The Three Ms of Marketing

  By guest author Logan Strain

There’s an old truism about marketing that goes: you always waste half of your marketing budget, but you never know which half. 

This applies to most  health and fitness businesses because too many try a scattershot approach to marketing, trying to be all things to all people, or worse yet, think that “brand awareness” is all it takes to reel in the clients. The missing ingredient that causes all this wasted money is information, specifically information about your market (your potential clients), your message (what you should say), and your media (how you should communicate your message). 

This first thing you should make yourself aware of is the market for your health and fitness services.

If you don’t know your market’s values and what their biggest motivational factors are, then you won’t have any idea on how to effectively communicate with them You probably already know a million reasons why a person should start exercising regularly and eating right, but you should put those aside while researching your market. Instead, you should try to research what actually motivates your average client to take charge of their health.  If you ask your current clients (and you should if plan on taking market research seriously), chances are you will discover firstly that different demographics choose to come to you for different reasons. Older people may have a slightly different reason than younger people, men may have different reasons than women, etc.  At the same time, you will discover that that is one single major reason why most people start going to a health club.  This bit of information will be key to creating a message that will truly resonate with your market.

Once you understand your market, you are ready to craft your message. 

This is where you start to distinguish yourself from the other guys.  If you know what your market wants, you now have to find a way tell them that you can give them what they want in a manner that is far superior to everyone else. For example, pretend that a potential client has convinced himself he can get fit both at your health club and at a competitor’s.  What factor that only you can provide will convince him that your business is the way to go?  Once you have this unique “hook,” you need to convince your market that they need to act immediately with a powerful “call to action.” The double whammy of a reason they should act, and reason they should act now is a powerful way to get people to try your services.

Now comes the really tricky part. 

Once you know what you are going to say, you have to figure out how you are going to say it.

In other words, what media are you going to use to communicate your message? This is tricky because you can’t really know what works and what doesn’t until after you try it. This means it will require a bit of experimentation before you discover what medium or media will give you the best results. This is another instance where quizzing your new clients is crucial, so be sure to ask “How did you hear of us?” every time someone new walks through your doors.  At the same time, you should try a little bit of everything, and slowly weeding out the media that don’t work as you get information from your clients

This has been a personal training marketing post by guest author Logan Strain