See, it’s something that a lot of Personal Trainers, and small business owners in general don’t know how to answer…
You could answer based on how much money you’re making…
How many clients you have…
How many hours of training you’re doing…
While these might be indicative of the success of your marketing, they are not the right answers.
A multitude of factors will affect all of these things; such as how much you charge, how many new clients you have versus recurring, how many referrals you get and much more.
How You Should Define Success in Your Fitness Marketing
Seems a simple enough question, huh?
But how would you answer it? What do you define as ‘working’ or ‘not working’?
More to the point, what would you define as a success?
Marketing is all about Return on investment (ROI).
Let’s look at a scenario to explain what this means in the real world. To keep things simple, we will have two people, they are both Personal Trainers and they charge the same amount of money for their sessions.
Person A spends £500 per month on marketing.
Person B spend £500 per month on marketing.
They spend their £500 differently, however..
What if I told you that Person A is randomly throwing their money at Facebook Ads to try and drive traffic to their site and on average spends £500 to get one new client.
Meanwhile Person B has a strategic approach that utilises SEO to gets them to the top of Google search for the local area. They use Google Adwords and Facebook adverts to retarget their visitors and keep them coming back to read his latest content. The average client acquisition cost is just £100.
That means for the same investment, Person B is getting 5 times as many clients. They are getting a significantly better return on investment.
Let’s look at a scenario to explain what this means in the real world. To keep things simple, we will have two people, they are both Personal Trainers and they charge the same amount of money for their sessions.
Person A spends £500 per month on marketing.
Person B spend £500 per month on marketing.
They spend their £500 differently, however..
What if I told you that Person A is randomly throwing their money at Facebook Ads to try and drive traffic to their site and on average spends £500 to get one new client.
Meanwhile Person B has a strategic approach that utilises SEO to gets them to the top of Google search for the local area. They use Google Adwords and Facebook adverts to retarget their visitors and keep them coming back to read his latest content. The average client acquisition cost is just £100.
That means for the same investment, Person B is getting 5 times as many clients. They are getting a significantly better return on investment.
How To Get The Best Return On Investment
Imagine that both Trainers charge an average of £500 per client, per month.
Month 1:
Person A: 1 new client at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £0
Person B: 5 new clients at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £2,000 profit
Month 2:
Person A: 1 new + 1 old client (2 total) at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £500 profit
Person B: 5 new + 5 old clients (10 total) at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £4,500 profit
…and so on. You get the picture.
Imagine the average client trains for 6 months…
With just the clients from month 1
Person A makes £2,500 (1 client (£500) times 6 months, minus £500 marketing spend)
Person B makes £14,500 (5 clients (£2500) times 6 months, minus £500 marketing spend)
That’s just from 1 month’s new business. Do the maths if you like for if that was the same every month…
Month 1:
Person A: 1 new client at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £0
Person B: 5 new clients at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £2,000 profit
Month 2:
Person A: 1 new + 1 old client (2 total) at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £500 profit
Person B: 5 new + 5 old clients (10 total) at £500 - £500 spent on marketing = £4,500 profit
…and so on. You get the picture.
Imagine the average client trains for 6 months…
With just the clients from month 1
Person A makes £2,500 (1 client (£500) times 6 months, minus £500 marketing spend)
Person B makes £14,500 (5 clients (£2500) times 6 months, minus £500 marketing spend)
That’s just from 1 month’s new business. Do the maths if you like for if that was the same every month…
Let's Scale This Up...
What is the difference between Person A and Person B?
Person B works with experts in their field, to ensure that their money is going to be spent wisely and that they get an impressive return on investment for their marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, Person A is trying to do it all alone. They think that spending half of their investment hiring experts means they will get less leads and clients, because they have less money to put in to the adverts.
They do not recognise the value of getting things done right and how much money that can save.
Now Person B winds up with 5 times the return of Person A; AND they don’t even have to do most of the work. Someone else is doing it for them.
This means that not only do they get 5 times as many clients coming through the door per £ spent, they also have more free time to do what they love doing and serve their clients. Meanwhile Person A is stressed out, spending half of their week writing blogs, emails and tinkering with their website to try and improve conversions…while not having much time to actually get paid for training people!
Person B works with experts in their field, to ensure that their money is going to be spent wisely and that they get an impressive return on investment for their marketing efforts.
Meanwhile, Person A is trying to do it all alone. They think that spending half of their investment hiring experts means they will get less leads and clients, because they have less money to put in to the adverts.
They do not recognise the value of getting things done right and how much money that can save.
Now Person B winds up with 5 times the return of Person A; AND they don’t even have to do most of the work. Someone else is doing it for them.
This means that not only do they get 5 times as many clients coming through the door per £ spent, they also have more free time to do what they love doing and serve their clients. Meanwhile Person A is stressed out, spending half of their week writing blogs, emails and tinkering with their website to try and improve conversions…while not having much time to actually get paid for training people!
Are These Numbers Real?
No, they aren’t based on anything real, they are nice round numbers used to demonstrate the point of this post.
Person A will slowly build their business, but will be working a lot, stressed out and likely suffering from fluctuating income and some months where nothing seems to be going right.
Person B will VERY quickly be at a position where they hit capacity and need to start hiring trainers to work underneath them, expanding their facility to cater to more people, etc. Exponential growth.
Which business would you rather run?
Person A will slowly build their business, but will be working a lot, stressed out and likely suffering from fluctuating income and some months where nothing seems to be going right.
Person B will VERY quickly be at a position where they hit capacity and need to start hiring trainers to work underneath them, expanding their facility to cater to more people, etc. Exponential growth.
Which business would you rather run?
Hire Fitness Marketing Expert!
Being self-employed is hard. You have to wear dozens of different hats to deal with the various different parts of running a business, not to mention all of the time spent on education and practicing to be the best trainer that you can be.
Many of these skills are completely different and it can be hard, stressful and unsatisfying having to shift gears all the time. Think about it, imagine spending the morning staring at the code on the back end of your website, trying to geek out and understand Google’s algorithms to get your SEO working, and then having to shift gears and get in touch with the empathy and human connection required to serve your clients in the afternoon. It’s draining and on rough days, you end up snapping at your clients and getting frustrated when they can’t do an exercise correctly.
The value of hiring experts is that you don’t need to go through the harsh learning curve, and you don’t need to switch hats all of the time. You can focus purely on the things that you love to do, are an expert at yourself and that deliver massive value to your clients…like training them!
Plus, of course…the significant increase in the money your business is bringing in.
For more information regarding hiring an expert, visit our personal trainer marketing services page.
Many of these skills are completely different and it can be hard, stressful and unsatisfying having to shift gears all the time. Think about it, imagine spending the morning staring at the code on the back end of your website, trying to geek out and understand Google’s algorithms to get your SEO working, and then having to shift gears and get in touch with the empathy and human connection required to serve your clients in the afternoon. It’s draining and on rough days, you end up snapping at your clients and getting frustrated when they can’t do an exercise correctly.
The value of hiring experts is that you don’t need to go through the harsh learning curve, and you don’t need to switch hats all of the time. You can focus purely on the things that you love to do, are an expert at yourself and that deliver massive value to your clients…like training them!
Plus, of course…the significant increase in the money your business is bringing in.
For more information regarding hiring an expert, visit our personal trainer marketing services page.
