Ryan Vaughn breaks down Mike Michalowicz's Get Different marketing framework: Differentiate, Attract, Direct. Vaughn shares how his gym failed with generic ads and discount offers, then explains how to track which marketing channels actually generate profitable leads using a free spreadsheet that records spend, lead source, close rate, and revenue per client.
Hello. Last week I was at ProfitCon. The con stands for convention. It's short. They're trying to duplicate like a Comic-Con feel to the name. I don't think they realize that it's probably not a good combo because profit is not a con. But I wanted to share with you something. So Mike Michalowicz is the author of Profit First. And he and a guy named Ron Saharian are co-founders of Profit First Professionals. And they're the group that puts on ProfitCon. I have a great opportunity to interact with Mike during that event. And he, he just launched his latest book, Get Different. And I read it and finished it. And I wanted to share a few things that I learned from that. In his book, which, uh, you should pick up and, and read, he gives a 3-step analysis or checklist to see if your marketing piece is worth putting out. Um, and it's, does the— does your marketing piece or ad differentiate you? Does it attract the right audience? And does it direct them to do something? You want your ad to have all 3 of those pieces. Now again, I'm a cash flow guy. I'm not trying to step on the toes of anyone who does marketing. I know that from our accounting firm standpoint, we do a really good job with this, but I— full transparency, uh, when I owned a gym, we did not do a good job with the ads. I mean, in fact, if I go back and look at it, our ads look like everybody else's ads in the area, even though we were trying to be different. But the truth is, I think ultimately we are trying to tell people why we were better. And Mike does a good job of explaining that in his book of how to figure out, are you focusing on being better and why that's not really the best thing to do and why focusing and showing how you're different is really the best thing you can do. Also, you want to make sure all 3 of those components are in your ad piece. You could do something that's different, but is it attracting the right audience? Many of us have done those, um, maybe like 6-week challenge things with another program where they do all the calling for you and they have heavy sale, like high-pressure tactics. Or you do the bait and switch, uh, type of marketing approach where you tell them it's free but they actually have to pay you money, uh, so it's not really free. Um, those were different at one point, but what kind of audience did it attract? We, on our ads, you know, we sometimes we made the mistake of doing some sort of discount type of advertising piece or campaign, and it attracted the wrong audience. And then of course, if there's not a clear step, a simple step for them to take with the ad piece, it doesn't work. Now, how does this relate to cash flow? Well, In his book, he also talks about this, but I also talk about this a lot in, in my book, Profit First for Microgyms, and in the courses that we offer. But it is super important that when you are doing marketing and you're spending dollars, uh, you need to track that activity. So we have a spreadsheet that is a free tool that we give, uh, to anyone. So feel free to put comments here below if you want. Um, and one of our team members will reach out and give you the link to that. But you basically keep track of every line item. So for us, you know, uh, a mentorship group who serves gym owners, they would be the name of a marketing piece for us. Or maybe we go to a summit where there's gym owners. Maybe we're spending money on Facebook ads or Google ads. Uh, or maybe I'm taking financial planners out to lunch. Every single one of those things is a separate lead source. I want to track that lead source. I want to track how much money I spent on them. I want to know how many leads I got from it. I want to know how many of those leads closed. And I want to know how much— like, what's the average revenue per client or per member for that lead? You can get a lot of data from that. We, in our early years, Google was the thing and it was really easy to rack up a big old bill on Google. And yeah, we were getting no traffic. So because we were tracking it, it was super obvious to us, even though the world is screaming, it's super sexy and you should do Google advertisements. By tracking it, we could see it was not a good investment for us. Same with Facebook. We've had to— we when we used to pay for advertising and we were doing Facebook stuff, it actually wasn't a great lead source for us for the accounting firm. And so again, through the years we found which ones make the most sense and all of that happens because we track it and that has a massive amount to do with your cash flow. So that's what I wanted to share with you briefly today. Again, Mike's book, new book, Get Different. He talks about differentiate, attract, and direct. And then of course, there's a ton of examples in there about different ways he's approached it. Like all Mike Michalowicz books, he does give you action steps to do at the end of every chapter. It's good homework. It's like free consulting with Mike. I know this because when I meet with Mike, these resonate with a lot of things that he's asked us to do in the past.
