Four Power-Positioning Marketing Strategies For Attracting The Best Personal Training Prospects

by Eric Ruth

If you take the time to understand and implement the information in this article, you will never again have a sleepless night wondering where your next client is coming from. I will introduce and explain four dignified, professional and inexpensive power-positioning Lead Generation Marketing (LGM) strategies that can magnetically attract a steady stream of high-quality personal training prospects to you. Prospects who are 90% pre-sold on your services and ready, willing and able to act.

When done correctly, LGM can deliver outstanding results… but only if you actually use it.

Unfortunately, many fitness professionals have been programmed to believe that if they build a better mousetrap, people will beat a path to their door. If they excel at delivering exceptional, results-oriented services, their business will grow itself by referral. In some very rare cases, this does occur, but for the vast majority of personal trainers, nothing could be further from the truth. There’s simply too much competition and too many other solutions available to the consumer.

The hyper-competitiveness of this industry demands a systematic, strategic approach to generating high-quality prospects. If earning the money you’re worth and growing your business are important to you, then proactive steps must be taken to continually and consistently fill your prospect pipeline. But the trick is locating prospects who are predisposed to your solution.

Attempting to educate and convince “suspects” (you suspect they should want what you offer) is infinitely more difficult, frustrating and expensive than preaching to the choir of predisposed “prospects” (people who have raised their hand indicating an interest in your solution). This naturally begs the questions, “How do you systematically sift and sort through the throng of suspects to find the ready-to-act prospects? How do you locate the people who are eager for your solution? And how do you get them to come to you, rather than you chasing after them?”

Lead generation marketing is the answer. LGM is the foundation of any solid business.

Without high-quality leads, you don’t have sales. Without sales, you don’t have clients. Without clients, you don’t have a business. It all starts with LGM.

LGM is about power-positioning, not traditional prospecting. Power-positioning establishes you as the expert and compels high-quality prospects to seek you out, rather than you engaging in the drudgery, pain and constant rejection of traditional prospecting (you chasing them). Power-positioning not only brings you better quality prospects who want your services, thereby overcoming “sales resistance,” but it allows you to command premium fees for your services. It virtually eliminates price objection.

If you’re thinking that if you excel at providing your services, you already have the power-position and shouldn’t have to concern yourself with marketing – then you’re not thinking accurately. Accurate thinking is about what “is,” not what “should be.” The reality is that if you’re not doing certain specific activities to market your services, you are abdicating responsibility for your financial security and embracing business mediocrity – or even failure. If you think accurately and use these four power-positioning LGM strategies, your reputation, business and bank account will grow.

LGM STRATEGY #1: WRITING

You have spent years of your life getting educated: experientially – in the gym, working on your own and others’ bodies; and theoretically – in the classroom studying the exercise sciences. You are a fitness expert, whether you acknowledge this fact or not. You have education and unique life experiences that can and should be documented and communicated to attract business to you. And it’s considerably easier than you may think.

I write many articles (like this one) for fitness industry publications, and I’ve written and self-published numerous books and reports on fitness marketing. Why do I write?

Because fitness professionals read these articles, reports and books, reach the conclusion that I am the expert who can help them, and then seek me out. It’s the best kind of positioning.

How does this apply to you? You could write an article or a regular column for your local newspaper about The Myths and Misinformation of Weight Loss, or The Six Questions You Must Ask Before Joining A Gym, or The Jealously Guarded Secrets Of America’s Top Personal Trainers, or Ten Tips For Regaining Your Pre-pregnancy Figure, or any number of other emotionally-compelling topics.

When you write for publications, it’s standard operating procedure for them to provide you with a resource box at the end of your article. This little box contains your brief bio and contact info. But the secret to leveraging each article for LGM is the inclusion of a specific offer to the reader to get more information from you. You can see how I’ve done this by looking at my resource box at the end of this article.

By having your article appear in a publication, you are automatically perceived by the readers as an expert. If your article resonates with the readers and they want additional information, your resource box offers your LGM tool. Readers call, email or visit your web site to obtain your LGM tool. This way they are pursuing you, seeking your advice and counsel. And this positioning gives you all the power.

Are you writing articles? Magazines, newspapers and newsletters (online and off) are hungry for valuable content benefiting their readership. Plus, each article you write becomes a reusable asset. Once you’ve written ten articles, you can flesh each one out a little bit, add a table of contents and a great title like, Confessions of a Personal Trainer: The TRUTH About How to Really Look and Feel Better Than You Have In Years, and you’ve got a book. With the technology available today, you can inexpensively self-publish your own book in a matter of weeks. Then you can advertise your book, rather than directly advertising your services.

Anyone buying your book is a prime candidate – a red-hot prospect – for your services.

Being a published author is the king of power-positioning and gives you the ultimate lead generation marketing tool.

LGM STRATEGY #2: PUBLIC SPEAKING

Public speaking is a very efficient and effective way to use LGM to bring you an unending supply of people qualified to do business with you. Open your local Yellow Pages and look under “Associations.” Most have monthly meetings. Most need speakers for these meetings.

With just a few phone calls, you could be booked to speak in front of hundreds of people each month. Getting speaking gigs can be as simple as pitching the Association Director with, “I’m a certified fitness expert and have a 30-minute speech called Confessions of a Personal Trainer. It’s fun, provocative and will show your members the truth about how to really achieve their weight loss and fitness goals and have a higher quality life.”

Associations generally won’t pay you to speak to their members. So what! Your goal is not to get paid on the front end, but rather to cash-in on the back end. The combination of expert positioning (you’re the speaker, therefore the expert) and the use of LGM will get the qualified prospects in the audience to pursue you.

Providing a hand-out to each audience member covering the major points of your speech and including an offer for your LGM tool (book, special report, audio tape, etc.), will result in a percentage of them requesting it. Those requesting more information are indicating a direct interest in what you have to offer. This strategy effectively separates, sifts and sorts the prospects from the suspects.

LGM STRATEGY #3: POSTCARDS

Postcards enable you to inexpensively reach your best local suspects with an offer for your LGM tool that magnetically attracts the hottest prospects. Here’s how to use this powerful strategy. Obtain a mailing list of the wealthiest homeowners within a five or ten-mile radius of your business and send them a simple, attractive postcard with a compelling free offer. Something like this:

FREE to Sheridan Farm Residents:The Consumer’s Guide To Atlanta’s PremierHealth, Fitness And Beauty Providers

Your copy might go on to say... “this $9.95 guide is being made available free of charge to Sheridan Farm residents as part of a consumer interest test. It’s full of inside information, critical reviews and special offers from the most acclaimed health, fitness and beauty providers in the Atlanta area. To receive your free copy, just call…”

The Consumer’s Guide – your LGM tool – gives you three major benefits:

It automatically sifts, sorts and separates those who have an interest in premium health, fitness and beauty solutions (prospects) from those who do not (suspects).
It prominently promotes you as the leading personal trainer in your area.
It gives you the ability to establish and leverage multiple strategic alliances.

Only a percentage of the people requesting your guide will be hot prospects for your services, but everyone requesting it will be interested in exclusive health, fitness and/or beauty solutions. This is an excellent “reason why” local businesses catering to your ideal clients will be motivated to establish a cooperative referral program (strategic alliance) with you. The nuances of strategic alliances are beyond the scope of this article, but I hope you grasp the big picture and can see the unlimited potential of this LGM tool.

LGM STRATEGY #4: PUBLICITY

Publicity can literally change your life overnight. You can go from being just another personal trainer to a local, even national celebrity. Having a story written about you in a newspaper or magazine, or appearing as a guest on radio or television, firmly establishes your credibility as a legitimate expert. The media’s coverage gives you what’s known as the “halo effect” (a perception by the consumer of an implied media endorsement). This makes you infinitely more attractive and seductive to the consumer.

One of the most effective ways to leverage the media for lead generation marketing is to tie your news release to current local or national news with an offer of specific and revealing information. For example, recently Newsweek Magazine did a cover story on children’s obesity. Maybe one of your local newspapers piggybacked on this national coverage with a story of their own. The minute you see this story, you fax your local paper a news release headlined, “Local Fitness Expert Provides Child Obesity Prevention Guide.”

You see, the goal of all media is to be current and timely with their news. If there’s a big national story, the local media want to find a way to report that news to their audience with a local twist. If you help them with that, you will be rewarded with coverage. Your child obesity release capitalizes on the timeliness factor, while adding local flavor.

You have two objectives with this release:

To generate an interview and story about you as the local child obesity prevention expert.

AND

To get your release, which includes instructions on how concerned parents can obtain your guide, picked up as-is.

If you are interviewed for a story, you will have an opportunity to plug your guide and provide instructions for interested parents to obtain it (downloading off your web site or calling your office). However, if the media simply chooses to run your lease as-is, it’s critical that you’ve included instructions for obtaining your guide (which only makes sense – the media isn’t going to publicize the guide without explaining how to get it).

This is LGM at work. Anyone requesting the guide (your LGM tool) is a prime candidate for your Family Fitness Counseling (or whatever you want to call your service). Creating guides, reports, tip sheets, white papers, expert interviews and books which can be made newsworthy and capture the attention of the media, is just one of many different ways to obtain publicity for your business. Publicity is much more powerful than any advertising you can do, and it’s virtually free. The main reason some people are unable to garner publicity from the media is simply a misunderstanding of how to make their business newsworthy. Discovering how to create compelling “hooks” the media will bite can return huge dividends to you.

As you can see, all four of these powerful lead generation marketing strategies require that you do a little work documenting your expertise – writing. If you want tangible proof of the power of writing, look no further than my esteemed colleague, Phil Kaplan. He is the most prolific writer in this industry. Like most of us, Phil would probably rather be lounging on the beach than writing another article or book, but he writes regularly and often because it produces results. Model success.

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