Personal Fitness Professional - March 2009 - (Page 10) Grab Your Calculator In order to know where your 80% is coming from, you’re going to have to get down and dirty and do a little tracking and measurement. You’re not going to be able to play it by ear; track all of your marketing. It’s what separates the winners from losers; marketing is a game of inches. If you ran ads in five papers like in the above example, you have to know which ones are performing and which ones aren’t. You can either use different methods of contact in the ads, such as different phone numbers, or ask when people call where they heard of you and track it. You can even run different promotions on each ad and see what people call for, since many of them won’t remember where exactly they saw your ad. Once you know what ad medium works (newspaper, radio ad, etc.), you’re still not done. Now you have to determine what ad itself works best. Never run just a single ad and call it a day. Run two and see which outperforms the other, then run another against your winner (in marketing, this is called the “control”) and try to beat it. 10 Ignore Your Marketing Budget When the going gets tough at big companies, the marketing is the first thing to get slashed. That’s because they’re not doing the type of marketing you should be doing; they’re branding. When you brand, it’s a guessing game, and you never know really how much money you made from an ad or even a whole campaign. Does Budweiser really know how much they make specifically from a Super Bowl commercial? Nope. It’s impossible. You, however, will now be tracking and measuring every nickel that goes out the door for marketing. When that nickel turns into a dime, do more of it. When it turns into a penny, don’t. It’s not rocket science, but you need to put the organization around it. Then when you know that your marketing is creating dollars and not costing dollars, a tightened marketing budget is senseless and the last thing you should be cutting back on. If you give me a dollar, and I give you back five dollars, how many dollars will you give me? As many as I’ll take, right? It’s the same with your marketing. When done correctly, your money is working for you and making you money. Why would you ever say, “I’ll do that for $100 a week, and that’s it”? You wouldn’t. Marketing budgets are for people that aren’t getting or tracking results and look at marketing like throwing dice in Vegas. There’s a word for people like that: broke. Money comes a little quicker in a good economy, but when you’re doing things right, it shouldn’t be a large factor one way or the other; you just have to pay a little closer attention. The really great thing about tough times is that it weeds out those not determined or smart enough to pull through. Now you know what to do; go do it. And when things turn around — and they will — there’s going to be a lot less competition than there was going in. Take advantage of it. Make sure you read the next issue of PFP, in which I discuss the power of positioning in the marketplace and how most trainers shoot themselves in the foot from the first day. Rich Butkevic, CFT, a.k.a. “Coach Rich, is a personal trainer and con” sultant to fitness professionals who are serious about optimizing and growing their business. Prior to becoming a trainer, he was responsible for marketing and Internet projects for companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, AT&T and others. He’s also the author of the Trainer Traffic System, a step-by-step marketing system for fitness professionals (www.trainertraffic.com). ● March2009 · www.fit-pro.coM http://www.trainertraffic.com http://www.fit-pro.coM
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