The biggest thing being sold by a Fitness Business is an experience.

Sure, part of that experience is the product or service you’re providing, part is the removal of the client’s struggles or pain points, part is the result they’re getting. But these things on their own aren’t enough. Even if you’re helping your clients achieve their goals, if the journey you’re taking them on isn’t valuable, the destination on its own won’t be enough.

We teach Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients that they’re not selling a product or a service, they’re selling an experience.

Ask most Fitness Professionals what their product is and they’ll tell you something like ‘Personal Training’.

They’ll focus on what it is they provide, not what it is the client receives. And they make the same mistake with their marketing. Their website and social media will be saturated with what they do, not how they help. For most people, getting to where they want to be is more important than how they get there, so the message from a Fitness Professional should reflect that.

So the product isn’t the Personal Training session you provide. Sure, that’s a big part of the product, but it’s not the whole thing. What you’re really providing is an experience.

The experience is the sum total of contact and interaction with you and your business. Your product isn’t just about what you do for them, or even about how you help them. Your product is about how you make people feel.

In fact, so important is this need to provide an experience that, for Fitness Professionals at least: product = experience.

Within this overall experience, or what we can call the ‘Macro Product’, we can have multiple ‘Micro Products’. This is where we’d place things like the physical weekly one-on-one session with your client, classes your run, the membership they pay for, the nutritional consults you offer. A small piece of the puzzle.

From their initial awareness of your brand, the first time they reach out for help, their transition to a paying client, right through to long term retention and referral, every point of contact combines to create their experience. Every point on their client journey is part of the product you’re providing.

In this way, the client experience or journey is synonymous with the concept of a ‘sales funnel’, or ‘sales process’. And at each level of the client journey, our aim (as marketers) changes to move them through the process. We’ll cover this concept more and examine the changing priorities as we go.

A key element of this journey is that the client journey begins with their initial awareness of your brand – even before they consider themselves a potential client. This is where we can look at the importance of content marketing, positioning yourself as an authority – an expert in the field. Delivering content to solve the problems and pain points of your avatars. Brand awareness will also come from other long-term marketing strategies, like social media documentation and leveraging client content.

It’s not unusual for a client to spend months consuming your content and ‘watching from afar’ before deciding to make contact with you. Don’t underestimate the power of this step. All client leads are cold before they can become warm before they can become hot.

Your client journey begins with awareness and consumption.

Ultimately, the purpose of this ‘pre- enquiry’ cold lead marketing is to encourage the potential client to contact you. So this become the next stage of the journey. For this to happen however, you must first convince them to visit a location where they are able to contact you. Where this location is will differ for different avatars. Some people may email you, some will want to fill out a form on your website, others might send you a direct message through Instagram or Facebook. The common theme is that you want the process to be as frictionless as possible. The more steps they have to take, the more likely they are to stop taking them.

So to cater for your different avatars you should take advantage of as many avenues of contact as possible – with the website being the one requiring the most effort on your behalf and therefore the one most requiring of your time. Your website is also the destination of a lot of your social media traffic, so it makes sense to funnel people here and optimise the experience. We cover the importance of an effective and frictionless landing page in the website part of this series.

A potential client makes contact with you – the next part of the client journey. Your priority now shifts from ‘making contact’ to organising a time to sit down with the lead.

As soon as possible after their initial contact, reply, with the aim being to lock down a time to sit down and discuss how you can help them. If they emailed you or filled out a form on your website, email or call them. If they texted you, text them back. If it was a direct message, DM them back. Match your reply with their enquiry. Whatever your chosen method of contact, it should happen as soon as possible after the initial enquiry. They’ve indicated they’re ready – don’t keep them waiting. Systemise email responses by using a feature like ‘canned responses’ in Gmail. Here, you can use a template email and then add specifics like their name and answers to any specific questions or pain points they have raised.

At Range of Motion our initial response looks like:

Hi John,
Thanks for reaching out to enquire about getting started at Range of Motion.

We’d love to invite you in to sit down and discuss how we can help.

Are you free any time in the next week to drop in and have a chat about options?

Looking forward to meeting you soon!

Kind Regards,

Again, to emphasise, the purpose of this step is to arrange a time to sit down with you, the next step in their journey, which we’ll cover in the next part of this series.