Okay, so here’s the situation I want to clear something up right away. You’re likely on this journey right now; you’re on this journey of CrossFit marketing. The reason being is you’re a box owner or perhaps a person who is doing marketing for someone else’s CrossFit gym and you’re looking specifically for CrossFit marketing.
Understanding CrossFit Marketing
Now, I want to tell you something that is probably going to hurt a little bit, and that’s okay. Here’s what it is: marketing for CrossFit is no different than regular marketing. There are probably a few nuances here and there, little subtle differences that make CrossFit marketing a bit different, but at the end of the day, it’s really just branding that makes CrossFit different. The concept of marketing is the same wherever you go. You need to get that clear when you’re trying to market your box. This is just the most simple and effective way to do this.
Personal Experience in CrossFit Marketing
So how do I know this? Well, my name is Chris and I was working with my sister, who was a CrossFit gym owner, to build up her business. Personally, I work for a marketing agency and I specialize in helping small businesses effectively market their business in a way so that business owners don’t have to spend a ton of money at an agency. They can do a lot of things themselves and we minimize the work they need to do. They don’t need to be putting a ton of output in order to get a bunch of input, and that is the most important thing because business owners, especially gym owners, you’re likely running a business plus you are also working with clients. It’s a lot of work.
The Challenge of CrossFit Marketing
To be marketing as well, this is why so many people are looking for CrossFit marketing because they just don’t have the time or the bandwidth or the expertise to be able to do these things. So I helped my sister build up her business using really basic and simple marketing tactics that I want to share with you. I’ve got it basically marked down to a very simple framework that anyone can follow. It will likely eliminate a lot of the extra things you’re probably doing to market your business that actually isn’t working.
Basic Marketing Principles
Let’s dive right into this entire thing and we’re going to talk about just the very simple basic marketing principles that you can use to grow your CrossFit gym. The first thing we’re going to talk about, and if you’ve done any searching about marketing, you’ve heard this term before, and that’s a funnel. You understand the concept of a funnel. If you don’t, we’ll dive a little bit deeper and you’ll understand a funnel after this, but more or less, a marketing funnel is where at the very top of the funnel, you imagine an upside-down triangle. All your leads and everything goes on the top of that and it goes through this process of basically filtering people out until they become a customer of yours.
Simplifying the Funnel
There are so many different types of funnels that are out there and different sections within each funnel. Everyone’s got different words they use, and oftentimes they get very convoluted and strange and complicated. Really, when you’re looking at this funnel or when someone’s explaining the funnel, you’re not really sure what you’re supposed to be doing at this stage of the marketing funnel. Whether this is like, “Okay, is this where my social media fits? Is this where perhaps SEO fits? Is this where this fits?” You just don’t really know. So, like I said, a lot of these funnels will have things like at the top of awareness, then consideration, then conversion, then loyalty or retention. All these things are like awareness, interest, desire. They funnel all these things and, like I said, you’re not really sure where everything is supposed to go.
The Common Marketing Approach
So what ends up happening is the gym owner or the person doing the marketing sees all of this and just gets very, very confused. At the end of the day, here’s what their marketing looks like: “Hey, have you heard of CrossFit? Want to come to my gym? Hey, do you want to get fit? Why don’t you come to my box?” That’s literally it. It’s a very simple process of all they’re doing is working to qualify the prospect and then asking for the sale. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work unless you have a lot of time and a giant budget. This is what television or radio advertising is; it’s more or less just brand awareness and then expecting people to come in. As a local CrossFit gym owner, you can’t do that. You don’t have the capacity and likely not the budget either.
Effective Marketing for CrossFit Gyms
If you’re on this article and you’re reading what I’m talking about here, you probably don’t have the budget to spend a ton of cash to get the branding and the awareness that you need in order to simply say, “Hey, have you heard of CrossFit? Hey, why don’t you come to my gym?” You just can’t do that. So what we want to be able to do now is to basically market effectively. Instead of just blindly posting on social media or trying to run Google ads, or even trying to buy into someone’s CrossFit marketing program, you need to simplify. There are so many different bespoke CrossFit marketing programs. My sister bought into a whole bunch of them and all they did was one of two things: either they convoluted the entire marketing process or it was just lipstick on a pig. It was more or less exactly what I’m going to teach you, but it had the CrossFit name on top of it, therefore it was especially related for CrossFit. Unfortunately, all these things lead to complication. You need to simplify. It’s as simple as that.
Shifting Your Business Mindset
So in order to simplify, here’s what we need to do. We need to ask ourselves a question: what business are you actually in? If you think about that for a second, your first instinct is, “Well, I’m a gym owner. I’m in the business of training people and getting people fit. I’m teaching people CrossFit. I’m training CrossFit athletes. I’m taking people to CrossFit Games.” These types of things. That’s what I do. But at the end of the day, no, that’s not what you do. Here’s what the business that you are in and this is the problem you’re trying to solve: you, as a CrossFit gym owner, are in the business of lead generation. The quicker you understand that, the quicker you’re going to be able to excel at CrossFit marketing because this is the answer. This is what you’ve been looking for. You are in a lead generation business. As soon as that mindset changes, you shift to understand what you’re actually trying to do. CrossFit marketing becomes so much easier.
Simplifying the Marketing Funnel
Let’s dive into the process right now. We’re going to go back to that concept of a funnel, but we’re going to really, really simplify it. There are only four parts to this entire funnel. I’m going to list them all out to you: we have attract, we have capture, we have nurture, and then we have sell. These are the only four things you need to worry about when it comes to marketing. In fact, right now you’re probably doing two of these things from this list: only two of them, and that’s the top one and the bottom one—attract and sell. Attract and sell. Going back to our conversation before: “Have you heard of CrossFit? You want to come to my gym? Do you want to get fit? You want to come to my gym?” These are the things that people do. And like I said before, if you’ve got a large budget, you can just do attract and then sell.
Understanding Each Funnel Stage
To give this concept a better understanding of what each section is, I’m going to explain it like trying to find someone to marry. So, attract: the first thing you’re going to do is you need to try to attract a mate. What you do is you go places where a potential mate is going to be, whether that is at a club, a library, a church, or perhaps a sporting event. You’re going to go places where people are that would potentially be able to marry you. Once you meet a person that you’re interested in, what do you have to do? You have to find a way to communicate with them on a regular basis. This is the capture stage. You need to get their phone number from them to communicate with them regularly because you’re moving to the next step, which is nurture. Nurture is that stage where you’re building a relationship with someone. You’re getting to know them, trying to figure out if you’re compatible. Is this a person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, or is this person a crazy person? Oftentimes, you’ll find out that you’ll be with a person for a bit, and they seem all great, and then eventually it turns out they’re a nutjob. So you want to make sure that this is a good fit both for you and for that person. Therefore, there is this relationship-building side.
Selling and Closing the Deal
Once the relationship has been set and you have built this relationship, you understand the person, both of you seem to feel that the next step is to bring this relationship to the next level. This is where you ask them to marry you. This is the selling process. This is the selling side of the endgame. Now, if we go back to the initial analogy that we had at the beginning, looking at attract and sell, attract and sell, this is more or less going through a stadium of people and saying, “Hey, do you want to get married? Hey, do you want to get married? Hey, do you want to get married?” Guess what? Eventually, someone is going to say yes. If there’s thousands upon thousands or 10,000 people, someone is going to say yes. But here’s the problem with that: the person that says yes, are they the right fit? Who knows? So this is also one of the reasons why even if you have a huge budget to simply broadcast your business to people, most of the time they’re not going to be the right fit for your business anyway. So you must go through this process of attracting someone, capturing a way to talk to them on a regular basis, nurturing them, and then selling them on their business.
CrossFit Marketing Tactics
Let’s take a look at this now from a CrossFit perspective. First thing is attract. Oftentimes, this is going to be things that you’re probably doing already. You’re probably spending a lot of time on this. This might be posting on social media, maybe you’re doing some SEO, maybe you’re running Google ads or Facebook ads, maybe you’re doing content marketing. These are all the things you’re doing to attract someone to your business or to attract someone to your website because we are talking like an online perspective here. So we’re drawing people into your website to come to your website. Once they’ve gotten there, what do we do? Are we going to leave them just up to their own devices? No, we’re not going to leave them up to their own devices because someone who comes to your website, they’re just going to be clicking around looking, and who knows what they’re going to be doing. So once they get to your website, you need to capture a way to communicate with them on a regular basis. This is going to be, on average, one of two things. There’s a lot of other ways to do it, but these are the two main ones that people do: one is capturing their email address so you can email them regularly. It can be part of a newsletter or a drip-fed email campaign where they get a certain number of emails after a certain length of time, or it could be capturing their phone number or both. This is really, really important because you want to build that relationship. You want to make sure that even though they’ve just come to your website and they’re interested in CrossFit, well, guess what? Maybe they get distracted by something, maybe they’re cooking dinner and they have to go back to that, maybe they’re looking after their kids and the kids are calling for attention, maybe their house is on fire or something, right? There’s always going to be something that’s going to draw them away and draw their attention away. So you need to be able to draw them back over and over again to remind them about your business. This is critical.
Effective Capture Strategies
Oftentimes with CrossFit gyms, the marketing style is this: you attract someone to your website, you find a way to capture their phone number or their email. This has to be done. There has to be an exchange. People don’t willingly give up their email address; they don’t willingly give up their phone number unless the thing you’re giving away is of value. You’ll often see websites where it’ll be like, “Enter your email address and we’ll send you our newsletter. We’ll give you cool tips and tricks on such and such.” That’s not a good value exchange. There has to be a specific value exchange in this process. The most successful CrossFit gyms do this. They have a little opt-in box on their website, and it says, “If you would like a free introductory session to CrossFit at such and such CrossFit gym, enter your name, your email address, and the date that you want to come in.” Then it’ll say underneath, “All you need to do is fill out this form, propose a date, and we will get back to you with availability and book your session.” It’s as simple as that. All you have to do is get someone to come to your gym. This is the hardest part. This is the lead generation side of things. If you can get someone to your website, if you can get them to fill out a form, then they commit to a date, and then you come back to them and say, “That date works,” or “Here’s a proposed date,” they’ll come in and they will be in your gym. They are now in your gym. That is the hardest thing to do, to get someone into your gym.
Nurturing Leads
This is where most marketing costs the most money: getting someone down to your gym. Well, guess what? Now you’ve got them at your gym, or you’ll have them in your gym in a couple of days. During that time, you’re going to have their email address. Once they do that, they’ll get an email address saying, “Hey, this is such and such a gym. Here’s the owner, here’s this person, here’s that person.” The next thing is like some benefits of CrossFit, maybe some community. You’ll send them on an email drip campaign so that they better understand your gym. They know about it. When they come in, they might see and recognize people as well. When they come to you, you might highlight your employees. There’s a whole bunch of different ways you can do this. Either way, you’ve now got them on this nurture sequence, and they’re on the way to your gym. Once they arrive at your gym, they’ve now communicated with you already. They’ve now learned a little bit about your business because they’ve been on the email sequence. They probably also then looked on social media to learn a bit more about your business. They come in, they hang out with the coach that’s going to train them. They go through the coaching process, they go through the introductory session, whether it’s one-on-one or a group, depending on what your capacity is. One-on-one is usually best, but of course, that’s a little bit time-intensive. They go through the session, and then you can say to them one of two things at the end: “Did you like what you saw here? If you did and you feel that this is going to improve your health or get you to where you need to go, whether it’s going to be more fit, more strong, maybe you’re training for the games, whatever, would you like to come back?” This is where you can offer them now your membership package. From there, you can figure out how they want to come into your gym, how they want to pay, how they want to, whatever your membership system is.
Inviting Potential Clients Back
If you find that that process doesn’t work, you can invite them back for another session and say something like, “Okay, we’ve been through our introductory session. What we found works really good now is for someone to come back for a second session. Oftentimes, it’s a little bit easier to stay motivated with a friend. You need that accountability partner. So you’ve gone through an introductory session. Think of a friend of yours that would be a good accountability partner. Why don’t let’s book a time for you and this person to come in and come back for a second session? We’ll go a little bit more in-depth, a little bit deeper. We’ll talk more about your goals and figure things out.” Now you’ve invited them back, plus they’re bringing a friend. Again, the hardest and most expensive thing is getting someone into your gym. Now you’ve got two people coming in, and when there’s two of them, you can offer them, and chances are if one person says, “Yeah, this is a really good idea,” the other person is going to be like, whether they’re on the fence or not or they don’t want to, they’re going to feel obligated to come and help their friend. So now you’ve just got two people into your gym, selling them both for the effort of getting one person into your gym.
Next Steps: Planning Your Funnel
This is really important. This is how the funnel works. So here’s your next steps. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to grab a piece of paper. I want you to write the words at the top of the page into four sections: attract, capture, nurture, and then sell. Here’s what I want you to do: look at all the places that you’re doing things online to attract someone to your website and write them all down in that column. Look at the capture side and write down all the methodologies that you’re using to capture someone to your website. Then write nurture and write down all the things that you’re doing to nurture your clients into coming back. Under sell, write down all the things that you’re doing then to sell your processes.
Simplifying Your CrossFit Marketing
When you’re finished doing this, it’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be good, but it’s going to give you an understanding of how things are set up and maybe where you need to improve. I want to help you improve this. Here’s what I want you to do: pop your email address into the box just below here and I will send you all of my resources on how to set this up. I will send you every single person that I learned from, all the business people, and then also you’ll get to see this process in action because guess what? What you’re seeing right now is actually the attract, capture, nurture, sell process. It’s as simple as that. So you’ll be able to get to see it, understand it, and learn by example.