Marketing Strategies for Business Owners

Understanding Your Ideal Client

The most important part of any marketing campaign is understanding your target demographic. How old are they? Where do they live? What websites do they use? What do they want? What do they need? What causes them pain? If you have good clients already, talking to them can answer a lot of these questions. Once you’ve answered some of these questions you can choose effective keywords and write ads that will move your audience to take action.

For the sake of this post, let’s say you are a personal trainer. This process can work for any type of business as long as we know our ideal customer.

You might think that people sign up for gym memberships to get healthy, and while this is a great bonus, it isn’t usually what people are actually looking for (with some exceptions of course). People who start working out are generally dissatisfied with the way their bodies look. They want to be more muscular, have better proportions, and be more shredded. They might also be looking for performance related growth (faster sprints, bigger bench, flexibility, etc.). In any case, they really just want to be accepted, loved, and respected by themselves and others.

I love working with gym owners and personal trainers on their marketing because people tend to be very emotionally invested in their health and bodies. This makes advertising for gyms very effective because it is easy to elicit an emotional response from potential clients. The great part about gyms is that once you’ve acquired a new client and delivered the results you promised, that person will likely become a repeat customer for a long time.

Writing an Ad

Our ads need to show our ideal audience that we understand how they are feeling. The feeling of not being accepted is what motivates most people to work out. In our marketing, this is the feeling we want to tap into when writing the copy for gym related ads. These people are already suffering so it isn’t too hard to remind them of their pains. Be very careful when using negative emotions in advertising. A little negative emotion goes a long way and it won’t work if you don’t show that you can solve the problem.

You need to paint a picture for them of a better life. One where they have the body of their dreams. This is obviously hard to do, but we want to make it seem easy. You know that they will need to put in hard work and dedication, but all they know is that they want 6 pack abs.

Here are a few gym ads I came up with after a quick brainstorm:

“We make your fitness journey easy. Lose weight and fit into those old jeans you love.”

fat person weight loss challenge gym marketing

“Skipped another beach day? Start your weight loss journey today and get your dream beach bod.”

“Too fat for the beach? Start your weight loss journey today and hit the beach this summer.”

“Getting winded walking up the stairs? Do this one thing and increase your endurance by 100%”

“Don’t love your gut? Do this one thing and lose 20lbs.”

“Can’t touch your toes. Do this one thing to increase your flexibility”

“Trouble losing weight? Let us help you write the next, better chapter of your life.”

“Start your fitness journey today. Warning: fat loss and muscle growth may come with snarky comments from people in your life who don’t want you to get better.”

Building A Sales Funnel

Once we have the ad written, you need a landing page. A landing page is a web page that people are sent to when they click on your ad. It should include a little bit more information than the ad but not enough that the potential client doesn’t need your help. When they finish reading the landing page (or watching the video on the landing page) they should not have their problem solved but feel like the solution is within their reach. At the bottom of the landing page (or throughout) there should be a call to action. Ask your audience to interact with you in some way such as sending you an email, giving you a call, or booking a meeting. You can also get your audience to leave their own contact info by offering a downloadable piece of content.

Split-Testing Your Ads

Any of the above snippets of text have the potential to elicit some kind of emotion in our audience. However, we don’t know which ones are best yet. To figure this out we need to split-test a few of them against each other. During the testing phase it is important to start with a very low budget to avoid burning money. With proper tracking, we can figure out which ads are actually leading to increases in profits for your business. Once we know that a certain ad works, we can crank the budget and let the business flow.

There are many other steps in our ads that can be split-test but it is best to work one at a time to be able to see what is happening. You can split test individual sentences or even single words in an ad (example: weight loss vs. fat loss vs. fitness vs. muscle growth). You can split-test which keywords you bid on. You can split-test the landing page. You can split-test the call to action. You can even split-test the offer you are making (example: you could offer them a full refund if they meet their goal in 30 days – the idea here is that once they meet their goal, they are highly motivated to continue training so instead of refunding you sign them up and give the next 30 days free).

Continue split-testing and improving your entire sales funnel to reach your goals for your business.

Marketing Strategy for any Business Owner

Let’s go over the steps for a good marketing strategy one more time:

  1. Understand Your Ideal Client
  2. Identify Pains or Needs
  3. Write Multiple Ads
  4. Build A Sales Funnel
  5. Split-Test Ads at Low Budget
  6. Analyze Data and Choose Best Ad
  7. Increase Budget and Start Profiting
  8. Split-Test Other Aspects of Sales Funnel
  9. Repeat Step 8 Until Ads Reach Perfection

By continually improving your sales funnel you will attract more of the people you want to work with and you will be able to increase your earnings indefinitely.

For help developing the marketing strategy for your business, please contact me at scott@scalewithscott.ca or 289-943-5477. Send me a list of your pains and needs!

Thanks for reading!

Scott Carroll

Carroll Property Services

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