The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
How to Create Gym Offers That Actually Get Clients to Act
Studio owners, are you tired of running challenges that attract bargain-hunters instead of ideal members? Ever wonder why your "lose 10 pounds in 10 days" promotions bring in crowds but fail to convert to paying clients?
The Fit to Great Cast tackles this common frustration head-on by redefining how fitness businesses should approach promotional challenges. Instead of random discounts or free offers that attract low-commitment participants, we explore a strategic framework built around emotional connection, clear outcomes, and quality filtering.
At the core of this approach is understanding the psychographic traits of your ideal members – the people you actually want more of in your studio. By crafting challenges that address their specific pain points and desired outcomes, you create offers that resonate on a deeper level than generic weight loss promises. We examine how studios working with specialized populations (like high school athletes) can leverage this specificity to attract qualified prospects.
Perhaps most revolutionary is the concept of the "lead challenge" – a paid offering priced at approximately one-third of your regular membership that serves as a quality filter. This modest investment immediately distinguishes serious prospects from freebie-seekers, positioning your services as valuable professional guidance rather than commodity workouts. Combined with a year-long themed campaign approach inspired by professional sports teams, this creates a cohesive promotional strategy that builds excitement rather than relying on urgency gimmicks.
Whether you run a specialized boutique studio or manage multiple locations, these principles apply across the fitness industry. Stop discounting your value with free challenges and start creating promotional experiences that convert to loyal, paying members. Subscribe to Fit to Great Cast for more strategic insights that transform fitness businesses from surviving to thriving.
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lose 10 pounds in 10 days challenge. Those things somewhat work from a lower level, but if you're at a point where you're a much more focus on delivering results, you're going to want to focus very heavily on understanding the types of things that really hit their pain point. You don't want just everybody, remember. You want to start building your audience. So hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the 50 Great Cast. I'm your host, zach Coleman. Today we're gonna talk about promotions, challenges that really pop cringe word for me that really resonate with your audience, and how you can start creating effective offers, slash promotional challenges that can bring people in, that really just drive more action and revenue. Think about this for a sec. How often do you create a challenge? How often do you create a challenge? How often do you create this promotion? Spend weeks on end developing a Facebook ad or developing, spending all of your time doing an organic social media post to try to get people in the door and it flops. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Today, that's what we're gonna talk about. How can you really build something that resonates with your preferred members, with the types of members that really want to utilize your services and not really just coming in for that free workout and your attention basically runs out the door? Or do you have a situation where they just come for the free class, never talk to a woman again? Now, those things are always going to exist somewhat. You're just in the B2C market. You're always going to have lower quality membership situations and promotionals and challenges that you're going to have to deal with on a normal basis. But today I kind of want to run through this and kind of work with you on how you can really drive action towards providing better challenge opportunities that can build better retention and or better promotional ideas for certain types of the year that or full years that can really drive membership growth and or further on retention, right, I remember when I first launched my business, you know I thought a lot about doing a lot of promotional ideas. I would do a lot of discounts, I would do a lot of start something for free. What ends up happening when you do that? First and foremost, what ends up happening is, you know, I would get a lot of people in the door that just expected that to be that price forever. So if you're doing these free challenges and then they get sticker shock at your $200 membership fee, then what's the point of having the challenge and or you're put yourself in a situation where they just bring other free people. That comes back to our values.
Speaker 1:Watch this video up to the left right here or this podcast up to the left right here if you really want to understand a little bit more about how values can really build advocacy for your studio. But I really want to dive into that. I want to dive into these challenges because it hit me quite a bit, and so these are the three things we're going to talk about today. We're going to dive in and I'm going to give you kind of like three ideas on how you can start creating emotionally driven promotional ideas that your members existing members will expect. Techniques for effectively generating some sort of urgency but much more excitement around the offers that you're continuing to develop. And how you can craft future promotions around specific outcomes, not just reducing price. So let's start off by the basics here creating an emotional driven promotion for your members. Expectation or future members expectation. You know.
Speaker 1:First off, go back to my last video. If you go back to my last video, you'll see that we talk a lot about you know what to do to really drive a strategic growth in your studio and we talked a lot about building an audience, and I think you should kind of watch that first if you really want an understanding of this. But to really dive in and understand how you're going to be able to create these emotional type challenges, you really do have to understand your member, or the types of members that you want to continue to bring in, your true members, so to say, who are the ones that you want to keep around, and that in itself is going to start giving you some ideas on their psychographic traits, and if you can understand some of their psychographic traits you can kind of emotionally build something around it. You know, most of the time I see people building challenges like our lose 10 pounds in 10 days challenge or 20 pounds in 20 days. Those things somewhat work from a lower level. But if you're at a point where you're a much more tactical style of studio and you much more focus on delivering results, not just having a place for people to work out hint, hint big box gyms you're going to want to focus very heavily on understanding the types of things that really hit their pain points. I'm going to use this for an example One of the studios that we worked with works very heavily and they built out their ideal member and they know that a lot of their members are high school kids and so they have built challenges around that.
Speaker 1:So, building challenges around how we can get your 40 yard dash up to, to down to like 30, I'm just using as an example here to 35 yard dash in a matter of 10 days, you're giving them an outcome, and so utilize that type of that type of lingo when you're creating these challenges, because people more care about the outcome of what they're trying to achieve, more so than just the gimmicky like come in for a great workout challenge type scenario, and so I'm just using that as an example. But that's a way you can start building emotional connection with the types of offers that you're doing. A really good, effective way to utilize these two and these challenges and these promotions is by really taking into account that you can use this as a retention play, not just a new membership play. So a lot of people, a lot of studios, will say, hey, let's do a challenge during the summer, let's doing it during the winter, knock off that weight January, blah, blah, blah, and they'll do it for certain times of the year. They'll try to hit summer to try to bring new members in before they get the hold accounts. They'll try to get the you know the, the, the January they'll try to come in and get the uh, the people that are the newcomers that are trying to come off of the new year resolution stuff. But that's very surface level and thinking season. There is a good idea and those can be seasonal challenges that you learned, that can work for you on a normal basis and if they work, they work.
Speaker 1:But when you also have existing members, think about it a lot like you're doing a webinar. If you're doing a webinar, if you're an online company, right, you're saying our speaking opportunity, you're going in, you're speaking, you're building retention with your existing audience, you're giving them a YouTube video, blah, blah, blah. Or you're doing a training and you're providing a training for existing members I mean for your existing members that they can use at home or whatever. You would have same thing with your challenges be able to allow existing members to come in for these challenges as well, because what that's going to do is that's going to build advocacy with existing members and building that community with possible new members, and so that's a way. You can that two ways. You can build emotional connection and, just to recap there, just kind of understand your audience, understand the types of people that you want to bring into your studio and leverage your existing members to build better retention for them that they get exclusive rights to because they're already a member, but then they're going to build advocacy for those people that are new, to get them to kind of join. That's another way you can use your existing members to not just build retention but to build new clientele.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about urgency here versus excitement around your offer. You know urgency is kind of gimmicky nowadays. I think a lot of people understand, like get in now, before the sale is over. You can do that. If you want to look at yourself as a product, go ahead and do that. But I like to. I like to look at it as more of excitement, get something for people to look forward to.
Speaker 1:The best way to do this around your offers is taking a note out of what sports teams do. So what do sports teams do? Sports teams have one season. They have their brand, they have their logo, they have all their stuff, but they end up every year and I used to work for a. I used to work for a sports team, so this is kind of why I understand this. Every year, we would take their existing branding and we would come up with a new yearly type campaign, a new yearly type campaign that we would then designate other campaigns for later in the year. So how do you build excitement? You allow people more time to have it resonate with them and put it on their calendar. So instead of saying we're going to do a challenge, we're going to put it up two days, two days a week, before you know the new year's. Do that every year.
Speaker 1:Look at the overall year. At the end of the year, when you're doing your yearly retreat, your goals, meeting with leadership or your managers, sit down and kind of say to yourself okay, how do we build up the excitement for next year? What theme do we come up with? Come up with an overall theme for the whole year. Say this is the year we build and this will all depend on your studio. This is our mental well-being year, for instance. If you're like a yoga studio, we're going to focus on this. Or this is our flexibility year, the year of flexibility, for instance, and that that like would be a campaign year, and so every challenge that you do throughout the year matches that campaign, from the visuals to the messaging, and you set them up early. You say, hey, we're going to do this one in January, we're going to do this one during the summer, we're going to do this one over here, and you're going to make sure that your offers and your pricing match that. I don't want to get too deep into this, but I think that this is something that we just have to have people start to studio owners, just start to really focus on.
Speaker 1:Don't just give free offers. Don't just give free offers. Don't just give free challenges. I understand the practicality of doing a free tour or doing like a free assessment to build trust, but if you're doing a challenge and you're trying to bring people in, you need to make up that, that money, and you want to actually get rid of the people that do that, that will just want the free workout and that won't possibly come back, so you should charge for it. So back to our webinar and our speaking. Look at it, what we call, what we call our lead offer. So you have lead challenge, we'll call them lead challenges. Lead challenges should be ones that you're like huh. Our normal membership fee is $200. So, instead of just coming in with this free challenge, let's say, hey, spots are limited, we're only putting on 15, we're only bringing on 15 people and the cost is 20 bucks a person, so it's exclusive.
Speaker 1:You set these up at the end of the year or before the year and you start announcing them early, all of them, and so you have them in the queue and then you only do advertisement for them, actual advertisement for them, when it gets closer. But you allow people to resonate, build excitement over oh, it's flexibility here and you're like we'll help you learn. What is that? One pose in yoga that I always, I always couldn't do, the one where you stand on your hands and you put your leg, though I could never do that, no matter how much I I did yoga. But by the end of this, you'll be able to do poses that you'll be able to be more flexible by this percentage, or be able to do this pose or do this, this, and that gives them an outcome instead of just a specific need to come because it's free but charge for it. So, of course, you're going to have to do a little bit more fornangling.
Speaker 1:Look at your offers and what you're providing and look at the pricing and find a good. I think one third cost of a normal membership is a is a is a good starting point, or even one fourth for these, this one off class, to bring in more people, and then you can kind of utilize that instead of a lead offer, we'll call it a, we'll call it a lead challenge, where you actually charge for it up front, because I think that it does actually promote higher quality people coming in. That you don't want just everybody, remember, you want to start building your audience. So those are our three points that we're going to cover today. Again, creating emotional driven promotions and challenges. You know, start with your, your, your existing audience. You're building off of their psychological traits, of that audience, your ideal members. Utilizing your existing clients as advocates, your existing members as advocates for that. We talked about techniques for effectively generating urgency and excitement. Focus on a year campaign, have a theme around it, come up with everything a little bit early and then set it out so that you could build excitement around that theme and make sure that every year you have this theme in place that you can utilize throughout the whole year and make sure that you don't just do free. You provide what we call a lead challenge and you kind of provide a challenge that is paid for so that you can bring in higher quality people. Higher quality people are always going to be willing to pay and just make sure you have a specific outcome for that.
Speaker 1:Again, my name is Zach Coleman. This is the Fit to Great Cast foundational series. Again, you know, fit to Great Cast is new. It's a culmination of all of the clients we've worked with, from big box to boutique fitness studios of three to seven locations, all the way down to Gym Mark, which is our one to two fitness studio type marketing package that we do for a lot of the smaller studios to help them build their communities up. With that said, I'd love to hear from everyone in the comments. I want to know what's really resonating with you with the Fit to Grit cast. We'd like to, you know, give us a rating if you're on the podcast. If not, you know put down in the comments on the YouTube channel channel what's really worked for you in this video and I'd just like to say subscribe. We're really trying to build a Fit to Grit cast. We're really trying to build out our audience Again. My name is Zach, with Fit to Grit Cast, and you all stay gritty, thank you.
