¶ Intro / Opening
Here in my leads suck. I literally spent 25 minutes on the phone yesterday with a lead who ultimately thought that I was the phone company help desk.
Mark , did you do anything to warm your leads up?
Not a , not a , not a as router and , uh, tried to solve them that way.
Well, I can help you with that
, I thought you could. That's why I wanted you on the show. This is Run a Profitable Joe . I'm your host, Mike Warkin in before you go further, hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening so you do not miss an episode. Now my guest, Kiir o Dwyer from Australia to Brain Mentor, he runs Bathroom Strength and Conditioning and Orange City s and c .
He's also a sales and marketing expert and he's going to help us improve lead quality with organic content so that when you talk to people they're gonna wanna buy and they're not gonna ask you
¶ Are there bad leads?
what resetting their router. So let's dig right into it. Glen Gary , Glen Ross, famous Alec Baldwin scene where he starts talking to about the leads. He's yelling, he's mean, he's nasty. And he says the leads aren't weak. You are weak. And he gets really nasty with these guys. So what are bad leads? Like, aren't all leads great?
Okay, well firstly, coffee is for closes only. Mike , this
Is true. That's true. I don't have any right now .
And my nugget here is that all leads are important, right? Every single person who connects with you with a business owner and gym owner is an opportunity, an opportunity to help someone, to make them fit out, to change their life. However, there definitely are leads that can waste your time with little to no chance of actually joining your coaching. That's
What I'm getting at.
And , and they show up in four ways, right? So you have the ghosters, they fill out a form on your website and they never respond to you. You have the price hoppers, they just message you how much vanish, right? Then you have mismatch expectations. They just think you are a global gym . Cool. They uh , they might message you or ring you on the phone and say, what , what time is your spin class? What do you do?
Lead meals ? And then of course you have the free trial bunnies. They just want a free session with no interest. Can I do a free trial?
Okay, so you've got these four different kinds of leads and I had essentially mismatched expectations where, you know, you get a bad lead target, they don't even understand what they're seeing. They click on the wrong thing, it's a disaster. But more commonly, that's an extreme example. Of course, just joking. But more commonly, someone clicks on, they say you run a CrossFit gym and they're looking for spin.
It's just not a match and you can't really do much with that person. Maybe I've had like one or two over the years where someone was looking for bootcamp and they end up doing CrossFit, but super rare and it , it's not a slam dunk. I lost most of those people. So, you know, do do bad leads, cost to business time and money. How does that work?
A hundred percent. So it shows up in three ways. Number one, wasted time and resources. You and your team spend hours chasing leads. Like you said, you spend 25 minutes on the phone to someone the other day and then giving attention when it could go somewhere else. Number two, and this is where it starts to have long-term repercussions, is burnout. And then developing that scarcity mindset.
You know, constantly dealing with situations like the above. They wear you down and they usually start to view the entire market as being cold or bad. And then number three, if you start to give in, you start to realize that's how people are. Or you think that anyway 'cause that's who you deal with. You start to think that this is the market and the world you are dealing with.
So you give in, you offer discounts, you give free trials, you haggle lot money and then the cycle begins.
You're not true to your brand. And this is where that Jack Lemon character comes in from the Glen Gary Glenn Ross where he says the leads are weak. You know, he's got that cynical mindset where he's just like, they all suck.
You know, nothing happens and it's, it hurts like as a salesperson, it hurts when you hear no, no, no, no, no. But if you're set up with people who are, are 98% likely to say no, you're in big trouble.
And listeners, I'll give you this right off the bat, if you're hitting a string of nos, ask one of your best clients for a referral and try selling to that client because you're probably 98% likely to get a yes at that point. And that might give you a little confidence when you're dealing with cold leads .
So that's a little sales secret from the referral funnel, which is one of the most important ones you can possibly have in a gym. We're talking ads here today, but don't never forget that referral funnel. So let's solve some problems. How do you fix the problem and get better at bats in the sales office?
Okay, so to put it simply, the reason people are treating you this way is just because they don't know you. I mean, in the end, all leads are people and if they don't know you, then it's gonna treat you like you're an insurance company or just a random guy they found on the internet. So they're gonna interact with like, they're gonna interact with you in that way with mild hostility and get to the price mentality.
And there's a lot of bots out there now too, right?
A hundred percent . So they might actually think that you were just AI or somebody not from their local town just being paid to talk to them, you know?
So the way we fix that is to use our organic platforms and content to start to build trust with them so they know, like, and trust us even before the first conversation to build that coaching relationship so they know who we help, how we help, and that we can get them results before they even talk to us.
Have you seen AI Granny? You've seen that bot ? Have you heard about this one?
No . What's AI
Granny ? Okay , she , she's only in Britain right now I think. But an AI company actually created a granny character who is designed to nail telemarketers and just waste their time with Epic. Like, oh I can't find the the button and I don't know my password and all that other stuff. And it's literally designed to eat up the time of telemarketers so they can't get to you and me.
Now it hasn't made its way to Canada and Australia yet, but those things are out
¶ Great organic marketing
there now. And you know, that's kind of a funny aside to what we're talking about with AI bots selling to people .
Wow , that's good.
Yeah. So let's talk about this great elements of an organic marketing plan that's going to lead to leads, appointments, booked and sales. What do we got?
Okay, so I've got a a few for you. Firstly, let me tell you that great organic marketing gets your audience to know, like, and trust you before they speak to you. The goal is to when you get them on the phone and you say, Hey Mike, well I say, Hey Mike, it's kid from back to Strength and conditioning. They know who Kiss is. That is the goal.
So they feel a connection because they've seen me on the website, the Instagram, the Facebook, they know who I am, what I do, and that I can help you. So number one is that profiles need to be set up properly. Every great gym has a well optimized profile across those three main platforms. Website, Facebook, and Instagram, right? So this means four things in terms of that clear high quality logo that look professional.
That's number one, right? No small thing that looks pixelated. A mission statement that instantly tells people what you do.
I help busy mothers lose 20 pounds. Boom,
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Uh , social proof within seconds. So in the first five seconds of any of those profiles, I should see some sort of testimonial before and after success stories, anything matching the mission statement and then a clear call to action. So when I'm convinced I know how to get straight to you . So that's number one.
Number two is you need to define exactly who you help and show it everywhere. Now, this is the most important part. Your content should make it overwhelmingly obvious who you help. So let's say Mike , you own a gym and your bio says we help parents over 35 get fit and lose fat.
But then I check out your Instagram and website and I say Canva, images, motivational quotes, stock photos of people under 35, maybe a few videos of Rich Froning . This is confusing. Yeah , right? This is confusing for your audience and at best I still might be interested, but I feel no connection with you yet. So I'm gonna trigger you like the insurance company, like the telemarketer and our worst, I'm gonna move on.
So your content needs to feature your actual clients winning. I need to see people
¶ Social-media content plan
like me getting results. And then that actually leads me to what to post.
I need to ring a bell here because this is probably the most important part. You're literally gonna tell people exactly what to post here.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. So I'm going to make the assumption here that uh , gym owners that are listening are getting started or have some base. So this is a simple four post cycle that will help those people. So they need no previous experience, no knowledge, no high tech , just these four things to cycle through on a weekly basis. So number one, technique videos, that's easy because we are coaches, right?
Simple videos of me, all my coaches demonstrating and coaching proper technique in the exercises found at my gym. Number two, client wins. Closeup photos of your members , winning attendance club, weight loss, pbs, just simple. It doesn't even have to be as as. Um, it doesn't have to be before and after. Say they do help.
But even just a happy person over the age of 35 in the case of your mission statement, our hypothetical one with a whiteboard saying that they feel better, they have more energy and they're spending more time with their kids, stuff like that. Um, number three is a height reel . So a quick video edit of members training set to music showing the energy of your gym.
And then number four is group photos and community moments, people smiling, engaging, enjoying the atmosphere. And also what is a beautiful about all four of these is that they're actually set in the location that you're trying to send people to.
I'm gonna recap listeners, your notes are one technique videos, two client wins, three hype reels, and four group photos and community moments. Write that stuff down. You can literally do that from day one to day 10,000 in a cycle and your gym will have better leads as a result. Sorry to cut you off, Kieran , but I wanna lay it out for listeners on that.
Yeah. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a gym's profile back said I have bad leads, but if I look at the entire nine post, you know, screenshot, it gives me, I actually can't see the gym. I see quotes and everything, but I don't see the location that you're trying to get me to. So that is key there. Alright ?
So once you have a simple four post cycle that's very easy, you have your profile set up , you then need to give people opportunities to connect with you, right? Because you want those touch points there so they know that you are a human with feelings that cares. So step one, every new follow up that comes through message 'em , Hey Mark , thanks for the follow you're speaking with kids .
Quick Q , are you here for the content or do you need help with your fitness? Now whether they respond or not or whether they continue the conversation, it actually doesn't matter because you've shown you're a real human.
Almost no one does this though.
In two brain they do. Yeah,
In two brain they do. You're you're exactly right. But it's in the larger community. When you say content, people are like, I pump it out, I pump it out, I pump it out, and they just post and walk. I see very few people outside two Terrain talking about how I'm spending time engaging and interacting. And here's the thing people don't follow.
You know, following seems to be a weird thing where , oh, I don't wanna follow that person. Follow other people, right? Follow people, see what they're up to. You could even like, Hey, I saw in your profile this isn't stalking. Hey, I saw in your profile , uh, you're training for 5K races . That's a real person interacting, right? Like stuff like that's really important. Commenting and engaging.
And I don't mean like just putting a fire emoji on stuff and walking away. Like what if you actually like someone follows you and you look at their profile, take a look, see who they are , make some comments, send them a message. How much more is that person likely to like respond to you like a thousand times? Am I wrong Kieran ?
No, you're exactly right. Think of it in terms of in-person communication. It's like the gentle wave to somebody new or the smile, right? You're just a hundred percent, you're just showing them that you are a normal person.
So then from there, step two to give people opportunity to connect with you is to get them into your email list because that's where the real value over time, either email list or Facebook group, wherever your container, which is the way you're trying to nurture 'em , is that's where the real value comes in.
So a nice easy way for this, let's say you just have a free PDF program , um, in two Brain , we've got a stack of them that you can like white template everything or you just put in your story. I've got a five week booty building program I want to give to you for free, just reply with booty and I'll send it over. Then what you do is you just say, Hey, what's your email address? I'll email it to you.
They give it to you and then you send it to them with no sales pitch, no nothing, just send it to 'em. But then you add them to your long-term email lead nurture, more value, more gifts, more opportunity for them to know you.
Yeah, and I'm passionate about the email list because organic reach on social platforms is brutal and it's only getting worse. It is hard to get seen even by people who follow you. You have a council have 10,000 followers, they'll post something, they'll get seven likes, right? It's hard to get stuff in front of people, but if you have an email address, there are still spam filters and stuff.
But if you get people your name into an email address and people read and engage with like great content, that's the best thing you can do because the platforms can't really stop that. And people want the stuff you're sending out free guides, excellent information. Like Kiran said, not a sales pitch, giving you the stuff you wanted. Hey, here's a blog I wrote. Here's the thing, here's the thing.
Eventually they're going to know , like, and trust you. And that's the whole goal here. Continue on.
I I couldn't agree more. And you have to think about the mindset you are in when you're on the two different platforms. So when you're scrolling Instagram, you're , you're chilling, you're laid back on the couch, just scrolling. But usually in emails you're in some sort of work mode. 'cause you might be like working. So you actually are in the mindset to maybe take what comes your way a bit more serious.
And I look forward to emails from companies I like. When I see stuff from certain companies, I'm like, I can't wait to open this. What have they got from me?
And I bet our listeners look forward to emails from coop , right?
I bet help every day .
All time . Hundred hundred percent . Who
Doesn't want that?
Number three is to use Instagram stories. So posting like two, you know, upwards of like six, so eight a day of very simply your members just training four second , five, second clips of someone doing, you know, a deadlift or whatever it is.
And then even celebrating wins and tagging them so they reshare, especially in small towns, this is gold because if I am looking for a gym and I'm on bath strength and conditioning and I look in the stories and I see someone, I know there's more affinity
Instantly.
Yes, a hundred percent. And also from this perspective, if I'm a 45-year-old woman nervous about lifting weights, but then I go into the story and I see another woman like me squatting, I start to believe that I can do it too.
The only quick , uh, maybe not a con, but something to consider is that with organic marketing, especially in Instagram stories, it does need to be a regular churn of it because the stories go within 24 hours. So you do need to find a way to have content as part of your daily flow, which we're gonna get into in a second. Yeah.
But those stories are great because they're , they're prioritized When you go on on social media. Now those quick vertical reels , uh, like YouTube shorts , uh, so , uh, Instagram stories, they're prioritized and people look through them a ton because they're short and easy to consume. The platforms prioritize them, they get tons of visual and you can encourage your clients to post them and then you can reshare them.
So it's like you don't even have to create the content at times. You could just say, Hey guys, post your stories. Make sure you tag us, tag our location, et cetera , et cetera. That gives you reach into their circles, which you don't have, and then you can just reshare them and then you get that, oh, that's my friend Kim doing some great stuff, et cetera, et cetera. So that fills your content.
And then if you just take your cell phone and do some quick stuff around the gym, you can easily fill six, eight stories a day. So yes, they go away in 24 hours. You don't have to put a ton of effort into them, but do create them and do it fast.
I love that. So let's say you have that little, you know, that funnel going, that cycle going. When you repeat this consistently, something powerful happens. So let's say someone's followed you for three months before reaching out.
By then they've seen dozen of real success stories, plenty of videos, normalizing scary experiences, lots of happy, relatable people smiling and training in your gym, you and your coaches demonstrating expertise and giving advice and even more value in their inbox. When they finally reach out, they don't ask what's the price? They say, kids , I need help.
'cause they know you're the expert
Because they know me. They, they know me. Even if I don't know them, they know me because I'm all over it. I'm all over everywhere.
I, we had , uh, a marketing leaderboard and we interviewed all our, our top 10 Jim owners on there. One of the people recently, I don't think it was you actually, but said almost the exact same thing saying that we put so much effort into our social media that one of our coaches or a general manager is like a local celebrity.
And when people call and they're like, Hey, I saw Tim on Instagram or whatever it was, they're , they , they've literally, this gym has accomplished exactly what you're saying to the point where this guy is like the local expert in this field. Everyone knows him and he's, they wanna take selfies with him . That's how far they took it. In this case it was incredible.
And their sales, I'm sure are off the chart as a result of that. Hey, I'm the celebrity wanna join the gym? Of course you do.
Yes. I that's awesome. That's awesome.
Yeah. So that's the rewards, the reward. You said if this is a game changer , lay out the reward for people, just spell it out for 'em so they understand exactly what they're getting here.
Uh , the reward is, is that when you are in the sales process, they know you and then they will buy from you. So they don't treat you like some sort of bot. Yeah ,
Yeah . So you've got better leads from the start. You've got higher conversions and then you've got less friction and you've got more sales, which equals more revenue, which equals more income, which equals a better owner lifestyle. That's the chain from organic content all the way to success and the lifestyle you want. Like, and Kieran , as a mentor, have you seen this stuff happen in work, in practice?
Yeah . Every day . Yeah , every day . So what
Happens when people don't do this do are they like me on the other end of it and they're like, oh, my leads suck. My leads suck. Is that the, is that the other end of the spectrum?
Yes. They , it falls into two camps. Number one, they might put ads up, right? And they're like, oh, the leads are so terrible. Or they, and then they also flat out say social media doesn't work. Mm-hmm . They're just blanketed into those two things . So not only do the lead suck , but the whole thing doesn't work because again, they're just posting quotes, they're posting camera images. Yeah.
And , and you know, and the other thing that that's sort of attached to that, the leads, if you advertising is a whole different game, like we're not gonna get into this and I , I hesitate to even mention it, but if you put up a bad , uh, a bad lead that targets the wrong people that says the wrong thing, that doesn't give people any idea what you do.
You're gonna get some crappy leads like the phone call, the phone company guy. You need to tailor that, that end of things too. We're not gonna get into how to do it because that's a whole endless period of things. But to bring clients have access to this stuff, we teach them exact copy to use images, to use all the different things to do. Test your ads, find out why it's working.
Here are the metrics, all the other things that make sure that you are getting what you want, presenting the best foot forward and so forth. That stuff is all a different topic,
¶ Content production and AI
but do know that that is available as well because if you put up the wrong stuff, you're going to get some weird leads as well. Now we talked a little bit about content and how to produce it. We both gave some tips on how to do that. Ai, is this an option for content or how can a gym owner produce this stuff? Because it sounds like quite a bit, but is it really?
No, it's, it's just like anything in your gym. You need to create an operation for it and then , and then carry it out. So there's kind of three pieces here. Like number one in terms of, and by the way, yes, AI is an option, but maybe not in the way that everybody thinks. Let's talk later. Number one. Yeah, number one, in terms of actually getting the content, you can do it in two ways. So you can batch it.
So you can just batch all your content in one sitting, set aside four hours once a month, attend two classes while your coach coaches you get videos, you go around asking for wins , get photos of members, take a group photo of each class and then straight afterwards be able to fall back to back . Technique videos, you can batch it like that. That's four hours done per month.
Number two, spread it out into your daily operations. So you can have your coaches each class get two to three videos or photos per class of members exercising, smiling, just whip out the phone, five second blocks, put 'em back in. It's not going to , it's not gonna interrupt any of the coaching as part of the admin task that the coaches are assigned.
Or that you assign yourself one technique video per week and then each week, either you or a staff member ask one member for wins, like a whiteboard win or whatever. And then you either produce that or work on that in your golden hour as obviously people listen to this. No coops golden hour .
Now Lead magnets, I don't wanna get into how to do that, but just so you know, two Brain has like 50 of them in the, you know, in the toolkit for you just to put your logo on and use that. Now, how to use AI the right way after you have all your content, you use AI well before content, you can get them to come up with ideas for you. There it is.
Create , yeah, brainstorm ideas, create content calendars for you or just get it to think for you. Use some prompts. We actually have, I think , uh, John made a AI for gym owners ultimate guide that has all that in 2.2 , which is awesome. Um, you can even get AI to draft email newsletters and blog posts for you, but you have to go edit them yourself. That is absolutely crucial.
And in the other way around, you can get AI to edit your writing, which helps a lot. Spell check emojis, that type of thing. I would say the only thing I don't recommend that gym owners do, even though they're very tempted, is to get Chad GBT to write the copy of your posts with no editing because it's gonna look like they wrote it. ,
You can smell that stuff when you see it
A hundred percent unfortunately. You gotta do some work, but AI can, it can be the legs.
Yeah, and I'll give you an example of how I like to use it. Sometimes if I'm coming up with a , uh, subject line for an email, I'll say, give me 10 ideas that are catching, engaging for this email and I want to improve open rate . Go and it'll gimme 10 of them and some of 'em be bad, some will be good, but not quite right.
And then I'll sometimes take one and just tweak it so it sounds like me and does the thing that I want. But the ideas, and I love what you said, the ideas are there and that's easy. And Jim , I'm gonna give you a couple two, two easy ideas here. I , I used to like to do this with my classes. If I had say a class at five and six, I would go at five 30 so that I would catch the end of the five 30 class.
The meeting of the six o'clock class. That means you get double the people and you get a nice, a whole bunch of different stuff going on. And I would just take pictures of people, I'd just say smile, throw up a bicep, do something, just smile. And I'd just take , and I would have like 15, 20, 25 pictures of smiling members. You can use those individually. You could slice 'em together in a reel.
You could do them in a story. You could do all these different things with those. Another cool one that you can do is just have members in every class just say, can I film you just giving each other high five and just high fives, high fives, high fives , high fives. Put them all together in a reel.
And these are two super easy pieces of content that take like, I don't know , five minutes to film, maybe two minutes to edit. Like it's so easy. But yet you get all these smiling faces and what's better if you go to an account , if you're looking for a gym or a service and you're looking , you just see smiling, happy people having a good time in a great space. Like that's what you want people to see.
And that's just a one example of stuff that you can do. Kieran gave the other example , uh, videos of technique stuff. You're a coach, you can crank the stuff out for sure if you've got staff members , get them to do it. I've seen some incredible staff member videos come out from businesses and you just have to teach people how to do it rather
¶ Next-level content
than just del , sorry, abdicating and saying , ah , make some videos and then they never do it. There's a ton of great ideas. Kirin , can you think of a great piece of content that you saw on a gym , social media account that made you say like, that was next level? Is there any an an idea that we can throw out these guys that you saw?
Yeah, and it's so simple, Mike, is that the , a couple of gyms in Two Brain , they do an , they do an attendance club. So they do like if you go 50, 75, a hundred sessions, whatever it is they give and they might give 'em a gift or they might just like put 'em on the spotlight right Now what this gym did is that in one of the classes, I think they had like five people who had attended 100 or 500.
So in that one class they took a photo of each of them individually that took them dude two minutes and that was their winning Wednesday post one per Wednesday for the next five weeks. So two minutes and they just celebrated, you know, mark has hit a hundred , um, sessions well done here , has hit 500 sessions, well done. And it's just week after week. And that was two minutes away .
So to wrap it up for you guys listeners, more organic , organic content is going to get you better leads. Those leads are gonna convert at a higher rate with less friction because they have more trust in your business and you. So get your face on social media, create that content, put it out, and you can scale this stuff up very, very fast wherever you're starting out .
If you're in Two Rain , you can scale it up even faster because like Ki said, we have tons of stuff in the content vault, which is you can just go in there and download guides, images, customizable stuff, all sorts of things that you can then tailor to showcase your specific business use that stuff. It's freely available and there's tons of ideas.
You could just look in there and see a picture and say, oh , I can recreate that picture of my gym. Even better get your coaching your person to recreate that picture of a deadlift instruction or whatever it is. All that stuff is freely available. This stuff scales fast. The final thing, ki mentioned the golden hour. Chris Cooper talks about this all the time. It is an hour of focus.
You use one hour every day to do something to grow your business. Marketing reps are part of that golden hour and this is marketing. So you could in that schedule, crank out some social media. I've seen genome members crank out huge amounts of social media in an hour, respond to leads, engage people, talk to people, generate more leads. It all works. Some people even get clients right on the spot as a result.
The Golden Hour book, got it right here, you can get that. We'll put a link in the show notes. That's the guide, that's the focus manual that will teach you how to do this stuff because everything you listen to today works. Kieran's helped tons of gym owners deal with it. He's done it himself. It works if you do it.
If you don't do it, if you just walk outta here and have the knowledge in your head, nothing happens. Nothing changes. You need to take action. Kieran , do you agree on that? Have you seen people take action and just scale up their social media in like a period of weeks?
Yes. One, 100%. I would say that you need to take action ASAP today. Start your gold now tomorrow and it can happen very, very fast.
And then you'll make more sales. So we'll leave you right there. Guys. That was Kier o Dwyer , this is Run a Profitable. Jim , i , Mike working in thanks for watching and listening on your Way out the door. Please hit subscribe so you don't miss another episode like this, because we give you tips every single time. So you run one of the best gyms in the world.
And now here's two Brain founder Chris Cooper with a final note.
Hey, it's Two Brain founder Chris Cooper. With a quick note , we created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you have already joined in the group. We share sound advice about the business of fitness. Every day I answer questions, I run free webinars and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym.
I'd love to have you in that group . It's Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gym owners united.com to join. Do it today.