In this episode of the Marketing Muscle Up podcast, host Richard Toutounji (founder of Com Marketing) and guest Ev Chapman (Head of Digital Brand at Com Marketing) tackle the common dilemma faced by small fitness and local business owners: they have no formal marketing plan and claim there is no budget for marketing. They outline a practical, low‑cost, data‑driven approach to create a marketing plan from scratch. The method starts with a retrospective audit of all new clients and leads over the past three to six months, recording the presumed source of each (e.g., word‑of‑mouth, signage, referrals, social media, Google, events, partnerships). After compiling this list, they advise categorising and tallying the sources to identify the top channels that are already delivering results. The next step is to double‑down on those proven funnels, making them consistent and scalable, while allocating a modest test budget for new tactics rather than chasing shiny objects. Throughout, they stress the importance of gut‑instinct or simple probing to guess sources when exact data isn’t available, and they highlight the need to understand the sales cycle length associated with each source (warm referrals vs. cold online searches). The conversation concludes with a call to action for listeners to implement the audit, focus on the most effective channels, and use the insights to craft a focused, affordable marketing plan that can be iterated over time.
Chapters
Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. I'm Richard Turtungi, founder of Com Marketing, and today I've got Ev Chapman, who is Head of Digital Brand at ComMarketing. How are you, Ev?
I'm great. How are you?
Great. I thought I'd use some titles today, make it all formal.
It's very formal.
Well, we're talking formal because I did want to do a tactical marketing piece today. So if you've been listening to a bit along the content, I'm going to try and keep this really tight as I can, specifically around the question that you may get asked as a small fitness business owner or medium-sized business owner, but most of our audience is small business owners who have, um, self and a couple, maybe people working for their studio. And you may get this question asked, what's your budget for your marketing? When I've ever got that asked, I'll look at my pocket And put my hand in it and go, there's no money for my marketing plan.
I think that's pretty normal for most businesses.
I think so. And there's a 2-question approach. It's the first thing I think about is, well, most of our clients that we've worked with starting off think about, they think, well, hang on, number one, I don't have a marketing plan. And number two, if I had a budget, I wouldn't know what the budget is for my marketing plan. Yep. And so today I want to talk to you if you don't have a marketing plan and you don't know how to put one together and you have no idea of the conversation on this. And so then you pass it over to go, well, it's just all too hard. I'll just let that go and just get back to what we call word of mouth marketing and referral marketing and hope marketing as well is a good strategy I like to use as well. So let's get into that topic of how to actually work out a marketing plan when you don't have a marketing plan. And this is perfect if you're in that category of like, well, I just following a video here, I'm doing some organic marketing, meaning I'm posting a little bit on social media. And what we generally find is when people come to us in our program, for our program, they are doing a bit of this and a bit of that. And when I say a bit of this, they might have boosted that, they might be doing some organic stuff, they might have some reviews, they've probably got a website. And so they're doing stuff. And I think business owners, you've got to do stuff,
but
it's like what's working is the biggest thing I want to focus on today.
Yeah, I think so. I think most business owners would identify with like the scattergun approach. They're like, Well, somebody told me I need to post every day on social media, so I'm doing that. Somebody told me this, I read this here. And so you're kind of like putting a whole heap of stuff out, but you most— I would say most people that I speak to in their first few months of our program definitely just, they feel really like they have no idea, one, if it's a plan at all, or two, if it's working.
Yeah. So if this is you, I want to take you through a couple simple steps to do. Step number 1, and this might be a tough one for you, but it's a good one. And what it— what the approach here is to go back and look at all your new clients and all your new leads. So that means then you might have to go to your inbox, scan how those leads come in, or go to your phone if you don't record them, or go to your CRM if you have a CRM, or Go anywhere where you get those leads, and if you haven't tracked them, just go and try and find out where they came from. And I want you to write them all down on a piece of paper. So you do this month, and then last month, month before that. And if you can do six months worth or three months, depending on how much lead volume you have. So if you're a small business, you don't have much lead volume. I would do six months. If you're a business that has a lot of lead volume. but you're still not sure where they came from, or you're not sure with marketing plan, you just write 3 months down. And this is a really important first step, and I'll tell you why. I, I, um, um, we— there was somebody, uh, one of my sales guys that worked for us for many years. His name was Tim, and he was really good at closing, uh, new business.
Yeah.
And sometimes he'd go out to the car park, he'd go get a coffee. He'd come back and he'd say, oh, I've got a new— I signed up a new client. And I go, oh, that's great, but where'd they come from? And he goes, I don't know, they just called and that was it. And as much as I liked the new sale, I disliked understanding where they came from.
Yeah.
Because I didn't know what was working and what wasn't working. And that kept me in the scattergun approach concept. And that's what keeps us all in the scattergun approach concept where we're just throwing at everything because we're not sure what's actually working or where it's working from. And this ran on for quite a while until I realized that we really need to understand the source of where they come from. So the second part here is when you write every, all those Clients down. What you want to do next is you want to put another kind of. So I'd write them down the page.
Yep.
I'll put another column. I write at the top source. Source meaning where you think they first entered into the business from and then directed to make the call. Now this is a tough one because most clients will go, "I just found you on Google." I just heard about you. Isn't that right, Evan? Found you on Google.
Yeah. I saw you on Facebook. You know, and you like try and like. Probe a bit more. They never really know.
Yeah. So a lot of this time you're going to have to guess it, uh, or gut instinct is a good one if you're a business owner. Gut instinct is a pretty good indication.
And I think, I think also don't overthink it. Like, we're, you know, we want to get a general idea where clients are coming from. If you think they came from a walk-in or a flyer or Facebook, just Put that down.
Yeah, I mean, you can go ask your past clients, but up to you. But I'll try to get it out the best way you can know it. And so you should have a list of all the clients or leads and then a list of all the source. I believe personally the source is the most important thing to understand in the, um, in the closed part of that potentially new client. Because if you know that they've been word of mouth, you know that the, the sales cycle will be very short. If you know they're cold, meaning that they just walk past— well, maybe those Googled, that's a bit more cold, or they found you that way— they're going to need a lot more nurturing to get them across the line into your, into your fitness facility. So the source is the best way to understand that. Now You know, going back to my example of my my sales rep Tim, he if people called, it somewhat meant that they were kind of ready to go to a degree.
Yeah.
And then he would have to do you know the explanation what we do etc. And then you know do a sales process. But we're talking about. When the person actually called the business, had they entered in? And so this is going to give you a really good indication. So then what you would do now is you're going to have— you want to basically add up and, and kind of like categorize where the main sources you feel have come from. That's point 3 now. So it might be word of mouth, it might be signage, it might be referrals, It might be a partnership for an allied health or anything like that. It might be a Facebook ad that you're running. It could be your social media organic posting that you're doing just whenever you're doing that. It could be an Instagram story. It could be like a local fair that you went to. And a lot of the time here is that you might be branding. When I say branding, you might have, you know, a sign on your car.
Yeah.
Or you've done something that's spiked up, like it could be a local fair, and then the next week after that, you see an increased percentage of calls, but they tell you Google. But if you know that, you know, Google's been giving you 1 or 2 a month, and then all of a sudden you got 5 or 6 and you had that fair, well, maybe there's an indication they came from there.
Yeah. And I think this is why sometimes we like digital marketing because we can pretty much like attribute it to like a Facebook ad or Google Ads or something like that. But, you know, I don't think in a local area you can discount brand and what you do every day in the community, even just like wearing your uniform around.
Totally.
You know, and that kind of thing. So yeah, I think, you know, there's probably going to be a lot of different places that they've seen you, hopefully. And then it's like that last trigger. That you, that made them call you or put their details in.
So we are talking about as best as you can from the initial source of where they saw you from is the key, because obviously they're either going to call you or they're going to go onto your website to your About Us page, your landing page. That's clearly where they're going to go because that's the front door. But we are trying to get on the top of it because that's— because now we're talking about marketing on the top. We're not talking about, oh yep, that person just walked in the studio and just closed them. Yep. But where do they walk in from? What entrance, back or front? That's what we want to understand. So when you've done that, you've got a list of all your clients and leads that you've brought in over the last 3 or 6 months.
Yep.
And then you've got a list of all the sources. So where they actually, where you think they initially came from. And then what you want to do is tally up the ones that have multiple. So if there was a walk-in times 2, put 2 walk-ins or 5 walk-ins. And then by now, you should have a list that gives you the number one way people have found you over the last 3 to 6 months. And once we have that, that's really good data because now we know, okay, great, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 top ways that people are already finding us. Yeah. So then what we, with that data, now we can actually start to work out a marketing plan. If, you know, you've had a great referral that came through, maybe you had some sort of referral day once a year. So then with a marketing plan, we can then go, okay, right, what's working? Let's make that a bit more consistent. And so this is the third of the first steps that I do. We do it when people come into our Com Marketing Ninja program is that we get them to understand where their lead sources are coming from. And then I can understand, well, okay, you've got already some good ways people are finding you. Let's make that a bit more consistent whilst we're working on new streams of marketing like digital. And so I just think that we give ourselves a hard time as small business owners where we actually think we don't know anything, but we do. We just got to put it on paper and then we really find out where that source is coming from. And then yeah, we can work the source. And we can make that consistent. We can make that focused. We can build around it. We can create new marketing strategies and plans instead of thinking that you have to go on the next shiny object every single month.
Yeah. And I really like this way of doing it because you're working with what you're already doing and what's already working in your business. Because, you know, you could go out on the internet and find 100, 1,000 different marketing plans and try and do that in your business. And it's probably going to fail. But this is like bottoms up, what's already working, let's double down on that.
Yeah, this is one of the key, you know, this is probably one of the key secrets that we do.
Yeah,
when, you know, we can get clients relatively fast results because we're not giving them something brand new or testing a theory. We don't have time. We need to generate leads fast. We don't have time to reconfigure a landing page or reconfigure a funnel. We just want to really focus on the one or two ways that are already working, but just inconsistent. And then we can fix those up really fast. Then we can create a really cool marketing plan. But that's probably for another, another conversation, another day.
I think so. Yeah. So basically they're listing out everyone that they— all their clients, where they've come from, and then adding that up and doubling down on those ones that are the highest numbers.
Yeah. And then we can get— and then we can work a marketing plan from that. And then it goes through ensuring that you have, you know, 2 to 5 really solid funnels of leads coming through. And that's— and then we can get targeted on how much we should be spending in our marketing plan. So then the next person that comes in, they say, listen, I've got this really cool billboard I want you to advertise on as a small business. And you think, what the hell would I advertise on a billboard for? And then you might go, okay, well, billboard hasn't really worked for me, so it's a test marketing concept.
Yeah.
Do I have money to test the marketing concept? And yeah, you should always have some test time and test money. But, um, you know, I don't really love to test a huge amount. I like to do what's actually working and, um, pick the fruits, reap the rewards.
That's it. That's the easiest way to do it.
Very good, team. If you've Enjoy this episode. Be sure to share it with a business friend or colleague that may get some interest out of it, and let me know how it works. You can always find us at Com Marketing on Instagram, or me personally on my IG, Richard Turtungi, spelled T-O-U-T-O-U-N-J-I. That's a good one for today, team. Take it aboard, implement it, use it. It's a marketing tactic that always works. So the next time someone calls you up to say, do you have a marketing plan? You say, yes, I understand where my best clients are coming from. I'll catch you next time on the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show.
