Proven No-Ad Tactics for Generating 30 New Gym Leads Fast

If you type that into your browser, URL , that will take you to our Free Gym Owners United Facebook group. And in that group we're just handing out this guide for free. It's called the Get More Leads Guide. And I'm gonna walk you through it right now. Now, in this guide, I've got 10 different tactics and you've got a choice. You can use each one if you want to and get a few leads.

It's also possible to just pick the one that you like the best and hammer that and get better and better and better, and repeat it until you get 30 leads in the next 30 days. Two ways to do it, right? One is be okay at each one of these. The other is to be very good at just one, and either one is gonna work for you. So we're gonna walk through each of these step by step .

And again, if you want this guide, you know, don't worry about screenshotting this or trying to zoom in on what I'm talking about. Just go to jim orders united.com , ask for the guide and I'll give it to you. So the first thing is what we call sell by chat . Conversations lead to conversions.

And so the first thing that we wanna do is get people off of your social media feed and into an actual conversation with you. This was part of our golden hour challenge back in January when we talked about like every Wednesday you're gonna DM five people who follow you on Facebook or Instagram and you gonna start a conversation.

But in this guide, what I've done here is tell you exactly what to say to those people, okay, here's exactly what you say. You know, just message five people on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, friends and followers, and just start with this. Hey, wanna chat about your goals? And then what you're doing is just basically having a conversation with them. More conversations lead to more conversions. Okay?

And I've even got kind of a pro tip down here too, just in case you know, you wanna get a little bit deeper. Now, of course, inside the two Brain Mentorship program, we go even deeper with this. We give you scripts, we give you role play . You know, you can play the , uh, a game with your mentor, where you're going back and forth and practicing all of this.

The next step that we wanna do is what's called a 51 30. Now this is what we call a pillar post on social media. What you're trying to do is get people to raise their hands. So you're looking at the low hanging fruit, you are looking for the people who already know that they have an issue and they're basically like looking for a solution.

But what you're doing is you're talking about that solution instead of talking about your service. So here's what a 51 30 post looks like. I am looking for five people, specific people. In this case, five dads who have one problem they wanna lose. In this example, they wanna lose 10 pounds in the next 30 days. Okay? Five one thirty, we call it a fifty one thirty, but 5 1 30.

And what you're trying to do here is basically combine this strategy with the previous one. So while you can just make that post and people are gonna raise their hand or they're gonna send you a DM or whatever, and that might even get you 30 leads in the next 30 days, if you combine that with the previous post, they're gonna compound on each other.

So everybody who hits like you start a conversation with everybody who dms you. Of course, they're just looking for a clear invitation to join your gym. And this is one thing that you'll find with, with this guide, is that you can do just one of these if you want to, but if you do two or three, they'll actually multiply the results that you'll get from each one.

And if later on you decide to run paid ads, that's fine, because all of these organic free strategies will multiply the results that you get from that too . See, in Two Brain , we teach four different marketing funnels and each one builds on the other ones, and they all compound to like create this big snowball effect.

And once a gym is good at those four marketing funnels, they can stop thinking about marketing, stop looking for new stuff, stop chasing novelty, and just work on getting better and better and better at it. The third thing that you're going to do is take your best clients for coffee and ask for referrals. Why your best clients? Because they're the ones that you wanna duplicate. You want more clients like them .

So you're going to just make a one-on-one coffee date with two or three of your most engaged clients. These are the people who show up every day with batteries included, who pay their bills on time, who'd never complain, who light you up when they come in the route. You're gonna pick three of them and you're gonna book a coffee date with each one individually.

Here is exactly what you're gonna say, thanks for being part of our community. And then a quick question, you can even say, the thing I love best about my gym is the people just like you. I'd love to get more people just like you in my gym. How can I do that? Now, here's a little bonus, okay? A little pro tip, a little gift for 'em . Hey, brought you a t-shirt. I've had this conversation twice.

One time, it's led to a referral. One time it hasn't, but both have been valuable. So I'm gonna go really quickly through this story . The first was with , uh, a couple , uh, who are close friends of mine. They're also entrepreneurs. I asked 'em for a coffee.

They came into the cafe, we sat down and I said, guys, you know, I, I, you're some of my favorite people in the gym, you know, I'd love to have more people like you. What should I do to get those people? And of course, you know, Chris, who's one of my favorites, was like, oh, I know I can help. You know, I'm part of Rotary. Let's bring you into Rotary and talk. It's just a whole bunch of people like us.

Wonderful. Another time this didn't go as well. And this other person was also an entrepreneur and her name was Anne . And she gave me the candid feedback. And she probably only told me this because we were alone in the cafe instead of in the busy gym. She said, Chris, honestly, I I wouldn't invite my friends to your gym. They wouldn't like it. I said, what do you mean Anne ?

And she said, well, you know, I mean, it's okay for me. I can, I can deal with it, but it like, sometimes it's kind of messy and sometimes it's full of loud like power lifters and sometimes it doesn't smell very good . Now, this was all back in about 2009 and that feedback rocked me. And my first instinct was like, no, no, no, no. Like talk her out of it. Right? And then I realized, Ann is right.

And, and that advice changed the way that I looked at my business. It changed how I thought about my ideal clients and frankly it changed my entire business. And I started to reframe more on clients like Anne . Now, the , the people she was talking about were my power lifter buddies. It was not easy to make that pivot.

But right after she told me this, that afternoon, I saw one of these power lifting guys pulling into the gym. Here was a guy that liked to stay for three hours, right? He be wearing the same clothes he wore three days ago, messing the place up. I went out and met him in the parking lot. I put my hand on the hood of his dad's truck 'cause he didn't even have his own vehicle.

And I was like, Hey man, we don't have open gym anymore . And I started to reframe my business to ask myself like, how can I serve people like Anne better so that I can serve more people like Anne ? Okay ? Hopefully that helps. Next, ask a personal training client to bring a friend to train with them. Now, here's what's important.

This is not like a free trial where you just let people come in and try out your gym, okay? That does not convert people. That doesn't convince them to buy, right? The reason that a free trial works at the grocery stores , the people are hungry and they're already looking for food. It doesn't work in a gym. In a personal training setting though, you have a lot of control and you can lead to a conversation.

Now, this is the important part. So what you say with is what you say is you, you talk to your personal training client and you say, Hey Anne , I'd love to work with more people like you. Okay? Would you like to bring a friend in to the next session? Now, I know this says bring them for a week, but you don't have to do that. One session is enough.

In fact, there's no difference between bringing them in for one session and bringing them in for a full week. So what you say is like, Hey Ann , I know your husband's trying to get in shape for ski season comes to mind. 'cause I'm looking at snow at my window here. You know, is he, is he doing any exercise right now? No. No, he is not. He is just doing, you know, waiting around.

Okay, well, I'll tell you what, how do you feel about bringing him into our next personal training session ? I won't charge you for the session. Just like bring him with you. We'll do some really easy stuff. We'll do some stretching so he is not too sore the next day, you know, and we'll, we'll see if he likes it. Okay, so you'd bring him in after that session though.

You gotta say to the husband, Hey Dennis, what did you think? You know, was this valuable to you? Yeah, it was pretty good. Well, you know , how do you feel about continuing? We can either go one-on-one if you want your own sessions or, you know, we can continue to pair you guys up, right? And sometimes you'll look at the client and the client's like, no, no, no, I want my own sessions.

Sometimes they do wanna work together and you can start a semi-private group, you know, and that's literally happened with , uh, with the previous example that I gave. So the key is that they're gonna do this together, which means that your client is probably not gonna have a good workout. That's why you're gonna do this for free, but only if it's somebody that they know already.

Because now what you've got is you've got kind of a trifecta. You've got the client surround , the new client surrounded, right? And like your existing client is trying to talk them into it, you are making an offer before they leave the building. Like, let's be clear here. This is not a try it and tell me if you like it. This is a try it. Now. How can we get you started?

You have to be willing to have that conversation if you're not, skip this and go to the next tactic. The fifth tactic. And I, I love this, but I need this reminder about every six months to email all of my old leads.

So these are leads are people who, you know, they, they came in, they booked a nose , sweat intro, they came in, they didn't sign up, okay, maybe the timing was just wrong, or maybe they booked a nose , sweat intro and they didn't show, or maybe they inquired about information on your website, but they never really signed up or , or booked.

These are the people that you want because they've shown interest, they've shown awareness. There was just one little thing stopping them. And quite often it could have been their schedule, it could have been the time of the year, it could have been like gas prices were high, you don't know. But it's a mistake to think that they just didn't like you and they're never gonna sign up.

Most of the time when people say, no, I don't wanna join a gym, what they mean is, I'm not ready to join a gym right now. And so it's a mistake to never go back to those people. You should be going back to those people and don't just count on your software to do that for you. You know, you really, really want to go back to them one-on-one individually with a private email about every six months or so. Okay?

So here you go. I've given you the subject line. Hey, you still looking to get fit this year? Okay? Or, you know, are you still looking to get fit in 2025? Something like that. Okay ? And of course, you know, you gotta follow up because the people who respond are not gonna be interested forever. They've already shown that. So you wanna talk to them right away.

Now again, if you're in two brain , you can go into the toolkit, you can copy these scripts verbatim. You know, we go a little bit deeper and you can use these to get clients right away. In fact, this works so well, and it's usually overlooked so often by gym owners that we put it right in the very first couple of weeks of work that you do in our membership program.

The next thing that I want you to do is reach out to canceled members. Now, look, I'm a gym owner too. When somebody leaves my gym, it feels like a breakup. I'm sure you feel the same way. Oh, I never wanna see you again. And, and we have all these feelings about it. Like, what? I thought we were getting along so well, what's wrong and right? And we're like guessing.

What you actually have to realize is that when somebody says, I wanna leave the gym quite often, that doesn't mean forever. They might be gone for a month, they might be gone for a year, they might come back after a decade. But the reality is that if you don't maintain that line of conversation with them, they will never ever be back, ever.

And so we wanna make sure that you are reaching out to your canceled members, okay? Now here's exactly what to say. Just want to check in, see how things are going. Does that feel natural? I mean, honestly, it should because this is a conversation. Some people will make the mistake of signing up for A-C-M-S-C-R-M, whatever and like automating this with a robot, but your conversations are what sell you.

You want to do this in person. Don't worry about feeling awkward about it because again, it's not like you're DMing your ex-girlfriend and being like, just wanted to see how your relationships were going, right? You're talking to a client, they trusted you as a coach. A coach doesn't let the lost lamb wander on its own forever and get eaten by lions .

The lost , the good coach is the shepherd that goes out and finds the lamb again. Next, a great way to get leads is just to ask your client to post about you in a local Facebook group. So what I would do is I would find the Facebook groups myself, okay? So I would go to, I would look for like dads in suse Marie, or um, over 50 in Suse Marie or like even neighborhood Watch whatever.

Click on the members of that group. Look at who's in the group. If any of your gym clients are in that group, ask 'em to post something about you in that group, okay? And that, that's as easy as it is here is exactly the script boom, okay? That they have to share. A lot of the times people will be quickly willing to do this. Hey man, I saw you in that , uh, St . Joseph Island buy and sell group.

Would you be willing to paste this on my behalf? They won't let me post myself . Yeah, sure. Um, hey, I saw that you're active in the , um, healthy and fit , uh, suse Marie Seniors group. What do you think about sharing this for me? No problem.

Okay, we feel awkward about this, but the reality is that sometimes clients feel honored when we ask them for help and they wanna help, but they need to be told exactly what to do, right? It's, it's like engaging an army of volunteers. If you tell 'em exactly what to do, they will go out there and do it, and then they get a little praise afterward and they feel great mission accomplished.

They do not need to hear, I will give you $50 to do this, or I will give you $20 if this person signs up. Or worst case, I will give you x percent off your membership. If that person signs up and meets these conditions and signs this contract that doesn't work. Your clients love you and they want to do you a favor, ask them exactly what to do next. Create a lead magnet.

Now, look, I've been telling people for the last decade here we go to do exactly that. Create league magnets, start conversations, invite the right people to join your gym. It's gotten a lot easier with ai. You can quickly do this. You can go into chat GPT and say, Hey, I I wanna create a lead magnet about how to lose 20 pounds. Can you help me put it together? Chad , GBT will just write that for you.

Then you just have to create a nice cover and put it all on a PDF and you're done. Now if you don't know how to do that, of course in Tube Brain , we have dozens of examples of these that you can just pull from our content vault and use. But the key is that you're giving people something of value to start a conversation. Here is a present, they say thank you, and you say, how are things going? Okay?

And that's it. Like you're talking to 'em in person. When I'm DMing somebody on Facebook, Instagram, and if you're watching this, there's a chance we've been in that conversation before. When I'm talking to you, I'm pretending that you and I are standing across from each other waiting in line at the coffee shop, and I'm just having a conversation as a human. It's never a robot.

By the way, if you DM me on Facebook or Instagram, you're not talking to like a chat bot . You're talking to a human. And so that conversation is gonna feel like a human. Okay? Next, and , and I love this, I do this, I try to do this twice a year, at least. Host a seminar or an event at your gym. So there's a few ways to do this. Number one, every January you can just host an event about nutrition.

Like how to lose 15 pounds by June , or how to beat the winter blues. That's a big one in my area. Um, you know, how to, how to get over the winter blues, how to beat stress, okay? You can just host this. Here we go at your gym and people can sign up.

Another way that I've done this really successfully in the past is to partner with somebody who has an overlapping audience, but they're not in a competing business. You could partner with a nutritionist if you want to, if you've got somebody in your town. But once a year around March, I like to partner with my financial advisor and say, invite your clients. I'll invite my clients, we'll meet at my gym.

I'll bring the coffee. We're gonna talk about health and wealth. You're gonna talk about the wealth. I'm gonna talk about the health. We'll share the emails of everybody who shows up and then, you know, we can make them offers afterward, right? It's great and it's helpful for both. And now you've basically piggybacked on their audience and they've piggybacked on yours.

Make sure this is somebody that you really know, like, and trust. Don't just look for like, you know, the next closest person. But we've done this with physical therapists. Um, we've done this with like wedding shops. You know, there , there's so many ways that you can do this and it's, you know, you approaching this other person is helping them too. You're really helping everybody involved.

Finally, and this is the one I love, we have done this dozens of times over the years at Catalyst, what you do is you look at your client and you say, what do they do for a living? Now, this time of the year, I've got bookkeepers and accountants in my gym, okay? So I'll say, turn to one of my accountants. Say, Nathan, there's a reason that springs to mind.

By the way, hey Nathan , um, dude, I know everybody in your office is stressed to the max right now over over tax season. Is that true? Oh yeah.

Well, look man, the best thing that I can do to help you right now is to help you control your environment so you're not stress eating , but you're also not surrounded by stress eaters so that you're not sitting in a place where you're just like, ugh , headache, trying to figure stuff out and people are walking in with dozens of donuts all day long.

If I can help you with that, it's gonna help you stay on track toward your health and fitness goals, right? Yes. Great. What if I come into your office at lunchtime and I host a free seminar? I can even bring sandwiches or snacks or coffee or something if you want to. And I'm gonna tell people how to de-stress. I can teach them how to meditate if you want me to.

I'm gonna give 'em some stretches they can do at their desk, and I'm gonna give them some diet tips so that they're not just drinking coffee and eating donuts to quote unquote stay alert all day. How's that sound? Now, of course, when you go into Nathan's workplace, you're going to take a signup sheet, you're gonna have everybody sign it.

Hey guys, we're just taking attendance here outta interest, but also just in case I give you some advice and you want to talk about it more later, I'm gonna get your email address so that I can send you a summary of my notes from this presentation. Okay? Now you've got everybody's email address. You're gonna put them on your mailing list.

You might send them a special offer, but you might just talk to 'em through your email list. And that's a great way to get like 15, 20 leads at a time. We've done this with nurses and I mean, we had probably 40 people show up to that seminar. Um, we've done it with, we have a , a lottery headquarters in our city. You know, we get like 30 people for that.

We called it a lunch and learn or like a brown bag session. Uh, we've done it with parents of hockey teams too. So it doesn't have to be a workplace. It can be like, Hey, you know , uh, I , I saw your kid playing this afternoon. She had a lot of energy, but there are a lot of kids on her bench who were just kind of like fading in the third period.

If you want to introduce me to your coach, I'm happy to put together a free nutrition seminar for, you know, hockey playing girls age 10 to 12. If you want to bring 'em in.

I'll even come into the locker room like a ahead of the next game and talk to parents about what to feed these kids before a game so they've got lots of energy instead of like chugging a monster energy drink or, you know, drinking a , a latte, which, you know, I can't believe that happens, but it does stop caffeinating your kids, right?

Stop giving them sugars because you think you're giving them energy and I'll tell you exactly what to feed them. Of course, you're gonna capture those parents' email addresses. Now look, I went deep on this tactic in my book. Help first , and we go even deeper. We go step by step with lead magnets and exactly what to say. Everything in the tubing , uh, curriculum. So look, it's not hard to get 30 leads.

If you follow one of these tactics, two of these tactics or all 10, the key is that you do one of these two things. Number one, do all 10. Go out there and do 1 50, 1 30, make one invitation, do a client, invite one client to coffee, right? If you do that, you're probably gonna get 30 leads. Then what you can do is you can say, well, this is the one that worked the best.

Here's the five that I didn't, couldn't figure out or whatever. And just go hard again, like, repeat what's working. Always. That's a top tip for all business owners. Repeat what's working. The other thing that you can do is go super deep on any one of these. How do you know what , how do you know which one to pick? How do you know like how to get better and better? How do you measure your success and, and improve?

You work with a mentor and that's why we're a mentorship practice. Um, you know, every three weeks we publish a guide just like this in gym owners united.com. If you join that group, you won't miss any of them because we post them front and center right there.

We're sharing videos like this , uh, to help you implement the guides because I really want you to use them instead of just reading them and collecting them and like amassing information that you're not using. But if you go to gym owners united.com, you can ask questions about the guides. You can start a conversation with me. You can ask me questions about the guides. You can make sure that you never miss any .

You can even find the old guides. But the key here is that we want you to grow your gym whether you use mentorship or not. And that's why we give out these free guides to you. And I've been doing this for well over a decade. I wanna make sure that you're growing your gym so that you can help more people. And that means helping clients stick around long enough to get healthy and fit.

Helping coaches build meaningful careers and expanding your impact and helping you stay in the game long enough to actually make a difference in this world . This is run a Profitable Gym. I'm Chris Cooper and let's get to work.