Brand marketing is like digging a moat around your business with a shovel:
Every action over time makes the moat a little wider, and a very wide moat offers impressive protection for a business.
You should use brand marketing daily as part of your long-term strategy—I’ll tell you how to do that in the next post in this series.
But you can’t wait 10 years for your marketing efforts to pay off.
Enter direct-response marketing.
This is active, engaging, short-term marketing designed to get results fast.
The best part: Direct-response marketing can—and should—be used while your brand marketing runs in the background. As time progresses and your branding takes hold in the market, your direct-response campaigns become increasingly powerful.
Example: You’ve run the best gym in town for a decade, and everyone knows it. People know what you do, where you do it and how well you do it. In an odd month, five clients all move out of town, so you put up an ad: “I’m looking for five people who want to lose 10 lb. in three months!”
What happens? You fill those spots fast.
Strong brand and direct campaigns are a powerful combo—but I’m going to give you a shortcut here so you can add new clients while you’re establishing your brand.
Get More Leads Today
We teach gym owners to build four marketing funnels (Two-Brain clients, I’ve provided links to your Toolkit resources):
Here’s what the funnels look like:
I’m going to dig into the social-media funnel and show you how to apply direct-response techniques so you can engage leads and pull them into your business instead of wait for them to fall through your door.
Action 1: Post Regularly
We recommend you post to your main social platforms once a day at minimum. When you have a system built out for creating and publishing content—we teach clients to build these systems and supply done-for-you resources—posting takes about 10 minutes a day.
Action 2: Start Conversations
This is where almost all gym owners miss out on opportunities because they are too passive. They post and walk instead of post and talk.
Every non-member who follows, likes or comments on a post is a lead, and you only have to tap a screen to start a conversation, help someone solve a problem and make a sale.
So what do you say?
Try this: “Thanks for following/liking/commenting! We post stuff daily to inspire. Are working out right now?”
Just continue the conversation and get info about the person.
Action 3: Push to No Sweat Intro
When the time is right in your chat, ask the lead to take the next step—this is direct-response marketing at its finest in the digital age.
Say something like this to invite the person to your gym for a free consultation:
“I can put together a personalized program that will help you hit your goal in that 5-km race. Want to talk about it?”
Action 4: Sign ‘Em Up
In your in-person or phone consultation, use the Prescriptive Model to solve problems and close the sale (we teach clients how to do this with speed and skill).
Direct Action Every Day
This direct-response marketing strategy is called “selling by chat,” and it’s been proven to work in gyms all over the world.
In fact, if you spend a few minutes using this strategy every day, I guarantee you’ll book more free consultations and make more sales.
This is just one direct-response technique that’s used in one of our four funnels, but it’s simple and effective, so I wanted to present it for you here.
Start using it today!
In the next post in this series, I’ll teach you how to tell everyone that you’re the best steakhouse in town using the QuickCast brand-marketing technique.
