Effective Lead Generation: Proven Techniques to Attract Quality Leads

In this episode of The Pilates Business Podcast, host Seran Glanfield unravels the secrets to effective lead generation. 

You will gain tips on attracting quality leads, understanding your ideal client, leveraging social media, the power of partnerships, content marketing, and email campaign mastery. 

Tune in to this episode to unlock the secrets of sustainable growth and community-building!

GRAB YOUR FREE RESOURCE:
The Studio Owner's Guide to MASTERING REELS

📲 Follow Seran on Instagram @seran_spring_three

❤️ Loved this episode? Leave a review - your review helps spread the word about the show and I read each and every one!

🎧 Never miss a new episode! Be sure to follow or subscribe to stay up to date

Work with Seran:

🌟 Join the Thrive Membership and get the support and accountability you need as you grow your business

🌟Enroll in the Marketing Intensive and get everything you need to master your marketing and finally build a thriving studio business

Join my FREE FB group - and ask me your biz questions!

🤳 Join the Growing A Studio Business Facebook Community

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

In the ever-evolving landscape of this increasingly competitive boutique fitness industry, the epitome of success is consistent and sustainable growth, and at the heart of this journey lies effective lead generation. That is, attracting new clients into your studio a really critical element that truly leads to your long-term success. In this episode, I'm exploring various proven ways to attract really quality people into your studio, ensuring that each step you take moves you towards the studio business you really want. Well, hi there, I'm Sarah. In Glenfield. I'm a business and marketing strategist just for boutique fitness studio owners like you. If you're ready to be inspired and make a bigger impact, you're in the right place. All you need are a few key strategies, the right mindset and some support along the way. Join me as I share the real-life insights that will help you grow a sustainable and profitable studio.

Speaker 1: 1:11

This is the Pilates Business Podcast. Welcome back to the Pilates Business Podcast. I'm Sarah and I am thrilled that you're here with me again today. Now, I was just out taking a walk this morning thinking about how the year is going so far, what I'm hearing people are experiencing in their studios and what I wanted to share with you on this episode today. I think, upon some reflection and thinking about this and some conversations I've been having with studio owners this month.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I think that one of the most challenging aspects of being a studio owner and a business owner is the consistent focus that is required to create that consistent growth. No matter who you are or what you think, or what you're told, when you open up your dashboard on your booking sketch software or your studio management software, you want to see those numbers increasing every month, don't you? You want to see, at least year over year, an increase. It's that consistency in growth that really, truly, I think, leads us to feeling really good about our business. It doesn't really matter how good you are at customer service or teaching those classes, or the experience overall you deliver in your studio or the relationships that you have with your studio clients. At some point you will also need to be consistent about attracting new clients into your world, into your business.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Really being effective at what we call lead generation is truly multifaceted. There is not one way to do this or one way that always works. In fact, when it comes to getting new clients, it actually requires quite a deep understanding of your target audience, a really clear and compelling marketing message, as well as using all of the different tools you have available at your fingertips, from social media to digital online media, to strategic collaborations and so much more and just like nailing the perfect teaser effectively, generation truly does require a level of focus and a little bit of consistency and kind of that sense of just kind of going for it. So I think having a conversation about lead generation is always a good idea, not mostly, because I think for many, especially in many Pallati studios that work really closely with their clients and that develop these deeper relationship with their clients, it's often the part of that marketing that is most put off, is most put to the bottom of the to-do list until it becomes a real problem, and I don't like you to get to that point. In fact, I like you to be very proactive about both attract marketing alongside retention marketing and being very consistent about nurturing your clients throughout the customer journey. So I don't ever want to see you being super reactive and I think that when you have or I know that when you have systems in place to attract clients in, to convert them into your regular clients and then to retain those clients, you do not have to be reactive at all. You do not need to have to be putting out fires or stressing out when you open up your dashboard and look at those numbers, because you've got systems and activities in place that keep you consistent and focused on all of these different elements in your business. So having conversations regularly about some of these things that perhaps we might have been not thinking about or putting off and is one of the reasons why I'm here with you always every single week and so lead generation is really important. Visibility for your business is really important, and I know that it's January and I know that you're a little bit busier than you might normally be compared to some other months of the year, and so you might not really be thinking about, oh how can I put my studio out there right now, but I still think it's really important and really really necessary.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Okay, now, when I talk about a lead or lead generation, I'm talking about how you can get people who out from outside of your studio who are not not a client yet and have never been a client. These are people who are new to your business and what we call leads or are actually people, and they're people who might have an interest in becoming your client and perhaps have shown some indication that they are people who are interested in what you do. And as that lead becomes, I say, closer to the point of sale, where they get what we call warmer and warmer and warmer as a lead. And the hot leads are those people who are right in there in the mix, perhaps about to hit by on your intro offer and are about to become your client and take that step forward.

Speaker 1: 6:24

And so in your world right now, you've got a lot of people around you who are watching your business, and you don't know it. You may not know it, you may not feel like it, but you do. You have a lot of people who are aware that you exist, who are not yet in your world, that you know of. You haven't actually seen them or met them, and they may not have really visited your website or seen your social media just yet. They may have heard about you from a friend or have been recommended to you by someone else, and so you have this pool of people around you that we would call leads, who are cold leads, and when they become to perhaps be more curious about your business, they might become warm leads, and when they get to the point where perhaps they've reached out or they've created an account or they've checked out your website or they've sent you an email and got it in touch or chatted with you, then they become even warmer leads or even hot leads, and so when you are sort of thinking about how you can or who you can pull into your studio, we've always like to say that those that are the warmest leads are those who are more likely to become your clients, and those who are the coldest leads are perhaps a little further away, further down that path, a little further away from your studio and becoming your client. But that's not to say that we shouldn't be looking at bringing some of those people a little closer to your business, a little bit closer to making that decision, to becoming your client. So leads is sort of one term that covers kind of actually quite a lot of different types of people at different points or different stages of the customer journey. So when I talk about a lead, I mean someone who has not yet become your client or probably not yet even entered your studio.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Now, when it comes to leads, I think that we can look around your studio and in your town and in your city and you all see that there's many, many, many people who could be your clients, and you might be wondering where are they all? Where are they all, those people? And when it comes to leads, though, we don't want just anybody in your studio, and I know that we're often taught, especially in teacher trainings, that anybody should be doing, everybody should be doing what you teach. Everybody should be doing Pilates, everybody should be doing Bar, and it is possible for everybody to do these modalities. But there are some people who are perhaps a little bit more likely to choose your studio because perhaps they're more aligned with your business, perhaps they're more aligned with your brand, perhaps they're more aligned with your modality that you offer in your studio.

Speaker 1: 8:54

So not all leads are created equal, and we absolutely want to make sure that the people who ultimately choose to try your introductory offer or to book their first class with you are people who are genuinely interested in becoming a client in your studio. And so, when it comes to leads, you want to think of quality as your core strength. This is the fundamental muscle group, right? You need to build everything else around. You want to have quality leads. A hundred sort of lukewarm, random leads won't give you the return on the investment of time and energy and even some hardened revenue that even 10 super engaged prospects will.

Speaker 1: 9:43

So quality of leads is really, really important, and that's when we want to make sure that, in order to get quality leads, we want to focus on people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. So it's not just about filling classes. It's about creating that community of people who feel a sense of belonging to your studio, to your studio's community, as well as to each other in the studio. And that's when we see that wonderful energy exist in a studio, and this is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of free anything. Anyone who's ever done a group on or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 10:24

You often tell me that these things don't work so well because you don't tend to get that quality lead, that person who is genuinely interested in signing up for a specific for your studio because of who you are and what you do. So we want to make sure that we are getting quality leads first of all. So the question is, how do we get quality leads? Because we're not just talking about getting anyone in. We want to get some people in who are really excited to be there, who are really keen to learn and to move in the way that you do what you do in your studio.

Speaker 1: 10:58

So before you could even really start on this process of attracting quality leads, you need to know who it is you most want to bring into the studio. Maybe it is the working professional looking for early morning or late evening classes, or maybe it is the person who is able to be more flexible during the day, or who is a stay at home parent who needs perhaps flexibility, or is able to be more flexible with their time during the day, but maybe during school hours only. And you want to think about who this person is and what their motivations are and what their routines are and how that fits with the way that you work with your clients, your schedule and so on. And it's really really important to really know your ideal client. And I talk a lot about this in my marketing intensive program and you've heard me talk about it here as well before. But knowing your ideal client is really important because once you have your target, once you know who it is you want to bring into the studio, you can tailor your marketing plan, campaigns and messaging to really resonate with them deeply. So you remember, you're not just selling Pilates or bar or yoga. You're selling more than that. You're selling only what you can do in your unique studio and you can really tailor the way you position your studio and what you do only when you know exactly who it is you want your marketing to speak to.

Speaker 1: 12:35

Now, one of the things that I do inside of my marketing intensive program, which is so incredibly valuable to these studio owners that go through that program, is to take them through the exercise of understanding their ideal clients and creating what we call an ideal client profile. And this is where you kind of dive into that ideal client on a bit of a deeper level. And I am not talking about what their favorite cocktail is or perhaps what they like to eat for dinner. What I care about is what their needs are, what their motivations are, what their wants are and what their habits and routines look like. And the exercise that I take the studio owners inside of my marketing intensive through really helps to understand a lot of these deeper motivators for your to drive your clients to your studio, because once we know what people are coming in looking for and how they're feeling when they find you, and also what their hesitations are, what might be holding them back. We can really come craft some very compelling messaging around that that helps them understand your studio a little bit better. And so I know there's a lot of I don't know what to say, how to call it, but it's, you know, a little bit of.

Speaker 1: 13:53

There's a lot of different ways of doing this. I've seen, you know, some pretty awful ideal client profile exercises out there. So this is not, like I said, you know what your favorite cocktail is or what they want for dinner or where they like to go on vacation. This is about really understanding them on a much deeper level and understanding what drives them, and so it's really important to, if you do do this exercise, to do it correctly, because then you have a very valuable tool in your back pocket, and often we lean on this tool over and over and over again when deciding all sorts of things in our business things like how to raise your prices and when to raise your prices, things like whether or not to schedule something specific or new to on the class schedule, when we're thinking about even who to hire and who's going to be a good fit for your client base. So having an ideal client profile, and having a good one that really can help you make business decisions can be incredibly powerful.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Okay, so I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent, but this is super important to really know your ideal client, know who it is you're talking to and know what it is they need to know in order to understand and get excited about what you're doing in your studio. So we also want to make sure that, as we're thinking about how we can reach those ideal clients and making sure that we're getting the type of people into our studio who we know are interested in being your client for the long term, the next step is how do we find those people? Right Now, we know there is a lot of power in digital media and, as much as we love to hate it, it is actually one of the gifts that we have available to us at our fingertips to be able to put your business in front of many, many eyes, and the digital realm truly is where most people hang out, and that includes your potential leads and that includes people who you want to have come into your studio. And when you can harness the power of digital media and be accessible and available and findable online, then you'll find that you start to open up, kind of the gates of what's possible for your business. So you want to, for sure, be present and active in the places that you know your ideal clients are, and you want to make sure that you're showing up in a way that is showing your expertise, that is, sharing your unique value proposition, what you do in your studio, and really giving people a lot of insight into how it feels to be your client. And the beauty as much as we love to hate it, the beauty of what we have at our fingertips today is we have a lot of different ways we can do that, whether it's on TikTok, whether it's on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or on any of the other platforms we have available to us that are able to give us the ability to showcase our studios.

Speaker 1: 16:53

Okay, so we do want to make sure we are active online, alright, and this gives you a lot of visibility. Now I'll tell you what I told the studio owner last week, which when we were talking about this in a lot of detail, which is that you don't often see an immediate response to your digital media marketing efforts, especially if you're not putting any paid advertisements out there. So if you're not paying to play, I should say, then you may not see an immediate response, but you will see that people tend to know who you are or engage with you or know you exist, the more consistent that you can be in promoting what you do in your studio and promoting your business in a way that is thoughtful and compelling to your target audience. Okay, so you know, I think digital media is really really important. What I will also say is we do not want to neglect those personal connections that you have in your community. You certainly want to find ways to leverage partnerships and to network. So look around you and look at all of the other local businesses or influencers who are aligned with your brand values. You know, a shout out from a popular local coffee shop or a collaboration or event can do so much for your visibility and your credibility. So use those and make those connections and network locally. It truly does pay you back in bucket loads.

Speaker 1: 18:31

On the same note, events and local community participation in those sorts of events or sponsorship or other gifts, that kind of keep on giving, and these often give you the opportunity to sort of get that first step of connecting with new people in your community who don't yet know you well enough to know if they want to come and take a class with you, and it opens up the opportunity for you to be able to make that invitation and to invite them in. So when you introduce your studio and you know exactly what to say to that person who walks up to your stand at the local farmers market, for example, you'll be able to know exactly how to invite them in and know exactly what to say. That's going to make them feel like you are the perfect studio for them. All right, so you certainly want to use local events and participate in local community events, sponsor local events. Doing those sorts of things gives you a lot of visibility locally. That really helps you to stay top of mind amongst your potential clients.

Speaker 1: 19:33

Now we also don't want to overlook my most favorite way of communicating with your clients, which is email campaigns, and I want to remind you all that, yes, email still is very, very powerful incredibly powerful actually when it comes to making sales in your business. So do not underestimate the power of a well-crafted email sequence. It truly is your chance to keep a conversation going, to nurture new people in your world and ultimately to turn them into clients who really, truly love what you do. So when you use email well and you use the power of the segmentation and all that's possible within your email marketing campaigns, you truly can move people kind of through that customer journey from being perhaps just a little bit of a warm lead to being not just a hot lead but actually a wonderful and enthusiastic paying client. Now it often takes anywhere between five to 15 points of contact before a lead becomes a client. So people are looking often to be nudged in the right direction, especially when it comes to movement and fitness and wellness.

Speaker 1: 20:50

So be persistent it doesn't mean you should be pushy, but be persistent and so regularly following up and kind of staying top of mind by being at the top of their inbox or at the top of their social media feed can be the game changer. So lead generation is there is kind of an art to it, but and there are some what I've shared with you today truly is some of the tools and tactics that will help to move the needle for you when done correctly. I've just kind of scratched the surface of all of these, because there is so much more I could share with you about each and every one of them, but I know that you've got things and places to go. But if you are interested in learning a bit more about how you can leverage local networking events, partnerships, referral campaigns and using and implementing an ideal client profile, then I would encourage you to consider joining my marketing intensive program. So there you have it. Generation doesn't have to feel like an uphill sprint on the treadmill at all. When you are able to use targeted strategies that truly resonate with your ideal clients, you can attract leads in that not only convert but also stick around, which will boost your studio's revenue year after year after year. And if you're looking for more personalized guidance tailored to perhaps more of that unique style of your studio, just let me know and I will give you some extra guidance and tips. So I hope this is helpful to you as you go about building your boutique fitness studio business.

Speaker 1: 22:25

And if you've enjoyed what you heard today, please, please, please go and take a quick minute to rate and review this podcast. It really would mean so much to me and help to get this podcast out there into the world in front of more people just like you, so that they can feel encouraged and supported on their journey in our industry. Did you love this episode and want more? Head to Spring3.com and check out my free resources that will help you runa profitable and fulfilling studio business. And before you go, one last reminder there is no one way to do what you do, only your way. So whatever it is that you want to do, create or offer, you've got this. Thanks again for joining me today and have a wonderful rest of your day.