Stop Wasting Time and Money on Marketing That Doesn’t Work with Ben Pickard

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I’m talking with Ben and we’re talking about how to figure out what to spend your time and money on when it comes to marketing your gym. So if you want to tighten up your investment of time and energy and money in your marketing efforts, this is a great episode for you to tighten things up and get really clear on the best use of your resources.

So let’s dive in.

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 Keeler. Join me and the Business for Unicorns team 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 industry.[00:01:00]

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the business for unicorns podcast. Before I jump into today’s episode, I got a question for you. My friends. Have you ever wanted to peek behind the scenes of Cressy sports performance and Mark Fisher fitness? What if. You could spend a day and a half learning with Pete and Mark for only 150 bucks.

Sounds a little too good to be true, but it’s true. You can actually, after selling out last year’s offering, we’re bringing back our collaboration with perform better and you perform better than the industry’s leading source of functional training, equipment, training, info, and seminars. We’re doing the gym.

Owner masterclass again, it’s exclusively for gym owners looking to create more income impact and freedom. And we’re going to teach you the most important lessons that we’ve learned over the last 30 plus years of combined experience running our gyms. You’re going to learn also what’s working right now for the top 1 percent of gym owners.

It’s going to be a full day of learning on Friday, May 16th [00:02:00] and a half day on Saturday, May 17th. It’s in Warwick, Rhode Island, which is a. Great place to visit, pretty inexpensive to stay, and you’ll never find a better value than 150 bucks for two days with Mark Fisher and Pete Dupuy. So go get more information down below.

There’s a link in the show notes and RSVP, cause this sold out last year. It’s going to sell out again. Hope to see you there. Brings me to today’s episode, which is with Mr. Ben Pickard. How are you, my friend? I’m doing great. How about you? Good, good. We’re recording this kind of mid February. How’s your 2025 so far?

I think I have some recency bias that snowy as hell. Yeah. If you live in Southern Ontario, you’ve had two and a half feet of snow in the last week. My son hasn’t gone to school since Wednesday. We had to close the gym for a couple of days, but also I’d rather have a nice snowy winter than the gray muck.

So it’s a good thing. I just would be happy to never touch a snow shovel again. You know, it’s, you know, it’s a lot of snow when Canadians have to close things. Seriously. Yeah. You’re all good at this. And the fact that you’re all like no school, that means you got a [00:03:00] lot. But someday, today I’m going to go to school and I’m.

Why? What happened? Then there’s other days where it’s like, how is this school open? I don’t know what checks and balances they have to guide this, but it seems to be like, I don’t know, the equivalent of the groundhog who decides if it’s spring or not. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much how schools make a decision.

There’s some sort of groundhog. Open the school or close the school. Yeah, it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Yeah, I’m glad you’re getting a nice snowy winter. We’re the same here in the Northeast in the US. It’s like lots of snow, also like crazy cold temperatures. So I just have my fireplace running every day and it’s a damn delight.

Yeah. Let’s talk about today’s topic. So today we want to talk a little bit about, as y’all could tell by the title, which is like how you can stop wasting time and money on marketing that doesn’t. And I think this is a very common experience for all small business owners, especially gym and studio owners who we don’t have unlimited resources and unlimited time.

When it comes to [00:04:00] investing in marketing. And we all know that we got to do something because lead generation is like the lifeblood of our business. We don’t have more people coming to the top of our marketing and sales funnels that we don’t have a growing business. And we sometimes means we have a dying business, right?

And so figuring out what is the right mix. And money spend on marketing is an ongoing process that we’re all going through. So today, Ben and I just want to share our thoughts on how to figure that out for yourself and some best practices we’ve seen over time. Let’s start with this, Ben, just generally speaking for yourself as a gym owner.

What’s your experience been figuring out where to spend your time and money on marketing? Educated trial and error. Yeah, and I don’t mean that in the sense of we throw literally anything at the wall and see what shit sticks Yeah, the analogy I use or the analogy of how I think about this in my head is very akin to fishing I don’t want to clarify.

I go fishing like once a year. I’m not a Don’t identify as a fisherman But when you go fishing, there’s no guarantees. You try different [00:05:00] lures, you try different spots, you try pulling on the line a little bit differently. But I think marketing is the same. That, like, for everything that works really well for a member of BFU, we have someone that that thing Absolutely bombs.

It doesn’t work at all because there’s different markets. There’s different avatars, a different spin on things. If you’re naturally really good at being in front of people and talking, probably doing things that play to those strengths will be a lot different than someone who’s better at leveraging charity events or Facebook ads.

So there is an element of. At any given point, you want to have enough pools in the water, which I can argue is probably like five to seven is probably the right amount. But you’re always like checking your pools and adjusting your lures. It’s not a process that you like set and forget. So that’s my long winded spiel.

Yeah. I think that analogy just, again, I think it works really well, but I’ll also say this. I also think of marketing a lot like running a science experiment where you have to put your science hat on and test some [00:06:00] hypothesis. Right. And say, let’s go to the farmer’s market and see if we can get any leads from there.

Let’s go see if that works. If our people are there, let’s try running these kinds of ads. Let’s try this referral strategy. Let’s try this email marketing strategy. And I think there’s so many factors. So I think that the point I’ll summarize this all by saying is if there’s anyone out there that you’re following, any of the marketing gurus out there that tell you they have the one thing that works for everyone all the time, always.

They’re lying. And I say that with all love in my heart, because I don’t know, they’re not trying to deceive you. It’s just people like simple, straightforward answers. And the reality here is there’s a lot of stuff in marketing that we know is more likely to work, right? There’s a lot of best practices to follow.

And the reality is that you’re going to do some experimenting because based on your avatar and your budget and your market and all that. Your competition, different things are going to work for different people. And I think that’s part of the process. So let’s just say this. How did you figure out what really works for you in terms of spending time and money?

In terms of spending time, it was the [00:07:00] experimenting piece. And any good scientist is going to test their hypothesis and they’re going to take some notes. And we’re not suggesting you need to write up a research paper every time you try out a farmer’s market for lead gen, but kind of keep track on like, all right.

I would think of it as roughly like, how good a job did you do executing the thing? And we don’t know necessarily ideal, but you do know if you three quarter or half asked it. Yup. And then I track and how well did it work? Cause if you can find something that’s, Hey, I’m just going to keep going with the farmer’s market.

Thanks. I think that’s a great analogy. I went to the farmer’s market. I spent a lot of time with my head in my phone and I didn’t talk to everyone as I could. And it could have been more outgoing and I should have just drank another Red Bull and got after it. And you still got a couple of leads out of it.

It’s like, all right. That worked pretty good. Now, then you could ask when’s the next farmer’s market, but it could also be like, all right, what were the types of people that were there? What was the location that was there? What other events are there that are farmer’s market adjacent that clearly play to my strengths?

Yeah, I think it’s a really great [00:08:00] point because I think when it comes to things like this, tracking, not just your outcomes, which is important. You need to see, did you get any leads from it? Do you get any new names, phone numbers, and email addresses, and also keeping at least a casual track of how much effort did we put in?

How much time did this take? How much money did this take? Cause if it was a two out of 10 effort and you left that day with three decent leads and one of them, two of them came in and bought, then that’s amazing. Make it a five out of 10 effort and you’ll double that. And I think that’s really useful to both keep track of how much time and money or energy did this take and what was the result.

What did actually we get out on the other side? And then when you track that over time, that’s real useful data about inputs and outputs, and that’s really what we’re tracking here. Money works very similar. So you’re really talking about time there, but money works very similarly when you’re talking about paying for advertising.

So talk to me about your experience there. Yeah, there’s only so many ways. Independent training, Jim through it probably could or should. [00:09:00] Pay for marketing. I’m sure there’s some pitches that you could find other ways to do it, but maybe that’s not a good idea. And that’s probably like direct mail, inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

It’s like Google and Facebook ads. And that’s, it’s even easier to track because it takes a little bit of time. Like time doesn’t actually go to zero, even though money went up, it, time went to one out of 10 and money went to nine out of 10, but it’s easier to track. What did I spend and what did I get?

Now, there is some intricacies of like, how good did you do the copy yourself? How good were the photos, et cetera. But it’s the same type of thing that you can dig, right? What was my cost per lead? And then you can compare that to other gym owners, or if you’re a unicorn site, you post in the group, like, Hey, what’s everyone getting as a cost per lead right now to benchmark it.

And inevitably someone’s going to be an amazing market that Facebook ads haven’t touched yet, and their leads are coming through for pennies. But for the most part, you’ll get like a going average of. My gym, I know that if we can keep our cost per lead under 30 bucks a lead, ideally more like under 20 bucks a lead, which Alicia does a pretty good job of, [00:10:00] we’re doing great and it’s super easy metric and it doesn’t take too much time to do once it’s up and running.

So yeah, versus I guess you could do like magazines and newsprint and things like that have my gym. We actually do a advertisement that it’s not a retirement home. It’s like a community that you have to be 50 plus to live in my avatar and then drastically undercharged. So we try to take advantage of that.

Yup. But there’s only so many places you’re going to spend the money because the rest of it usually is like time related, like organic social media, it takes practice to get good at it, email marketing, you can spend money to get better at it, but you probably are still going to write or at least edit your own emails, even if you use chat GPT.

So I’m giving him a more complicated answer than I wish I was, but there’s lots of elements that go into each other and then you just take a step back and see, did that feel worth it? And it’s just working in our business. 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.

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 [00:11:00] book. com. I worked super hard to make sure this 30 minute read and as a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do to grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, and importantly, change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marking secrets book. com. And now back to the podcast. Yeah. I think what you’re pointing on here is not just did it feel, but like, do we have the data to show that was worth it? Right. Can we track how much time, energy, money it took to put in, right?

Whether it is time, energy or money, we’re going to keep track of that in some way, and we’re going to keep track of what we got out of it in some way. So that, cause the first time you do things is the first time. Whether it’s run a Facebook or meta ad or a print ad or direct mail, or spend time at a farmer’s market or a workshop or an event or a webinar.

First time doesn’t mean anything. First time is the first time, right? And you’re never going to make decision about what a great investment of your time and your money is. By doing it once, right? So you have to keep track how much time, energy, and money you’re [00:12:00] putting in over multiple occurrences of these things, right?

Especially when it comes to some things like ads, people need to see your ad multiple times for it to really take action. When it comes to direct mail, people need to see you in their mailbox multiple times in every piece of research on these topics. Shows this. They need to see you in their mailbox many times before it actually results in action.

And the same is often true for the more organic stuff that just takes your time. When it comes to social media, they need to see your posts for days, weeks, months, years before they’re gonna interact with you in the DMs. And so like, none of this stuff is a one and done boom. I did this thing and it was magical.

I know it’s the best use of my time, energy and money. I think, you know, once in a while, you might hit it out of the park and find something that really crushes for you. But for the most part, these things are going to do iteratively, right? You’re going to keep improving your approach. You’re going to keep improving your effectiveness, right?

And over time, when you track those things, it’ll become really obvious that. The data will become really obvious about what is a good use [00:13:00] of your time, energy, and money. And I think the big mistake we see people make time and time again is they’re not tracking their time, energy, and effort, and they’re not tracking the ROI, or maybe they’re tracking one, but not both.

And I think the idea of really keeping track of both is the kind of foolproof proof way of making sure you’re not wasting time and energy and money on something that’s just having you run in circles. Yeah, I’ve actually had a really good, I think a really good example of that if you want a real life one.

Please. So for the longest time, I had always been hesitant to do a referral event. We have an evergreen referral offer that is always on, but a referral event such as bring a friend week or a one week long ish thing where we’re like pushing it a little bit harder to our members. I’ve always had friction with that.

Until a couple of years ago, where I think Lisa actually just convinced me to say, fuck it. Let’s try it. Yeah. We tried doing our first bring a friend week. It was a problem because we have custom programs. Like, how do we write a program where it doesn’t move an assessment? All the training nerd stuff came up.

I’m like, you know what? We’ll give them a templated program and teach the coaches just set expectations. The [00:14:00] coaches adjusted on the fly. No big deal. That turned into, we now do bring a friend twice a year. Does that work well? So we tried a thing out, knowing that we didn’t have our systems dialed in because we were.

We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel because we’ve got plays like this in our content library, but there’s some work to do. We needed to get it over the finish line, and I can’t remember how many people we got, but we tracked how many people came in, how many people converted it, because we track our lead source with our members so we know where are they coming from.

Let’s say we got two people. Great. Handful of people signed up, a couple people bought a membership. Now that’s good enough that we know we’re running it every year and just trying to get it one percent better. That as of right now, bring a friend, we started today as we’re recording this and I think we’ve got seven people signed up and at least two or three are like decent candidates to convert.

So if we get two of those, awesome. So at first it was high uncertainty and high time, but now it’s just part of our regular marketing calendar. But the reason we do it is because we tested it out to be like, Hey, this seems like it’s got legs. It costs very little money. Also our [00:15:00] members love it because they can bring people who have no intention of signing up for it whatsoever, which to be clear isn’t everybody you want.

But like. When a 55 year old brings their college stage son or daughter for a workout when they’re home for a period of time, you know what, bring them in. It’s fun. That could be a retention thing. And then through experimentation, we’ve now got it down. It’s just like, that’s perfect. Part of our marketing cadence.

The email is already written. We just tweak the dates. Like it takes almost no time and we probably get. Five to 10 clients a year out of that, right? And then the brilliant part about that, like you said, is that you tried and tested something. You kept track of both like your time and effort and the outcomes.

And now when you figured, oh, there’s a trend here, this is useful. This actually works. Every time we’ve done this, we’re getting some results. Let’s keep doing it and see what happens. And we keep doing it over time. And I’m sure that you’re still tracking that. It continues to get results. And if the day came when you stopped getting leads from doing it, what would you do?

Oh, it’d be [00:16:00] dead immediately. We’d never do it again. Or we take a five year hiatus and come back to it. If it’s not working, we’re not going to spend any time at all on it. And that’s it. I think all too often we stop getting results from something that used to work. And then we keep running it because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

And that’s what we do every fall. We run this referral campaign or that’s what my, those are the ads Facebook, even though they haven’t been getting me the leads that I want, we all. Are guilty of doing that thing that, uh, long past its expiration date. And I think you have to recognize that we have to recognize this is not getting results at once did, or the results that we need to for the time, energy, and effort we’re putting in, we have to go back and either reinvent the thing or push pause until you have a chance to test something new, but I think ultimately.

It’s an iterative process, right? And a campaign, any kind of campaign that worked for you once has no guarantee. It’s going to work again. If you do it the same time, same year, same time of year, same exact words and language and picture, whatever it is, you can repeat it [00:17:00] exactly the same. And it just may not produce the same results, right?

That’s what kind of makes marketing tricky is that there is no kind of one silver bullet. You’re not going to find that one campaign or that one marketing approach that works forever and always, it’s always going to be a little iterative. So you have to ride the wave to drive the wave. The wave stops flowing, go find a new part of the ocean.

We’ve mentioned tracking it a few times. So can I maybe just give like a suggestion of what that could look like? Please. Super simple spreadsheet. So like we recommend with framework for unicorns, you track your weeds on weeds, your leads on a weekly basis. Mm-hmm . And if you’re doing a new thing, just make a new line that’s bring a friend week.

How many leads did you get out of it? Mm-hmm . This is what I do in our gym. We’ve got five or six main lead sources that we use and if we, we will rotate them in and out based on the waves not waving anymore. And then we just track it and we look at it. And then second to that, when we sign up a new member, we track the lead source.

Where did they come from? So at a glance, it’s not perfect, it’s not like in one second I can know where all my leads came from for the [00:18:00] year. But this can just be a really simple spreadsheet. We’ve got a lead for bring a friend week, turn the 2 into a 3, we’ve got another lead, turn the 3 into a 4. It doesn’t have to be complex software or complex systems, it’s just a way to be like, when I forget how this went a couple months from now and I want to remember, I want to know if that data supports my feelings.

Yeah, I think that’s really important. I think keeping track of those or of those kind of key metrics there every single week when you’re generating leads is useful. I also say that sometimes it’s useful to keep a, like a little journal for yourself to say, okay, this is how I felt about it. This is the experience I had.

These are the kind of leads it got. This is the kind of conversations I had with those leads. This is my experience of them being in the building, right? All of that is useful. So that exactly what you said, Ben, when you, when it comes to, should we do that again? In three months, you have no idea what happened three months ago.

No one remembers. So unless you took time to, to, to write it down, it’s really hard to reflect on what worked and didn’t work in the past. It’s so hard to [00:19:00] remember. And our memories are fickle. I think the other thing that I’ll throw out there, just really tactical advice on this topic is. Is I think after each marketing campaign is specifically a new one where you’re in the experimental testing phase.

It’s really important to do and what we often call an org site, like an after action review. We used to call these like postmortems, but that’s really morbid. And so we now call them after action reviews, which is really just sitting down and talking about, okay, we just went to the farmer’s market for the first time.

What did we learn right? A week later, we just ran that new referral campaign through email, or we did it on text messaging for the first time to form our members, whatever the campaign is, having an after action review serves like that little time capsule. Okay. Let’s look, did we actually get leads? Did we track those KPIs?

Let’s make a note of that. You also get to talk to your team about what was our experience doing that? How much time did we spend? What did we learn that worked and worked? We find any shortcuts and that kind of after action review, even though it’s five minutes. Just a five minute dedicated conversation, 10 minute dedicated [00:20:00] conversation to what did we learn from the thing we just did?

That is something that the best learning teams and the best learning organizations do is they’re constantly reflecting on the thing they just did and trying to learn from their own experience and actions. And so I think that’s another one that’s very simple to do. So tracking those KPIs. Having an after action review, keeping track of metrics in the first place, what you’re doing.

And I think really having that fisherman’s mentality of a lot of what you’re doing and marketing is just testing. I think those are all like really key to making sure you’re not wasting time and money. How would you, anything else you would say to summarize what we’ve covered? I think, you know, that I had this great visual because you use the experimenter, the scientist testing hypothesis.

I had this beautiful image of like a, Crazy gray haired scientists with a lab coat standing in like a fishing boat with a bunch of fishing poles. And yeah, that’s it. But that, because they’re a scientist, they’re going to check what things went afterwards. You’re doing the exact same thing when you write training programs for your clients.

Like what my wellness training program would be learned. [00:21:00] Yes. Hey, barbell deadlifts, not a good fit for that person, but they still need hips. So let’s do some trap bar deadlifts. It’s applying those same things and being willing to like. Just test it out and track the results. Yeah, I think that’s it. I think you’re right.

Another good analogy here is writing programs for clients. That’s exactly what we do. We think this program is going to get people, the client, the results they want, but we track it. We track their actual results. Are they lifting more? Are they doing more reps? How are they feeling? How do they like the program?

And we make adjustments over time. And then once we find best practices, we solidify those and we, and we take shortcuts over time, useful shortcuts. And so I think that’s another good analogy. All right, my friend, I think we covered this topic pretty well. I think there’s some good takeaways here. This is something that we all struggle with when it comes to marketing is finding out what is the best use of our time, energy, and money.

And while there’s some good best practices and we have a lot of good playbooks for Unicorn’s ID members, there’s still going to be a lot of experimentation for all of you. And I want to, we wanted to normalize that today. So hopefully we did. Perfect. Awesome. As I, as we wrap things up here, I just want to remind all you listeners, please [00:22:00] come join our gym owner masterclass.

Again, it’s a Friday, May 16th and Saturday, May 17th in Warwick, Rhode Island. We’re doing in collaboration with perform better, click the link down in the show notes and go find out more and go join Mark and Pete for one and a half days of friendshiping and learning. You won’t regret it. Thanks for a great conversation, Mr.

Pickard. See on the next one. Thank you.