Imagine if you could be doing exactly what you do now, but with more of the stuff you love and less of the stuff you don’t. Sounds like a decent deal, right?
Well, for so many Fitness Professionals, you get into the business to help people get fitter, healthier and happier but perhaps you don’t quite anticipate the amount of ‘other stuff’ you need to do to actually gain traction and build a solid, reliable business and career for yourself.
When you break it down, this ‘other stuff’ usually consists of Sales and Marketing, which are both areas that can quickly take a considerable amount of time away from delivering the best possible service to your clients.
It becomes a balancing act of looking after your existing clients, and actively trying to get more clients!
Well, as a Marketing Agency, we understand how important it is to spend time on your Sales and Marketing if you’re serious about growing your business. However, we also understand that it’s far more important to focus on what you love and what you’re best at, whilst offloading, automating, systemising and delegating everything else.
In this blog post, we’re going to share some of our top tips in automating a few key areas of your Sales and Marketing, so that you can spend more time doing what you love!
Let’s get into it…
#1 Automate your outreach / Lead generation
The first area we’re going to automate is your outreach and lead generation. This alone is especially important to the success and effectiveness of the next two areas, which will become clear as we go.
Every customer starts as a lead, but not every lead becomes a customer; so our advice is to automate your lead generation so that you can generate higher volumes of leads on a fairly consistent basis and solely focus on converting a percentage of those into paying customers.
A couple of the most common lead generation tactics we see are:
- Free resources or an eBook on a landing page
- Free discovery or coaching call
- Free initial health assessment offer
In our experience, we’ve seen the best results when our clients are able to get their leads on the phone for an initial conversation about their goals, the difficulties they face and so on. This creates a much deeper connection between you and the lead than any eBook ever will, however, it’s all a game of warming your leads up from cold to hot. You may find that cold leads will shy away from the idea of hopping on a call with you right away, whereas warmer leads may jump at the opportunity!
Setting up a landing page that prompts your visitors to take the desired action of opting in to receive your eBook, receive your email series, schedule a call or whatever else is a far better, and more scalable means of generating leads than simply waiting for someone to email you out of the blue, for example.
#2: Automate your follow-up
Once you have leads coming in, there will likely be a certain amount of manual work you will need to do, depending on your specific sales process etc. However, with the right tools, you really can automate the vast majority of your follow-up, at the very least.
The reason we recommend doing this is because of the sheer amount of potential business that’s lost through simply not following up regularly with your leads. It’s important to remember that very few leads will be ready to buy right now, and that the majority of them are more likely to buy later and in their own time.
Following up with people keeps you “top of mind” and hot on their radar for when they are ready to make a decision. It drastically reduces the chances of your lead forgetting about you and deciding to work with someone else.
At FitMedia Co. we always recommend ActiveCampaign to our clients, as it gives them the ability to create automated follow-up campaigns / lead nurture sequences. It’s pretty inexpensive to get started ($15/month) and has tons of room for it to grow with you, as you grow too.
#3: Automate your on-boarding
Now, once you’ve generated leads, followed up with them and converted a percentage to ready-to-go customers, you’ll be in a position where you need to “on-board” them to your service.
This is a process that collects any necessary information from your client, sets and manages expectations, and generally gets everyone on the same page before the work begins.
You’ll start off by registering them as a new client on My PT Hub, which will include them completing a PAR-Q form, any additional forms you have added to the sign-up process and adding some extra information about their fitness goals etc. You can then follow this up with an initial “kick off” call, a tutorial on the My PT Hub software and anything else that’s necessary for the service you provide.
Right now, you may be doing a lot of this already, but the chances are that you are spending extra time doing it on a one-by-one basis, where you could set up an automated sequence that takes people through the whole process, without you lifting a finger!
Once again, this could be something you build in ActiveCampaign, or a series of landing pages that contain videos and links to tutorials and forms – or whatever setup fits best with your business!
The whole concept here is to do less of the stuff you don’t NEED to be doing, so you can spend more time doing the stuff that you’re best at, as well as the stuff that genuinely does require your direct involvement.
Once you apply the concept of automation to your business, you will find yourself in a far more favourable position as a business owner than you ever imagined possible. Strip away the stuff you don’t need and want to be doing, and you’ll find yourself only doing the things you do need and want to be doing, which is undeniably a far more enjoyable and fulfilling place to be!
As always, I hope you’ve found some value and inspiration in this blog. If you do have any Sales and Marketing related questions, then please do feel free to schedule a call with me at a time that suits you best. Or, if you’d like to explore the options in working directly with our team, then you can register yourself for a Discovery Call here.
Suggested automation tools:
- ActiveCampaign (Email marketing automation)
- Calendly (Call scheduling)
- LeadPages or ClickFunnels (Landing page design)
Written by Jonah Cockshaw, Founder of FitMedia Co.
