Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008 - (Page 27)

Each marketing message needs to serve a particular demographic — the tighter, the better. If you know that you want to serve the weight loss market, good. If you know you want to serve the female weight loss market, better. If you know you want to serve the weight loss market for busy female executives between the ages of 24 and 40, better yet. That’s not to say you can’t have two marketing messages for two diﬀerent audiences, but it needs to be in two diﬀerent marketing campaigns. You need to get into the head of your prospect so you can talk to them speciﬁcally and address their needs and ﬁx their pain. response, either. Maybe you sent out 1,000 copies of an ad and had 100 responses, then the next week you send out a diﬀerent ad to 500 and only have 75 responses. Many people would throw out the second ad and keep running the ﬁrst since it had more responses — wrong! The ﬁrst ad had a 10% conversion, but the second had a conversion rate of 15%, although it was sent to a smaller number of people and therefore had a smaller response. If you sent that second ad to 1,000 people, you could expect 150 responses. Not convinced it’s a big deal? That’s a 50% increase. That means if you train 20 people now, you could train 30. If you make $1,000 a week now, you could make $1,500. It’s huge. Get a calculator. Track it. Conversion Conversion is how many people you are able to convert into taking a desired action, and it’s where your money is made. It’s usually expressed as a percentage of the number of people who saw your message versus the number of people that responded. So if you sent a letter out to 100 people and your desired action was for them to pick up the phone and call to schedule an appointment, and three did, then your conversion rate is three percent. Trust me, I avoid math whenever possible, but you have to know if your marketing is working. It can’t just be decided by pure volume of Trafﬁc The last thing we look at is traﬃc, and funny enough, it’s where most people start. When it’s done right, it’s a step-by-step process. First, you ﬁgure out who you’re going to talk to, then you make sure you’re talking in a language that motivates them. Only then do you go recruit more people to talk to. What most people do, especially online, is throw up a website or some other marketing tool (yes, your website is a marketing tool) and then spend a boatload of money on search engine optimization, banner ads, pay-per-click advertising and a whole bunch of other expensive and confusing things to try to get a lot of people to see their marketing message that wouldn’t inspire a mouse to eat cheese. Some trainers will brag that they get 10,000 hits a month to their site, but if none of the 10,000 visitors give you any money, what’s the point? I’d rather have only two visitors a month, as long as one of them writes me a check. Don’t worry about traﬃc until you’re converting, and don’t worry about converting until you know who you’re talking to. That’s a crash course, huh? Don’t take it to mean that now you know everything needed to go out and take over the world, as there’s a ton of techniques and subcomponents to learn and become very good at, if you want your business to survive. With the speed at which the world moves today, the technology available and the ease of research for the customer, there’s no way you can ignore this aspect of your business and expect to be around in the next couple of years. The trainers that know and use this information for their marketing crush their competition; once you know it, it doesn’t even seem fair. Rich Butkevic, CFT, is a personal trainer and consultant to ﬁtness professionals and author of Search Engine Muscle: SEO Secrets of Elite Fitness Professionals. He will soon be releasing the Trainer Traﬃc System, a step-by-step marketing system for ﬁtness professionals. For more info, visit www.TrainerTraﬃc.com. ● �� AUGUST2008 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM 27 http://www.TrainerTraffic.com http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008

Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008 Contents Letter from the Editor It's a Weighty Issue Current Controversies Streamline with Digital Neuro-Linguistic Programming Continuing Education Mark Your Calendar Act Like You Know About Marketing Blog For Fun and Profit Exercise Spotlight Product Profile New on the Market Spotlight: Krystal Davis

Personal Fitness Professional - August 2008

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