The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
How to Turn Cold Leads Into Paying Gym Members Before You Open
Ever realized your future members simply don't know you exist yet? The most successful fitness studios have mastered the art of turning strangers into excited, ready-to-join members through strategic lead nurturing—and the results speak volumes. Studios actively targeting external leads experience a remarkable 42% more members in their first 90 days compared to those relying on passive approaches.
Forget the exhausting cycle of chasing thousands of leads and endless sales calls. The most efficient approach generates just 20 quality leads monthly, converts half immediately, and nurtures the remainder through a year-long campaign of thoughtful touchpoints. This strategic patience recognizes that membership decisions often align with life transitions and moments of heightened motivation that may occur months after initial contact.
The foundation begins with smart geo-targeting within a 10-mile radius—understanding that your location and customer experience are your true product. From there, build a 15-touchpoint nurturing sequence incorporating wellness guides, community events, review campaigns, and story-driven content that humanizes your brand. Email automation platforms like LoyalSnap make implementing these sophisticated sequences simple, maintaining contact with leads for months without constant manual effort.
What truly differentiates thriving studios in the 2020s is their focus on community building over transactions. Today's consumers aren't just seeking workouts; they're searching for meaningful connections in an increasingly isolated world. The most compelling marketing highlights how members form friendships, break habits, and achieve mental breakthroughs within your supportive environment. By positioning your studio as a community rather than just a fitness provider, you'll create a powerful gravitational pull that attracts and retains members for the long term.
Ready to transform your approach? Focus on retention from the very first interaction, leverage automation to nurture leads consistently, and build campaigns that showcase what truly makes your studio special—the community you're creating. Your future members are out there, waiting to discover the difference you'll make in their lives.
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Have you ever realized that any of your future members may just not know you exist yet? The key is getting in front of them at the right times early and turning those strangers into exciting members that are ready. Hey everyone, I'm your host, zach Coleman. This is the Fit to Grit cast. Let's just get right into it. You know, have you ever realized that any of your future members may just not know you exist yet? The key is getting in front of them at the right times early and turning those strangers into exciting members that are ready to join prospects. I work with a lot of fitness studios myself and one thing I can tell you is most owners think let's get a thousand leads and be on the phone a million times and think that, hey, that's the way to try to bring in members. But I'm here to tell you that you can get 20 leads a month, sell half of them, put the other half in a funnel and leverage that for about a year and then be able to bring them back when they're actually ready buyers, just giving them insights into your studio in the future, of what you're trying to achieve with everything you know.
Speaker 1:Last week we talked about the pre sale launch campaign and how you can build a campaign around about 15 touch points. You can utilize that same type of campaign for said future members as well and leads that come in through all forms. But today we're going to kind of get into some touch points. We're going to talk about geo targeting ads, the importance of them and how they can actually start helping you reach the right audience. Other ways that you can build wellness guides or anything along those natures to help build value along the way within these touch points, to help solidify your brand and your studio differentiation factor. And how you can really start to nurture your leads through stories, videos and testimonials which will go back to this, and how you can update this in a future campaign, especially since that type of a year, and how you can really start focusing on community beyond just them joining. There was a study done by MindBody that showcases that studios that actively target external leads and pre-sale type generation methods have about 42% more members in their first 90 days compared to other studios or walk-ins, and so this is a great statistic to have you realize that retention is a huge factor when it comes to the pre-sale engagement as well as the post-sale and keeping them around.
Speaker 1:How do you build trust faster? We're very big advocates of intent-focused marketing, seo, google Ads, brand to focus on audience and how that really works into the play of how you write and how you engage with your audience. But at the end of the day, sometimes you just need members. So we're going to kind of go through something that we talked a little bit about last time. We talked a little bit about that urgency and how you can create trials or different types of offers and test them out to see how they work, and we're going to kind of focus on that a little bit today and how you can kind of engage that into your platform through our said points that we're covering today.
Speaker 1:So first and foremost, I want to talk about the sponsor of today's video. They're more of a partnership than anything LoyalSnap. Loyalsnap is a fitness-focused automation platform meant for emails that makes life easy for you. They already have a lot of pre-built templates in there. Us at Creative and Jim Mark have our own templates as well, and if you're a client of ours or a future client of ours, you get about $40 off a month on a membership with LoyalSnap so that you can start building those automations today.
Speaker 1:Now you know, I've once had this client, this studio owner. They relied solely on just word of mouth and transactional type engagement, which means they didn't have any email automations. They didn't have any really retention. It was they called, they didn't answer, they moved on. We started to build their external leads and campaigns, not just focusing on a certain mile radius of about a three to five mile radius, but we also focused very heavily on partnerships and building these automations in place. So their pre-sale optimization was set up in a way where they can engage with prospects that come in two, three, four, five, six, seven months ago.
Speaker 1:And there's going to be something that happens as you continue to move forward with your studio. You're going to hit certain value death periods where you're going to have to raise prices, lower prices, change offers always recommend doing that, looking over that with your team at least once a year, and your old members may get upset, but new members may not, and so what you really want to do here with your new members is you really want to focus on those pre sale engagements and starting to build retention with these pre launch type campaigns. Now you have the trial campaigns right. The trial clients are going to be the ones where you're going to change pricing and there's an automation set up for that. So you can have an automation set up where these people come into a free trial and then you start testing them. You ask them how the class was. After the fact, you ask them about the package, how to move forward. You can send an email after they check in, after they check out. Then you can give them some bonuses that are achieved after said situation. You definitely want a gym management platform involved so that when you schedule these and they're scheduled as part of the class you can be able to give them these emails. But that's going to be your first real understanding of how you can really reach them through those trials and nurture said leads through this.
Speaker 1:Getting to the points to cover today, we're going to talk about geo-targeting ads. One of the biggest factors I see is studios really tend to focus on spraying the wall. You know, there's nothing wrong with doing cold outreach if you really need to and hitting people that way, but we're all about intent, right, and so we're going to talk about the pre-sale external leads. Let's get started. How do you get these leaves right? Geotargeting is going to be your first main thing In the studio environment is a lot different than a lot of other type engagements, a lot of studios.
Speaker 1:First and foremost, they kind of look at themselves from a marketing perspective. If you have one location as an e-commerce brand when you shouldn't, you're not there yet, but you do need to look at it from that aspect is your location is your product, your location and your customer service is your product. So, with that said, you want to geo target within a 10 mile radius. That's good. Any further you can as you start broadening out your local campaigns. But the further you are, the harder it is it's going to be to make a sale. People don't want to drive further than 10 miles. Most want a studio within a mile radius, within a two mile radius. The only reason they're going to move even further is if you start to open more locations and they have the ability to go to multiple locations and or partnership opportunities where you can leverage other locations like a daycare, for instance, for drop off or things of that nature. That can kind of coincide on the way. But your customer service and your location are going to be the two major factors that get them to sell right and then it's going to be your differentiating factor. So when you go into GeoTarget you have to understand the type of intent you're trying to bring people in for.
Speaker 1:We talk a lot about websites. We talk a lot about what type of keywords really focus on that intent. But I will say, if you want to learn more about smart ways to leverage tech and find your competition, check out the podcast up to our right where we talk about really smart ways to beat your competition for any studio owner. So back to the video. You know we have wellness guides. We talked about wellness guides and just collecting emails Highly recommend you find events that are in about a 10 mile radius from your location, that you can have a spot to go to for community events and collect people and put them in here. So you have community events, community email campaigns.
Speaker 1:We can talk about review campaigns in our next video, review campaigns. Review campaigns are very good. If you have a member, you start to cycle down and understand your audience and you want to bring like minded individuals in. You can have a pre sale and a retention type campaign set up for existing members and having them bring in other people that have similar values as you. So review campaign. This is really highly if you already have a location. This isn't made for online people, just so you're aware. This is all studio driven, so make sure that you have a location to take advantage of any of these types of campaigns.
Speaker 1:And then you have something that we talked about in our last video, which is all about telling stories. You can take that story and recycle the story of how you open this location, when you opened it, and leverage that story-driven type campaign as a part of your nurture campaign, your 15 touch points so you can have a story campaign about you to differentiate you from your competition, differentiate you. Your trainers talk about your trainers, talk about yourself, and this will allow you to build personal brands within the environment of the corporate brand environment. And if a trainer ever leaves or you have to change a story, luckily enough, this is a year campaign campaign, so you can go in and you can switch any of the content pretty fast within the templates associated with your account, especially if you're using LoyalSnap Again, contact me with that. So you want to do stories, you want to do videos. You want to start putting testimonials within these email campaigns to show what other people are thinking. This will help with not just the pre-sale campaign, but in a future video we'll talk about post-sale right and so having those testimonials just clarifies and if you can get testimonials, it will also help and that's part of the review campaign.
Speaker 1:Now I'm very big on intent. So back to what we talked about getting the right audience in. You don't want to do any sort of price shopping unless you're doing a campaign around, go shopping and you show other prices and you show what makes you better versus, let's say, a big box studio or another location in your area. A lot of studios we work with utilize what we call. It's basically just a pricing campaign, but it allows for those people that are trying to shop around. Most studios don't allow you to show that, don't show their pricing. So we have recommendations on how you can show that so that you can start bringing in the right audience based around your price point. So we have a pricing campaign.
Speaker 1:And now one of the biggest things that we're going to get off topic here a little bit and we talked a little bit about community and story driven emails is I want you to build the story in there. Once you talk about how you're going to events, I want to talk about you, how you you're hiring certain types of people. I want you to talk about the culture that you're looking to develop and the community that you're building. We're living in the 2020s people and because of that, the environment has changed. We're moving away from transactional. People are looking more for relational. So I want you to start focusing on what makes you stand apart, and 99% of the times times it's community.
Speaker 1:Did you help someone break a habit and build friendships within the studio environment? Not just physical milestones, but mental milestones. Allow them, of course, to give you the rights to talk about those, but utilize those types of stories because in today's day and age, where everyone's working from home and you think that everyone wants to be online, everyone wants to find their community. So leverage community rich type campaigns and you can leverage this within your external lead campaign, which is this you can test different pre-sale launch campaigns and then you can have a external lead where you change a few.
Speaker 1:I know, I know it's wrong, it's hard to read that, apologize, but you can understand what I'm saying. So I think that that's going to be it for this video. Again, if you're not focusing on retention, you're not focusing on taking those external leads from any source that they're coming through and putting them in any sort of email campaign newsletters fine, but you could do much better. If you're not using a platform like LoyalSnap or a system that's helping you keep your external leads to push them to qualification, then I really highly recommend you do, because that's just going to boost your ability to sell in the future and get a better cost per click per lead as you continue to grow and build memberships and build that waterfall effect right. I'm your host, zach Coleman. This is another episode of the Fit to Grit cast and I hope you all stay gritty.
