Building Brand Awareness Through Workshops

Getting people to come into your facility is one of the most difficult things for most business and gym owners to do. Creating a strategy and understanding how to do it is even more difficult.

The awareness stage begins with getting people aware that you exist and working to convince them to come into your facility for a low barrier opportunity or you go somewhere that you can partner with another business to attract more people to your brand.

To do this you want to offer simple workshops that shouldn't take more than an hour to do. The price of entry to these workshops is an email address so you can send them email follow ups after and invite them to future seminars.

Now it's important to point out that the goal of these seminars is to move people into your monthly memberships not to try to market workshops as an additional revenue stream.

As you gain a larger email list you can potentially do workshops that you charge for, but for this blog we are focusing on building awareness around your brand through workshops.

These workshops don't need to be extremely in depth, but they should tackle common pain points people give you. Some examples of these workshops include:

• Shoulder Pain Relief
• Low back pain relief
• Meal planning
• Everyday nutrition
• Simple stretches for pain relief

The point behind the topics I listed is that they are there to showcase your expertise and to showcase the fact that you work with everyday people who have real life pains. Not to mention that it builds a relationship with people who are not connected to your brand.

I would set up a monthly or bi monthly workshop series, create Facebook events for each one, and make them register for it through a CRM or another registration tool. This allows you to collect their email address and contact info.

Once you get this setup you can make a short (1-2min) promo video post to your social media accounts, ask your members to share it and email it to your list. The most important things to be aware of here are that:

1. You HAVE to be consistent with this or it won't work. Posting about the workshop 2x per week and emailing it out twice per week is a good strategy.
2. The emails you collect should be entered into a sequence that nurtures them long term with your newsletter or a specific campaign and about every 3-5 nurturing emails they should get some sort of call to action asking them to come in for a consultation. You're building trust and brand awareness with the workshops, but you won't sell them until you ask.

This is an excellent way to showcase the fact that you work with regular people who have regular pains and to collect their info to get them into your facility as members later on.

This is especially effective if you sell a very high priced fundamentals program as your primary offer. You can choose to charge for this or not, but remember this is to drive people into your core product of fundamentals + memberships and if you do this long enough it gives you a very large list of people to market to in the future.

There's More To Leads Than This

When you hear the word relationship, what do you think of? It's probably not marketing is it?

Well I'm going to try and convince you that marketing is ALL about relationships and how strong you can build them. Those relationships dictate everything about your prospect and what they expect from you.

The way we think of marketing in a general sense is how many leads can it produce and how quickly can it be done. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing if done in the right order, but is a major headache if our audience is not warmed up to is first.

If you want to build up a following of people who trust you, recognize your brand and feel a sense of connection to you. You have to understand how relationships and human dynamics work.

When you meet someone you don't just go right up to them and ask them to marry you. If you did and by some miracle they accepted that relationship would not last long at all.

It takes time to get to know someone, date someone, move in together, and then finally get married and live your lives together. Your chance of getting a yes and the relationship lasting is much higher if you actually know the person.

This is the same way we need to start thinking about marketing systems and campaigns. You have to show your audience who you are, how you can help them and that you are a brand they can let their guard down with and trust.

You do this by producing content that your audience wants to see and that will produce value to them without asking for anything in return. Now in order to effectively nurture that audience you have to keep putting the content in front of them and constantly interact with that audience.

After you've moved them from a cold audience then you can start to enter the next phase, which is potentially asking them to buy your products or come into your facility. A warm audience that trusts you is also much more likely to convert when using different lead generation tools AND they will stick around much longer once they do convert.

The takeaway from this is that we cannot just focus on using lead generation tools as our only way to produce leads for our businesses. A long term marketing strategy that focuses on building a relationship and building awareness around your brand is key to developing a system where you have a consistent and more predictable flow of leads into your business.

This strategy takes consistency and might take 6 months to a 1 year to starting producing results, but it moves you into a long term focus for your business rather than trying to figure out short term strategies all the time.

If you want to win in business and marketing you need to be thinking years ahead of the game and working to understand how you can get yourself there by establishing micro goals along the way. It's even better if you know someone who you can talk with and who can hold you accountable for your goals!

Remember marketing is a long term game. Play it right and the pay off is always worth it. Focus on the short term survival game and you will eventually lose!

Boosting Strategy For Local Businesses

There are a literal TON of ideas and strategies available on how to market and how to do it in the most effective way.

Something I've learned as I've built campaigns and worked on and designed strategies around different businesses is that it's most often the simple things that work very well and it's the long term strategies that win in the end.

Especially for local businesses.

If you want to grow your business and your brand you need to get it in front of as many people as possible and in the most efficient and cost effective way.

The best way right now to get in front of people is to get on their phones where they have their faces inserted in all the time. One of the best ways to do this right now is to utilize a boosting strategy for brand awareness on Facebook.

This strategy is designed to put your brand in front of people on a consistent basis and at the lowest cost possible for a local business. This is assuming you always have a solid content calendar put together and that your are actually executing on that calendar.

The boosting strategy revolves around putting about $5-$10 into each of your posts that you put out. This does a couple of things 1) it builds your website audiences and video audiences that you can pull from later on to create new lookalike audience and 2) it puts your brand in front of people from the same audience on a consistent basis.

I recommend using a website or email list custom audience and making a lookalike audience from that as they tend to work the best, but using the people who like your page and their friends will work well if you don't know how to create lookalikes or if you don't have a large enough email list or website following from your Facebook pixel.

If you're in front of someone all the time with content designed to build a relationship and tell a story, you are there when they need you to answer question or when they see you put out a call to action at the end of the month they are much more inclined to come in and see you. As they have already been consuming your content for some time and will trust your brand over others.

If you do this and do it consistently for a few months you will notice an uptick in the traffic into your business and a much larger social blueprint from that. But the biggest thing you have to do is be CONSISTENT! Everyone starts something like this and falls off the wagon due to not being able to produce the content or not seeing immediate results.

Last you can go into your business manager and invite all the people who liked your post to like your page. Thereby building up your page audience on top of what the boosting gave you.

This really comes down to building that relationship with the people who follow your page and working to develop a sense of trust with them.