How To Bond With Your Market

 By guest author Logan Strain

I want you think a little bit about the difference between how money flows between family and friends and how it flows between businesses and organizations.  If you go out to dinner and your friend picks up the tab, no problem, you’ll just pay next time (not that anyone is keeping track, of course.)  If a college kid needs some money for books or food, their hard-working parents are usually happy to fork it over.

But if someone is looking to say, buy a car or get a loan, it invariably involves time-consuming background checks and mountains of paperwork.  And of course, that’s the smart way to do it, otherwise the company or bank is basically asking to get screwed over financially.  So why is it that money flows much more freely between family and friends, even in cases where there is just as much risk to lose money and get nothing back in return?  In and word: bonding.  When you really know the person you are handing your money over to, you just feel a lot better about it, even when there is risk involved.

Ok, so a fitness service could never hope to have as strong a relationship as a parent does with their child, but they can still bond with them in a way that makes the customer feel really good about forking over their hard earned dough.  To make them feel not just like they are paying for a service, but also giving money to a decent person or group of people. To start the client-customer relationship somewhere between business people and kin.

How do you do this?

Well, for starters, personalize your copy.  Don’t write from a prospective of a profit generating organization.  Write from the perspective of you, a real, genuine person with real hopes, fears, and struggles.  Someone who still has messy hair every time they wake up in the morning and has to sit in traffic like everyone else.  Few people really want to train from a “fitness machine,” someone who does everything perfectly every time, because so few people are like that.

The classic way to do this is let your audience know that you aren’t the kind of fitness trainer who has nothing but scorn for “cheat meals” and doesn’t understand what it’s like to schedule workouts around family and work.  Tell them you have a weakness for pancakes.  Make it known that yes, even you once struggled to lose weight and worked hard to find a way to get in quick but effective workouts. And once you, the struggling schlub, broke through and got the body you always wanted, you decided to share your techniques with the rest of the world. 

Even if that doesn’t really describe you, you can still say that you understand how much difficulty most people have getting fit, and you are happy to work around your clients busy lives and can maybe even work favorite foods in their new, healthier diet.  Understanding that your clients are human, with human weakness, will go a long way towards earning their trust.

 If you do this, your average potential client will feel a stronger bond with you than, say, the national fitness chain down the street. And for that, they will feel really confident about giving you money for your services.

This has been a fitness marketing post by guest author Logan Strain, focusing on Marketing Ideas for Personal Training