re gonna pick the one that performs the best, meaning that it creates a measurable increase in leads on your website. And if your site doesn’t measure the number of leads that you’re getting, go way back to Number 1, but you’re gonna pick the ad that’s performing best. You’re gonna shut off those other two ads and dedicate your full ad spend to the one that works. Now, if you want, you can try running two other ads as testers while maintaining your ad spend on the working ad. Finally, you can outsource the advertising process only when you understand your metrics, when you have somebody who will report on the process and you know how to fix the process when it eventually stops working.

Chris Cooper (14:11):
This could be months or even years down the road, but eventually every ad campaign will stop working, and you won’t know it until you understand your metrics. So if you hire an ad agency before that last step, it won’t help you. It might generate some traffic, but you won’t know it, and then you won’t maximize your return on ad spend because you won’t have the other pieces in place. Instead, the ad agency will maximize ad spend instead of maximizing return on ad spend because their job is to spend the money. And when an agency leaves, as they always eventually will, you’re gonna be back to square one, right? It’s better to learn how to drive before you buy a car. The Number 1 reason gym owners hire ad agencies is fear. They don’t know how to run ads. And they fear that they can’t figure it out in the time that they have.

Chris Cooper (15:02):
We help them do that, and it saves them $3,000 every month in agency costs. Now, some still decide to hire an agency later just to save the time and the energy, and I get that, but they’re doing it with their eyes open and they know how to tell if the agency is doing well with the gym’s money. Should you run paid ads? Yeah. After you set up your referral funnel, your content funnel, and your social media funnel. Do you need to run paid ads? Probably not. I spend five bucks a day to run the same ad that I’ve run for three years. I’m in a small market, but I also have good referral rates, solid content, and really consistent social media posts. Now we teach all of these in order in our RampUp and Growth programs, and it’s all plug and play for you too.

Chris Cooper (15:48):
You can swipe ad copy, you can swipe pictures, graphics, blog posts, AI prompts, everything. You didn’t open a gym to learn marketing, I get that. But when you open a gym, you accepted the marketing job. It’s not complicated when you build your funnels with a mentor. I’m Chris Cooper. These are the four funnels you need. This podcast is called “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I would love to invite you to join gymownersunited.com, which is our free Facebook group where we provide samples for this stuff, templates and free resources and advice from 7,600 gym owners around the world. We’ll see you there.

The post The 4 Essential Marketing Funnels That Will Grow Your Gym appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: The Referral Funnel

Your gym needs more than one way to get clients.

Most gyms ride a roller coaster because they aren’t consistent in their marketing. They see something, try it, get a few clients and then drop it to try the next thing.

Successful gyms have up to four marketing funnels working for them all the time. In this series, I’m going to lay out each one: from getting attention at the top of the funnel to collecting information to nurturing leads to book a free consultation. Two-Brain clients have these funnels broken down step by step, including all tools and scripts, in our Growth Toolkit.

Every funnel we built leads to a free consultation we call a No Sweat Intro (NSI).

Each funnel also makes the other three funnels work better. If your referral funnel is working well, then every client you bring in from the ads funnel will become two clients, which improves your return on ad spend.

Let’s start with referrals.

The Referral Funnel

Most gyms treat referrals as a passive process. But no gym has time to wait. To make this funnel effective, gym owners simply have to ask for referrals.

Top of funnel: Your current clients book a Goal Review Session in which they meet with a coach to review progress.

If the client is satisfied with progress, you can ask them to bring their spouse in for a two-on-one private session with you to try out the service.

Alternately, you can just say, “Is there anyone else in your life who would like to see the same progress you’ve made?”

Mid-funnel: You call the potential referral.

While your client is still with you in the office, you call their friend or spouse and say, “Hey, Jane, it’s Chris from Catalyst Gym. I’m sitting here with Mary. She’d like to invite you in to work out with her! What do you say?”

You could also text the referral while the client is still with you, or email them and copy the client. You want to have the client “in the room” with you so the referral feels a pull to say “OK!”

Bottom of funnel: You do a two-on-one session, then ask the referral and the client to do an NSI with you right after the session.

Don’t ask “how did you like it?” but instead follow a script and sell the benefits of your service (fitness, self-love, weight loss, etc.), not the features (hard workouts).

Referred Clients Are the Best Clients

We all know that referred clients are the best kind of new members to get. They’re pre-filtered for personality and price. They have a friend in the gym, so their retention is usually better. And when one client adds a spouse, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. You can really change the lives of an entire family!

Because referrals are so important, I like to get even more directive.

Going into a goal review, I make sure I know the name of at least one important person in the client’s life. I ask specifically about that person in the session. This way, the client doesn’t have to brainstorm names or assume that none of their friends would want to join.

Take the lead and you’ll see far greater results. We call this Affinity Marketing, and we teach it in the Growth Toolkit to Two-Brain clients.

The most important aspect of the referral funnel is this: You never stop using it. If you try it once and don’t get a new client, don’t give up. The process requires practice until it feels natural.

Remember, it’s worth trying again and again to save the life of a client’s spouse or best friend.

The post Essential Gym Marketing Funnels: The Referral Funnel appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Co-Working Spaces in Gyms: A Good Idea?

Imagine a client trains at 6 a.m. at your gym and then puts in an eight-hour remote workday inside your building.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this is happening as some gyms now offer co-working spaces to solve clients’ problems and generate additional revenue.

So is it a good idea?

Here’s the WSJ article: “The Hottest New Office is the Gym” by Anne Marie Chaker. 

The 411: The post-pandemic world of remote employment has some people looking for places to work in between the office and the home. And some fitness facilities are capitalizing on this by selling access to co-working spaces.

The cost? About US$500 a month, at least in the Life Time gym profiled in the article. The WSJ also reported that another gym—Biân in Chicago—offers co-working space for $4,000 a year plus a $1,000 startup fee.

So can your bring more revenue into your gym by setting up a co-working space and selling premium packages to clients?

The answer is maybe.

But here’s an even better question: What’s the very best use of every square foot of your space?

Run the Numbers!

About eight or 10 years ago, it was trendy to try and put coffee bars and smoothie stations in gyms.

The idea works in principle: Clients buy coffee and post-workout shakes from you instead of the shop down the street. That raises average revenue per member.

Same deal with co-working spaces: You’re using your existing space to make money from current members or new members who would join to train in your gym and work in your space.

But in practice, coffee bars, smoothie stations and co-working spaces can cause trouble:

They take you out of your area of expertise—coaching fitness.Food services require supplies, storage and equipment.Co-working spaces require desks, décor, AV equipment and internet bandwidth, and perhaps build-out costs if you put in a conference room, cubicles or booths for private calls.You have to have a plan to sell products or services that fall outside your core offering.Coffee and smoothie bars require staff or very regular supervision and cleaning at minimum. Co-working spaces require management at minimum, and you’ll likely have some audio-visual and internet problems someone has to deal with promptly.The space dedicated to a new offering might create more revenue and fewer headaches if you used it another way.

I’ll just focus on the last one because it’s the most important.

Gym owners would be wise to maximize revenue per square foot. This is related to a key Two-Brain principle of ensuring all expenses generate ROI.

The key word: maximize.

That means you must do more than just avoid bad decisions: You must also avoid “suboptimal decisions.”

The best way to do that: Run the numbers. Then run the numbers for a different plan. And another. Compare them all.

Here’s basic example that doesn’t address all the variables, which include the risk of vacant space and other considerations:

You might find that you can sell 10 monthly co-working memberships at $500 apiece. That’s $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year. But the buildout costs of the space are going to be $100,000, which includes some walls, desks, furniture, AV equipment, carpeting, décor, lighting and additional bathrooms.

Compare that to this scenario:

Run just 60 PT sessions per month—about two per day—in the space at a rate of $80 per session. Use equipment you already have and pay a trainer four-ninths of the revenue. That’s $4,800 a month gross with no buildout costs, and after paying the coach about $35 per session, you’d clear about $2,688 a month delivering a service you already know how to market.

I’m not suggesting co-working spaces are a bad idea. My point is that The Wall Street Journal is suggesting the “hottest new office is the gym.” That might be true. But it might not.

As a gym owner, the best plan whenever you see a news story like this is to ignore the hype, do your research and talk to a mentor. Then choose the best action to grow your business.

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