Paid Marketing Secrets: Colm O'Reilly's Tips for Gym Owners

He's also the founder of We Do Your Paid Marketing, a brand new company that helps you do exactly what the name says Call Welcome from Ireland. How are you today?

We wanna get them people who have at least an interest. Maybe it's cold, maybe it's super warm, but at least an interest in improving their fitness and health. And that's a lead campaign on Facebook and that's your direct response. They're scrolling along, we come along every third or fourth post and we're like, Hey, do you want to get fit? Something that, like something message to that extent.

And that's a direct response because they click into that and we're like, sweet, give us your name, phone and email. Next step privacy statement. No one ever reads the privacy policy ever, but we all have them. And then the next step is either like, thanks one of our expert team will be in touch, or Hey, do you want to take the next step and book a consultation book a free intro, book a no .

So an intro that's direct response. Why we start with that is because, you know, if we've got a limited amount of advertising dollars and we've got a limited amount of time, we wanna vest it in. The thing that's gonna bring us closer to sales, because let's face it, most gym owners need more people in, or at least they need to up their sales or frankly they need to develop their lead, nurture and sales skills.

So that's direct response. Um , brand awareness on Facebook is generally done to two other platforms. It's known as the engagement campaign or the traffic campaign. And I'll speak to engagement campaigns 'cause that's the one we'd recommend. An engagement campaign is basically boosting your already great organic content out to a targeted audience.

So if you've got a great post about how Samantha lost 20 pounds or how Jill got her first pull-up, or how Bethany, you know, managed to find time in between, you know, mining her kids and her busy job, you're speaking to your avatar. That's more brand awareness and that's building the whole idea . Look, people like you achieve the things you want by trusting our company.

Now the great thing about engagement campaigns now on Facebook and Instagram is they used to just be like, you'd boost your post and people would see 'em like, oh, that place is cool, but for them to take action, they'd have to go into your profile, find your link, go ahead and book, and now Facebook and Instagram gives you the ability to put a link on a boosted post.

So when they see it after a couple of seconds Facebook registers, you're reading it, it will change color. So it's like prompting you to click in and visit the site and it builds , uh, more it , it gets me to take more action.

We can take care of that in a few minutes, which saves you those precious hours you have. 'cause let's face it, most gym owners, they're up, they're running a 5:00 AM class or a 6:00 AM class, they're getting home, they're cleaning the gym and like they're finishing at eight most days of the week. So we know your time is at a premium, so let us help you.

But if you wanna do it yourself, you're gonna set up what's known as a lead campaign and a lead campaign will be something that says, Hey, please fill in this form essentially. And that form generally is name , phone, and email. The reason why we want to do a very simple form to kind of extend out the answer is you wanna make it super easy for people to take that next step in , um, their fitness journey.

So when someone's scrolling Instagram or on Facebook, they're not in buying mode. They haven't gone and looked for personal trainers, my area, CrossFit gym, my area fitness class, my area. They're, you know, they're on there to be entertained, see some cat videos, you know, see what their friends are up to or just like dissociate for a few minutes.

We come along and we're like, Hey, we've got the solution to your fitness problem. So we wanna make it super easy for 'em to take action 'cause they're not in action taking mode. So we make it super simple, very, very simple form, name, phone and email. Um , generally what most people on the social media platforms, that's already prefilled. So it makes it easier again for them to click in and say yes.

And then boom, we're like, hey, the next step is to book a 30 minute consultation or come on on down to the gym or book a phone call or book a Zoom consultation. But you wanna make that first step super easy for people to take action because social media is not where they're taking action. It's where they're browsing, you know, chilling out, being entertained.

That's probably a longer answer than you bargained for, wasn't it Mike ?

If you've ever seen one of those, the giant horses roll across carrying a , you know, a a a carriage or whatever and it looks glorious and there's cool music and at the end there's a beer can and that's the brand, right? And they've done this for decades and it's very powerful and so forth as gyms and call 'em . I wanna ask you about this specifically.

Most of us don't have great brands, so running brand campaigns right off the bat maybe won't do exactly what we want. That's not to say they're a bad idea, but we talked a little bit about this before the show. What you really need, if you're gonna start spending money is return on that investment and a branding campaign is gonna take a while to get some traction. Direct response can make some gains quickly.

So talk maybe a little bit about that. Why is maybe branding not the thing to focus on right off the bat as a gym owner?

And that's actually very true for us as well. But again, start with something that you can see in instant return. It's very easy with a lead ad to say, I spent a hundred dollars, I got 10 leads, $10 a piece, find one of them. They paid me 200 bucks, boom, I spent a hundred bucks, I got 200 bucks for those in Europe, that's Europe for those in the uk that's quid. So there we go.

International for branding, what you're doing is you're building your know , like , and trust factor and you're getting your posts out to people to warm up your audience. But it is a slower burn and it's harder to see the direct , um, benefit of it. Um , there is a phrase in marketing that's like 50% of all advertising works, we just don't know which 50.

So from the Mad Men area, absolutely you put up your Hinz commercial, you put up your Mercedes-Benz commercial and you're hoping that this works. And it's not as easy to say we did this and we got that. It's not a strict ab there's a more complex path for gym owners with our branding. Um , again, you live in a very, very small market. We're very, very geographically tied for our gyms.

And even if you take like some of the biggest gyms in the world, like they're still very, very geographically tied. As much as I, I might like Invictus for example. Well I don't live in San Diego so I'm not going to see see them. Um , as much as I might think , uh, Gary down in Waterford has great branding with his gyms, it's still a two hour drive from me. I'm not market for them. He has a very specific market.

So with branding, what you're doing is you're taking your best organic posts and you're giving them to people in your area, in your age demographic that you want to see more of. Now what you should put out is if you think, 'cause I want to give you more of a direct , um, instruction. If you think of your best client, your seed client, right ?

Um , and I'm always picturing her 'cause our target demographic is busy working parents, busy working moms predominantly . So I know type of Adrian that , so all my posts or 99% of her posts are directed at, what would she need to see a week before joining a gym?

So we'll definitely put up a, hey great bank holiday murf post, or we had a barbecue in our gym last week as well, great internal event. We were like, thanks GU for putting up the barbecue. Thanks EF for taking the photos, thanks the loaders, et cetera , et cetera. They're great posts for our members, but most of our posts are like, Hey, look at Arthur saying great people, great coaches, the system works.

A busy parent that post goes and gets boost . So people say, Hey, I'm like Arthur , I'm a busy parent. I'm 40 plus, I've done mans on my time, I can do this. Or we can say is like well done to Linda for kicking on our nutrition challenge. And they're like, Hey, I struggle with my nutrition .

These guys help Linda overcome , uh, you know, a struggle to that like she didn't know what to eat or how to counter calories or her macros. They're the types of post you put into brand awareness, not the great barbecue or great MF ones.

I even can go down and boil down, I can spend this much per lead because I know I'm making my money back. Like it's a science and I love it. It works really well. Branding, little bit different. Is there any way to measure the ROI on branding campaigns?

Now if you're going to measure it, what you would do is you would monitor your number of quote unquote organic leads. So website leads or people who didn't come like, okay, this person paid $5 to see my ad or whatever, Facebook or I paid $5 to get them.

He would track your organic content between running engagement ads and not now know that might seem like you shouldn't run brand awareness or engagement ads at all as a gym owner. Um , I will caveat this by never ask a barber if you need a haircut. I do paid marketing for most of VI day , so of course I'm going to recommend paid marketing.

What I can tell is we went to all our seed clients or most of our seed clients earlier this year and we said, why did you pick us there? Is to get to my gym, you have to drive my own CrossFit gym to get to my gym. You have to drive off the main road past another CrossFit gym. As you turn the corner, you pass by a bootcamp. As you turn that corner again, you pass by a personal training studio.

If you take a wrong turn, you're gonna end up in another gym and if you take another wrong turn, you'll end up in a High Rocks gym. So to get to ours, it's very, very easy for people to have choice and so many of them, the response that they could remember was they saw us first and they liked our vibe.

So brand response is being there in front of your client when they're ready to take action and we don't know when they're ready to take action, which is why we need to be there all the time. I ask people this quite a lot, it's like, can you remember the last three or four ads you saw on Instagram or Facebook? And they'll say no. And that's because you're blind to it until you're reticular activating system.

If I got that right, that's where your brain is, is primed to look for something. When that's ready it will spot the ads. So that's why your brand awareness is so far. So when people go into the discover feed or things, click on the things pop up in your story, you can then see, oh hey this is a great gym.

Like hey, if you're looking for your sign to get fit, August is the perfect month before the kids go back to school and the madness begins, for example. So no , you can't directly um, test to see if, okay, well I put a , you know, $5 a day into it and I got two clients at the end of the month. It's not as simple.

I do think it is important once you've developed your lead nurture and your sales process and you've honed your skills with the direct response marketing

It works and he's built it on content, which is essentially branding. He's also run ads and so forth. But the idea Colin , that you put out I think is great for gym owners. You have to pay to get people's eyes and you can very easily track that ROI , which is fantastic because I hate it when people, like I used to work in radio and you say, oh buy these radio ads, they'll work for sure.

And people would just say, well how do I know? Like , ah , people, you know , and you can't really track the ROI in the digital age. You can track ROI very clearly so that, you know, all of a sudden I spent a thousand dollars but I made 2000. This was a win. And you know that. So you can track that money and you know, it's an investment, not a cost. At that point.

With branding though, I love what you said, where you can do things organically where it doesn't cost you anything but your time.

And if you do that all the time over and over and over and over like Chris did, you build this whole entire structure behind that pointy, you know, the the sharp tip tip of the spear, that's that paid ads, when people look further down, they start seeing your website, your social media, your smiling clients, your testimonials, your blogs, your YouTube, whatever else you you have.

All that stuff costs you nothing but time to put up. It builds your brand and then eventually maybe once you're a very successful business you can maybe run some paid ads, a little bit of branding content and so forth with boosted posts. But I really like that idea. On our blog this week, Chris Cooper's got two things for you. One of them is a direct response tactic.

It's called Sell by Chat , where you're going to use anything on social media, whether it's paid or not, to start talking to leads and people who know who follow, comment and like on your stuff and sell them stuff. You're gonna ask them to come in for a no sweat intro free consultation and then you'll sell them something. He's got the exact steps laid out.

That's a direct response campaign that makes inroads very quickly. Other thing that he's talking about in terms of branding is a concept called the quick cast . And I won't lay it out in detail, but what it is very short podcast that you put up regularly on YouTube and a podcast platform that helps you get your brand message out and talk to your current clients and prospective clients doesn't cost you anything but time.

And that combination gives you the pointy thing, which is the direct response and the background stuff, which is when people look at your and say, what's this all about? And they find lots of great stuff, call 'em . What do you think of that plan for a gym owner right now? Just those two tactics. Simple and and trusted.

I don't want everyone to think it's like the getting customers is super easy. There is a skill and there's an attrition rate. 'cause what generally happens with people when they start, like they send 10 dms the first day on Instagram to their new followers like, hey, it's Colin from CFI, thanks for following us. How did you happen to hear about us? And 10 of those might get all left on red or not even opened.

And then they go, well that didn't work. And like I did it and you know, 'cause John first suggested start DMing a new followers. I did it and it was two weeks of absolutely nothing. Then finally Isabelle replied and said, actually I was looking for a new CrossFit gym, then it was easier for me to go, Hey, I can see you're into rugby. Are you still playing? Have you retired? Et cetera , et cetera. And got her in.

So what I will say is that if you're using sale by chat , um, or any marketing method , any conversation starter , letting understand that attrition is part of the game. So you are not failing, you're not doing anything wrong. If the first 10, the first 50 attempts don't work, it just becomes part of what you do.

You could put out the best Instagram post in the world, but some world breaking headline takes place and nobody's gonna talk about it. There's , there's nothing you can do about that. Matt Timley actually said, he was talking about strategies once on a call and he said like, just because of football play doesn't , um, execute perfectly. It doesn't mean it was a bad play.

You might just have to run it again or run it again with a different variation. So when you start with sell by chat and it doesn't work the first time, that's okay. You're getting good reps in and also you're getting more comfortable starting conversations, which you can then bring into the coffee shop.

You can then bring into your neighbors, you can then bring in to your gym members and just be like, Hey guys, you know, we really thrive on referrals. You mentioned your brother, you mentioned your boss, you mentioned your sister. How do we get them in here for a free trial or a , a free chat? So that's what sell by Chat, absolutely do it.

Um , we do a podcast and I think we're the third most popular health and fitness podcast in Ireland, which I says a lot for the health and fitness podcast here in Ireland. 'cause we're only talking to our members, right? Like most of the time we're talking to our members and we're like, why do we do strength?

Why it doesn't matter if you miss a PR one day, you know, simple changes for your sleep, how to manage your stress. All we're doing is just putting out content. Now realistically, what you're doing with content like that is you're giving people a vibe. Like this is the type of person you're gonna deal with. These are the human. And then if that resonates with someone, it's going to work.

Um , but again with that, if you put out a content one week, miss a week, put it in two or three weeks later, it's not gonna gain traction. And as Cooper would've said, this stuff compounds. So now Coopers , I don't know , 10 plus years of emails and blogs, but he still writes every day . So first of all, it really finds, it sharpens his message and you do it more with your Jim .

'cause IC might be talking too long, but like if someone says work for everybody is a gym, you're not like, I'm only for the people in the Sanford area of Dublin and about a 15 to 20 minute commute. I'm not for the people of Bangladesh or Brisbane or in Baltimore. So you're not for everybody for a start, you are for people in a specific area.

Which is why we talk about like keep mentioning your area, in your posts, in your podcast, in yourself by chat. Um , I'm not for people who don't wanna get coached, who don't want to be social, I'm not for people trying to make the CrossFit games and that's just to instantly get it , um, filtered out. So, but you more you refine your message the easier it is for say who you are and who you aren't for.

And I totally get the fear of saying, well we're not for that type of person, but in reality if you can be like, no, we're not that type of person. And I'll give you an example. I had someone, she went ahead and booked a phone call with me , um, talking to her briefly on the phone and she said, I'm very nervous about CrossFit 'cause all I see are 20 year olds running around with their shirt off.

And I said, well luckily we're all 40 year olds who run around with their shirt off . We didn't have have our shirts off , but I said, we're more people who are busy. They want to come in a couple of times a week, have a great workout, de-stress and get back to their day. And most of our members are in the same age range as you.

But that took time for me to be able to refine that message, to be able to say that we're not that type of CrossFit. And if you want that type of CrossFit, if you want be competitive, I can absolutely refer you out to another gym

They always tell me they can rattle off in quick succession, their exact avatar brief. You know, it is a 30 to 55-year-old woman who wants to get stronger and lose body fat or what in , in this area or whatever it is . And it's something all , uh, some variation of that that informs everything they do . Their paid marketing is directed at that person. Their branding is directed at that person.

And you've already talked about exactly who you are for people of this age who do this kind of thing in this area of this city. Away you go. I'm gonna ask you this. You said a really interesting thing earlier in the show about what does this client need to see a week before joining? Now what does that look like on the branding side?

So if someone says, let , let's say for example, a person sees one of your calls to action something direct response saying, Hey, you know, this thing, come do this thing, join our gym, whatever. Let's say they don't act on that, but they start creeping on you in the background and going to one of your social media platforms or your gym or whatever. What does that person need to see to join CrossFit Island?

For most people, fitness has never been rewarding in and of itself to do, sorry, rewarding in terms of actually losing weight, getting in good shape or has it never been intrinsically enjoyable? They've hated running, they've hated lifting weights and they haven't found that thing that makes 'em go, oh, I actually can enjoy this and I can see benefits.

So that would be the start is telling your clients that you understand them. So like you could put, we put out a post once and I remember it was my social media , um, girl Garrett fair credit. She , she put out that everybody is 24 hours in a day post. And I thought it was gonna be one of these nonsense of you can find a day. And it's very, very, of course blaming the person.

And she goes, but we get, you have demands on your time, we get you. That's why we have a flexible schedule. That's why we also allow you to bring your kids in if you can't find a babysitter. So we're saying we get you and we can help you overcome your problem. So that's one thing to say post, like we get you, we get your objection.

And how you find them out is you just listen during your nose , sweat intros and you listen during your phone calls or your sell by chats to what objections people are saying. And then you just turn it into a post and then you boost that post. Um , we get you people like you achieve what you wanna wanna achieve. And here's how you get started. Here's the first step.

Get that in front of your, the people that are out there and tell them how you're solving the problems, right? If you can do that. And they, they come and they look and they say, ah, this problem that I have, here's how it's solved. And they see that right away there . It's a greasy slope right into your gym. That's a great, great idea. Column , what , what's a problem? Give me an example that Jim might copy.

What's a problem? Uh, you said busy schedule, right? That's one that you've seen in no sweated intros. And so your , your posts and your branding will start to talk about flexible. Is that how you do it?

Another problem I can definitely hear in my demographic is I know I need to do strength work, but I don't know what to do. So we say everybody knows you need to keep strength up as you age to avoid health problems. For a lot of people they don't know what to do. We teach you what to do, we hold your hand accountable every day of the week. So you don't have to worry about that.

Another problem people have are gyms. They have the perception that everyone's super fit and they're gonna be judged. So we say we're a supportive environment, that does not mean slag , slagging free and friendly, abuse free . It just means non-judgmental. 'cause there's plenty of that.

Here's how we solve your problems. And a great one again is if someone's market avatar is like busy urban professionals within 10 minutes of walking distance from the gym on a lunch break, that might mean 30 minute classes. And it's like we, we give you 30 minute classes because we know you've only got an hour because we checked with all the businesses surrounding and many of our clients work in your buildings.

You have an hour, we're gonna get you in and out within 30 minutes and fitter faster. That's an easy solution. If someone sees that, then that hey marketing campaign starts to take effect because they understand how it solves their problem and the way things go, which is a really, really interesting way that branding can help direct marketing work much, much better.

Call 'em , talk to me about your new company and what you do as a trained mentor and as part of that company.

Well that's why we start you with one-on-ones in an on-ramp to make you comfortable in the gym to teach the movements and to find the right level for you. So the paid marketing's extending out to say it's like, Hey, are you ready to make a change in your fitness?

So we deal with the backend of Facebook and Instagram so you don't have to figure out the ever changing how they'll change the algorithm, how they'll change the , uh, just the user interface on it as well to we'll set up your ads for you and we try and set up what are known as evergreen ads that don't change and they can run with.

Um, without too much of you going in and having to spend your very precious time in figuring out what to do and what to look for, then we , we do your paid marketing is again, we save you that time long term by we take your brand images, your best images from inside your gym, we create ads around them and then we monitor your performance for you so you don't have to worry about the lead generation that's taking

care of it. You know, what's working best from thousands of gyms across the world. So you've got much greater data set to pull from so we can get you, okay, well this is what's working the best for your market. And then you can focus on conversations with people, which is why you started the gym anyway, was to coach people.

Uh, uh, you also get advice like this because when I started doing this kind of stuff, it was use these lines, this exact script has been tested in, you know, it was like a hundred gyms around the world. It's working really, really well. Use it in your market perhaps with a tiny variation like this for your exact demographic or perhaps just as is.

I also got advice on exact photos to use and eventually we tailored things to a different degree, but that was all helped out as well. What does your company do?

So rather than you having to go in, figure out what type of images work, figure out what type of copy works, what type of headline works, figure out if anything changes in the, in the Facebook marketing, we'll take care of that. So that saves you that time so you can just invest in the conversations and the no sweat intros.

So really what that is, is it's saving you that time and that exploration because um , if you're a gym owner, you maybe don't have a month, two month , three months or a thousand dollars to figure out what type of ad works. So take what we know this is right . Well this one works and we'll fit it to, you know, what you want to say.

So some gym owners hate the word tone, even though that might be what your client says. So if you don't want to focus on people who want to tone up, we can talk about strength and muscle gain for you, but I know which words are gonna pass the Facebook filter and which ones which I know which words are gonna resonate with your market and which ones aren't historically and in aggregate.

So we can take care of that for you long term with your branding as well. We can also run your brand awareness and your engagement ads, which then is providing you feedback on these are the type of posts that are getting the engagement.

These are the type of posts that are getting people to click and outside step from talking about we do your paid marketing for a moment to say , um, Facebook and Instagram will tell you to push video because it keeps people on the platform. So over the last 30 days I pulled up the stats before I , uh, jumped on this call.

So I'm talking off memory, but I, in my brand awareness, I have my ad set broken up into reels and images and reels got 18,000 engagements over the last 30 days. Images got 425. So you're thinking, oh wow, cool, I should definitely do reels. But images got 2 25 actions taken on them as in people clicking through to visit my website.

And that's what we can do for you.

However, if I'm looking at an image and reading something, I am much more inclined to say read and take action on something because I'm not in that scroll, scroll glazed over kind of thing. That's just my theory, but that's how I operate.

Listeners think about your market and again, if you aren't tracking data you won't have this info, but that's a really insightful thing that track , that columnist laid out based on the data that he sees. Where can people find out more about we do your paid marketing.

Even if they got the email, even if they follow you, you just send it again like, hey, oh, the next month is rolled around and you want to give people an excuse to start. So if you say, Hey, are you ready? Our August intake is open. Oh, okay, their August intake is open.

No , chances are people can roll into your gym at any stage, but now you just said the August intake, boom, you've given them an excuse to get started.

But if you don't send that email, you'll get no clients guaranteed. So try that tactic easy. Away you go. Colm , thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate it.

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.