Don’t Do This in Your Marketing

[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. On today’s episode, I’m here with Mr. Mark Fisher and we’re talking about marketing specifically. We’re talking about some stuff we see people do out there in the marketing land [00:00:10] that we think kind of sucks, that we think are the kind of strategies that don’t really set you up for success.

So today’s a little bit of a rant. It’s a little bit of us talking about the things we think you should avoid [00:00:20] doing. But listen, a big part of being strategic in your business is not just deciding what you are gonna do, but really getting clear about what you’re not gonna do. And these are some marketing strategies.

We think you should not do. [00:00:30] And so if you wanna learn the the don’t dos in marketing, this is a great episode for you. Keep on listening.

1, 2, 3, 4. [00:00:40] 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. [00:00:50] 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.

Get ready [00:01:00] to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.[00:01:10]

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast. I’m very excited to kick today’s episode off with a new [00:01:20] workshop that we’re offering. It’s called The Trainer to CEO Workshop. It’s gonna be hosted by Mr. Mark Fisher, who is with us today. So Mr. Fisher, tell us about this workshop.

Yeah, essentially a lot of people [00:01:30] open up their gym and it can be a transition to stop thinking like a trainer and think about the A business owner or a co o, if you will. Mm-hmm. So the [00:01:40] workshop is designed to teach you a very simple weekly system to spend the right amount of time thinking on your business so that you really are able to use some [00:01:50] high leverage hours to really get some traction and get the business moving forward so you’re not constantly stuck in work.

In the business. So we’ll be covering things like how to make scorecards simple [00:02:00] and how to make sure you’re voting the right amount of time on the right efforts for things like marketing and sales. And yeah, I think it’s gonna be great. And it’s also, it’s only $99. You get access to the recording, [00:02:10] you’ll have that for seven days after.

So if you can’t attend live, you will get it there. But obviously I prefer you attend live ’cause otherwise I’ll be lonely. Yeah, 100%. We’ll put a link down the show notes, so if you wanna learn more [00:02:20] and engage, go click that link. Mm-hmm. We’d love to have you there. ’cause I think, I’m glad that we’re doing this because it’s such a big shift to make.

Yes. From being like an individual contributor and trainer to [00:02:30] thinking bigger picture about the business. It’s both the mindset shift and a shift of how you spend your time and what you learn about. And so I think it’s gonna be valuable to so many of our listeners. So friends, go check it out and what a great price.

You’re [00:02:40] not gonna find that kind of value in else. That’s awesome. Alright my friend. Let’s switch gears. I know one of the things we wanted to do on today’s episode is, this might be a little bit of a shorter one because we wanna rant, we [00:02:50] kind of wanna just have a little bit of a mini gripe, fast bitch fest.

I don’t know what we wanna call it. Yeah. About marketing. Just because both of you and I have seen for many years now our beloved. [00:03:00] Fitness industry and among other industries. We’re not alone here, but the ones that we’ve been looking at in this industry, there’s a lot of shady shit that goes on. There’s a lot of marketing that’s just not in line with the way we like to [00:03:10] do things.

We wanted to just, without calling any one out, call out the strategies that we don’t think that you, dear listeners, should be mimicking out in the world. Where do you wanna start your [00:03:20] round fisher? Yeah, so one that I don’t like, which to be fair, I don’t, this isn’t necessarily something I see with Jims mm-hmm.

Much, but I think in the sort of like personal brand and [00:03:30] business space is the throw rocks at your enemies, right? Whoever, the more you can loudly yell and create an enemy. Yeah. And I really find this really bothers me [00:03:40] philosophically. I can understand actually why this might work because I see the value of negativity bias, but you know, oftentimes.

Humans are choosing between, am I [00:03:50] gonna stand for common humanity or am I gonna make a tribe brought a common enemy? And it seems to me part of what is perhaps driving society off the cliff is virtually everybody’s digging in to a tribe [00:04:00] against a common enemy. And there’s a lot of pushing against what we don’t want and not a lot of creating a vision and.

Clarifying what we wanna stand for. Yeah. And [00:04:10] I don’t think it’s good. Yeah. I think it’s expedient and I think it will work short term. It’s not wrong, but I just, for me, first of all, to be fair, it’s not really available to me because it wouldn’t [00:04:20] be authentic. It’s really not how I roll number one, but also number two.

Yeah. I’d rather just make less money than me contributing to what I think is an unhealthful [00:04:30] trend towards further divisiveness in every element of every pocket of our society. Yeah. No, it’s so true and I don’t like it. It’s no secret. There’s a ton of research around how [00:04:40] social media has exacerbated already.

1000. Deeply ingrained negativity bias, right? That we already have such a negativity bias that we’re drawn to those negative things or those negative emotions so much [00:04:50] more powerfully as a survival instinct. And social media has turned that and turned it up to 1000. And so every headline on social media or in YouTube, right?

Yeah. [00:05:00] Is all. The thing You’re getting wrong. The thing you’re missing the thing. You’ve been fucking up all these years. Yeah. Yeah. Because, and listen, we do a little bit of that too. This PO of course, course has titles like that of course. But I think what you’re calling out here is the people who [00:05:10] really take it pretty far and really target that negativity to like a competitor.

So you’re really encouraging people to hunker down in this space over here. Yeah. Where we talk shit about those people over [00:05:20] there. And I just like such a, I don’t know, I’ll call it out, this kind of lazy way to build community. Yeah. It’s also, I just, it’s such a turnoff for me. I also wanna acknowledge just [00:05:30] the.

Naked hypocrisy of ranting about this kind of ranting, right? Yeah. But yeah, I don’t know. I’m just always so turned off when I hear people talking negatively about their competitors, just, dude, do you, do [00:05:40] you? But anyway, lemme ask you this, just in the spirit of turning, doing more than ranting. Yeah. Yeah.

What should be people’s relationship or positioning around their competition? Should people address their [00:05:50] competition in marketing at all? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think so. Listen, I definitionally, if you have a strong UVP, right, and we can probably debate for a geographic constrained brick and mortar, [00:06:00] how unique it needs to be.

That doesn’t need to be that massively different. Like certainly in general. Yeah. It’s, if you want to clarify specifically how what you do is different, but in a lot of cases, [00:06:10] like the typical training gym, it’s, it’s not that different, right? So I don’t know that there is a place for position yourself explicitly against competitors.

And even if you are, [00:06:20] I don’t know that you need to just call out. YX other sort of competitor sucks necessarily. Now again, there’s new ones involved here, right? So if you’re thinking about like gyms, like might there be value in [00:06:30] educating your clientele on YA given training philosophy by your assessment is not gonna get them where they want to go.

Sure. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That can make sense. Yeah. And I guess [00:06:40] as we talk through this, I think there’s something about the energy with which we approach this that feels. Meaningful. Right? Because I’m certainly not suggesting there’s a world where you [00:06:50] can’t intervene when there’s something you see that is unhelpful or incorrect.

Mm-hmm. I’m certainly not suggesting that, but I am saying that if you stare into the abyss long enough, it stares back [00:07:00] into you. Yeah. And I think there’s just such a temptation to do that in so many places. So in general, yes, it’s a gym. I would encourage you to not speak publicly about [00:07:10] your competitors, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t acknowledge.

Things that you think are gonna be unhelpful and educate your audience on the [00:07:20] most efficacious path towards whatever their goals might be. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I think the idea of attacking a methodology or attack, even attacking, but pointing out that this [00:07:30] methodology might not get you the results you want or as safely or as quickly or as effectively.

Yeah, I think is really useful part of the educating that like all gyms exist to do. So that makes total sense to me. [00:07:40] I’ll share one, and this is like maybe a painfully obvious one, but I don’t know, maybe it’s not because I still see it a lot. I see a decent amount of marketing that is just. Lies [00:07:50] just like bait and switch, right?

A free thing that once you get farther down the funnel you’ll learn is not free or a discount that you’ll learn. You only really get, if you finish the program or [00:08:00] jump through hoops or win the lottery. There’s like the, these kind of deceitful ads or headlines that get people engaged in a funnel and then later down the line they learn, oh, that’s not really [00:08:10] what you are offering.

And, and I just. I just can’t imagine that’s a good way to start any relationship. I just, I can’t imagine that kind of bait and switch moment where the [00:08:20] rug gets pulled out from the lead or that client. Yeah. Further down the line, that’s just, oh, we actually don’t have any integrity at all. We told you something just to get your attention, and now that we have it.[00:08:30]

It’s actually a little different. There’s a thing we forgot to tell you or there was some fine print, or that’s just straight up. Just was not true at all and, and I’m grateful to say I don’t see a lot of unicorn signing [00:08:40] members trying those things on a regular basis. And if they did, I would’ve yelled to them already.

But I still see it in the industry. And if fitness industry’s not alone here, there’s a lot of kind of bait and switch marketing out there. But I just can’t [00:08:50] imagine there’s ever a good reason to try something like that when the truth is gonna be so much more effective at winning over relationships.

[00:09:00] Yeah, I think it’s interesting because that play that sort of six week challenge mm-hmm. That’s free but then winds up not being free. Yeah. Also, clearly worked for a long time. Yeah. I think it definitely probably just burnt [00:09:10] its way through the forest and now there’s no kindling for it to work in a lot of spaces.

And the reality is that, listen, there are some gyms that did it overall pretty well [00:09:20] and definitely were able to grow doing that way. I think part of the issue that. It is true now in the year 2025 is a lot of gyms that [00:09:30] grew that way because invariably you are gonna turn off a certain percentage of your audience.

You really run a risk in a geographic constrained market because with the exception [00:09:40] per he, perhaps of a place like New York, you’re gonna run out of people a certain point, right? People are gonna find out about you. So if you are in the online space, it is to your [00:09:50] financial interest to actually just kill them all and let out throughout the bodies.

Still something I probably wouldn’t feel great. About Personally, I probably wouldn’t sleep great at night. Probably. I probably wouldn’t wanna do it, [00:10:00] but yeah, at a certain point, like if you have an unlimited size of an audience, who cares if a lot of people are having bad experiences and even if people, you have a bad reputation, there’s always [00:10:10] gonna be somebody else you can find that doesn’t have bad things to say about you’re haven’t stumbled upon you.

That’s a lot dicier to do in a geographically constrained market. Again, I wouldn’t even say that, like [00:10:20] that’s like. Impossible to do just that. It seems in today’s day and age we can look back on that experiment, which has largely run its course that the unfortunate costs ultimately [00:10:30] probably do outweigh the benefits there though I will say, I mean there’s something be said for I think you, you should consider if you unpack like why it went so well, right?

It was a clear benefit. It was a clear amount of [00:10:40] time and it’s free and people like a free thing, right? So you got the benefit of offering a free thing that was exactly what people wanted in a very specific amount of time. You just, it [00:10:50] didn’t wind up actually being free, but I think we should consider as markers, what was it about the work so well, and are there versions of it that we could do that are maybe more in line with a little bit more transparency?

[00:11:00] If that happens to be something that matters to you, which I suspect for most of our listeners, it does. Hey there, business Unicorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your [00:11:10] 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 book.com. [00:11:20] I worked super hard to make sure this is a less than 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, [00:11:30] importantly, change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marketing secrets book.com and now back to the podcast. 100%. [00:11:40] I think, you know, there’s plenty of people who have a pain point that’s extreme enough or present enough every day that they’re willing to jump over that speed bump of, oh wait, it’s not free.

Oh, but I still [00:11:50] need it or want it bad enough. I’ve bought things that I thought were gonna discount it. Then Wharton still bought them. I know what it’s like to just having already decided you want the thing that there’s nothing that’s gonna stop you [00:12:00] from getting it once you’re already bought in. Yeah.

Psychology’s compelling. Yeah. Yeah. Which is fair. I think it, you really just. Both of the dilemmas we’re putting forward are really about about zooming out and talking about what is like your [00:12:10] ethical tolerance. For the, the amount of like honesty and integrity that you lead your brand with. Yeah. And everyone has different ethics, right?

So it’s not as black and white as that one’s wrong or [00:12:20] right. But people have different ethical benchmarks in their lives. And I think it’s something that every business owner or marketer has to grapple with is like, where are our ethics here? Uh, and [00:12:30] how far willing to push things in pursuit of a dollar, in pursuit of a lead, and at what point is the cost higher than we’re willing to bear?

And I think for us, that’s part of why I think we, we always worked as partners is that [00:12:40] our ethics actually play a big role in most decisions. We, we’ve been, yes, we’ve made a lot of decisions to not make money off things we felt like we wouldn’t be able to sleep on. And, and in some cases we’ve regretted that [00:12:50] in some cases we haven’t.

But we’ve always put that like very high ethical bar, front and center for better or for worse. Yeah. And I think, and I’m not shaming anyone who has different ethics, I [00:13:00] just think it’s something we’ve really gotta consider. And I also just from, from my. Organizational psychologists hat on. Like I said before, any moment where I think we’re deceiving someone or showing up [00:13:10] in a way that lets invites ’em to question our integrity at all is a hard way to start a relationship that we want to last a long time.

That’s just no matter what your ethics are, that’s just. A [00:13:20] fact of human relationships. And so I think when you can, you know, lead with honesty and integrity, it’s gonna benefit everyone. There’s gotta be some strategy that allows you to do both. Make money and [00:13:30] lead ethically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else in marketing lands?

And we got a few minutes left else that you wanna call. I’ll give you one really quick, and this one is, yeah, I [00:13:40] think is, is well intentioned and this, I spoke a little bit about my talk at the recent Toronto retreat I think is. And again, it’s hard because I can’t, I don’t really fault [00:13:50] the human because I think it’s hard not to do this is not being able to really understand what your prospect actually wants.

Mm-hmm. Superimposing your own [00:14:00] values on what the prospect should want. Yeah. And the most common situation I see this is actually the second professional, second career rather fitness professional or gym owner that got religion. [00:14:10] They got the religion of fitness and fitness really matters to them and they become very enculturated in.

Movement and health, and it just feels so [00:14:20] good and it’s so thrilling to them and they really feel like everybody should value their health. And there is a level of, at times judgment of people that [00:14:30] don’t value your health. And why won’t you invest in my gym? And why won’t you invest in this thing you say matters to you?

And, and again, I understand. To some extent, like I think I have [00:14:40] some compassion for it, but ultimately I think it’s the opposite of a client-centered agenda, right? Yeah. And it’s one of the reasons why a lot of marketing doesn’t work is because gym owners don’t talk [00:14:50] enough about what the client actually wants in the words they actually use sometimes because they don’t even have a theory of mind for it, because they only know what they want.

They can’t even step outside of their own brain to think [00:15:00] what might it be that the client might want? And in some situations because they have some judgements about it, they think it’s wrong. Like you shouldn’t want X particular kind of goal. And while it is [00:15:10] true that certain motivations, me, mainly ones that are more extrinsically centered than extrinsically centered do tend to be more sustainable and more [00:15:20] positive, and.

That’s just not where most people start. And in fact, most people start a fitness journey, particularly if they’re getting the flywheel going, they’re going stopping from zero. It’s usually because they feel [00:15:30] bad. Mm-hmm. They’re not moving. They’re not moving to heaven, they’re moving away from hell. And sometimes yeah, it’s not elegant and they’re not in elegant place when they come in and they don’t [00:15:40] even really.

Know where B is, they don’t even know where A is. They just know they don’t wanna be wherever they are. Yeah. And I think the more we can make that okay and not yuck the yum of a person, the [00:15:50] more of a chance we have to ultimately get them into our environment, our culture, and ideally educate them and in, I would say, in positive ways and indoctrinate them and help move [00:16:00] them up the motivational spectrum to find.

Interests, there are a little bit more centered around their sense of their identity, their values, and less so about [00:16:10] moving away from something they don’t want in their life, whether it be like a health issue or being overweight or what have you. Yeah, I think that’s a really great one, Fisher, and I think it might be the most common I.

Kind of marketing, [00:16:20] I’ll call it mistake that we see people make. Yeah. Is that their materials are just really talking about them, centering what they care about, what they want their clients to care about, what they love, what they dislike, their approach, [00:16:30] their, their philosophies. And it doesn’t do a good enough job at centering the client and.

Like you said, talking about what they want and the words that they would use to describe it, and I think that was such a great talk in [00:16:40] Toronto for that reason. ’cause it really walked people through the process that all of you listening can do at home, which is you need to study your clients either by talking to them and interviewing them and finding out what they want or [00:16:50] sending out some surveys, or at least the very least, testing different language on your website or on your social media to find out what do they really want.

What do they really care about? What are the pain points? What do they say they [00:17:00] care about and what words do they use? And then really use their words in your marketing language to so they feel seen and heard and not judged for maybe thinking differently about fitness [00:17:10] than you and your team do. Yes.

Yeah, that’s a great one. I think we can end on, that’s a positive note to end on. Let’s leave it there. Even though the start is a rant, that was a very positive way to end. Friends, [00:17:20] if any of you listening out there, feel like you’re in the process now of going from being a trainer to being a CEO, guess what?

There’s a workshop coming up. Yes. Links down below in the show notes. It’s only 99 bucks. You’ll [00:17:30] spend some quality time with Fisher and talk through exactly how you spend your time each week. I. To shift your mindset and your approach to work to become that CEO you’ve always wanted to be, [00:17:40] or whatever you wanna call yourself to, do you wanna, or so call yourself CEOs really that much, but become the leader that you wanna be of your gym.

Awesome. Thanks for a great chat as always, Fisher. I’ll see you on the next [00:17:50] one. [00:18:00] [00:18:10] Bye-bye.