Get Mark’s FREE Marketing Book with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I’m speaking with Mark Fisher and we’re talking about the brand new book. He just launched all about marketing for your gym. In fact, it’s free. It’s in the show notes right now. It’s a free download. You can get right as we speak, go click the link and get it right now.

Cause in this episode, we walk through who the book is for, how the book is organized, how to use the book to effectively improve your marketing at your gym. So if you want more leads with less effort, this is a great episode for you. Keep on listening.

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym, get ready to unlock your potential.

And become a real unicorn in the fitness [00:01:00] industry. Let’s begin.

Hello, fitness, business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business for unicorns podcast. Before we jump into with today’s episode, I want you all know, we have some extra spots for our upcoming unicorn society retreat in Boston. The retreat is September 14th and 15th. It’s a weekend of fun and.

Excitement and learning and friendshiping with me and Mark and Pete and Ben and the rest of the business unicorns team. We also have a special guest star, Kevin Carr from Mike Boyle and CFSC. And so if you want to learn more about this amazing two days with us in September, and you want to join us with one of our few limited spots, go over to Instagram, DM us the word Boston, or click the link below in the show notes, and we’ll give you all the information you need to join us on Fisher.

You’re going to be there. How excited are you for Boston? I will be there. I’m very excited. It’s particularly a good opportunity for. Listeners to find me in a particularly tender, raw, and vulnerable state as I will be Nearly, barely a week out of Burning [00:02:00] Man, so come see what sort of permanent damage I’ve done to my brain this year and see if I can put together sentences.

That’s a reason to show up in and of itself, it’s just to see what kind of shape Fisher’s brain is in. Yeah. Let’s switch gears. I can usually talk 10 days later. Yeah, you’ll be able to talk, you’ll, you’re getting on a stage and do great. Let’s talk about another exciting thing going on in our world, which is you just recently put out a book.

All about marketing. So first congrats. I know that it takes a lot of work behind the scenes to put this shit together. I watched it happen. And so maybe start by telling people about like, why did you buy this book? We already put out so much marketing content. And so why a book? The first thing I should acknowledge, I have come to, I’ve got an appreciation of the proper name is probably, we’re going with a working title, power pamphlet.

It’s really, it’s more of a power pamphlet than a book because I want something that essentially functions as a super juiced menu, a super juiced checklist that put together [00:03:00] all the things you can do to grow your gym and organize them in a way such that you’ve been understanding how the various tools and systems you could apply.

fit together in a system so that people can honor the principles of marketing. So it’s called the little book of gym marketing secrets and whether the secrets are not also is probably somewhat debatable. So it’s really the power pamphlet of gym marketing strategies and systems that you may or may not have heard of.

This was partly, of course, as always, I think, for all of us, right? Partly the reason we teach, I think, is to learn more. And between running MFF for such a long time, the really deep diving we’ve been doing in business for unicorns over the past couple of years, running a 12 week marketing sprint for a bunch of gym owners.

And of course, running my gym in New Jersey with Alloy, I have a lot of new ideas. There’s a lot of things that I’ve learned by working with gym owners and see what worked and what didn’t by having to develop quite frankly, new skills, myself running Alloy out in New Jersey. And [00:04:00] what I was longing for, and I hope we value for other people some way to organize all the things you can do.

Because to jump right into one of the most common mistakes I see with marketing for a lot of gym owners is it can often be very scattershot. So if you’re doing anything, first of all, that’s amazing because what a lot of people do, and you know, it might be interesting to talk a little bit about my assessments of what MFF did well and bad.

The beginning, I’d be curious to get your two cents on this. Sure. But in practice, if you’re doing anything, that’s great. And what I tend to see is when you start to do things, they tend to be very scattershot. Maybe we’re posting a bunch on Instagram, but we’re not really seeming to get traction, but we feel like we should be there.

And then we email. sometimes, but not consistently. And maybe the list isn’t as robust as it should be. And then your website may or may not make it clear who you’re helping. So if you do have people stumble upon your website, they may or may not take action. So I wanted to create some organizing system, and I’m happy to get a little bit more about what that is to organize all these systems and tools.

And the last [00:05:00] thing I’ll say briefly, I actually re edited So the nice thing about this being a mostly digital book that we do have actually a bunch of physical copies that we’ll be giving away, hopefully in an event soon for you, Jim, our listener, but in practice, one thing that became clear after.

working on the book that I went back in and make crystal clear is the disclaimer is this is not a to do list for you to do all of these things. That would in fact be a mistake. You don’t want to try to do all these things. This is literally a comprehensive guide to everything you could do to grow a gym.

And that’s cool because if you’re looking for ideas, you’ll find them in there, but that’s bad. That’s a threat because you would need three full time people to actually leverage all of these strategies. And being a gym owner, your constraint is always going to be time. The average gym owner is going to have If I’m being real, you’re going to have to spend at least three hours per week on marketing minimum.

Maybe if you’re a little bit more sophisticated, you’ve really delegated a lot of things and you can spend 20 to 30 hours a week explicitly on marketing, which might sound like hell to you, but I [00:06:00] got to tell you the more sophisticated gym owners, that’s often where they land because leadership and marketing tend to be the two things that you really need to hold onto because you got to be the rainmaker and you got to make sure your team is performing well to really fulfill and deliver on the promises you’re making.

with your marketing and sales. So that’s a little bit about how we got here, how I think the book functions. And I’ll say briefly, It’s obviously in the show note, right? So you can find the show note or you can go to jimmarketingsecretsbook. com. It’s absolutely free. And the digital copies I mentioned, I have been making little tweaks to clarify things over the past month and a half or so to make it even more clear.

Yeah, I think it was a great summary Fisher. And I’ll say from my own perspective, the real win of this book, which again, Fisher is a free resource. You can download right now in, in the show notes is that you’ve done a great job of curating all the information that, you know, works from firsthand experience.

I think one of the things I see Jim owners get so frustrated by and confused by is that there’s a lot of information out there about marketing. A lot of people who speak with absolute [00:07:00] confidence That this way of getting leads is the only way or the best way or the most effective way. And so I think a lot of people just get that kind of analysis paralysis and they just don’t know what to do next.

They don’t do much at all. Yeah. Or if they do pick something they do to do, they don’t do enough of it. I sent one email, I didn’t get any responses, or I posted three times and no one engaged with me. Uh, and so I think one of the things that this book really does is make clear that there’s a lot of things you can do, and you have to build a repeatable system for doing them, because once is never enough.

And, and you need to dedicate as much time as you can. You are someone in the business to doing this because it’s not something you can do with just a few minutes a week, right? That does require someone’s time to be doing this. And we know how hard that is. I think the book is such a great kind of roadmap, proven strategies.

That if you listen to this podcast or you follow Mr. Fisher at all, if you believe him, if you believe that these are things that are real and really work for us and other people. [00:08:00] And, and it’s clear that how much time you’ve gotten, I think you’re really honest in the book about the kind of investment in building these systems that’s required.

And I think that’s so important. Yep. Because it truly is comprehensive. And I’ll say there are some things in there that I mentioned because I really want this truly to be the most comprehensive resource you can find with the every item on the menu you might want to employ. And some of them I think are just not great a lot of the time.

So they’re in there. But as an example, I mentioned, yes, perhaps creating a podcast could work for a gym. This is going to be provocative and maybe trigger some people. I think that is the most. unhelpful strategy. I think about all the things you could do, the time it takes to do that. And again, it’s not that it’s a bad idea in of itself.

And there could be a world where listen, if you’re leveraging it partly for retention because you’re doing case studies with clients, it could be marketing because if you collaborate with your clients when you share the reels on instagram and you’re really splicing the content, getting it out there that could have some of your clients friends [00:09:00] discover you so they know Exists and they come to entrust you.

And of course my favorite undercover move and hat tip to John Goodman, who I cribbed this idea from is you could use it to develop business partnerships and highlight other local small businesses and try to become a local hub. Now. Those are all great ideas. That’s not a bad idea, but I’m saying if you’ve only got five hours per week and you’re on the floor 25 hours per week, that’s not going to be the first thing we go to.

And in practice, even if you have 30 hours per week, I think in most situations in most markets, there’s going to be better uses of your limited time and money. Yeah. 100%. So let’s talk about the other side of the rainbow here, which is what are all the ones that are absolutely essential things you start with, you know, not even the top five, just like the top one or two that if you’re turning to the book, this is the chapter you start with.

Yep. Yep. So the book start, the book is organized really into five pieces. You have foundational tools, [00:10:00] you have the systems that allow you to generate leads. So people know that you exist. You have the systems that allow you to nurture the lead so they come to entrust you. And then you have systems to convert the leads where people raise their hands after an offer, you follow up, you sell them, et cetera.

And then finally, the last part of the book is about planners. And I think there’s a case to be made for daily and weekly planners. So you’re really planning out how one should spend a day in a week and a marketing calendar, which always sounds very complicated, but really is nothing more than a calendar.

All right, there’s three means three months coming up one or two messaging per month. Are you going to do to the various constituents of your gym? So those are the five buckets. If there’s only, let’s say one thing you do, the first thing I think you need to do is get the offer, right? Get the offer. That’s the one thing because you probably already do know some people, your audience isn’t as big as you want, but if you don’t have a specific obvious way for them to get started.

We’re in trouble, right? If you have two things, I would say, get your website, right? Because that’s the best way to deliver your [00:11:00] offer. And people find you on Google and you could drive people to take action, capture contact information. And the website’s kind of a cheat of course, because there’s a number of things involved in that hat tip to kilo that we work with at business for unicorns, which is a great done for you solution if you’re looking for someone to handle it.

But even the website, if there’s no offer, It doesn’t matter. Yeah. And I’m happy to give some more thoughts on what offers work or not. But regardless of what you do, there has to be some clear, obvious thing for somebody that’s interested in maybe doing something with you to get started. You got to start there.

Yeah. Yeah. Let’s keep going with that. What, what are some key offers? I love asking these questions. If I don’t, as if I don’t know the answer. Yeah. Yeah. You want to know about this? Not as if we just had a big debate about this a couple of months ago. Oh, yeah. So what do you think people should start with?

Yep. So I’ll keep it simple. Your vacuum gym owner is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna do 14 days, unlimited, whatever you do for 99 bucks. Simple. I [00:12:00] think. 70 percent of the time, that’s the best move. I won’t even bore you with all the reasons I think that. Just trust me, 70 percent of the time, that’s going to be the best move.

And I will say this, if you don’t do a group model, that might be harder to do. No problem. You’re going to do three personal training sessions over 14 days for 99. And that’s it. There’s some other things you could do if you have a larger group brand. Maybe you could do a free class if you’re very adept at sales.

Maybe you do a mid or a high ticket launch for the challenge. I think those can work great, but I think that’s a much smaller percentage of people because you either need a lot of capacity and or some sales skill. 14 days for 99 unlimited. Whatever you do. And just in case anyone’s like, but I can’t do unlimited.

That that’s so much, you’re not actually going to be having these people train six times per week. And what I like about this is this works for classes. This works for small group. If you happen to do both, which I strongly discourage, even though I do it, do an MFF. That’s why I discouraged it. I realized for some of you that models working.

Okay. So what’s great about this [00:13:00] is people when they’re doing this approach, which I would bucket as a low barrier offer, as opposed to a premium price officer. offer. They want to do workouts. They want to try some workouts. Yeah, we’re listening. We need sales. We need digging emotions, but this is a way they can try your workouts.

That’s the thing they want. It’s reasonably priced. It’s not so low that there’s no barrier for them to come in. It’s going to feel valuable just by saying unlimited. Another thing I’ll pick on here that I see sometimes is people hedging their bets a little bit. They’ll do four small group personal training sessions for 99.

Same idea, less of compelling. Unlimited is just more compelling. You might still prescribe in that quickie call where you get them all set up. You might still prescribe that they’re going to only train two times a week if they’re deconditioned. Again, I’m not saying they should work out six times per week.

I’m just saying 14 days, unlimited training, 99, 100 percent money back guarantee. Simple offers immediately. Obvious what it is. People want workouts, but I’m try your workouts. Yeah. I think really that does work for most of the people, most of the time. And we won’t go too far down the [00:14:00] reasons why, but I think just the CliffsNose version I’ll share about why I like it so much is that I think two weeks is long enough to be an appetizer, but not too long to drag out the process.

I think once they’re a few weeks in a month in that the new car smell is worn off and they’re a little less motivated, the pain points a little bit farther in the rear view mirror. And I also think under 99, just while a lot of research shows that it can be an impulse purchase under a hundred bucks, people don’t always have to ask their spouse.

They can just go for it at a whim. If you can get, if you do large group and your rates are a little lower, you could even do unlimited for 49, 79 and it becomes an even easier yes for folks. And so I think that, I think just gives a little bit of context to like why we think that recommendation is just so strong.

Yeah, what I will tell you is hilarious about this. Yeah. Just briefly. This is, I just find hilarious is we’re very good friends with the guys who run Kilo and they have a podcast called Gym World Worldwide, which we’ve both been guests on. I’ve been on a bunch of times and it’s very funny because they advocate a [00:15:00] long time for going in with a more premium priced front end offer.

more of a mid ticket. And it’s hilarious because they really opened up my eyes for me taking that more seriously viable path. And I will say, I think you’ve convinced John who’s now circling back to the 99 for 14 days unlimited. So listeners beware, you’re in a circle of yours. We’re going to keep changing our mind about things, but also I think, you know, as you said, there is that 30 percent of people that it does work for.

If you’re in a high end market selling high end, high end one on one personal training, and people want an all inclusive service that includes all this stuff, yeah, maybe you’re paying them super. And they pay more money up front. They’re more compliant. They’re getting better results. There’s a case to be made for it, for sure.

There’s just, that’s just not most of you listening. Like most of you listening are just not in that category. Yeah, for sure. You got to be good at sales, right? You’re, you got to be able to kill on the phone. That’s as much as very nerdy listeners that are aware of the six week free challenge that a lot of people complain about.

They’re like, that’s unethical. It’s a bait and switch. And listen, it’s not for me, but I think. [00:16:00] anybody that is serious about the business of gyms needs to think about why that was so impactful. And here’s why, because you’re combining both the benefit of a super low barrier offer with a higher ticket program where now they put the money down.

So the free piece means lead flow is going to be very high. And then the money up front means they’re getting the benefit of a premium price offer, which is you can really, coach the shit out of them. You can give them types of results over six weeks that get sticky and they’ve got skin in the game.

They’ve given you money so they’re actually going to be compliant. That is, I think, a fair criticism of the problem. That is a fair criticism. If your barrier gets too low, it can work, but it just becomes more of a volume game and you’re going to get more people ghosting you. That’s why on the far extreme and the other side, it’s not wrong.

I don’t think they have a free offer. Again, people shit on them, but I think anything can work. The challenge of a free offer is you just need a lot more lead volume. You need to do a lot more following up. And most gym owners don’t have the bandwidth to do the sheer amount of followup required [00:17:00] for people that are, have that little of interest and commitment.

Yeah. Let me ask you this about the book. If there’s anything in the book that you think would be most surprising to our listeners, are there any strategies or ideas that you are like, you know what, this is something I think people will be. Maybe pleasantly surprised by, I don’t know, yeah, what is it? Yeah, I think it’s something that they will sad.

They won’t be sad about it, but you won’t feel like, no, I don’t want to do this. Yeah, yeah. I think this, and this comes from, again, my personal experience with the gym in New Jersey. So understand the first thing we’re going to do when we talk to you, and this is another thing, probably top five things you got to do is the first thing we’re gonna have you do, we work with you is organize your existing network.

So these are both your personal relationships. People would say hello to your grocery store. and anybody that’s a former client or an unconverted lead or a name in your booking billing platform, anybody that’s an explicit personal contact. Okay. [00:18:00] So that’s an existing asset. Another thing we’re going to do relatively early is start figuring out a system to make referral asks of your clients.

So these are both great. And Mark Fisher fitness, this was whole game for us in the beginning because this was pre digital ads. So one of the things that we did well is we took a very large contact database. We, I had personally trained a lot of people the year before we officially opened up the space and we did have some offers, right?

So the challenge that, here’s why this was like, Oh no. So let me real talk with you. Cause again, I’ve seen this happen with a lot of gym owners. If you don’t know a lot of people, You don’t have a lot of former clients or unconverted leads because you haven’t been open that long and you don’t have many clients.

Those are all numbers games. Those are volumes game. If you only have 10 clients and you only have an email list of 75 people, I’m not saying that you can’t succeed. I am saying lead generation becomes paramount and you’ve now mostly lost client referrals because you should still do it, but you’re not going to [00:19:00] get massive play there because you just aren’t enough of them.

Now we have to just generate the leads. Now paid digital. is an important pillar for a lot of people, certainly for a mature gym. At a certain point, you need that extra gas. You need that higher lead flow, but it is true that it is expensive. It is true that it’s not always that easy to figure out because oftentimes you have to pay an ad agency and an agency that’s It’s going to be doing other things and you’ll need, you’ll really need automations.

If you have paid digital, cause the lead flow is higher and you don’t have time to be tracking things in a spreadsheet. So paid digital can very much work, but also this is now very expensive and the leads are going to be, again, I don’t want to say lower quality cause I hate implying that they’re bad beads, but the throughput is going to be lower.

All right, let’s say, okay, follow with me, Jim owners. I love you. Let’s say, okay, I don’t have any one. I know. I don’t have many current clients. I can’t afford, and I don’t really have the capacity to do paid digital marketing. What is left is meet strangers actually going out and meeting strangers. And a [00:20:00] lot of people lament that gym owners, this is unfair.

I want to paint the unfair picture that a lot of people have about gym owners and actually advocate for why what happened was making sense at the time. So a lot of people speak on the fact that 2016 to 2018, 2019, a lot of gym owners lost any skill, any muscle memory of going out and meeting strangers in person in flash because they could just press the buttons.

I want to make the case that, yeah, it would be dumb to have done anything else at that time. Far and away, it was the, when you actually understand how cheap it was and how relatively easy it was to convert reads at that time, That’s actually what you should have been doing. It would have been silly to stubbornly spend a lot of time going out there and talking to strangers because it was just so much relatively easier at that time to convert those leads.

And the price point was much lower. This is now a different era. So what this means is gym owners need to regain the muscle memory, which by the way, before the land of paid digital, this was always a fundamental strategy. And I think of this as two different ways [00:21:00] of meeting strangers. There’s one on one meeting strangers, which you can do by literally going into parking lots.

You can do this by talking to people online for coffee. You can do this by showing up when the moms and dads are picking up or dropping off their kids to school. You can do this by setting up a table at a local town event. You can do this by setting up a table at a health fair, and you literally Stop people, start conversations and quickly engage them to tell them a bit about what you do and then make them some offer.

And I would note these types of offers often are better if they are something on the lower free or the more low barrier side, because oftentimes somebody doesn’t know you, do you stop on the way into target is not necessarily going to buy a 99 trial. But if you offer them two free sessions on the way to doing the trial, that although it complicates your funnel, I think does make some sense.

So you have one to one. hand to hand combat. Your other option is business partnerships. Now, business partnerships I think are super powerful, but the thing that I’ve come to understand is on average, [00:22:00] I’m making up these numbers, but this feels directionally correct. One out of 20 business partners will be fruitful.

So if you want three good business partnerships, you have to meet 60 businesses. So is that worth your time? Most likely, but it is a little bit of a lottery ticket, right? Because you might meet 57 businesses and get nothing and then not get anything until you’ve been doing this for six full months. Not only that, but now you’re going to need oftentimes several months for those business partnerships to be fruitful.

So to be clear, I do like a business partnership. I would call that meeting strangers at scale versus meeting strangers one on one. But if we get down to it, follow with me again. Okay. We don’t have that many former contacts. We don’t have that many current clients for referrals. We don’t want to spend money on paid ads.

We know business partnerships we should do, but it might be nine months before we see anything. You are only left with going and talking to strangers and the barriers there are going to be potentially getting over limiting beliefs around marketing, feeling like it’s icky and [00:23:00] not wanting to promote ourselves to strangers, which is literally what marketing is.

We might need to overcome imposter syndrome where we feel shy talking about what we do because some part of us actually that we are not totally conscious to feels we’re actually not that great at stuff. And thirdly, a lot of people, a lot of gym owners, you love people, but some of you have a little bit of social anxiety and that’s okay.

And I understand that it can be scary to talk to strangers. That makes perfect sense. And I want to share. You can absolutely get better at this. You will have to focus on getting reps here. And if I were to quickly operationalize this for you, go have 10 conversations with strangers per week. Every single week.

There’s some people have a lot much higher for this. My buddy Luca Josevar says six for six. We’re six conversations of strangers. For six days out of the week. That’ll get you much further, much faster. But again, I understand time is a constraint. So let’s say you’re on the floor a lot. Let’s say this is all terrifying.

With two to three hours of time, you can go meet strangers and just get in the habit of talking to people you don’t know, striking up a conversation. [00:24:00] And I’ll give you a hint. Here’s your open. Do you live in the area? Okay, cool, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you go into, and there’s, there’s more to it that when we work with people in the unicorn society or our 12 week marketing sprint, we give you very specific scripts because I do think the script matters, but you can start, you start to open by, do you live in the area?

And then from there you can begin to have conversations where people then come to understand you exist a perfect world. You get contact information, but the least you give them some sort of physical collateral and some sort of offer they can take action on. Yeah. Thanks for sure. I think it’s a really great strategy that I think you’re right.

We’ll make some people be like, oh, Hmm, I don’t know if I really want to do that. And I think it’s really true I wish I could come with all of you. Yeah, if you really wish I could go with all of you into the parking lot If you’re just getting started you don’t have a ton of clients or a ton of leads if you have any of those things you’ve already have a ton of Clients or you’d have a great list of past members that Then there’s other strategies in this book for you.

But if you don’t have any of those, you’re just starting, you have to get out in the world and let strangers know [00:25:00] you exist. And to all of Fisher’s points, I might be uncomfortable, but it really is the way it used to be done. That’s speaking like the old man that I am. Uh, and just to give a quick example of that, when we first started MFF, one of the few marketing things I think we did right from day one is anytime we had a party, no one can get into the party without giving us their name, phone, or Bernie.

Yeah. We didn’t always do that. Yeah. Do something. We don’t always do the right thing with the name, phone, or email, but we grew our list every time we were out in the world interacting with people. Yep. We literally back then had postcards at the door. People would fill out and put into a box. Yeah. We would leave some events with 25, 50, 75 postcards of people who came and gave us name, phone, or email.

So it’s, we did the face to face hustle before anything else. And we know it can be. Fun and can also be uncomfortable. So I think it’s a great lesson to leave everyone with on this podcast. And I’m sure we’ll be talking more and more about the books. Let’s leave it there today. Fisher remind people how to get access to the book and where to start.

Yes. You can go into the show notes and if for some reason it is not available [00:26:00] to you because you’re working out or driving a car, then just remember jimmarketingsecretsbook. com and again, it’s totally free, instant access. Go ahead and put in your name and email and we’ll zoom it to you and I think you will like it.

I think you’ll find it valuable. Yeah, for sure. And if you want to come talk to us face to face about this book and so much more, join us at our Boston retreat, September 14th and 15th. Go click the show notes or DMS on Instagram, the word Boston, and we’ll send you all the info. Thanks for a great conversation.

Fisher. See on the next one. Bye.