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Sweat Success | Interview with Michael Benso, Co-Founder & CEO of Buzops

The REAL Reason Why Your Gym Marketing Agency is Failing You…

Sweat Success | Interview with Michael Benso, Co-Founder & CEO of Buzops

The REAL Reason Why Your Gym Marketing Agency is Failing You…

Sweat Success | Interview with Michael Benso, Co-Founder & CEO of Buzops

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Show Notes

On this episode of The GSD Show, what’s the real reason why your gym marketing agency is failing you?

It’s because they’re not a marketing agency… they’re an advertising agency. These are two vastly different things.

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss, It’s Expensive (4:13)

Of the Top 5 reasons gyms go out of business, 2 of them have to do with financial literacy. Marketing is a huge part of your gym’s finances. If gyms can get financial literacy right, they’ll have a much better foundation to build on.

Many gym owners assign themselves identities like I don’t really understand gym marketing or I’m not a math person. The truth is, they simply haven’t done enough of it to be good at it or have enough knowledge in it to know if the person they hire is good at it.

You Are What You Practice

Remember, you’re always practicing. So, if you’re practicing I’m not good at gym marketing then you’ll continue to get better and better at NOT being good at gym marketing. However…

If you start practicing any aspect of your business, and you put some passion behind it, you’ll unlock a mindset some of the most successful gym owners have.

Speaking of passion… 

Gym Marketing Requires a Different Kind of Passion (07:48)

Most gym owners start out passionate about fitness, then lose it—some even come to resent it—when they start a fitness business…

For some, the business side frustrates them so much they lose their passion for fitness entirely… for helping people transform. It leaves a bitter taste in their mouths.

Others transfer their passion for fitness into a passion for business. They want to learn everything they can and do what it takes to be successful. What’s great about this? They end up helping even more people than before. Members AND employees.

Who Gym Owners Need to Become

The key is, at that inflection point, developing a passion for business. Does that mean it’ll be easier? Less frustrating? Not at all. But it changes your mindset and your drive.

Once you start a business, you’re no longer a fitness person. You’re a business person who just so happens to specialize in fitness.

H2: Gym Marketing is Bigger Than You Think (10:35)

In order to grow your gym and help more people, step one is having everyone within your 5-mile radius know that you even exist. That’s where gym marketing comes in.

But, it’s so much more than just “generating leads.”

Gym Marketing’s #1 Purpose

Marketing has one main purpose, and it’s why it’s so much bigger and so much more important than most gym owners think:

The #1 purpose of marketing is to generate revenue.

That’s it. Period.

Is generating leads part of that? Yeah. It’s an aspect of it. But there are a lot of different ways to generate revenue and marketing typically touches on all of them.

Strategy vs. Execution

There’s a big difference between marketing strategy and marketing execution. Most gym marketing agencies are good at the execution part, not the strategy.

What a lot of gym owners do (and small business owners of all kinds too) is pay agencies for the strategy and execution. Here’s the deal, you want to own the strategy. You should absolutely hire an agency for the execution, but here’s why you should own the strategy:

Because only you and your team know exactly who your ideal member is, how to talk to them, how to connect with them, and how to reach them. Leave strategy to an agency and you’ll end up with a lot of low-quality, unqualified leads—that you paid for—not signing up for a membership.

Here’s the high-level playbook for your gym’s marketing…

Mastering the 4 P’s of Marketing

Grab this FREE video training on the 4 P’s of Marketing:

That video breaks it down even more, but here’s why it’s in this article. What gym marketing agencies do is a fraction of what marketing actually is.

Here are the 4 P’s and way down at the bottom is what most agencies do:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion
    • Advertising
      • Paid Advertising
        • Social Media

See how delegating the entire spectrum of marketing to an agency that does one little piece of it is not the key to increasing revenue?

Gym Marketing Strategies (16:40)

So when you see it this way, you see how vital the owner is to the marketing as a whole, not just social media and paid advertising.

Imagine you’re helping someone get into great shape. You do a S.W.O.T. analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). They’re this tall, these are their habits, here’s what they enjoy, here’s what they hate, this is the time they have, etc.

OK, now imagine that you hire a chef to cook their food so they stay within their calories and macros while avoiding processed food. What does that person do best?

They cook food, right? If you gave them no info about your client and said get this person lean in three months… they’d do their best but there’s so much of the strategy missing and it’s outside their scope of expertise.

It’s the same with agencies.

Perfect Example

One of our Mastermind members Delfin just pulled 6-figures in revenue for the past 6 months without running a single paid ad.

How?

It’s not necessary for him because he has other aspects of his gym marketing strategy firing on all cylinders.

That’s the power of taking control over your marketing strategy.

So what are some of the things you can do to increase revenue through marketing? Here’s the short list:

  • Increase pricing
  • Upgrade members to a higher tier
  • Increase ancillary sales
  • Boost books rates, show rates, and close rates (sales is under the marketing umbrella!)
  • Get more referrals at the point of sale
  • Create B2B relationships, programs, and referrals

…and not one of those involves a paid ad.

Just like real fitness people hate the so-called miracle diet pills, real business owners hate the “diet pill” version of marketing.

Save money and grow your business by learning the gym marketing game.

Get Every Marketing Strategy You’ll Ever Need

It’s not about “How” do I develop a gym marketing strategy… it’s about “Who” has done it and how can I do what they did.

The best place to find “Who” for every strategy you’ll ever need is in the Mastermind Program at Loud Rumor. This is where the absolute best gyms come to grow. Learn more about it and apply today.

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