The Marketing Word We Avoid

Discover the secrets behind transforming your gym or studio business as I, Isaac Coleman, unravel the complexities of marketing that might hold you back. With insights drawn from my extensive experience in the sports and entertainment industry, I'll challenge the stigmas surrounding marketing and explain why it's not the taboo it once was. You’ll gain a fresh perspective on how understanding different types of marketing agencies can empower gym owners to achieve sustainable growth and success.

Consider the once-dreaded word "sales"—now picture marketing wearing the same cloak of misunderstanding. Through personal stories, including a critical client experience, I shed light on why clear communication and the adoption of warm marketing strategies are indispensable. Marketing isn’t just about quick fixes; it’s about building long-term relationships and fostering trust, much like the bond between a personal trainer and their clients. Together, we'll navigate the tension between cost-effective solutions and value-driven approaches to help you create a robust lead generation model.

Imagine marketing relationships as crucial partnerships akin to those you build in your gym community. Performance-based marketing models, while sometimes costly, can be powerful allies in your growth journey. I'll share my insights on evaluating the role of freelancers and the significance of choosing marketers who align with your vision. Trust and communication are foundational, with parallels drawn between marketers and gym trainers, guiding you to turn marketing into a strategic force that bolsters community building and paves the way for your business's success. Join me as we redefine the role of marketing in your entrepreneurial path.

Chapters

• 0:00 Marketing Insights for Athletic Businesses
• 3:27 The Taboo of Marketing in Business
• 6:26 Building Trust in Marketing Relationships
• 10:12 Building Trust in Marketing Relationships

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

You hear the word marketing and the first thing that comes to mind is you go and you get a car. You're afraid of getting that sleazy salesman that's going to try to hike up the price. I mean, I know, I've gone through it. Why marketing has become such a taboo word is because of that. Welcome everyone to the first episode of the Gym Break Podcast, where Isaac Coleman, your host, will start doing some individual type podcasts for anyone in the athletic space. Now this is much more of a leadership podcast with a main focus on the athletic community and the studio community and people in the brick and mortar type system that are looking to expand their horizons to make it to the next stage of their growth and their business and their life and everything else that they're trying to achieve with their family and maybe physical activities. If you've heard of the normal gym break cast, you'll know that that's a video slash, audio hybrid type cast where we sit down with other individuals within the studio space and talk about all those visionary ideas, and so I kind of want to expand on that. I kind of want to continue that forward and start this podcast kind of a fresh way for me personally to start putting more information out there for you guys to have something that you guys can listen to, either during your normal gym session to you know, your normal leisure time, when you're just trying to have that visionary time to get away from the hustle and bustle, but still have intriguing insights on how you want to envision the growth of yourself and your brand and your business, wherever you're trying to go and whatever success you're trying to achieve with it. Now we're going to go through multiple topics as we kind of continue through this on a day-to-day basis, but I'm going to try to do something a little bit different and I'm going to try to have this cast just be a little bit more audio focused and I'm going to have it kind of, let's just say, be a little bit more informal and go off of one subject at a time, going through my experiences through the years owning my agency and helping people within the sports and entertainment slash athletic realm, and hopefully I can give you some insights that can help you take it to the next stage in your growth, what you're trying to achieve.

Speaker 0: 2:23

This week I really kind of want to talk about something that's been on my mind lately and I think it works really well, because I think that it doesn't just help me kind of go out there and push out some information and vent a little bit about certain types of scenarios, but it's also going to help you, as the studio owner, kind of understand marketing. Today I really want to go into different types of marketing agencies. We'll go through the week and we'll kind of dive into different forms of marketing for you within your gym. But I want to start off by something that really hit me. I was actually on the panel. I went to the Beyond Active event. If any of you guys know that from a studio perspective, it's a large gym conference for CEOs and visionaries within the studio franchise and partnership space where people just collaborate. We get to know each other and get to build. I met a lot of the people that I really look up to at that event and where I'm trying to somewhat take my agency and what I'm trying to do. But I also was able to start building a lot of partnerships there.

Speaker 0: 3:27

And one thing that really came to mind while I was there is, you know, the whole facet of marketing becoming the new taboo word. You know, you hear the word marketing and the first thing that comes to mind is oh, here's some guy that's going to come in and say they're going to do something and they're not going to do it. You know, that really gets to me. Well one, because sales used to be that way. The word sales you go and you get a car. You're afraid of getting that sleazy salesman that's going to try to hike up the price. I mean, I know I've gone through it and now that's gone to marketing. It's gone to one of the four pillars of what makes a company successful, which, of course, sales is part of marketing, but marketing in general. Why does it have such a taboo? Why does the word marketing have such a taboo? And it's even more ironic for me personally because I didn't start my career in marketing.

Speaker 0: 4:17

I'm actually a brander at heart. I'm a communicator, I love communication, I love understanding and one of my biggest pet peeves is communication when it comes to my internal team or it comes to my prospects and my clients and building solutions for them. Communication is what makes the world go around, and so whenever anyone looks at me and says, oh, you're a marketer, I go. Well, really, I'm not, I'm a brander. And so what really put that word? Marketing is a taboo.

Speaker 0: 4:45

I'll keep it very simple here. Especially within the studio space, you have a lot of people. It doesn't matter if you're in sales, it doesn't matter if you're in marketing. They will sit there and promise you results that they don't achieve. And the funny thing is is they're just trying to make a buck or they're. There was poor communication and the relationship didn't work right because they said one thing and you took it a different way. You know, I actually had a client a few months back that we actually kind of parted ways because three months in he thought he was going to get results quick. And I told him from the beginning this is a sustainable lead flow model. You know this isn't meant to give you 100 leads tomorrow. You know we can go on a rant about that in a little bit. What it's supposed to do is it's supposed to help you start building a sustainable lead set of leads that come in so that you can start projecting end of the year results and members more quality.

Speaker 0: 5:40

And how did I come up with this model? Because I'm more of a brander. That's why. Because I looked at the warm marketing approach. More so Because I'm more of a brander. That's why. Because I looked at the warm marketing approach more so than I looked at the cold marketing approach, but I think that that's diving into why marketing has become such a taboo word is because of that.

Speaker 0: 5:55

Now, I think this goes on both ends here. Nothing for you studio owners that you may just not know anything about marketing, or you think that going cheap is the way to go. There's both sides of the spectrum. Depending on your size, you're going to have to sometimes cut corners and only do certain things, but then you're going to have other times where you're like you know, like value. I've seen people get screwed over over value-based selling as well. There's two sides of volume versus value, right, when it comes to marketing.

Speaker 0: 6:26

But in the studio gym specifically because that's the model that I've been honing in on and seeing a lot of other people in the niche is, you have a lot of people that push this performance-based marketing kind of perspective. What is performance-based marketing? Well, simple, I get you a lead, you pay me for that lead. You don't pay me anything before that, you pay me per lead, so on and so forth. Now, I don't think this is a bad model. I mean, we have partners that focus on this model and it's good for certain types of channels and certain types of situations, but it's also only good for certain sizes of gyms. Give you an example here we just signed a partnership with a large web build. Now this isn't in the gym space, it's in the sports space, but it's about a $60,000 job.

Speaker 0: 7:11

He was using Shopify, which is also, if you think about it, kind of a commission-based platform. That's why they're so cheap because they make a lot of their money off commission. When they first started off this, they were on one of these smaller platforms free hosting, $20 a month, had no good processes in place. But now that they're a $3 to $5 million brand, those commission fees add up to a lot of money, a lot more than you would be paying someone or an agency if you were just paying them per hour or value or per level of marketing services based off of your needs. But there's a lot of them out there, and so you have to really think about what you want when it comes to the type of marketer or consultant that you bring into your facility to work with you.

Speaker 0: 7:59

Are you going to be working with a freelancer? Freelancers usually are a single person. They're a person that's going to. You know you're going to say, hey, do social media ads for me. They're going to design, write and manage your account because that's all they know to do, but their only expense is their hour. They're so small, that's all they do. It's great for beginners, you know they may do a commission fee, but let you be wary. Just to kind of move past these types of situations, I've never seen anyone off of those types of services get anywhere. I really haven't.

Speaker 0: 8:32

It's the whole concept. You get what you pay for. How many times have you done a free challenge and you, you know there's no commitment, right? And so what usually happens when you do a free challenge? You work your butt off. You pay all this money. You get 10 people into a challenge Because it's free. No one commits. You may have a 5% or a 10% conversion rate on a monthly membership, and then what happens three months later? They cancel Because they are probably suckered into it anyway. They weren't. Your audience really is what it comes down to. But you did your best, you know, and there's nothing wrong with challenges. Challenges are great. Challenges are going to help you do certain things.

Speaker 0: 9:09

But back to the main focus point here, why marketing has become a taboo word. Why does everyone look at marketers? It's because they don't trust them. So how do you build trust? Let's kind of change the role here. How do you build trust? Think about it from the perspective of you. How do you build trust with your friends? How do you build trust with your so-called your members? Good customer service, good communication Systems may not be perfect, but systems do help. I'm only saying that because systems are going to grow and evolve right, and so when you're looking at a marketing company or a marketer, trust is going to be another main one.

Speaker 0: 9:46

Again, communication Results aren't always going to be there. You could have someone come into your gym that you're giving an offer on hey, we'll help you lose 50 pounds. But how many of those people that you can't guarantee they're going to lose 50 pounds because it's up to them to do their tasks? They're going to lose 50 pounds because it's up to them to do their tasks. It's up to them to make sure that they're watching their food, make sure that they're doing their workouts. How many of them quit? So you purposely say, hey, we can't guarantee you these results, this is all on you.

Speaker 0: 10:12

Marketing is the same way, though. They do the heavy lifting with their experience, just like you do with your gym goers, right? You give them a plan and you tell them what to do. They will help you with some things. They will not help you with others. For instance, you'll probably spot them when you're having them do workouts. You'll push them, you'll hold them accountable. Isn't that what you want out of a marketer? And, in reality, is that really marketing then? And why do I say this? Because, like I told you at the beginning of this episode, I'm a brander that says I do marketing.

Speaker 0: 10:38

I hate gimmicky marketing. I feel like you know, here, especially in the studio space, you have this ability to have a sweet spot. Everyone's all trying to go cheap and do $10 memberships, like you're a big box gym, when they have commercial real estate stacking up behind them to pay the bills. When you are a boutique gym just say one to seven locations they should be putting 10% towards your mind. That's just the numbers, people. That's just the numbers that society and business has determined from years of structural systems that you should be putting in place. But somehow gyms have gotten to a point and studios have gotten to the point where they cheap out on marketing because they keep lowering their costs. I'll be the first to tell you that I don't go to a gym because of the equipment. I mean, I do. The equipment's always going to be part of it, but it has to match the audience. I go to the gym because it's where I go to work on my mental health, my physical health and it's my community.

Speaker 0: 11:34

So back to that word marketing taboo. Why do you have such a hard time trusting marketers and paying money to someone that's going to get you results, knowing quite well that, hey, all the hard work they're going to do, they have the team in place to do the stuff that you can't do. But that doesn't mean that you still can't push forward and be a leader and focus on that strategy. Look at the results with the marketer and make sure that, hey, this is working or it's not working. 2020 was a great example. Millions of people were online, but no one was buying, especially in the studio space, because everyone had to stay home, right? So you have to really think about that stuff and look away from the taboo and think more just about trust. How do you trust people? And trust itself and communication are also going to be something that are going to help you with your other vendors, help you grow your location, and so just think about it from that perspective.