How To Get More Attention To Sell More In Fitness
Every single business owner wants to sell more. What we’ve been taught in the past 100 years is that to sell more we need more people to know about our products and services. We need more people to trust our company.
Today the world doesn’t work this way, times have changed, yet on a daily basis we see ego-driven messages that benefit only the founders of the company and the directors.
The way we gain more attention, the way we increase our sales is not by talking more and more about our products, but by talking about the transformation that the product achieves, and by talking about what change we want to make.
Steve Jobs said it perfectly in 1996 when he came back to Apple:
Let’s say we are selling a healthy snack bar and we want to increase our sales. The traditional way is to create ads and content about this bar. Talk about how tasty this bar is, how healthy this bar is (if it’s really healthy), speak about the ingredients of this bar and go on and on how we source the best ingredients for this bar.
This strategy can only get us so far because it will get boring. People will say yes, it’s a healthy bar and it might be even high in protein. But there are 1000 more bars that claim similar things. What’s the difference?
Well, that’s why it’s important to understand and articulate WHY did we produce this bar? How do we make change happen? How are we helping our customers?
The goal is to really be clear about what we stand for beyond just our product.
We can follow this strategy when we think of our brand story and our content marketing:
- What was the problem initially when we started producing this bar?
- What are we trying to do with our bar? How are we helping our customers / athletes achieve that?
- What do we stand for beyond the product?
- What are the issues in the industry that we want to solve?
Here are two examples:
Last month, I was speaking at the Adventure Sports Events Conference in Kendal, and Martin Stone, Managing Director at SiEntries and SPORTident shared some very important data with us that showed trail running as a sport is in decline with the younger generation of 18–25.
This means that the younger generation are not really keen on going out and running on trails or running at all. I guess it kinda makes sense as they are so obsessed with social media and dancing in front of a screen for views and likes.
So a trail event company or a nutrition company could say they will be part of the solution if they cared about the topic. They can start being relevant to the younger generation.
Another problem we face in society today is men’s depression: Over 6 million men suffer from depression per year, but male depression often goes under-diagnosed (source: ADAA).
In trail running, 63.5% of runners are male, so there is a huge opportunity to engage with an audience and make a difference.
These are two examples of problems we are facing in society, and yet I don’t see any fitness companies tackling this issue. Just yesterday, I saw an advert on IG from a gym saying that they’ve been voted the best gym in 2023. Who cares? Do the owners of that particular gym think people believe them?
There is a time and place for the ego driven messaging (Award — Winning, Best Gym, Best Gel etc) on the website that can be positioned subtly.
There are two things we can do:
1) Decide what we stand for beyond just selling our product and services
2) Communicate a story to clients and potential clients that helps them become who they aspire to become.
It’s positioning ourselves as the bridge towards the goals our clients want to achieve.
When those two elements are clear, it’s so much easier to create content, create campaigns and make an impact.
I guess the most important task is to make a difference, make an impact with what we are providing and look at it from a helicopter perspective. When something is bigger than ourselves, we are inspired to create and make a difference.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
