02 May 169 Powerful and Profitable Digital Marketing with Alan Leach
Fitness business owners often find themselves asking, “How do I attract more customers without spending so much?”
Digital marketing for fitness businesses is a critical element of the money-making (and money-saving) process. If you want to use your advertising efforts to its full potential, then focusing on digital marketing is the best way to do it. An effective marketing strategy should focus on building a solid brand and identifying new opportunities to attract and engage potential clients.
To learn more about powerful and profitable digital marketing strategies, we spoke with industry leader Alan Leach, himself an expert in sales and marketing for the fitness industry.
About Alan Leach
Alan’s career in the fitness business industry spans over three decades. At the beginning of his career he grew a fitness club’s membership from 700 to 3,100, subsequently establishing the club as one of the most profitable fitness facilities in Europe.
He is currently the Chief Executive Officer, Director of Sales and Marketing and sales trainer at West Wood Clubs Dublin, Ireland, with over 36,000 members at seven West Wood health clubs in Ireland and Bosnia.
He is also the Chair of the IHRSA and sits in its Board of Directors since 2017.
Powerful and Profitable Digital Marketing
As a fitness business owner, you know that digital marketing is essential for your success. But what are the best ways to maximize its power and profitability?
Having the right marketing tools can be crucial to your success. They’ll save you time, improve your promotional efforts, generate better results, get more leads and, of course, help increase profits. Alan shares the top tools and strategies that have given him proven results!
Top Tools to Leverage to Up Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Maximize Facebook through Paid Ads and Pixel
Facebook ads for fitness marketing can be a great way to reach people who are interested in your services. By directing your ads to the right target audience, you can attract new customers, get new leads and grow your business.
Alan shares that we can use lookalike audiences from Pixel and plug that into Facebook to create customized audiences. These customized audiences can then make your targeting more specific and more effective.
Using Content to Improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Another powerful digital marketing tool is content. In order to improve your website’s SEO, you need to produce high-quality content that is both informative and engaging. Ideally, this content will also be keyword-rich, so that it will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
According to Alan, producing quality content can be a challenge but the work you put into your content marketing strategy can give amazing returns. Alan’s content marketing efforts give them about 1,100 new leads every month, paired with ad words and 84% of all their new leads come from Google search results.
Create a Social Media Strategy
Social media is one of the most powerful tools that fitness professionals can utilize but Alan emphasizes that it can be dangerous if there’s no marketing strategy in place.
He believes that when utilizing social media marketing, there should be a strategy. And that strategy should fit in with the business goals of the company. By creating a social media strategy, you can connect with potential customers and help to build relationships with them. This will also help to increase brand awareness and create an online presence for your fitness business.
How Much Should I Spend on Paid Ads Annually?
Figuring out how much to budget for digital marketing campaigns can be tricky. After all, there are so many different options and strategies available, and it’s hard to know which ones will work best for your business.
However, Alan says the most important factor that should be considered are the measurable results which will work best with your business’ needs!
A great way of figuring this out would entail taking stock of what you want from a campaign: Are they revenue? brand awareness ? customer engagement ? Make sure that any estimate reflects these objectives before committing time or money into something less valuable than expected.
After all, digital marketing is all about getting measurable results, if you can’t track it, you can’t improve it.
That’s why so many fitness professionals are turning to digital marketing as a way to grow their businesses. Thanks to the internet and technological advancements, there are now more ways than ever to measure the performance of your digital marketing efforts. This makes it possible to track and improve your return on investment (ROI) over time.
3 Key Tips on Digital Marketing for Fitness Owners
At the end of the 20-minute interview, Alan shares what he believes are the most important when it comes to really progressing or moving forward with their digital marketing campaign or digital marketing activity:
1. Build an effective Sales Team.
Alan believes that this is especially important to fitness business owners in the mid- or premium-price range. The people that you hire to become part of the sales team must be able to convert your leads into customers– that is, they are adept at selling your product even to those who are often undecided. They must be able to nurture the relationship with someone who is just inquiring and turn them into paying, renewing customers.
Alan notes that while a full-time sales team is ideal, business owners must take into consideration their membership size. Those within the 700,000-to-800,000 membership mark may have difficulty building a full-time sales team, whereas those with 4,000-to-5,000 members may find it feasible.
He shares that for his own business, it’s the sales staff that brings in the money for digital marketing. He remembers a quote from the famous David Ogilvy, dubbed the father of modern advertising, that “ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.” He relates it to digital marketing; that the number may even less, at 99.9%, that sell nothing to anybody. “But that 1% or half of 1% of those who do react to your leads can be converted to money through [the] sales system,” he adds.
2. Leverage the principles of normal, traditional marketing.
The main difference between the two is the medium through which your customer receives the message. Traditional marketing means using newspapers, television, radio, magazines, and flyers to get the word out, while digital marketing takes advantage of the wider reach of websites and social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
While the medium may differ, both types aim for the same goal– for your company or brand to stand out. This includes being clear about your objectives and goals, making people recognize your brand, and choose you over your competitors. The same principles of traditional marketing can be applied and be made available to thousands, even millions, of potential customers.
3. Develop your database.
Alan believes that this third tip is the most important of all. It’s critical to drive traffic into your database because of the three ways by which it can be used to grow your business.
The first is through paid traffic, and Alan explains it as “the traffic that you don’t own that you can control.” You can then pay Facebook to go to or Google AdWords to go into the market that you want to penetrate.
The second type of traffic is organic traffic, those visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources through search engines. They are essentially free traffic “that just happens to come along”, as Alan puts it. They are potential customers that type a few keywords on search engines such as Google and Bing, and are then redirected to your online presence.
Finally, the third type of traffic is called direct traffic, and this is composed of your current clients. They are the ones who directly go to your website or social media for anything related to fitness business. These potential customers are already part of your database, nurtured over time, and you therefore have the ability to target them with SMS marketing, and email marketing.
In summary
For Alan, the most profitable way that you can use digital marketing is to use its existing tools to drive traffic into your own database in order to build it and target it in ways that you can further your reach.
Your marketing strategy helps you meet business objectives. Use digital marketing strategies and opportunities to tap into larger markets. You can leverage your website, blog, articles, social media sites and more to drive traffic to your services.
Resources Our Experts Shared in the Show
Contact Alan Leach at [email protected]
Amanda Bond Episode as mentioned in the show
BONUS SEGMENT
