In our last blog post we talked about Worried William and Experienced Ed, although these were obviously fictional people hopefully you were able to relate to one or both of them.
So the last blog was all about ensuring that you have multiple products to sell (if you did not read the last blog it might be worth checking it out before reading this one). Once you have your products to sell, we need to get them to market. As we discussed ‘Worried William’ has plenty of time on his hands so should be able to generate plenty of leads on the gym floor, ‘Experienced Ed’ however has very little time for marketing as he is too busy training people. Both trainers need leads but how they get them might be very different.
This blog is all about how we can get leads from digital marketing. As a PT each month over 17,000 people search online for you services across the UK. If we take one city in isolation, 310 people searched for PT-like services last month in Manchester…I am pretty sure that this is more people than filled in the enquiry forms you left on reception…
So how can we get our bit of this customer base? Just to be clear I am no marketing guru and you only need to put that term into ‘Google’ to find hundreds of people who claim that they are, but I have tried to create a quick guide for how you can start to leverage this army of people who actively reach out for your services.
Once again I am going to use the characters ‘Worried William’ the new PT and ‘Experienced Ed’, the overly busy trainer who cannot take on any more clients. How they each approach digital marketing might be very different. I am going to make the assumption (yes I know you should never assume!!) that worried William has little money to spend on marketing but lots of time on his hands and that Experienced Ed has some expendable marketing budget but little time to spend on marketing to new clients.
There are two main types of digital marketing, “Organic” and “Pay per click” – often known as PPC. Organic digital marketing is the concept of ensuring you have as high a domain authority as possible so when someone searches for phrases that your website ranks strongly for, you appear at the top. PPC is essentially paying to be at the top and Google will charge you each time someone clicks on the link to your site. Both have real importance but possibly at different stages of your business.
My 5 steps to digital marketing success below give a very small snapshot of how this can be implemented; how much you focus on sections 2 – 5 will be determined by how close you are to the Worried William or Experienced Ed business model.
1: Create a website, blog or Facebook page
First if all we need something to market, ideally a website with a good, clear blog. If not, then a Facebook page but these days you can get someone to knock up a website at a fraction of the cost that it used to be, so if you can then it is defiantly worth the initial investment. Make sure your page clearly lists your different products with easy to complete call to actions (CTAs), don’t just make it look pretty, the goal of this site it to generate your leads so make sure people can very easily and clearly complete the forms.
2: Become a thought leader
Post post and post. Becoming a thought leader is all about creating interesting, useful content for your target audience and getting it onto your blog and localised websites – getting the attention of people who are interested in your subject. This has two main benefits, obviously hopefully people will see your content online and get in contact regarding your services. Ensuring there is lots of content on your site which is relevant to your services will also mean that over time, Google will rank you highly when someone searches for the services that you offer.
3: Digital PT
Creating short bullet point press releases for local press will again help you in a similar way to posting good content. Firstly if the local newspaper, website, blog or magazine that you send it to decides to go with your story then this will get wide exposure in the local community, hopefully generating your leads for your business. However just as important is the increased ‘domain authority’ that these newspapers often have – just a simple link from one of these websites (known as a backlink) tells Google that you are a good website and shoots you up the Google rankings for the your relevant search terms!
4: Paid Per Click (PPC)
So people go on year-long courses on PPC so I do not expect you to fully understand this by the end of this short paragraph! However PPC can be one of the best ways to quickly generate you super-hot leads for your business. PPC puts you at the top of Google for your search terms but you are charged each time someone clicks though to your website. This is defiantly a channel for the Experienced Eds who have a marketing budget and are happy to pay for leads. When setting up a PPC campaign make sure you stick to these key rules:
- Make sure you are ‘bidding’ on the terms that are really specific to your product
- Set a max spend per day! Otherwise you might come back to a huge number of leads and a massive bill!
- Direct your campaign to a specific landing page on your website which has a very clear CTA at the top of the page so you can ensure as many people as possible complete the form; this also helps you track how many leads have come specifically from your PPC campaign.
5: Facebook remarketing
Have you ever gone on a website and not completed any contact forms and then not be able to get away from the company’s Facebook ads? Yep you guessed it – this was not a huge coincidence. Using ‘cookie tracking’ Facebook re-marketing allows companies to post specifically to people who have been on their site, even before they (as the website owner not Facebook!!) know who they are! A simple Facebook re-marketing campaign allows them to stay front of the mind of those who have been on the website to look at our their product, meaning they hopefully fill out a CTA at a later date!
Hopefully this gives you an insight into digital marking and opens your eyes to its potential!
