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Are you making these common Facebook ad mistakes?

February 25, 2019 Gym Marketing
To succeed in online advertising, especially with increased competition in the digital marketing landscape, you need to focus on three key goals: 1. Establish yourself as a likeable and trustworthy authority figure in your market.  Most in the blogosphere call this the know-like-trust factor.   2. Capture leads (prospective client contact information) 3. Nurture your leads and convert them into new member sales This list is written in order of importance.  Most gym owners attempt to drive cold traffic directly to a signup page on their website in hopes of increasing sales.  As a microgym owner, however, your #1 marketing and advertising goal is to first prove to people why they should listen to you and consider your gym. You need to consistently provide value to your audience if you want them to know, like and trust you. You can create value in many different ways. You can write articles and blog posts, Facebook Live Q&A’s, video tutorials or webinars. Ask yourself, “what are the most common problems that current clients are looking to me to solve?”  List out those problems, prescribe solutions, and distribute those in the form of online content.   Your ads will consistently underperform if you skip ahead and drive traffic to a front end offer. Offer your prospects something of value first before you ask for the sale. You need to dedicate part of your advertising budget to audience engagement – to nurturing your audience with content.   Using your ad budget solely to advertise and promote your front end offer, like a 21-day rapid fat loss program or a 6 week challenge, will lead to suboptimal results.  When your front end offer looks and sounds the same as every other gym in your area, there is very little to set your apart from your competition. Instead, build engagement campaigns that educate your audience on who you are, what you do, and why you can ...
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What I've Learned From The Open

February 22, 2019 Personal Development
One of my favorite things about CrossFit is what it teaches you between workouts.   Last night was the 19.1 announcement. Here are the lessons I took away:   It’s not really about the workout. People don’t care about the wall-balls and rowing; they care about how it’s presented. I saw a huge outcry on social media after the 19.1 announcement last night. But unlike most years, when nervous people complained about the exercise selection, most of the complaints seemed to focus on the presentation: “Where is Castro?” and “Why is it in French?” Of course, without a Media team, the Open announcements won’t be the same. But the great news is: you can make your members get this excited about their workouts without HQ’s help. Take the Open announcements of previous years as your template. Create anticipation for the “big reveal” through your own media. Invite guests. Clean the gym. Clearly demonstrate the points of performance. Do it on camera. Change your lighting a bit. GET EXCITED! There was nothing done in the Open announcement that you couldn’t have done in your own box, my friend. (You can do this stuff every single day. And, once every year, you can do it bigger.) Here’s Kyle Stepp of Priority CrossFit doing a great job: Share your plans with your team. Your coaches are really the voice of your business. If they’re excited about the Open, your members will enjoy it. If they’re complaining, your members won’t. Include your coaches in the plan for future weeks; put them on camera; shoot your own “update show” between events. Take ownership of the Open. Communicate more than you think it’s necessary.  Communicate before you think it’s necessary. Tell people exactly what to expect. Tell them exactly what to do. Tell them why they’re going to love it. Keep selling them on it. Smile when you do.   The Open is already a great ...
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Episode 156: Building Kids' Programs In Your Gym

February 21, 2019 Gym Operations Podcast
Announcer:                            00:02                       Welcome everyone to to brain radio. It is our mission at TwoBrain is to provide 1 million entrepreneurs the freedom to live the life that they choose. Join us every week as we discover the very best practices to achieve perfect day and move you closer to wealth. Announcer:                            00:26                       This episode is brought to you by ForTime Design. The real focus of this episode is talking about the value of your time. Is it worth it to outsource your programming and what I started to bring business.com to bring coaching.com I built these sites myself from scratch because I wasn’t satisfied with what else was out there. It’s important to know how to build a website yourself. It’s important to know how to change your own oil. It’s important to know how to rotate your own tires, but the value of your time is what’s most important. I’m not a graphic designer, I’m not a website designer and so I trust liquid state design to take care of all this stuff for me. Check them out. Toxic Teresa, they do some pretty amazing work and a lot of two brain gyms are already using them. To huge advantage in their local market. Greg Strauch:                        01:10                       All right. I’m here with Jason Rule, owner of Driven nutrition. Jason, how are you? Jason Rule:                             01:15                       I’m good. Thanks for having me on Greg. I appreciate it. Greg Strauch:                        01:18                       Happy to. I know personally within my gym, I love the products that Driven nutrition has been able to offer us. I would say as a business owner, I love the profit margins as well. Uh, before we get into all that, let’s kind of start with your story. Let’s start with kind of what led you up to open driven nutrition and uh, Kinda expand and we’ll go from there. Jason Rule:                             01:37                       All right. Right on. We’ll dive ...
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Where To Build Your Gym

February 21, 2019 Gym Operations
My second gym was a CrossFit gym. I built it in an industrial park, because #hardcore. It looked nothing light my bright, open personal training gym, which had tiled showers and sparkling windows. In fact, I remember by CrossFit landlord staring at my chalkboard wall and asking: “Don’t you want it to look NICE?!” I said, “Hell no!” and laughed. Of course, the joke was on me: over the next few years, I had a hard time getting people to drive across town to do puke-inducing workouts in a dusty garage. (You know, now that I say it out loud…) Meanwhile, downtown in my airy second-floor personal training space, my clients were begging for CrossFit! And I, stubbornly stupidly, told them to “drive up to the Industrial Park if you want CrossFit.” Most new affiliate owners are smarter than that. We work with dozens of future gym owners to help them avoid the crazy expensive mistakes we all made; open profitable; and kickstart their dream career. If you’re about to open, here’s a podcast I think you’ll LOVE (and I know will make you money). Entrepreneurs go through four phases in their journey: Founder Phase, Farmer Phase, Tinker Phase, and Thief. If you’re not sure which phase you’re in, take the test here. Then, whether you’re considering your first lease; an expansion; purchasing a building; adding a second location; or moving house, follow these guidelines: Founder Phase priorities: Convenience is more important than exposure. Choose a location that close to your ideal clients’ homes or workplaces. If it’s closer to their work, you’ll need showers. If it’s closer to their home, you might not. Don’t be swayed by proximity to a highway. “But 30,000 cars drive by every day!!!” Exposure might get you the first half-dozen clients, but won’t be measurably more valuable in the long run. If you have two buildings in mind, and they’re priced the same with ...
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The Real Reason I HATE Bait-And-Switch Advertising

February 20, 2019 Gym Marketing
If you go read the CrossFit.com message boards all the way back to 2001, you’ll find questions about marketing.   The very first affiliates struggled with marketing. Affiliates in 2014–during the highest-growth period of CrossFit affiliates worldwide–still struggled with marketing. And in 2018, affiliates were still struggling with marketing.   So when some gym owners started to find success with various Facebook marketing strategies, I was thrilled. FINALLY, we could talk about actually running a business! FINALLY, more affiliate owners could afford the service that would really make a difference: mentorship!   And it happened: on more and more “Free Help” calls with affiliate owners, I heard: “I ran this six-week challenge and now I can afford mentorship!”   It appeared that the marketing problem was solved–at least, temporarily. No Facebook strategy lasts more than a few months, but I hoped that gym owners were being given some breathing room to work on the stuff that works forever.   But then I started hearing about the “bait and switch” advertising (I refuse to call it “marketing”.) You know how it works already: “FREE challenge! Sign up here!” Then the potential new client is told the challenge is actually $499…but they’ll get their money back IF they leave a good review…and check off a bunch of other boxes.   I heard stories about coaches leaving, because they no longer trusted the box owners (“If they’re lying to clients, they’re probably lying to me, too.”)   I heard stories about great, long-term clients being “washed out” of the gym by the tidal waves of short-term, in-and-out groups of 30 or more.   I heard stories of burnout by owners. Stories of clients who thought they had “done CrossFit…and now I’m looking for the next thing” because they thought CrossFit was an 8-week mass challenge.   Stories of marketing companies charging tens of thousands of dollars for this stuff!   But what really ...
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The Feedback Loop

February 19, 2019 Gym Operations
The circle is broken.   The relationship between coach and athlete is now mostly one-way. It wasn’t always like this.   In years past, most fitness coaching was done one-on-one. A client would do their workout in front of their trainer; take homework or book their next appointment, and then the trainer would plan their next workout.   No one “programmed” a month ahead, because tomorrow’s program depended on today’s result. For example, if a client was doing a 3-minutes-on-1-minute-off HIIT workout, and couldn’t finish all five rounds, their future workouts would be altered to reflect their performance.   Likewise, if a client was running 400m repeats at a 1:16 average pace, their coach would program the next workouts based on that score (maybe 200m workouts with shorter rest breaks, or 400m repeats with a target time of 1:15…)   Now, it’s easy to do this with a 1:1 client. It’s even possible to stretch one client’s program enough to cover a second client, if that second client is similar in goal and ability.   It’s very hard to do this with a gym full of members taking group classes. VERY hard. But why isn’t anyone trying anymore?   The original HQ programming, as I understand it from Coach, was reviewed monthly. The workouts were all designed to have objective scores attached. So coaches could look at the scores and say, “90% of our clients improved their max deadlift this month, but only 5% improved their Fran.”   And then they’d program shorter HIIT workouts. Not too complicated, really.   So why aren’t we doing it?   Why are we searching for the hardest workouts we can find, instead of the best possible workouts for our clients? Why are we choosing “hard for the sake of hard” over “here’s where the majority of my clients are weak?”   Constantly varied, functional movement covers all the bases. Eventually. But what if ...
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