“HOW TO EFFECTIVELY MARKET YOUR FITNESS & WELLNESS PROGRAMS”

1. “HOW TO EFFECTIVELY MARKET YOUR FITNESS & WELLNESS PROGRAMS” Seth Hickerson, MS, CSCS Assistant Director, Fitness and Wellness The University of Richmond

2. PRESENTATION OVERVIEW • Marketing your fitness and wellness programs can be challenging, especially with such a complex and dynamic industry. This presentation will cover strategies and tips to help you promote your programs effectively and offer insight on how to find and offer the types of classes and programs that participants want.

3. LEARNING OUTCOMES: • How to develop and utilize a marketing plan • Marketing Strategies and Tips for on/off campus • Keys to offering classes/programs participants want

4. AREAS TO DISCUSS • 1. Marketing Plan development and implementation • 2. Strategies such as Door hangers/display board/open house • 3. Partnership with other departments such as we did with Athletics…Corporate sponsors get discount to offset marketing options • 4. Table at local businesses, grocery stores • 5. Hiring qualified and motivated instructors (word of mouth is everything) • 6. Train the trainer workshops

5. Globo-Gym http://www.truveo.com/Dodgeball-Globo-Gym-Commercial/id/3270136261

6. ELEVATOR SPEECH • The elevator speech is a very powerful sales tool for almost everyone. Here are the six basics of constructing an elevator speech: • What is your product/service/solution? • Who is the customer it is intended for? • What need or problem does it address? • What does it do? • How does it work and what are the benefits to me? • Why are you different and better than others?

7. MARKETING PLAN – Development and Implementation • The marketing plan at the Weinstein Center for Recreation and Wellness was developed to provide guidelines for departmental marketing. • The plan is now posted on our shared drive netfiles, which will give everyone in the department the ability to view the plan and check the status of pending materials and/or documents relevant to marketing.

8. STRATEGIES • DISPLAYS: • Develop an eye catching display board that advertises revenue generating program area such as FIP, Memberships, Special Events and Facility Rentals. • Display can be set up at on and off campus sites and sign can be specifically “built” to attract target audiences and invoke questions. • PRINT (Collaborate with Athletics/HR...anyone you can) • Full-page advertisement in UR football yearbook • Full-page advertisement in UR basketball yearbook • Orientation Video: • Develop a 5 minute orientation video that highlights facilities and programs which can be show at new employee orientations, open houses, community events and festivals. You can also link it on your web for virtual tour. • OPEN HOUSE: • Our department will host 4 open houses a year. They will be scheduled during specific times of the year and will focus on attracting specific audiences.

9. PARTNERSHIPS • ATHLETICS: • Our department is collaborating with Athletics to offer Corporate Sponsor Memberships at a discounted rate. In return for offering the discounted memberships to our corporate sponsors, athletics will provide marketing via: • To provide the Weinstein Center a working relationship with Athletics by assisting in promotional and branding opportunities at Richmond Spiders’ athletic contests. • To increase the visibility of the Weinstein Center in the Richmond market through an aggressive marketing campaign with the Richmond Spiders and to drive memberships to select audiences via the following strategies. • RADIO: • One (1) 30-second commercials for the following Richmond athletic contests to be aired on ESPN Radio and all night games also aired on the Wolf 93.1 - Football game broadcasts (11) - Men’s Basketball game broadcasts (29) - Baseball broadcasts (10) • One (1) 30-second spot on all football and basketball coaches show broadcasts

10. How well you deliver your services and help your clients (give value)... is marketing! • If you do it well, your clients will stay with you longer, buy more from you, be more inclined to tell others about you and more open and responsive to your referral programming. If you do it poorly, your clients will probably stop working with you and may even tell others of their bad experience with you.

11. How you dress... is marketing! • If you look sharp and professional, you'll be perceived that way. If not - not. That perception affects your ability to retain existing clients and acquire new clients. • Looking the part is more than half the battle.

12. How you speak... is marketing! • If you're confident, knowledgeable and informative (not just an adult “babysitter/rep counter”), you will be respected, treated and perceived as a professional. Obviously, this affects your ability to acquire and retain clients.

13. How you look... is marketing! • You don't have to be a “musclehead or hardbody”, but it helps to look fit. It may not be fair, but how you look affects how you are perceived (there's that important word again), and therefore affects your ability to acquire and retain clients and perhaps, members.

14. How you communicate with prospects... is marketing! • This (external) marketing, utilizing various media (direct mail, public speaking, publicity, internet, articles, radio, etc.) should be crafted to DIFFERENTIATE you and clearly delineate how and why you are UNIQUELY qualified to provide the solution your prospects WANT. If you're just doing what everyone else is doing, your MESSAGE will drown in the sea of sameness and never be acted upon.

15. How you communicate with clients... is marketing! • This (internal) marketing, generally taking the form of more PERSONALIZED contact via direct mail newsletters and letters, telephone and email, should always reinforce your UCA: Unique Competitive Advantage (you are always subtly re-selling yourself with success stories, referral programming and new products and services) and EDUCATE, INFORM and COACH.

16. How you communicate with existing and potential strategic allies... is marketing! • Athletics (games/events) • Human Resources (Employee Wellness) • Local Community Businesses (Ukrops)

17. How your gym, studio and equipment looks and functions... is marketing! • The great Walt Disney realized that the cleanliness of his amusement park did NOT fall under "operations," but rather under "marketing." His parks are so clean that when Aunt Sarah comes home she exclaims, "you wouldn't believe how CLEAN Disneyworld is!" That's word of mouth - that's marketing! Marketing is everything you do to get and keep clients for the lifetime of your business...

18. Fitness Marketing Power Pointsby Eric Ruth, President of Fitness Marketing Systems in Raleigh, NCLearn more at http://www.howtosellfitness.com/ultimate.html • 1. Sell benefits, not features: People never have, nor will they ever, buy personal training. They buy a solution to their problem, a result, a benefit. The better you are at articulating the benefits of doing business with you and then delivering those benefits, the more business you’ll get. • 2. Be unique: The most important question you can ask yourself is “Why should someone choose me over and above any other option, including doing nothing at all?” If you don’t have a compelling answer to that question, you are a commodity, and commodities can generally only be sold based on price. • 3. Get your phones working: Having your phone answered by a live person will dramatically improve your lead capture. If someone is “hot” enough to call you now, the last thing you want them to get is an answering machine or voicemail (unless that’s the intended outcome, as with the “hotline” fitness marketing tactic I teach). Have a virtual assistant to whom you can forward your calls while you’re training. If having your phone answered “live” results in just one new client a month, it’s money well spent.

19. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 4. Capture contact information: Every prospect who calls you MUST be captured. This is one of the easiest, yet most overlooked, fitness marketing strategies. A simple phone script should be followed for every inquiry to ensure contact information is captured, allowing for proper and complete follow-up. Your fitness marketing efforts are being squandered if you are not capturing leads and following up. You capture contact information by offering something, i.e. “Mrs. Jones, I understand you’re interested in knowing our pricing, and I’ll be glad to share that information with you, but you won’t properly understand all that we do for you if I simply give you a price. So I’d like to mail you our complete information pack…” • 5. Understand the lifetime value of your clients: If you don’t know how much your average client is worth to you, you do not know how much you can spend to acquire one (we all buy our customers in some way or another), you cannot accurately test and measure new ways to increase that value, and frankly, you’re abdicating responsibility, and therefore control, of your business. This is one of the most critical numbers you need to know to effectively develop a fitness marketing gameplan. • 6. Find ways to increase the lifetime value of your clients: The real money in any business is made by increasing the frequency and/or size of transactions with each client or extending the lifetime. Evaluate your service and product offerings and create new ways to increase, enhance and extend the lifetime of your clients.

20. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 7. Get your internal fitness marketing working: All too often we focus the vast majority of our efforts on external marketing (getting new clients) and practically ignore our existing clients, when it should be the other way around. Go above and beyond to ensure each and every client gets a “wow” experience from doing business with you. When your internal fitness marketing is working properly, it alleviates a lot of the external fitness marketing pressures because cash flow is good and referrals are flowing. • 8. Use welcome gifts and “stick letters”: Each new client should receive some sort of welcome gift from you (possibly a basket with a good book on fitness [yours?], a shirt with your company name, sample of a supplement you sell, etc.). Each client should receive a series of “stick” letters (make the sale stick, overcome buyer’s remorse, begin compliance programming). I don’t care if you’re seeing the client three or four times a week, receiving a sequence of personal letters with helpful information will go a long way towards cementing the relationship, overcoming compliance issues, maintaining motivation, stimulating referrals and generating testimonials.

21. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 9. Niche your services: I just got off the phone with a new Ultimate Personal Trainer Marketing Program Member who is giving birth in five days. My recommendation – immediately begin offering post natal services to other new mothers. There are so many niche opportunities it boggles the mind. Pre and post gastric bypass is another example. Pick one or two and begin offering specialized services and/or products specifically for those people. You can charge much higher fees and quickly become the dominant force in that niche (a big fish in a little pond). • 10. Use target farming: Dear neighbor letters should go out to everyone meeting your demographic requirements within a 1-2 mile radius of your studio/home/gym. 200 letters per month, every month, will enable you to personally communicate with 2400 of your “neighbors” each year. • 11. Sell cures, not prevention: Use graphic, powerfully emotional words and pictures to articulate and illustrate the benefits of your cure. Target those who already want your cure. Find ways to get in front of those people whether in person, through the mail, internet, television, publicity, advertising, etc. • 12. Target your market: Not nearly enough time or mental energy is invested by most of us brainstorming ways to get our message to our target market. If you think your target market is everyone who is overweight, you are in trouble. You must offer your services to those who WANT what you offer. The second most important question you can ask yourself (first was revealed in #2) is, “How can I most effectively reach and communicate with those who want what I offer?”

22. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 13. Be an information marketer: Find ways to inexpensively deliver helpful information to large numbers of potential prospects. Example: The Resident Expert model I reveal in the Ultimate Personal Trainer Marketing Program – visit every business in your area that has 20 – 500 employees and offer to provide a productivity enhancement program via email whereby you send fitness tips to their employees. • 14. Work backwards: If you’re doing $8K/month in sales now and want to do $25K/month, determine what it will require to do that by working backwards from your goal. It takes as much effort to increase sales 100% as it does to increase sales 25%. Be aggressive with your goals (within reason) and detail the steps necessary to get you where you want to be by starting with the end in mind. • 15. Use a database: The money is in the list. But the list must be good. The best lists are generated by you (lead generation). Phil Kaplan talks about touching five people a day. We recently discussed this topic in one of the exclusive ‘reverse mastermind’ consulting sessions we do with fitness professionals. You goal should be to touch and capture contact information for five folks per day who have an interest in health and fitness and/or weight loss. Plug them into your database. Send them a personal note. Follow up.

23. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 16. Be disciplined: Effective fitness marketing, just like effective fitness, requires discipline. If you do nothing other than #17, and are disciplined in its implementation and follow-through, your business will grow steadily and predictably. Most people don’t have the discipline to make it work. Do you? • 17. ABM: Always Be Marketing. Fitness marketing is everything you do to get and keep clients for the lifetime of your business. Marketing is your business. Because without clients, you don’t have a business. The more fitness marketing systems you employ to generate new leads, convert those leads to clients and extend and enhance the lifetime value of those clients, the more money you will make, the more value you will deliver and the happier you and everyone you touch will be. • 18. Know your numbers: You’re in business and business is about numbers. You have to know your numbers. There are many numbers that are important, but most of all you should be reviewing a profit and loss statement each month. You have to know the state of your business and the numbers don’t lie. Get an accountant if you don’t have one already. Or get someone to do your books and provide you with a P/L to review each and every month. Know where your money is coming from and where it’s going.

24. Fitness Marketing Power Points • 19. Communicate regularly and consistently: Write! Writing can be one of your most valuable fitness marketing strategies. Keep a notebook with you at all times and jot down ideas as they come to you. Ideas about everything. These ideas will become the foundation of your communications with your clients and prospects. They will be the seeds of your articles, news releases, newsletters, web copy, etc. If you don’t do this, when it comes time to write something, you’ll stare at a blank screen and freeze up. The two most important skills for any business person are speaking and writing. Effective communication is vital. Do what’s necessary to master it. • 20. Get things done: My friend and superstar personal training studio owner, Forrest Walden, is what I call a goal-achieving machine. Not yet 30 years old, he’s already dominating the PT studio business. He’s a regular guy in many ways. What sets him apart is laser-like focus and consistent follow-through. He makes goals, breaks them down into bite-sized chunks, then bites them off one at a time. He gets more done in a week than most do in a month. Make your to-do list the day before, then crank through it during the day. The sense of accomplishment you experience will be awesome.