Do Less Marketing, But Better with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend. On today’s episode, I’m back with Mark Fisher and we are talking about a hard truth when it comes to your gym’s [00:00:10] marketing, which is you’re probably doing too much and not enough of what actually works. So in this episode, we’re gonna break down why more variety isn’t [00:00:20] always better, how to figure out what’s really producing leads from your marketing and how to double down on those strategies that actually move the needle forward.

So if you’ve ever felt like you’re just throwing [00:00:30] spaghetti against the wall and nothing sticking, or you’re overwhelmed by the sheer number of marketing tasks on your plate, this episode is going to be helpful for you to simplify [00:00:40] and focus. And before I dive in, I wanna just give you a quick shout out, A quick shout out over to our YouTube channel.

We have got tons of fantastic videos packed with [00:00:50] actionable, practical advice to help you run and grow your gym. So hit the link in the show notes, head over to YouTube and be sure to subscribe and tap that bell so you never miss [00:01:00] a video. Alright, let’s dive into today’s episode.

1, 2, [00:01:10] 3, 4. Welcome to The Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and studio owners create a business and a life they love. I’m your host, Michael [00:01:20] Keeler. Join me and the business unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym.[00:01:30]

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.[00:01:40]

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast. I’m here with Mr. Fisher today. How are you, [00:01:50] sir? I am gloomy. It’s raining. I know. We are both, we were both lamenting about that before we recorded. Yes. We were like, we’re in New York and it’s just been like kind of gloomy and raining and it’s rain and it does take a [00:02:00] toll.

It takes a toll in the energy for sure. Yes, sure does. I’m trying to climb outta it. Luckily it does not affect my dog. Pippin, he is unaffected by the weather. Yes. And so he’s [00:02:10] got energy. All day. So I’m trying to, I’m trying to get a little bit of his energy. Let’s dive in. Today’s topic and today’s topic is really maybe just one key message, but maybe we’ll spend some time pulling it [00:02:20] apart.

And so the key message we wanted to talk about today is that many of you in your marketing are just doing to damn much and you’d really benefit from doing less. [00:02:30] And while that may not be a revolutionary idea, I think it’s one that’s hard to, to action on, right? Hard to know what to stop doing, what to spend more time on, what does better [00:02:40] look like?

So, Fisher, talk me through what, what made this kind of observation salient. Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause I have the good fortune of talking to a lot of gym owners, as I know you [00:02:50] do. And often they wanna talk to me about marketing, which I’m always happy to do. And it is also clear to me, and this I think partly came out of me preparing for, I should know, depending when this goes live, [00:03:00] maybe there’ll be a show note for it.

But I’m doing a free webinar whether our friends that perform better on what is working now in.[00:03:10]

Anybody has read. Hopefully now you already have my 30 minutes, less than 30 minute read of book.[00:03:20]

There’s not, there’s more than two, and I’m not suggesting you literally do two, but sometimes when I talk to a gym owner, it’s clear they’re doing nothing. So [00:03:30] we need to start there. We need to do something, and then sometimes they’re doing something, but they’re doing just such a small amount of it that of course they’re not getting results.

They just need to do a bigger [00:03:40] volume of marketing activities. Sometimes, and more commonly this is with more advanced operators are very dialed in on systems. Yep. That are very disciplined, that do things [00:03:50] consistently, that build out a team and start putting a lot of firepower and capacity behind marketing activities.

Sometimes actually find they’re doing too many things and they maybe have [00:04:00] 10 different sources of leads. But if you were to really analyze the number of qualified leads they’re getting per source, you might find that as many seven to eight of them.[00:04:10]

In that situation, depending on how much time and energy they are doing on some of these more fringe strategies, they’d actually be better. Just [00:04:20] stop doing most of what they’re doing, and then look at the maybe two to three strategies that are really bearing fruit and just do. Two to five [00:04:30] times as much of that, and we can dig more into what specific strategies I think are gonna be the first arrows I pull from the quiver.

But I think that’s the takeaway for people [00:04:40] listening is don’t keep doing more. Or maybe I should say don’t just keep doing a larger variety and variety of things. Just find out what’s working and then just do a lot more of that. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I couldn’t agree [00:04:50] more. The way this often sounds in conversations with some of our unicorn side members is they’ll get on a call and they’ll say, you know what?

My marketing’s not working. I’m just not getting enough leads. [00:05:00] And I’ll, we’ll say, oh, let’s walk through what you’re doing. Show me your plan, where your lead’s coming from. Let’s look at your dashboards. And they’ll go through just a giant laundry list of all the things they’re doing. And what will come to the [00:05:10] realization of is exactly this, that like 80% of the results are coming from 10% of their efforts.

And they get this overall impression that none of it’s working when the reality is they’re [00:05:20] putting all this effort into most of the things that are not working, not putting enough effort into the one or two things that are actually working. And so it can feel like none of it works. And they feel like I’m throwing [00:05:30] speed against the wall and none of it’s sticking, and I tried all these things.

Maybe I’m just bad at this. And they can really spiral out when they feel like they’re working at.[00:05:40]

Feelings versus facts is that it feels like to most of them, like it’s just none of it’s working. But the facts actually show that [00:05:50] these one or two strategies are actually crushing it. Percentage wise. You just haven’t put enough time, energy, money, resources into them for them to really pay off in a way that feels [00:06:00] good.

And so I think that’s a, it’s. Good example of why we do, we talk so much about tracking the facts and the metrics is because it helps you parse out moments like this where it feels [00:06:10] like all is lost. But the reality is is, oh wait, there’s actually hope in here. Yeah. Look what the numbers say. Yeah. And admittedly, sometimes, to be fair, I think there’s two versions of this, [00:06:20] and the one that is easier to solve and I like better, is when you are collectively spending truly 40 to 50 hours per week across you and two.

Team [00:06:30] members that are helping out, and you are getting a sufficient amount of lead quality, but you’re just wasting a lot of time because a lot of it’s actually not bearing fruit. Yeah. Yep. I think the other version is when you [00:06:40] are, it’s probably more common. A one human band. Yeah. And you’re responsible for marking alone and you’re actually killing yourself to put in a solid.

15 hours, but when you [00:06:50] actually look at it, it’s still, there’s actually like not enough time for any one strategy to bear fruit. Yeah. Further, some strategies are, I don’t wanna call it like a lottery [00:07:00] ticket. I need to find a better metaphor for this chat TVT without me. But business partnerships I think are the ultimate example of, there’s a little bit of randomness in there.

Right. As an example, [00:07:10] let me operationalize this for you, what this might look like. So my gym in New Jersey, we do paid ads. So we do paid ads, which I think most mature gyms, they’re not at a wait list probably want to [00:07:20] do. And while it doesn’t work in every market, it does work in our market. So a large percentage of our leads are from the paid ads, but you can’t rely on them alone ’cause you’re gonna get higher [00:07:30] volume and they don’t require a lot of time if you’re working with a good ad vendor like our friends gym member machine.

But you need to supplement that with some sort of organic lead [00:07:40] strategy and organic leads generally to generally new leads. So usually gonna be some referral plays, which are great, but admittedly work better the more people you have. And you can’t go to that, well, I should say, you can go [00:07:50] to that well every single week.

You can’t go with every client every single week to that. Sure. But then you look at business partnerships and business partnerships are very weird. And for a long time, I always felt stupid when people talk about business [00:08:00] partnerships because at Mark Fisher Fitness, we just never had a lot of success in the, I don’t know if it was like.

Our gym was weird. Or if New York City’s a weird market. I actually think in retrospect, a lot of [00:08:10] it was we just didn’t spend frankly enough time and did enough total volume and we did hit jackpot with one of our partners. It happened to be a nonprofit. [00:08:20] Broadway cares, equity fights, aids, particularly in the early days, drove like a lot of actual leads and a lot of members for us.

Yeah. But in my experience, when we even, we opened up the alloy New Jersey, we just [00:08:30] weren’t doing enough big enough volume. And because you only, I think, land maybe one out of 20, 25 business partners play ball. It is a little bit of a high risk, high [00:08:40] return strategy ’cause it’s going to be time intensive.

You have to get good at the reps of learning how you approach these other businesses. You have to create the lists of the businesses. You have to often physically [00:08:50] go there and call and email, and you might talk to 50 businesses and truly get nowhere. It might take you like four months of. Five hours per week can get nothing, [00:09:00] but it might be the fourth business you talk to is down to play ball and they really understand marketing and they wanna start cross-promoting with you and you start driving leads for each other immediately.

At any rate, I think that’s [00:09:10] why it’s like hard to make this fit exactly into an algorithm because I think there’s gonna be an element of luck with somebody. Strategies can’t completely control for. Yeah. But I do think it’s worth at least being [00:09:20] clear-eyed around the way this might look like, so you can decide how to allocate your time and energy and money.

Yeah, I think that’s the rate limiting factor that we are. We’ve mentioned a few times that I wanna just call out explicitly, [00:09:30] which is all of this decision making is centered on the pure fact that most of you listening are a very small team, if not a one person band and [00:09:40] your time, attention, and resources are limited.

Listen, if you are a giant. Corporation and you had multiple avatars and tons of time and money and resources to go [00:09:50] after them in multiple ways. You can afford to run a lot of experiments that don’t work out. Yep. You can afford to run a lot of experiments that just trickle in some leads from time to time because you have so much capacity.[00:10:00]

But for all of you listening. You have very little capacity, very little time, energy, and money, which just means how you spend. It really has to be scrutinized and you really have to [00:10:10] reflect on what’s working and not working on a regular basis because it’s so limited. Even when we talk about dollar spent, right?

We recommend you spend only like a single digit percentage of your revenue every month [00:10:20] on marketing. This is not a lot, a lot of ton of money to go around. And so you think about how every dollar spent, how every minute of your time is spent, all of those decisions really matter. [00:10:30] And so I think it goes down to just because you can do that fill in the blank marketing approach doesn’t mean you should, right?

You really wanna think about what’s the best, most effective use of your time, money, and [00:10:40] resources, because not all them are gonna be and not all have the same. Risk and reward profile. Things like business partnerships, events, community [00:10:50] grassroots things, right? They all can be so valuable when they hit and they don’t have, quote unquote guaranteed return as something that’s more structured, predictable [00:11:00] as paid ads.

Even though there’s lots of variation, it’s still, you know, a little bit more predictable. You pay for some good ads that are well placed. Yeah, you’re probably gonna meet some strangers.[00:11:10]

Hey there, business Unicorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your free, instantly downloadable copy of my new book, [00:11:20] the Little Book of Gym Marketing Secrets. You can find a link to download it in the show notes, or you can go to gym marketing secrets book.com. I worked super hard to make sure this is a less than 30 [00:11:30] minute read and is a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do to grow your gym.

Get more leads, more clients, importantly, change more lives. Again, find the link in the show notes [00:11:40] where you can download your free copy at jim marking secrets book.com. And now back to the podcast. And so lemme just ask you this, so when people are deciding, we mentioned a [00:11:50] few strategies, right? But just to put a fine point out, when people are getting a sense of maybe I am spread a little too thin, maybe I’m doing a few too many things and maybe they’re not all paying off, what do you [00:12:00] recommend for how they go in and make the decision about what to cut and what to do?

The hard part is when you’re, when you are looking [00:12:10] to clarify what’s actually working or not, it does require a little more tracking, which is annoying. Yep. So what we do at our gym in New Jersey is we have a spreadsheet, and you could do [00:12:20] this a few different ways. You could track where every prospect comes from.

You could track where every new member comes from. We’ve arbitrarily set the line of, we track where all new [00:12:30] sales conversations start from. And that gives us a larger data set than just new members. But it’s less tracking than tracking all than tracking [00:12:40] all leads individually. Now, I would note if you’re working with a company that uses go high level, which we have a white labeled version of it in our gym, it does allow you to track [00:12:50] lead Source.

The only thing on my top level dashboard I unpaid.[00:13:00]

How we might allocate time differently. We’re trying to understand often which of our various organic non-paid strategies are bearing fruit, right? Because is gonna be always to [00:13:10] bracket and see clearly how many leads you’re getting from it. So we have a tab in our master dashboard, very simple that we track.

Every sales [00:13:20] conversation that is scheduled, we track what happened. Did they no show? Did they reschedule? Did they sign up for a membership or did they fail to [00:13:30] convert? They say no. And then right next to it we are tracking what is the lead source, right? And it’s interesting. I’ll tell you, a lot of the leads for us are gonna be.

I wouldn’t say [00:13:40] a lot, but a fair bit honestly are drive by and you can’t really control that. That’s, there’s a case to be made that I was talking to another dear friend and smart gym or lately that, [00:13:50] that sometimes you can actually be willing to spend a little bit more for rent because it, it reduces your marketing costs because if you’re in such a location, [00:14:00] it’s going to help a lot of drive by traffic and this particular location happens to be the end.

Cap on a strip mall. So that actually is a very big piece of how we [00:14:10] get starting point sessions. But anyway, all that to say, I think if you’re not tracking either lead source or at least where new members get from, or my personal preferences, probably [00:14:20] how many the leads, the sources of sales conversations, or sources of low bear offers sold.

You don’t have the information, so you need to start [00:14:30] tracking at least that. And I know it’s annoying and there’s only so many hours, but hopefully if you have a dedicated sales conversation. Anyway, here’s the thing I like about it, it’s pretty easy and you’re likely naturally gonna be asking [00:14:40] How did you hear about us as part of that, right?

So hopefully it’s not that onerous and you’re not even doing anything new. You just have to make sure that. You and or if there’s somebody on your team doing it, just get in the [00:14:50] habit of tracking it because everything too is you do need to probably like at least a month, maybe three months of data to really understand this.

Yeah. But then at that point, you should be able to look back and be like, oh, I have gotten [00:15:00] literally no leads from X lead source. We’re just gonna stop doing that all. Yeah, I think that’s it. I think that it really, there are other ways to think about this, but I think the most effective way is just to do [00:15:10] the tracking, to do the tracking over long term, to see what the data says.

And even, and I love the distinction of doing it right at the sales conversation. Yep. So even if you don’t have the tools or resources to know [00:15:20] where people came from at the moment of being coming a lead, at the very least when you. How’d you hear about us? That’s a great moment to start tracking. So at the very least, people [00:15:30] who are the warmest leads that actually engage in a conversation, you get to know where did they come from.

Yep. And then I’ll tell you almost everything you need to know about where to spend your energy and efforts. I think the [00:15:40] other thing I’ll say, and I know this maybe, maybe this is fo for a whole nother podcast, but another consideration here, and I don’t wanna put too much emphasis on it, but is another thing, consideration for what to spend your time and energy [00:15:50] doing is on some level what you like doing.

Right. Yeah. On some level, in some cases you’re gonna have to just eat the frog and just do the shitty marketing thing you don’t like doing ’cause it really [00:16:00] works. But on some cases, if there’s something you really don’t like doing. Yeah. Starting with that thing is the real mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Finding some pieces of it.

For example, Fisher, you’ve always liked [00:16:10] writing, or at least have learned to correcting, and so El Marketing’s always been one of our go-to things. We’ve never taken our. Put off the gas when it comes to email marketing at mff or business unicorns in part because you [00:16:20] like it. Yeah. Not you happen to be really great at, and have gotten way even better at it than you usually started, but you liked writing.

And so I think same thing with bi unicorns. I know I don’t like writing or doing much else in marketing, [00:16:30] so I do this podcast as my way of contributing. And so part of the reason we do the things we do is because we like them and we of things we.[00:16:40]

Struggling to do any marketing because they have not found anything that they like so [00:16:50] far. I think that’s a real issue. If you really are beating yourself up every day to do some tasks that you hate doing, I think it’s gonna be a real obstacle for many of you. You have to find a way to do something you love [00:17:00] or to find the people who will do it instead of you.

But kicking and screaming, doing a task that makes you gr.[00:17:10]

We can provide some allowance for that from a behavioral change perspective. Certainly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Let’s leave it there. I think that we, this is a, I think, a pithy bit of advice we’re offering on today’s [00:17:20] podcast, which is take a look at all the things you’re doing in marketing. You might be doing too much, you might benefit from doing less of it.

Just better. And your metrics will mainly tell you what those things are. So if you’re not [00:17:30] tracking, this is a call to action to start tracking those things Mark laid out perfectly. I think a great system for doing that, and hopefully it’ll save you some time, money, and energy in generating leads more effectively with [00:17:40] less stress.

That’s the goal. Awesome. Thanks for a great conversation, Fisher. Thank you. I’ll see you on the next one.[00:17:50] [00:18:00]

Up go.