5 Tips to be Consistent with your Marketing

What we need to do to move forward in our business, and I think that's the better question asked because we can clearly see that the market has shifted and the market has changed. And now the question becomes: What are you going to do about it? Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. I'm your host Richard Turtungi. Welcome back if. You've been listening and you've been waiting for another episode. We took a bit of a break and pumped to be back to be sharing what has been happening and what is gonna be working to grow your fitness wellness studio in 2023 and beyond. Now, I wanted to kind of maybe recap what I feel what's been happening with the industry. Just so if this is your first time listening, we run a marketing education company where we focus on helping fitness professionals, wellness professionals grow their fitness and wellness business. The reason why we niche in this industry, we've been in a lot of different industries, is my background. I opened Australia's first private fitness studio when I was 17 and a half. And I've gone out of the industry in marketing and I've been back in the industry, out of the industry, but we've been back in this industry probably for the last, you know, 7 years exclusively in this sector. And the reason why is because a lot of the marketing strategies that work so well, they actually work way better within the fitness and wellness industry. When you compare it to other industries out there in the marketplace, we can actually do it much, much better if we understand what to do. So I wanna talk about what has been happening. A bit of a recap, if I can. So just at the time of recording, early August 2023, And over the last, you know, I reckon 3, 4 months, we've had a lot of different things that are happening in the industry, things that I don't think anybody in business, you know, a lot of people in business have never experienced before. And when I say never experienced before, they never experienced the hardness of interest rates going up multiple times. They never experienced at the back of COVID and what that looks like, right? And when you haven't experienced any hardships or recessions in your business kind of world, like if you've been running business for 5 years, you've probably never experienced that. You've been around the business for 50 years, you would've experienced these things. And so if it's their first time experiencing hardships in business, I think we're all learning really valuable lesson. And the lesson is that things weren't the way they were before, meaning that people's buying abilities and people's buying habits were different now than they were in the past. Now, it's not a good or a bad thing. It's just a thing. And it's something that we have to be aware about if we're not already, obviously, that things have changed and we can't be waiting and hoping that things are gonna go back to the way they were or once were. And when we— and we've been thinking about like, am I losing clients? Am I dropping clients? Are clients leaving me? Is it just me or is it someone else? I wanna share with you that it's not just you. I sit on a lot of different supplier roundtables and, and having a lot of different conversations with industry peers that are working in the fitness industry that have very large databases, you know, equipment companies, payment companies, and we have all these conversations around all different sectors. And so the sector's definitely been affected. It's been affected in many different ways, but the most important thing, it's part of business and it's part of the way that it's gonna work. Now, at the same time too, we've had some locations and fitness operators that are having the highest growth in their memberships in history. I have studios that haven't opened this, not gonna open the studio for 2 months, and they're already pretty much at 100 paid foundation members ready to go in their 2 months out of open. I've had clients that are highest profit months ever. And I've had other clients that are month on month on month on month, they're still growing. But on the flip side, yes, there is businesses at the moment that are closing down, and you're gonna start to see this. You haven't already. They're closing down. The reason why they're closing down is because there's a few reasons. Number one is they may not have been in a very good financial position going into this time of the season. Or they've kind of simply had enough. They've had 2, 3 years of COVID and this is just another nail in their coffin, and it's done, and they're done, and they don't have the drive and desire to keep going. And so you're gonna see a lot of businesses that are selling, and there is a lot, a lot of businesses that are selling. You just have to look at some fitness for businesses website. And again, I'm gonna bring somebody on in the podcast that specializes in business sales. And just to give you another idea as well, but we're seeing more of that happening. And we're seeing clients that were really good clients with us or they've been around for many years, they were dropped off. We're seeing the ones that were in the large clubs, the large clubs that the people are dropping off, the ones that were paying the least amount of membership that basically wasn't really plugged into the model, wasn't plugged into fitness, wasn't plugged into to building, you know, being better. Right? And they gotta choose between, do I want this membership or that membership, or I'm really using that, I'll just dump that. And so people are making a lot of different decisions where they didn't have to make before because, you know, there wasn't, what is it, 9, 10, 11 interest rate hikes. And that definitely affects somebody, definitely affects somebody that is out there. And you can't close your eyes to something and go, we're just blinded by this. So what we have to do is we have to really understand what we need to do to move forward in our business. And I think that's the better question to ask because we can clearly see that the market has shifted and the market has changed. And now the question becomes, well, what are you gonna do about it? What are we gonna do to grow our businesses? What can we do? And I want to take you through about 5 different points where I believe that you can insert this into your world at the moment to make a dramatic change, dramatic change in, in the way that you perceive business and the future of your business. And I want to take you through 5 points that I really think will help you, helped us, helped me. To make these changes in our clients. So number one, we want to change the attitude that we have going into everything. We've got to stop. We've got to stop and realize what are we saying out of our mouths? Are we consistently blaming things out of our control, like the government, like interest rates, like the climate? All these things, a lot of it is out of our control. So we can definitely understand where the market is, and we can, we know that's happening. But at the same time too, if you've been doing it for a while now, we've gotta sort of get out of that world and that conversation, and we need to move into a new conversation of attitude, change the attitude of the things that we can have control of. We simply can't have control of a lot of things, we can have control over attitude and what it means. Number 2, we wanna reset a new plan. Right? What I mean by that is that you might have had a plan going into this year. You might have had a plan last month, but at the end of the day, we wanna reset a plan for today and for the future. And basically, I like to know is like how many members you've got, how many members you wanna get to. What are you missing? And then we can start to understand what do we need to do. So we wanna make sure that you have a new plan, but are not, are not hoping or waiting. And that's, and that's sort of point number 3. Point number 3 is like, if you got members on paused, you got members that say they're gonna come back. You've got members that they're not paying you at the moment, but they say they're gonna be back. I want you to sort of keep them in the fold, but know that we shouldn't be saying, oh, we've got 100 members, but we've got 50 on pause. I want you to say you got 50 members and we need to get to 100, right? We've got 300 members and we've got 100 on pause, whatever it may be. And so we wanna sort of get that away from our mind, because when we get that away, we realize the real facts. And the facts is that if you've got a large percent of your members on pause, away, whatever that means, that's okay. And they're potential people that will come back. But if we keep relying that we've got these people, we're sort of tricking ourselves and we're tricking our business revenue thinking we have more, but we actually have less. So what we're gonna do is we wanna count our active paying financial members and keep that at the forefront and then go, okay, well, what do I need to do to get back to where I was or to get where I wanna get to. Now some of you may be in amazing positions, the best you've ever been as well. So this is depending, making sure that your pause members, they could, they could have gone to Europe. They could have been, you know, paused financially. But at the end of the day, we do have to draw a line in the sand and really focus on going after new business and going after people that want to be in our studios. And that's really important. There's no point holding on to clients that they do wanna be there. They have been great clients, but we need to move on and we need to keep getting more. And that sort of turns to my 4th point, which is you need to turn your advertising on. I'll say that again. We need to turn the advertising on in our business. I think overall, the biggest problem with growth in the fitness industry? Well, there's a couple of things, but the one that I see mainly is that we think we don't need to spend in advertising because we didn't have to before. We grew our business by referrals, so we don't have to do it anymore. And I think that's a really way that we can, we can trick ourselves thinking that, oh, it'll be okay. But essentially a lot of industries, most industries, most businesses need to spend money on advertising. Yet the fitness industry, for some reason, we think we don't need to spend money on advertising. And the ones that are spending money on advertising could be the franchisees, the ones that are franchisors, franchisees, the ones that are knowing that to grow their business, to grow their investment, we need to spend. Now, if you've come up slowly in the industry and you've started personal, like I did, started personal training in the back of a car, Got my equipment, home visits, right? When we do that, the cost to get into the industry is very little. So we feel we don't need to market that much. We just like grow from referrals or grow from letterbox drops. But essentially, you can't keep relying on referrals all the time. That is one of the sources, but it's not all source. At ComMarketing, we focus on 5 funnel sources. And so we need to turn you're advertising on. I think that's really important. And you need to, you need to spend money on it. That's the simple fact. You need to spend money on ads to make sure that you can consistently keep growing month in and month out. And I think that's something that if you're not already doing, please go to our website, commarketing.com.au, just book a chat in there. We can help you to show you how to do that. Commarketing.com.au. Number 5, I wanna talk about get a community and plug in to that community so you can stay out of your head. I take these times like, you know, hard times in business where I go back to COVID and, and with COVID you know, I believe that compared to uncertainty of times like now, Right? Not sure if the interest rates go up, not sure our client's gonna pause. Like, we had a level of certainty where COVID was like, no, this is closed, you're closed. It was like black and white, right? And communities got together. And I think if you're a business owner and you don't have a community and it's just you and you, you, you're coming out and you're frustrated with your, your wife or your partner or your husband or your friends, and your attitude's being more negative, you need to get into a community of other fitness business operators. Go to events, go to a conference. We have masterclasses coming up. We've got an immersive coming up. We run a program that's, you know, one, one-on-one, but one-to-many as well. Reason being is because we've realized that people get better results by making sure they have a community of people that they can understand what's happening in their space. And that essentially helps you know you are on the right track or you're on the wrong track. But you don't know if you don't surround yourself with that. So that's sort of it for today. I wanna give you those thoughts. If you're going through something, you're not sure where you've been over the last 3 months, and it feels like a whirlwind. Well, that's okay because we're in a business world at the moment where there are a lot of changes that are happening. fast changes that are happening. And we haven't even talked about things like, you know, AI and technology. I'm just literally talking about, you know, your clients that some of them are pausing, some of them are stopping, and you're worrying, well, how can I get more clients in? And I'm sort of saying there's 5 tips here that we need to talk about. Number 1, change attitude. Number 2, reset a new plan. So draw a new plan. If you haven't got a plan, put a plan in place, right? Number 3, pause memberships. Don't count them. Okay? Just have them there, but don't count them as I've got these members, but they're not really paying. They're not paying. Don't count them. Number 4, go and turn your advertising on if it's not already on, or if you need help with that, let us know. Number 5, get into a community and plug in. So you stay out of your head. Hope this has helped this episode, team. If you do need some help to turn your advertising on, to jump into a community, As I said, jump on our website commarketing.com.au, and we've got programs at the moment. We're guaranteeing 30 new members in 90 days. Go go onto website and opt in for a call. You can find all about that. Otherwise, if you've enjoyed this podcast, what I'd love you to do is share it with somebody who might need it. That's the best way that I find podcasts good. Just share it with someone who may need it at this point. Text them, and if you really loved it, I'd love to invite you to. Put a review on any of the platforms that you're listening to. It really does help to spread this podcast and this message out to the people that need it. Thanks so much. I'll see you next time on the Marketing Muscle Up Podcast Show. Bye for now.