Want a steady stream of new clients?
You need four marketing funnels running at all times.
Here they are:
Before you run ads, you should set the three other funnels up: the referral funnel, the content funnel and the organic social media funnel. Each multiplies the value of paid ads:
- Referrals double your return on ad spend.
- Content builds trust with cold leads.
- Organic social media lets you build a better audience for your ads and give people little samples of your personality. A lead who clicks through your ad with no other context will be very cold.
Paid ads aren’t an art; they’re a science. And we teach Two-Brain gym owners how to be scientific about ads so they get real results and know they aren’t wasting money.
Here are the most important things to know about the paid ads funnel:
1. Know your numbers. It’s easy to say “my ads don’t work!” but when we audit a gym’s marketing funnels, we often see the ads do work but their sales process is broken. Or their lead-nurture process doesn’t work. Or their website doesn’t work. Before you can determine what to spend on paid ads, you need to know your set rate, show rate and close rate. (We teach you what these are and how to measure them in our mentorship program.)
2. Boost your best organic posts first. If you don’t have good traction with your organic posts, you probably won’t be good at creating ads. Think of investing in ads as pouring gasoline on an already-burning fire. The bigger the fire, the greater the effect of the gasoline. If you’re not good at consistently posting on social media, it’s too early to pay for ads. Two-Brain clients can easily build a publishing habit: There are hundreds of posts, images, AI prompts and graphics for them to swipe from our Content Vault. Spend $5 a day boosting your three best posts before you set up an ad campaign.
3. Set up ads and test them. Use a mentor to jump through months of trial-and-error, but do not use an agency to run your ads for you at this stage. Remember when I said that paid ads are a science, not an art? That means you’re going to be systematic about testing—and digital platforms are now very, very good at promoting your best-performing ads above your lesser efforts.
Here’s what Two-Brain chief marketing officer John Franklin has to say:
“Facebook has gotten really good at optimizing ads on its own platform. When we started, there used to be a whole science to getting all these different creative variants in there and testing them and structuring the campaigns and building the architecture that allowed you to do this.
“But really all you need now is to dump a lot of ingredients into the machine. So you just feed it a bunch of headlines, you feed it a bunch of images, you feed it a bunch of videos, and you feed it a bunch of creative, and Facebook’s going to slice and dice and push that out in as many variations as it can.
“And it will naturally—assuming you’re giving it enough spend—find the winners.”
So if platforms will help you determine your very best ad, how do you measure its effects on your business? Good ads for gyms create a measurable increase in leads to your site. If your site doesn’t measure the number of leads you’re getting, go back to Step 1 above.
4. When your ads are generating leads, you must follow up as quickly as possible, with the goal of booking a No Sweat Intro. You can automate parts of this process, but nothing beats a live person calling or messaging as soon as a lead enters the funnel—within five minutes is ideal, and within 24 hours is good. Some leads won’t book. That’s OK—keep in contact and warm them up until they’re ready to book.
5. When a No Sweat Intro is booked, send a confirmation, then regular reminders. If a lead doesn’t show, re-book ASAP.
6. In your No Sweat Intros, use the Prescriptive Model to sign up high-value clients.
7. Finally, you can outsource the advertising process only when you understand your metrics, have someone who will report on the process and know how to fix the process when it eventually stops working. (This could be months or even years, but eventually every ad campaign will stop working—and you won’t know it’s stopped until you understand your metrics.)
Ad Agency?
Hiring an ad agency before Step 8 will not help you. It might generate traffic, but you won’t know. You won’t maximize your return on ad spend because you won’t have the other pieces in place. Instead, the agency will maximize the spend instead of the return. Their job is to spend the money.
When an agency leaves—as they eventually will—you’ll be back to square one. It’s better to learn to drive before you buy the car.
The top reason gym owners hire ad agencies is fear: They don’t know how to run ads and they don’t think they can figure it out. We help them do that, and it saves them $3,000 every month in agency costs. Some still decide to hire an agency later, just to save time and energy. I get that. But they’re doing it with their eyes open, and they know how to tell if the agency is doing well with the gym’s money.
When to Run Ads
Should you run paid ads? Yes. After you’ve set up your other funnels.
The most important part of all? Running your metrics so you know if your ads are an investment. “Ad math” is a thing:
When you know how much it costs to acquire a client, how much you earn on the front end and the average lifetime value of a client, you know when your ad funnel is producing more money than it costs. When you know that, you can spend on ads with confidence.
We teach clients how to build all four marketing funnels, in order, in our mentorship programs—and it’s all plug and play. We provide resources, spreadsheets, templates, step-by-step instructions, images, copy, guidance from experts and constant support. Here’s a starting point if you’re on your own:
I know you didn’t open a gym to learn marketing. But when you opened a gym, you accepted the marketing job.
Don’t worry: It’s not complicated when you build your funnels with a mentor.
