We all know why you’re here. Let’s not shy away from it.
You want to make money.
That’s okay. We get it. You’re not in the wrong to want to improve your life. In fact, as a fitness professional, we know you spend most of your time helping others to make their lives better. If anything, you deserve to make more money for the services you provide your clients!
And you’re not helping anybody if you’re working your butt off and driving your bank account into the ground to sustain a business model that fundamentally isn’t going anywhere. Money is what makes the world go round; money will ultimately make your fitness business revolve (and evolve), too.
“But how,” we hear you ask, “do I simply make more money?
You’ve come to the right place.
At FitMedia, we have helped almost a hundred businesses market themselves more successfully and multiply their profit on ad spend multiple times over. Not to blow our own trumpets here (I mean, I’m just the copywriter…), but our team is truly industry-leading when it comes to growing fitness businesses.
In short, if you’re a fitness professional wanting to make more money, look no further than these six quick tips.
1. Increase the price of your service.
No, seriously.
People pay attention when you name your price. How you price your product tells your prospective customers what you think your solution to their problem is worth. And that’s a big deal for your business’s success.
Imagine you bought your partner a cheap bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day. He or she then glances at the receipt in the bin the next day: £1.50, it says.
Suffice to say, if, by some miracle, you are still with that same partner next Valentine’s Day, you’d better not repeat the stunt.
If you buy your partner a bouquet that comes to a tidy twenty, thirty, even fifty quid, and you’ve got yourself a one-way ticket straight to those Good Books you’ve heard so much about.
This holds true even if the flowers are the same colour and any ordinary bloke wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. The difference in price represents a difference in quality that the untrained eye often can’t see - but which is there nevertheless.
To put it simply, people understand money far more than they understand bouquets of flowers. By the same token, people who want your services as a fitness professional understand the value of money far more than they understand the value of your services. Thus, they will use your price to predict how valuable you will be to them.
In case it needs saying, we’re not advising you to rip off your clients. But there is a paradox in business where most good service providers are bad business owners, and thus are broke, primarily because they undervalue themselves. By undervaluing themselves, they are signalling to their clients that the service they provide is not worth their money.
So know your worth. Put your prices up. Let people know how good you are, and grow your fitness business as a result.
2. Upsell.
If you have ever been to the supermarket for a bag of crisps (or, for the Americans: chips) and left with a multipack, you have been successfully upsold. Congratulations!
Upselling is the simple process of selling people more than they initially thought they were going to buy. Offer them a single carrot on a stick and convince them to buy an entire bag of carrots and throw in a whole pile of sticks to boot.
As a fitness professional, you know that your clients have problems that they need you to solve. The problem might simply be ‘being unfit’, and the solution (for which they have come to you) is some combination of exercise, nutrition and social support.
If somebody came to you for a workout plan, why not offer to coach them through it? If they came for the group sessions you run, offer some one-on-ones. If they want a meal plan, sell them your eBook on nutrition. If they want coaching for 8 weeks, sell them 16 to see even better results in their physique.
Not only have you increased your client’s value to you, but you’ve increased your value to them, too.
As long as your products are of good quality (which they unquestionably should be), never shy away from upselling!
3. Downsell.
Okay, we know the face you just pulled.
Haven’t we just spent the last two minutes justifying why you ought to upsell? Why downsell as well?
Well, not every client is going to have the money to invest in your top-of-the-range offer. Some are going to express interest before re-evaluating their position and backing down. Rather than letting a good lead get away, sell them a lower-value offer at a lower price.
Say a client has approached you for coaching but changes their mind. Rather than selling them your primary offer, have a scaled-down offer that can help them meet certain aspects of their overall goals for a reduced cost.
Do not view downselling as a failure or ‘last resort’ (though where you can sell your higher-value products, you should!), but rather see it as an investment for the future: your prospective client has bought something rather than nothing, meaning that you have given them value. If you have given them value once, they are astronomically more likely to come back to the source of that value in future.
4. Cross-sell.
“How many different types of selling are there?” we hear you cry.
Lots.
Well, three.
Cross-selling is like downselling and upselling, except it isn’t ‘a version of the same thing’ you’re selling here. Instead, you sell more distantly related products together in a bundle. Cross-selling often happens after a casual “Hey, did you know I did this, too?”, either as part of the sales process itself (e.g., a pop-up on the website) or else after having worked with a client for a short time as their needs expand and change.
Cross-selling only happens if you have spent time developing a wide base of solutions to a number of different problems, like different branches of your business. A one-trick pony is never going to be able to cross-sell a number of different tricks, so depending on how specialist your business is, cross-selling may not be an option for you.
If it is, perhaps you have a series of eBooks, online courses, meal plans, training plans, coaching offers, and so on. A single client might not realise at first that they are interested in your other offers until you take the time to explain what they are, what they cost, and the benefits the client will get from each.
Cross-selling, where possible, is yet another method of ensuring that each client is more valuable to you than they would otherwise be, because you are more valuable to them than you would otherwise be.
5. Become known, liked, and trusted.
Making the atmosphere around your business uniquely attractive will vastly increase the retention of your clients – and therefore increase their value to you over the long term.
Create brand voice, charisma, social media presence, and community. Don’t just develop your offers in more and more brilliant ways, but develop your business, your presence, even your own personality into an entity that lives rent-free in the mind of the client.
It has often been said that the trick to running a successful business is in making an offer so good that the client would feel stupid to say no. And that’s a big part of the story, for sure.
But the other bit of the story is in becoming a business or a businessperson to whom the client cannot bring themselves to say no. A great offer from a soulless business, in an industry like fitness, frequently goes nowhere at all.
Admittedly, this is far more an art than a science, but it goes something like this:
- Look at your social media. Are you getting across the image of a fitness professional whom you would trust? Are your socials consistent, regular, informative, educational, engaging, funny, friendly?
- Develop a ‘brand voice’. Don’t write and talk like a robot with a thesaurus (like most businesses on the internet…) but be somebody instead. This is easier said than done, and you might want a copywriter to ensure your brand voice works.
- Create a community. This might be through a Facebook group, monthly QnAs, group workouts, or even simply by engaging online with the people that follow you. The more that your client base feels like a community, the longer each individual will stay in it.
At the end of the day, this doesn’t just help you make more money. It also helps you enjoy what you are doing, and it helps your clients to enjoy working with you, too.
If you do these five simple things, you will be well on your way to growing the fitness business of your dreams by vastly increasing the lifetime gross profitability of your customers, as well as expanding your customer base.
If you want to learn more about how to grow your fitness business, simply head over to www.fitmedia.net/apply today and book a call this week. We can’t wait to work with you and take you to the next level!
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