Should Your Gym Have a Free Trial? with G.R. Hoff

[00:00:00] 1, 2, 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 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.
[00:00:30]
Yeah.
Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business v Unicorns podcast. I am back on the podcast again with a guest who’s no stranger to this podcast, but been back on before he’ll be on again and again. I’m sure it’s Mr. Gih Hoff, founder of Gym Member Machine. Welcome back, sir.
How are you? We are just doing amazing and
[00:01:00] living dreams and everything else. Everything’s incredible. I appreciate you having me. I love having you on the podcast. Not only you’re, you are a fun dude. I could officially call you that with a lot of confidence. You’re a fun dude, but you also have so much value to add and you really are an expert in, in, in the field of paid ads and this is a area where a lot of people have so much confusion.
So anytime you have, we have you on the podcast, we get people writing in telling how valuable it was. We’d love having you on and I’m sure today will be no exception. Before we dive in, for people who maybe have not [00:01:30] heard of gym member machine yet, maybe they’re been sleeping for a little while or telling everyone what is gym member machine and why should they work with y’all?
Yeah. We’re a done for you growth partner for boutique training gyms. So whether it’s paid ads, websites, automation, we’ll do sales coaching and whatnot to help you squeeze more juice out of whatever campaigns we’re running. We are a strategic growth partner for gyms. Like yours dear BFU listeners. So if you’re a global gym or a leave me alone and let me train Jim.
We don’t have much for you, but if you are [00:02:00] in that more boutique, small group, personal training, large group training space. We’d like to see if we can help. So yeah, there we go. Yeah, and we’ve talked about you had on this podcast ’cause we have a ton of unicorn signing members, leadership society members.
We’ve worked with you personally in our gyms and our business for years. And we’re not just, we’re not just friends, we’re and fans. We really are. We’re clients too. And so we’re walking testimonial for how great GRS team is and so go check them out. Go check them out right now. Link below in the bio.
Let’s dive in. Whenever we have [00:02:30] on the podcast, we’d like to kinda get an update on kind of your current thinking of how things are going in the realm of paid advertising, et cetera. And there’s been a lot of movement recently and a lot of opinions flying us to right, including Mr. Mark Fisher’s opinion on this podcast about how valuable or not paid advertising is in this moment.
How meta ads have seemed to have a big shift in the last, I don’t know, six to months or so, and so maybe we’ll start there. Just what do you see happening right now in the world of paid advertising? Good, bad, and ugly? [00:03:00] Yeah, so I, I have a, how do I say this somewhat eloquently and efficiently. I don’t think I’m gonna hit on both of those things.
I have one, maybe somewhat hot take that I feel quite strongly about at this stage. Mm-hmm. I have some other things that are still currently buns in the oven, so we’re always testing things like at this point we’re 360 plus gyms around the world, so we’re. Testing. We’ve got, clients are cool, that are cool with being Guinea pigs, things like that that I, the softly held take is something that I, [00:03:30] it’s more of a hypothesis than anything.
Sure. But I’ll end up sharing that today again. Yeah. We want em softly. It’s okay. We, this podcast is mostly half baked ideas, so there we go. There we go. You’re in Good company. Good. Good. Yeah. The, if we’re cool just diving into, yeah, I’m, let’s do it. I think it’s fun stuff. Okay. So the first annoying hot take.
With paid ads right now. And annoying is a very operative word here because paid ads, and I think I mentioned this on the first one, like anytime I get on stage and talk about paid ads, [00:04:00] I talk about how annoying they are. Sure. ’cause if you’re used to, you know, utilizing the fantastic coaching you get a BFU and getting a ton of referrals and a ton of really like nice highly qualified leads that if we’re being honest, your clients have done most of these selling for you dear.
Gym owner. Like paid ads are a much more annoying ecosystem. To play in, particularly if you’ve never played in that ecosystem before. What I am seeing now, paid ads are still working. This is good news. Mm-hmm. We’ve got people that are still absolutely crushing with paid [00:04:30] ads, but it’s still getting harder.
Yeah. So the analogy that I’ve been kicking around lately is it’s almost like asking, okay, does like strength training or does exercise still work to get healthier? Yes, exercise still works to get healthier, but we’re almost, now it’s less like we are the raging hormones teenager that took creatine and walked into the gym for the first time, and you just look at a weight.
Yep. You just get stronger. You just turn 45. This is amazing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. [00:05:00] Like you’re now paid ads are like for Jim’s, like you’re a perimenopausal woman, and yeah, things are getting harder. You’re an older dude and it’s like, do I need to do TRT? But I’m afraid of getting B. This is my internal dialogue every day.
And so it’s just harder. And so you have to get more things right to get the results that you’re looking for. I think there’s a world where. We need a more extreme dialed in effort at each stage. Mm-hmm. Of the paid ads process in order to get the outputs that we’re [00:05:30] looking for. One of those things that I feel.
Much more strongly about now is, gosh, our old offers, right? The more traditional offers. We see it a lot like with gyms across the board, it’s, oh, I’ve been running a, I’ve been running a 14 for nine, nine LBO for years, and it’s crushed and it’s gotten us to a hundred members or 150 members, and it’s like just not working anymore and I don’t want to change it.
We may have to change some of those things. Mm-hmm. In order to get the results that we’re looking for. Particularly when it comes to [00:06:00] paid ads. That is a. That’s one of the takes I feel pretty strongly about. So yeah. Well let’s keep pulling that thread a little bit. So clearly you’re saying it’s just a little harder than it used to be.
And does that start with more expensive and then work its way down? Yeah, so like the ads themselves are like to spend a little bit money, you have to do a little bit more follow up. With the leads, you have to maybe play around with different offers. Maybe you have to get a little stronger in your sales skills and, and overcoming objections might get new ones [00:06:30] out there ’cause it’s a colder audience.
So is it, are we talking a little more effort, a little more like the bullseye, A little smaller, all the way down the list of tasks. I think it’s a great way to put it. Yeah, and it goes all the way down, I think, even into the actual operation of the gym, which you guys are the best at. If our service is not on point and dialed in, then sure, guess what?
Like the bar for what good service looks is very different than it was. You wanna go extreme like 10 years ago when you could be late? Yeah, of course. And not wear shirts and Oh [00:07:00] yeah. The coach is writing up the workout on the whiteboard as clients are coming in 10 minutes after they were supposed to be there, and the workout’s supposed to have started.
Yay. Community like, this is fun. It’s not cute anymore. People have no patience ’cause they have a lot of choice in most markets, right? They can go anywhere, you can go lots of places and there’s a lot of places who brought a really a high touch coordinated like orange theory style experience, which is really pretty dialed in.
So if that’s what your market is comparing you to, you better have your shit together. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think is, what’s driving [00:07:30] the this, I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but what’s your sense of what’s driving it? Has meta made changes or Google made changes that are driving this or you know what?
I think there’s some changes to the way meta functions and works to a certain extent. The overall, the cost of eyeballs is just getting higher. There’s more people advertising. What have you, Fisher’s comments about, is there a conspiracy? I don’t think there’s a conspiracy, however, it’s just, it’s like there’s more people advertising and it’s not just gyms that we’re competing against, right?
It’s everyone else that is [00:08:00] fighting for your client’s eyeballs, like you’re competing against all of those humans. Costs of eyeballs are a little bit higher. Just like to get the ad served, then your conversion is tougher because there’s more gyms that are competing for your specific customer and the specific solution that you’re presenting.
And that’s where like my. My big hot take is I really think more people should be going to free offers. That’s why I think LBOs are not a compelling [00:08:30] enough thing, and this is all, there’s caveats to all of this because there’s gonna be markets where people are just absolutely crushing on paid ads with their traditional 14 days, $99, like whatever, insert any LBO type offer here.
There’s gonna be markets where those things still work, and that’s great, and I love that for you. However, in the more competitive markets. By and large, going with a more extreme offer and we never recommend the bait and switch stuff. Like I’ve been anti that the whole time. You can check the fricking receipts kids, right?
Sure, yeah. Like I think it’s one of the worst things you can do [00:09:00] for your business and your reputation long term. But I do think there’s a world where, gosh, either you have to go much more high ticket. On the front end and collect more cash on the front end to be able to make a profit on your ads because they are more expensive, which means every piece of, you’ve gotta have a really good, a really highly skilled sales person on the phone to book the appointment.
’cause you’re gonna have to deal with pricing objections and handle that elegantly and eloquently to get them to book and show up and so on so forth. You’re gonna have to have a really good sales process. [00:09:30] You’re gonna have a, have to have a service carpet that matches the offer drapes. Mm-hmm. If you’re selling something that is very expensive, so you can go on that.
Extreme. Or you can go on the other extreme where it’s more of an NBO. This is a Dave Brasco special. I don’t know if NBO was like a thing before, but like a no barrier offer where it’s, shout out Dave. Shout out Dave. Truly free. Which sounds annoying, but man, if you’re really dialed on the service side and everything else, the.
There’s benefits to the free offer. We, we, we did free offers a bunch of times at [00:10:00] Mark Fisher Fitness and we just get flooded with leads and did we get everyone’s big concern? There’s gonna get a ton of tire kickers, people who aren’t interested. We did, but we also got a lot of people who stayed. We got a lot of people we converted.
Right. So it was, both were true for us. It’s like you get a lot of people who are not gonna convert, but that’s the case anyway. When you’re. In this game, right? You have to get used to that. Ja. James Pratt. I’ve made the joke with Dave. I’ve been talking about James. I’ve been talking to James up on fricking group coaching calls Uhhuh and on podcast episode, he’s actually, yeah, I hadn’t been released yet, but he’s the [00:10:30] first guest of the GMM Oh fun podcast.
’cause I’ve been talking about it so much. We’ll have to have you on Michael Keeler, Jim. Remember machine podcast. Really sexy blood there to James. James broke my beliefs on so much stuff. Right? Yeah. So you’ve got this really, he’s a friend of BFU and Mitch on the former podcast. Former member. Much impact.
Mm-hmm. You guys had, when he started to actually turn on the gas with marketing, but dude was like a 300, 400 members before he started to enlist either one of us in terms of the marketing side already. Already crushing. Yeah. [00:11:00] Alien when it comes to the service. The delivery, the quality of the coaching trainers, et cetera, all those things.
He grew the lion’s share of that business on free trial offers, whether it was free 14 days, free, 30 days, what have you. Yeah. Selling people into like minimum, I think he said $350 a month memberships. We’ve had, we had a guru, I’m not gonna give like the names here, but we’ve had other gurus from other circles.
Mm-hmm. Still have and operate a gym or gyms. Right. Yeah. Maybe I’m not giving away too much [00:11:30] and we don’t do free Yeah. Tire kickers and blah, blah, blah. We don’t do discounts. Things like that. James has maybe, I don’t know if there’s anybody more successful, but maybe the most successful single location gym.
Yeah. Just training gym individually owned. Bootstrap, like it’s his thing. This is not outside money, what have you. That I’ve ever been around. Yeah, they built the whole thing. The whole one. Our biggest, yeah. Off of totally free. Free. Yeah. I think, listen, I’m with you. I think free’s gotta be on the table for most of the people.
[00:12:00] I’d rather people experiment with free than with high ticket offers, just because I think high ticket offers just leave too many people off the table. Like it’s just so inaccessible to so much of the population. Unless you’re in like a super rich area and your whole thing is serving rich people, then I think high ticket offers, I’d rather you do.
Free. The thing with free is just like you said, you just have to have your shit together. You have to, to have, be willing to follow up with lots and lots of people and every day, multiple times a day. You have to have a really good sales conversation. You have to have, and then a great experience when they walk in the door.
If [00:12:30] you can have all that, I think free can be a great try once in a while, maybe not a hundred percent of the time, but, but I think it’s gotta be a tool in your toolbox. For sure. Dude. Well, where James broke me is, yeah, he’s, we convert 83%. Of our free trials into memberships, and the minimum membership is like 350 bucks.
There we go. There’s, there’s one of the goblins, one of the kids making a, making an appearance. Sprinting across the bed. Yeah. No, it’s, it the, the, and here’s the nice thing for [00:13:00] folks that are thinking about free. Number one, I. It’s like James, and then there’s, we’ve got dozens and dozens, I won’t say hundreds, but there are certainly dozens and dozens of other small group personal training gyms that have grown to multiple locations mm-hmm.
That are growing off the back, basically of a free turn free trial offer. Right? Yep. Sometimes it’s a Netflix close. Sometimes it’s like there are ways to collect cash upfront on free offers. Of course, with integrity, right? Okay. Option A is this, and option B is this. [00:13:30] Maybe it gives you a little more free for your money, what have you.
Like you can do those things. But the nice thing when it comes to following up with folks on free offers is you can just tell your prospects, tell your gym prospects that come in and use this and abuse us. You don’t have to have a pricing conversation while you’re. Setting the appointment, right? Yep. The level of skill required to get the person to come in and try the service is much lower than with these because there’s no risk, like higher ticket or membership or whatever else type offers.
Yeah. And so there’s some nice, I think, throughput that you can [00:14:00] get on that side. And again, what we’ve seen at this point is. It. It’s not that the leads are tire kickers, so if you are not converting your free trial people into memberships at a rate that is somewhat acceptable to you, when you look at the finances of the business, then it’s a higher BFU tomorrow because probably your product needs to get better.
You still don’t have a great experience. Yeah. They want you have to wow ’em. Yeah, that makes sense. Before we get into any other hot. Takes. Maybe can I just ask a quick, maybe tangential question about the, about the landscape, [00:14:30] which is when we talk about paid ads, we mainly are talking about meta ads these days, but what other, what else should people be considering?
How important are Google ads to this, you know, what’s all the young eyeballs are on TikTok these days? What sort of say about advertising on platforms like TikTok or LinkedIn at this point? Yeah, LinkedIn, we haven’t, we. Because normally we’ll test a bunch of different platforms over time. Clients wanna try it out, and so we’ll try it out.
Sure. It’s like a good excuse for us to try a different [00:15:00] platform. LinkedIn’s never been one where we’ve seen success. Like my understanding of it right now is that it’s just so expensive, it’s so clunky of a platform to advertise on. Yeah, I just don’t think it makes sense. If you wanna cross post some of your organic stuff and start to see if you get some juice on the organic side of LinkedIn, by all means.
Sure, give it a shot. It just, it feels like a platform. Where are you really looking for fitness content organically on LinkedIn? Like, yeah, probably not. I could be wrong. It’s just like that, that platform for me, in my own [00:15:30] personal experience has always been so gunked up by bots and or automations, like my, I don’t know, my, my inbox has always like.
Thousands of messages full of just people I’ve never heard of. Yeah. Which just makes it impossible to do any real advertising on there for things that might actually be valuable, but, okay. So LinkedIn maybe not so much. You haven’t seen a ton of success. What about, what about Google TikTok? Yeah, Google.
Google is an interesting one. Google I think is very, it’s even more market dependent than the meta platform. So the deal with [00:16:00] advertising on Google for the most part, and we’ve got more folks. That are advertising on Google than ever. It used to be something where we’d just say, dude, you need to be absolutely maxing out your budget on meta.
Mm-hmm. Because there’s a point on meta now, like used to five years ago we were running pre-sales for folks and they would wanna run the budget up. These are like highly capitalized franchises that. So like you need to spend more, I’m willing to spend 500 bucks a day in this singular local gym to get as many clients, as many leads as possible.
Used to be able to [00:16:30] push buds budgets up way higher than you can now. Now, the optimal spin on meta for most gyms is gonna be typically like under a hundred bucks a day. A hundred bucks a day is like a pretty good cap for most markets. And you spend, oh, I spend whatever, I spend a hundred bucks to get seven leads, and if I spend 150 bucks, I get seven leads.
We shouldn’t be spending 150 bucks, right? That’s telling us that the max that we should be spending in that market is about a hundred. And so then if you want to keep spending money on marketing in other places, then take that budget in the next place that we would [00:17:00] place. It would be Google for us right now.
I still don’t know if tiktoks gonna be a strong advertising platform or not. I know it’s nice in that the platform itself is quite similar to Meta in terms of execution and setup. I think one of the challenges with TikTok is, again, with anything you really want to have your carpet match the drapes. So if you’re gonna be advertising on a platform, particularly like TikTok, you want to have a good organic presence already there.
And most gyms that we see, at least in [00:17:30] our universe, like they’re not doing. Three video short forms a week that are really high quality. And so TikTok, we’ve not thrown a bunch of people on at this stage. That makes sense. I think there’s a world where it could be good. Yeah. Google’s still a thing. We, we see some of our sports performance people really engage in TikTok.
People are going after youth athletes. Yep. Even college age athletes because that’s where their eyeballs are. And so those are the folks who I think maybe would be worth it would be worth considering for them. ’cause they are incredibly. Present on there. [00:18:00] Yep. And then, sorry, you were gonna say something else?
Yeah. So with Google, the issue with the lion’s share of Google ads, and there’s actually, if you wanna get deep into the fricking mechanics of this stuff, like Google has, and I forget what it’s called, my brain’s not working, but Google has a more interruption based. Option now for local gyms, and we’ve been doing some of that, so we’ll mix some of the higher intent search driven advertising that people are used to on Google.
Oh, when someone plugs in personal training, let’s serve an ad to that individual when they’re in our given location radius and things like that. [00:18:30] The issue with Google is if there are not enough people searching for your thing in your market, then you can’t throw money at Google. Mm-hmm. You can’t have it do the interruption based stuff in the same way that you can with.
The meta platform, right? Facebook and Instagram. So Google tends to be a, typically a lower ROI than lower ROI platform than the meta platform. We will typically only recommend folks go to Google when they’ve [00:19:00] maxed out their, basically what they, their max efficiency, their peak efficiency spend on the meta platform.
Then and only then what do we look at Google as somewhere where we wanted to spend money. It’s not gonna be something where we’re like, oh, dear client, does it make sense for us to spend money on Google or Meta First? Like it’s sure it’s almost always a higher return on investment. Makes sense. With Meta, even though those leads are candidly a more annoying lead to work with, then.
A Google lead that’s searching [00:19:30] for personal trainer near me and then your ad gets served to the top. I’m much more of the philosophy. Let’s make sure our SEO is really good on our website and if you’re up in, make sure your GMB is, or G-B-P-G-M-B, they’re always changing the name, your Google business profile, right?
Yeah. Uh, is as optimized as it can be to give you the highest probability of landing in that top three on the map pack is what we call it in the business. Mm-hmm. And if you’re there already, then I’m like, don’t spend more money on Google as much as I’d love to sell you an additional platform. Like you’re already there.
Makes sense. And you’re there for free. So yeah, [00:20:00] focus. Yeah, I appreciate you going on this tangent with me. Just ’cause I think it’s a question we hear a lot in talking to folks who are been running paid ads or considering running paid ads, or maybe you’re hitting a plateau with paid ads, like what other platforms is a place they often go to.
So it’s great to hear your thinking on that. What else? Any other, what other hot takes are in your back pocket? So the, I mean, I think the offer Hot Take is the one that gym owners should. Take and run with. That’s a big one. The, it’s just so much easier to [00:20:30] get a lead, to claim something for free upfront and you can look at your, the ecosystem in your market and be like, all right, people, were running a bunch of bait and switch stuff.
Or maybe you still have people that are still trying to run bait and switch things like you can zig when they can. When they’re zagging and go completely anti, this is actually free. There’s no bait and switch, like no accountability deposit to come in and try this thing out. It is truly use us and abuse us for 14 days, 21 days, 30 days, absolutely free.
30 days free gr. That sounds insane. Yes, it is insane. [00:21:00] Also, James filled his fricking gym, his second location in like. Four months or so. Yep. On the back of a free 30 day, no bait and switch offer. Just really easy offer to say yes to and then serve the hell outta people on the other side. And guess what?
They’re closing. 83% of the free trial leads into memberships on the other side. Do I think you’re gonna get that? Probably not. Probably not. But you could, right? Another thing I think people should look at with when it comes to an offer like that is just long-term [00:21:30] conversion. Look at that list a hundred percent in six months in a year, and calculate people who’ve converted from that offer long term.
Because I think you’re right, they’ll opt in immediately even though the timing might not be right or they’re already, they’re still locked into another gym. They’ll opt in to try and claim it, but it might not be the right timing. But you look back over, over a year, I bet you do convert at a pretty high level, folks like that.
Yeah. Yeah. The other, this is the one that is in the oven, so to speak, so Sure. There’s lots out there on meta that I think people should not be paying attention to, [00:22:00] right? There’s a lot. If you go on YouTube, the universe, YouTube University, and look at, all right, I’m gonna try to run my ads myself, and I’m seeing X, Y, Z guru, talk about the new Andromeda algorithm and that I just need hundreds of pieces of creative and throw it into the ai, and the AI is gonna do its stuff for me.
I would highly recommend gym owners never listen. To what the masses on YouTube University are talking about and what the meta marketing experts that are probably, if you’re running paid ads yourself, you’re [00:22:30] probably getting calls and emails from the meta marketing experts saying, Hey, I’m Sean, you’re meta marketing expert.
I’d love to talk about ways to optimize your campaigns. Guys, the meta cares a ’cause I’m. I eat my own dog food, so I’m a big believer in these like continuing education situations. I was in ‘EM when I was a gym owner in groups like BFU, and I’m in ‘EM now as an agency owner. We had in the agency group. This guy was like sharing a win.
He said, oh, we got this client up to 1.8 million a month in spend, and we’re trying to scale ’em up [00:23:00] to get to 2.2 million a month in the next two months. Do you think Meta’s advice is going to be more designed, more optimized for the giant e-comm company? Spending 1.8 million a month or for your gym where you’re spending a thousand bucks a month, and like how many, I can’t even do that math.
Like how many months is it gonna take for you to be worth mm-hmm. What that guy is worth in Yeah. One freaking month. Years. Yeah. A lot of the, the algorithm stuff and everything else, like the meta’s advice, it, they don’t care [00:23:30] about your gym spend. If you go off the platform tomorrow, they don’t give a shit what they give shit’s about.
Are the people that are spending multiple seven figures a month on their platform. Their advice is to no fault of their own. Like it, it’s a smart thing. Their advice is more geared toward advertisers like that. So all of this and drama to stuff and everything else, and we’re constantly testing the management best practices and making sure, hey, like this is the horn that we’re tooting.
Is that the correct horn for us to still be tooting right now? Yes, sure. So [00:24:00] the managing yourself locally is very different where I do see a world that could be interesting. This is the baked potential hot take is going back to the world where I’m calling it Three Birds, one stone. Mm-hmm. So I may like, we’ve still got a few weeks until the BFU in Atlanta.
I don’t think you’re still selling tickets for it, but gosh, you should be there if you’re not. This is part of what I’m. Again, potentially gonna talk about, depending on how these preliminary results start to shake out. I think there’s a three [00:24:30] birds with one stone method that we’ve been starting to implement for clients that I find quite interesting.
And basically it’s this idea of. There. There used to be what folks in our advertising space would call a carpet bomb campaign where you run brain awareness stuff on the top level, right? Yeah. We’re gonna do engagement or video, a video view campaign, throw some video creative out there, and then retarget that list with our direct offers.
Sure. And it used to be this fun, [00:25:00] sexy thing that people like me would say to scare people like you, dear listener, into giving us money to make this advertising thing sound really complicated. It never really did that well, and we never pushed it to be fair. We’re seeing some things now where, and you guys are probably seeing it on your feed if you’re on platform at all, where you’re doing video driven stuff, and it’s a comment, CTA, right?
So comment blank. To get the thing. Yep. You run a GHL automation or a MiniChat automation off the back [00:25:30] end. Turn that person into a lead, hopefully have a conversation, sell by chat. Yeah. Few teaches that in a really great way. And the nice thing there is that you’re, the reason I’m calling it Three Birds, one stone is number one, we’re basically running brand awareness or engagement driven campaigns with good video content.
That’s cool. Right. The first stone is just the brand awareness and engagement that you’re getting at the top level. Your following’s probably gonna grow. You’re gonna get more reach on your posts. More people are seeing your thing. It’s just like an exposure, [00:26:00] a welcome mat to your brand, if you will. And it’s the same hypothesis of doing good organic content, but now you’re forcing that spend into a certain, into your market.
The second bird that we are viciously annihilating with this stone. Yay. That it’s hypothetical right is, but now we’re trying to get leads off of it. So now there is a window, there’s an opportunity for folks to comment whatever the key word is. Sure. And have that person become a lead. I like it. So I, [00:26:30] when I was first growing my first gym, we basically took off like crazy running direct Messenger ads.
It was all messenger. There was no email name, phone number, no calling leads, what have you. It was just messenger. Messenger is a less noisy platform. Then SMS and phone calls. Right now there’s less like robo dials that are happening in your Messenger account than there are in other places. The downside to it.
Is that you? That’s the one mechanism you have to follow up with that human. [00:27:00] Sure. Yep. Unless you run automation that hopefully collects phone numbers and things like that, but you are able to, A, create some brand awareness. B, collect some leads, right? Get some leads that hopefully turn into conversations and then into bookings, and then into clients of yours with whatever your offer is.
And then C, the third thing is, yes, those people do become an audience that you can then retarget with your more standard. Ads. And so that is something that we are testing promising results. [00:27:30] The cost of eyeballs is lower, running that type of campaign than just your direct offer campaigns. And so that’s a, that’s helpful.
Yeah. It’s an interesting spot that I could see for folks that are listening that are really good at video, organic content, you get good engagement on your organic stuff already. It could be worth, alright, how can I turn this into something? With turn into a lead collecting mechanism with some sort of keyword that people can comment to move forward, right?
Yeah. Express their interest and then move forward [00:28:00] deeper into an additional conversation. Um, makes sense. I could see that makes sense. Being a thing makes, that’s, I like this multi-layer approach. I would also imagine that it really does work well for people who are really good at knowing their brand.
Who are really good at making some noise and having a point of view, right? If you’re gonna do that kind of brand awareness, style, content creation, then you better know who you’re talking to and have your own personality. I think folks who do that really well, I can see this work even better for. Yeah.
Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah. It’s fun. [00:28:30] Yeah. I don’t wear lead magnets. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. So not a big fan of lead magnets, but this is, I think, a way, a kind of way of doing that. And by having people raise their hand in their comments, they’re opting in, just not in nutritional sense. Yes. So the way that. I’m seeing it taught right now.
Mm-hmm. It’s still with the traditional lead magnet like comment to get your belly fat guide or whatever. It’s Sure. I don’t think, I don’t, I think the best lead magnet that you can run for a business is a thing that makes them want more of the thing they’re hopefully going to buy. Yeah. More of the next [00:29:00] step.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. For gyms and we used to see a lot more of it where it’s, oh, like here’s a belly fat guide, like here’s a fit over 40 guide or whatever. Like Yeah. You grocery shopping lists and all of it. Yeah. It’s ebook. It’s like you’re gonna get more people that just want the ebook.
It’s like you have the perfect lead magnet already built into your gym. This is full circle, the best lead magnet for a local gym. Again, maybe this is hot take, maybe it’s not, is to try the fricking gym. Yeah, yeah. I think you’re right. I think those other things. Can be a distraction. It can be the reason people follow [00:29:30] you is because you’re giving out this content and makes them even less likely to wanna come in because they feel like, oh, you’re helping me do it on my own.
I don’t need to come in. I think that there’s a risk there for sure. But lemme ask you this because we haven’t gotten to this topic yet, and I wanna be respectful of our time, and we’re almost at the end here, which is. We haven’t talked about AI almost at all yet. You mentioned a little bit when a content creation, but we can’t have a podcast these days, so we don’t talk about ai.
Yeah, we’re gonna, I’m gonna get fired. Um, and is there anything related to AI that you find really helpful or, uh, false promise at this [00:30:00] point in, in, in the ads world? Oh, false promise. Meta’s ai ad setup stuff is still trash for local gyms. Like when if I do a talk about how to set up paid ads, I’m like, turn off all the AI stuff that Meta wants to make you turn on.
So there’s that side. I’m more bullish. We’re in the middle of beta testing, like AI callers that are pretty good so that folks aren’t having to follow up with leads. There’s some, uh, chat driven booking bots that you can utilize and we’re, again, we’re testing those. Anything that we can do to like. Take the burden of follow up [00:30:30] off the gyms.
It’s like Sure. The number one thing. So I think those things are getting better. My guess would be in the next year, 18 months, maybe max phone based appointment setting will be a thing in the past. Totally. Like I think AI’s just gonna do it better and not take days off and get sick or get annoyed when a lead hangs up on ’em or whatever else.
So I think that’s a fun thing to look forward to. On the, whatever, the quality of life improvements that AI will hopefully bring in the coming 12 to 18 months. [00:31:00] The other thing that we’re hearing a lot of in terms of questions is, oh, LLM, I wanna be a EO, I wanna be answer engine optimized, and so on and so forth.
The, there’s good and bad news with that. The good news is that for the most part. Good. SEO is still good. SEO folks are selling like, oh, AI engine optimized, LLM, optimized websites and da da. Okay. Fair play because it’s a thing that people are thinking about right now. Yeah. Yeah. There’d be a few tips and tweaks that were helpful there, but generally speaking, I’m with you from [00:31:30] what I’ve heard and seen, if you have good SEO, you have good SSEO and the AI are scanning the same shit that they used, that bots have always been scanning.
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you need to make sure you have a website company that is doing good, basic, fundamental SEO for you. There’s some stuff, and, and I’m not the expert on these things, right? I pay people to be way smarter than me on this. There’s some stuff on the technical side, oh, we, you make sure the schema is this and that.
Okay? FAQ pages are actually a nice thing. Like we, we’ve been doing every few pages on our sites for years, [00:32:00] right? It’s like a standard positive thing. So there’s, there’s some little micro stuff, but by and large, good SEO is still good SEO, and. That’s something to consider if you’re building your own website on Wix or whatever is probably not the best idea.
I mean, you probably, it could get away with it a long time ago, but these days I just think it’s a, the investment in the website from so many great companies out there that do this. Yeah, it’s so worth it. Yes. To not have to do it yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s not, yeah, there’s not a, a ton [00:32:30] on, on that side that I’m like, crazy.
Yeah. Oh, do this. Don’t do that. What ha, what have you, when it comes to ai, I do think there’s, and this is, I think the same thing we talked about last time. AI writing is still very clearly to me, AI writing. I would very much listen to Fisher’s workshop. When it comes to, okay, it’s really good as a first draft, and it’s maybe really good as a final review if you’re gonna do the first draft.
Don’t let the cousins make babies together, or whatever his term was, so it’s good for ideation or as a final pass if [00:33:00] you’ve got all the ideas in the world. But I would not be putting out just like AI slop in terms of writing, unless. You know, your business coach has told you it might be a positive thing for you to maybe put some people.
Yeah, definitely told a handful of people with all love that. Let’s just let the robot right for you. Like it’s fine. And honestly they’re getting better. Fisher and a lot of us recently have moved over to Claude and you can really do a good job. Training it to have your voice and tone. Yeah. And even if it’s not perfect for a lot of people who hate writing and don’t consider themselves good at it, and it [00:33:30] really causes them great emotional distress, just let the robots do it.
It’s better than nothing. Yeah. But I think you’re right that, that they’re not amazing yet. But all these things are gonna be changing. I’m sure we’ll have you back in the podcast and in, in a handful of months there’ll be new tools and new things to have on our radar. But I think that’s a good place to leave it.
This has been a great conversation. We covered some hot takes, some not so hot, takes some warm, just getting baked takes and any, any final lessons out? Actually, let’s do this final word of advice for anyone on the podcast who can, who’s never run a [00:34:00] paid ad where, what’s the first thing they should think about?
Ooh. First thing you should think about, I’ll tell you what the salesman in me is saying. Yeah. If you’ve never run paid ads before, probably book a fricking super high pressure call with our team. ’cause there’s a lot to dive into. And then we’ll either pitch you or tell you like maybe not. For right now, we do have, speaking of the free offer, we are going, we believe in the, we’re so bullish on the free offer.
We’re doing it for GM. We’re doing a pure like no bait and switch 30 day free trial at [00:34:30] GMM for gym to qualify, right? Like you’ve gotta have a bit of a critical mass of clients. You’ve gotta be able to show, hey, we’re at least decent at servicing people on the inside. ’cause if we throw a marketing gas on a crappy service fire, we’re just speeding up the rate of your reputation going into the trash can.
So if you go to just gym member machine.com, mention the podcast and say, Hey, the crazy prematurely agreeing a-hole douche bag pitch man said that there y’all were doing a three 30 day trial. So we’ll make sure we get you taken care of on that front. And again, the goal of that conversation is to point you in the right direction.[00:35:00]
Whether or not it’s time to run paid ads, whether or not we ever work together officially, but yeah, like I think the best thing to do, I tell, tell it to our members all the time, just go talk to you guys. ’cause I, we know you all well enough to know that you are, you genuinely have turned people away that I’ve sent to say we’re not the right fit at this time.
Either you’re not ready, or whoever the case may be, go work on this and come back. You don’t have the infrastructure following with leads at this point. Shown an unwillingness to follow up with leads at this point, or you don’t have enough traction, or your market is, we’ve worked with for a little while and your market’s really not getting any [00:35:30] traction, and so go talk to GR in the scene because they’ll honestly let you know if they can help you or not.
If they can help you, great. Get some leads and if they can’t, that’s, that’s, that’s the honest the answer. And so I think go click the link below in the show notes and do exactly that. Thanks as always for a great conversation, my friend. Uh, we, I’m sure we’ll have you back again soon. We’ll be talking about more of this, but thanks for bringing your insights and your personality and your energy to this conversation.
I really appreciate it. And dear listeners, I’ll see you on the next one. Y’all have a kick ass week. Appreciate you.[00:36:00]
Go, go, go, go.